When you have been forcibly displaced from your home, the revolutionary dream of what should have happened … stays alive as a utopian beacon of happiness that will (possibly) never come to pass. To be content and make a meaningful life from the ruins of that wrenching and uprooting is a small, everyday miracle that others easily overlook. 58 Facets is like a beautifully cut jewel, the kind Marika Sosnowski’s grandfather would have bought, cut and sold after he arrived in Melbourne in 1947. If you hold it up to the light you will catch different stories in each of its many facets. You will have the table, the bezel, the star and the upper girdle, the lower girdle, the pavilion and the culet. You will have the dreams, the checkpoints, the documents, the bribes, the camps, the occupation and the resistance. Part memoir, part expose, 58 Facets weaves together the narratives of Holocaust survivors and Israeli war criminals with Syrian activists, revolutionaries and dissenters. They are stories of passing through a checkpoint minutes ahead of Nazi occupiers, of being interned in a Japanese camp in Java and of life in a migrant accommodation camp just outside of Brisbane. 58 Facets challenges us to go beyond the links we see in our lives to our felt experiences of the law, violence and revolution, and how these links? Experiences travel across bodies, space and time.
