Present Past is a collection of stories, artwork, and poetry by Ava Kadishson Schieber. Like her debut work, Soundless Roar, this multi-genre collection creates rich and varied pathways for readers to approach Schieber as well as the absorbing events and transformations in her life as a Holocaust survivor.

The focus of Present Past is her life after the Shoah. Rejecting stereotypes of survivors as traumatized or broken, Schieber is stark yet exuberant, formidable yet nuanced. The woman who emerges in Schieber's Present Past is a multifaceted, heterogeneous...

Schieber s Present Past, like her previous Soundless Roar, is a multi-genre collection. Made up of drawings, poems, and stories, this manuscript confronts the reader with radically different responses to and representations of her rich life. These materials most obviously the stories cover decades, starting with her childhood in 1930s Novi Sad and ending in 1980s Chicago. In terms of pure space, Schieber s stories dominate the collection. At the same time, their content along with Schieber s approach to prose narrative is productively complicated by appearing interspersed...