The Daily Glance
Jill Magi's Threads put Estonia on the map for me. Before reading it, I knew little except that it is near Finland and Latvia. Essentially, in the book, Magi traces her father's immigration from Estonia and her own attempt at understanding her family's past. In the work, she includes pieces of a history paper on her father, pages from a journal/book, and stories about a trip back to Estonia. The metaphor of trying to piece things back together with threads is both shown in language and in images, for she included pictures with text literally sown together.
Jill Magi's Threads put Estonia on the map for me. Before reading it, I knew little except that it is near Finland and Latvia. Essentially, in the book, Magi traces her father's immigration from Estonia and her own attempt at understanding her family's past. In the work, she includes pieces of a history paper on her father, pages from a journal/book, and stories about a trip back to Estonia. The metaphor of trying to piece things back together with threads is both shown in language and in images, for she included pictures with text literally sown together.
Week four, my English drops into the dictionary's gutter like a city lostAfter reading the book, I spent a little time looking into the history of Estonia under the Nazis and the Soviet Union and pictures of Tallin, the largest city, on Google Images. Ultimately, this book does what I think many immigrants dream of in tracing a past before it disappears.
in the folds of the map. At the breakfast table of salty fish and boiled eggs, she asks, "Have you bananas in childhood?" and tells me of the difficulty of obtaining feminine products during the Soviet times.
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