Pogroms and the Holocaust, xenophobia and the Bush War provide the backdrop for Illuminating Love. The novel entwines the journeys of two Jewish women, Judith, an immigrant to South Africa, forced to leave her home and family in Eastern Europe before World War II, and Cally her granddaughter living in contemporary South Africa. While rendering Judith's poems in calligraphy, Cally uncovers her family's history and roots in the shtetls of Lithuania and she memorialises this past. Judith's love poems also serve as a counterpoint for Cally's own circumstances. Trapped in a cycle of abuse, she also inscribes a Ketuba, the Jewish marriage contract for Aaron and Shira, as well as a love sampler for her husband Jake in order to win him back.

We came to Johannesburg. Lived in Wynberg. After a time, my twin sisters Betty and Rosie also came looking for husbands. They stayed with us and the shadchen fixed them up. I can see that Hannah doesn't understand. Not the ideas. Not my mixture of Yiddish and English. Still she listens, looking at my face. Then they moved to their own homes but we always spent Shabbos and Yom Tov together. I go on, When your Mommy married your Daddy, they lived a one bedroom flat in Clarendon Circle. We wrapped you up tightly in your blanket when you were born. You slept in a drawer. I show her with my hands. You were this small. Spanning the pogrom years in Lithuania and the 1950s South Africa, Frankel weaves a delicate tale of despair and loss, of love and attachment and of place. She evokes the post-war years in South Africa in heartbreaking detail, and traces the relationships within an extended family and their own struggle with racism, grief and guilt.

A debut collection from an accomplished South African poet. The poems weave a rich tapestry of word images inspired both by visual art and a life lived with all the senses open. The language is lucid, the metaphors vivid, but controlled.