Hanna is the debut novel by young writer Magali Jeger, Hanna's great granddaughter; a remarkable true story of a young mother determined to be reunited with her daughter during 1940’s Nazi-occupied Amsterdam.
Magali will be in conversation with Ella Garai Ebner on transgenerational trauma and resilience, chat about storytelling and how to write a novel, as well as explore what it means to be a young Jewish person in today’s world.
Magali is a young novelist, playwright, dramaturg and script developer. She is half Dutch, half Belgian and has lived in London, where her writing career kickstarted.
Two of her plays, The Dalton Sisters and A Blue Something, have been staged, and her new play, Chocolate Marmite Cake, is a Semi-Finalist in the 12th Annual Jewish Playwriting Contest.
Currently, she is working as a dramaturg and script developer for a production company that produces comedy, high-end and relatable drama TV series. She has also worked as a theatre actress and loves to combine both performing and storytelling.
Magali always had a passion for fiction and wrote her very first book when she was only eight years old. Hanna, the story of her great-grandmother, is Magali’s debut novel.
Ella Garai-Ebner is a third-generation speaker for Generation 2 Generation, and she speaks about the story of her grandpa, George Garai. George did want his story to be told but found it personally too painful to do so. He therefore asked his family to do this for him in his place. Ella graduated from the University of Birmingham in June 2021, with a degree in Education and Sociology. She works at Maccabi GB as Events Coordinator and has written for the Jewish Chronicle and many other online publications.
Generation 2 Generation (G2G) is a Holocaust Education Charity, established to empower second and third generation Holocaust survivor descendants to present their family histories to a wide variety of audiences.
About the book
AMSTERDAM, 1941. Hanna is a young Jewish woman eager to have a child of her own, despite the harrowing conditions the family is facing. Nine months later, Hanna and her husband, Nico, welcome their beautiful baby girl into the world.
As the situation in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam is strongly deteriorating, and faced with the threat of deportation, Hanna makes a heart-wrenching decision. She abandons her little girl on the corner of a sidewalk. She is then determined to make it through the war and does everything within her power to reunite with her daughter.
