A sometimes Bantry resident, the mother of supermodel Emily Ratajkowski, has followed in her daughter’s footsteps this year – by publishing her own very important and personal book

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THE three members of the talented Ratajkowski family have achieved a publishing hat-trick.

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My Body, the book written by the model, actress and author Emily Ratajkowski was a New York Times bestseller, whilst her dad, John Ratajkowski, an artist and teacher at the San Dieguito Academy, gave the world something that it didn’t know it needed – a fabulous book of bovine illustrations called Cow Tuesday.

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Now, it is the turn of Emily’s mother Kathleen Balgley, a retired professor of literature, who has written a memoir entitled Letters to My Father – Excavating a Jewish Identity in Poland and Belarus.

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It begins with Kathleen’s childhood discovery of her father’s hidden Jewish identity and goes on to explain how she unearthed more of her own suppressed Jewishness when she accepted a Fulbright to teach in communist Poland, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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With three million Jewish people living in Poland at the start of the war... Read more