Julia Stein, poetry, Under the Ladder to Heaven, finalist in the Whitman competition, American Academy of Poets, 1984, West End Press.

Photos by David Brown of the author. 

Poems celebrate and deal with three generations of women:  the author’s grandmother Molly Plotkin and her generation of pre-World War I immigrant radicals; Anne Frank after her arrest during World War II, and young women  rebels of the 1960s and 1970s .  

The poems are themselves candles  bring joy when there is so little joy.—Deena Metzger

No one who reads this book can fail to be deeply moved.  These are distillations of women’s lives.  Julia Stein celebrates her foremothers, the immigrant Jewish working women “fresh from the shtetl,” who built unions, went to jail, and believed in socialism all their lives.  In celebrating them, she also celebrates Yiddish, a language endearingly use in some of the poems. There is a great abundance here.—Olga Cabral

You can still buy  some copies here: Amazon