Thistledown Seed: A Memoir

Interweaving fiction and memoir in multiple threads, Thistledown Seed follows the displacement and violence of the Holocaust for a Polish family who subsequently settle in Western Australia. In this deeply moving account, Louise Helfgott explores another side of her family’s tragic past made famous in the Oscar-winning movie, Shine, about her brother David Helfgott. The floating thistledown seed, often seen in Europe during summer, represents the diaspora of the Jewish people who were scattered around the world as a result of the Holocaust.

‘Only a poet perhaps can extract such beauty from a tragedy so immense it will shape generations not yet even born. Thistledown Seed is a powerful, moving, if forgiving exploration of hearts so frozen with emotion that their capacity to cripple is seemingly unbounding - a searing, yet beguiling record of one of the most painful journeys into adulthood I have read.’ - Sara Dowse, author of Sapphires, Schemetime and As the Lonely Fly

‘This beautifully written and deeply moving book weaves together three narratives tracing trauma down the generations. The first is Louise Helfgott’s own present day quest through modern Europe to trace members of her family lost to the Holocaust. The second is the story the generation who perished in the incinerators of the death camps. In the third Louise bears painful witness as a small child to the impact of trauma on her parents, survivors who forever mourned and lived in the shadow of past nightmares.’ - Emeritus Associate Professor Gail Phillips, Murdoch University