Dora B

The heartbreaking story of a bag lady and her daughter

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My mother is a bag lady. She writes me letters on scraps of paper she has found rolling in the park. She encloses newspaper cuttings - a photo of the queen of England or a picture of an apple cake with its recipe. It is 1961 in Montpelier, France. Dora and her eight-year-old daughter Josiane have been arrested, unable to provide on demand the one franc coin to prove - according to the law - that they are not vagrants. To the detective that holds her identity papers in his hand, the solution is simple. They are penniless, unwanted, itinerant and Jewish: they must be shipped back to The Promised Land. And so Dora and Josiane begin their new life in Israel - a place of warm sand-dunes and sweet oranges, of pomegranate juice and of mint tea poured from silver teapots. But this fresh start comes at a price. Dora, always convinced that she is the victim of some kind of conspiracy, fretfully searches for the tiny microphones that she believes monitor her every word, and rages at an imaginary enemy. Her neighbours, always hostile, begin to persecute her openly for her foreign-ness and her eccentricity.
As she tries to create a home of their tiny asbestos hut, their few possessions begin to disappear. Worse are the cat-calls in the street and the constant threat of physical violence. Ostracized from their community, Dora and her daughter face the world together. Dora B is the story of Josiane's struggle to come to terms with the truth: that the mother who has so cherished and protected her is losing her grasp on the world. Full of warmth, humour and heartbreak, it is a portrait of an inspiring and unusual woman and a testament to a mother's selfless love.