Published: 19 October 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
From their bohemian roots in New York, poet Magdalena Ball and her composer uncle Ricky Gordon have become artistic mentors to each other
Magdalena Ball, 57, is a novelist and poet who moved to Australia from the US more than 30 years ago, and now lives in West Lake Macquarie, NSW. She has recently written a book of poetry about her maternal great-grandmother Rebecca.
Her uncle Ricky Ian Gordon, 64, is an American composer based in New York. His recent operas include The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, produced by the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbeine.
Magdalena (Maggie)
I was born in New York City in 1964. My mother was only 17 when she had me. There were four children in her family, she was the second and Ricky was the baby, so he was only eight years older than me.
Because my mother was so young, my grandmother Eve, Ricky's mother, spent a lot of time looking after me. We were very close.
My grandparents’ house was always filled with music; mostly Ricky playing piano and my grandmother singing. She sang to me a lot in Yiddish. Before she married she had sung in the Borscht Belt in The Catskills and later in her forties she started doing musical theatre.
My sense of what it means to be Jewish is kind of bundled up in my grandparents and that whole sense of the foods that my grandmother would make, particularly lokshen noodle pudding and blintzes. She was always cooking, always feeding people. There were always people coming to the house. There was always coffee on the ‘perc’.
Ricky's friends always came round and my grandmother was incredibly accepting. His friends were always really funny, interesting arty people, and they were always really warm and generous to me. They didn't treat me like some kid and Ricky always treated me with a lot of respect too.
