Non Fiction: Memoirs / Biography

In this section we'll keep you up to date with news of books you might be interested in. The information will come from the publishers' website and we will add our reviews as often as we can.

Do also look out for events information and keep us posted if you are an organiser.

And remember, feedback is always welcome.

The Presence  

Dannie Abse

Vintage ISBN 9780099531869 

July 2007

Loss, grief and love are the themes of this remarkable memoir from one of Britain’s most distinguished poets.

Some months after Dannie Abse’s wife Joan died in a car accident in June 2005, he began to write a diary which is both a record of present grief and a portrait of marriage which lasted more than fifty years. It is an extraordinary document, painful but celebratory; funny as well as sad, bursting with joy as well as sorrow and full of a deep understanding of what it means to be human.

A supremely fresh and vital performance, matching profound emotion with witty observation... This is a truly marvellous book Boyd Tonkin  Independent

Foreskin's Lament

Shalom Auslander

Picador ISBN 9780330453530

February 2008

"Foreskin's Lament" reveals Auslander's youth in a strict, socially isolated Orthodox community, and recounts his rebellion and efforts to make a new life apart from it. Auslander remembers his youthful attempt to win the 'blessing bee' (the Orthodox version of a spelling bee), his exile to reform school in Israel after being caught shoplifting a cassette tape of "West Side Story", and his twenty-five-mile hike to watch the New York Rangers play in Madison Square Garden without violating the Sabbath. Throughout, Auslander struggles to understand God and His complicated, often contradictory laws. But ultimately, he settles for a ceasefire with God, accepting the very slim remaining hope that his newborn son might live free of guilt, doubt, and struggle.Auslander's combination of unrelenting humour and anger a voice that compares to those of David Sedaris and Dave Eggers delivers a rich and fascinating self-portrait of a man grappling with his faith, family, and community.

Beyond These Walls 

Janina Bauman

Virago Modern Classics ISBN 9781844083190  

Janina Beauman was a year older than Anne Frank when the Second World War began but, unlike The Diary of Anne Frank, this is a story of survival. When Hitler's decree forced her family into the Warsaw Ghetto, Janina, an intelligent, lively girl, suddenly found herself in a cramped flat, hiding with other Jewish families. At first even curfews and the casual cruelty meted out by the German occupiers could not dim her passion for books, boys and romance. Then came the raids, and Janina, with her sister and mother, had to keep on the move, hiding in the ruins of the ghetto to avoid being one of thousands rounded up every day and deported to the camps. Their escape to the 'Aryan' side was followed by two years in hiding, taking shelter with those willing to help them and living in constant fear of betrayal. Told through her teenage diaries, giving her story a rare immediacy, this is the extraordinary tale of a passionate young woman's courage and survival.

My Mother Was a Bag Lady

Josiane Behmoiras

Bloomsbury ISBN 9780747585671 

February 2007

  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.

Last Days in Babylon: The Story of the Jews of Baghdad

Marina Benjamin

Bloomsbury ISBN 9780747593287    

February 2008

The fascinating history of the Iraqi Jews told through one family's story

Marina Benjamin grew up in London feeling estranged from her family’s Middle Eastern ways, refusing to speak the Arabic her mother and grandmother spoke at home and rejecting the peculiar food they ate. But when Benjamin had her own child, she realised that she was losing her link to the past. And so, in 2004, Benjamin visited Baghdad for the first time.  

When Iraq gained independence in 1932, Jews were the largest and most prosperous ethnic group in Baghdad. Just twenty years later, the community had been utterly ravaged, its members effectively expelled from the country by a hostile Iraqi government. Benjamin’s grandmother Regina Sehayek lived through it all: born in 1905, her life of privilege was little affected when the British marched into Iraq. But with the rise of Arab nationalism and the first stirrings of anti-Zionism, Regina began to have dark premonitions of what was to come. By the time Iraq was galvanised by war, revolution, and regicide, Regina was already gone, wrenched from her beloved husband in a hair-raising escape from her homeland.  

The Invisible Wall

Harry Bernstein

Arrow Books ISBN 9780099504283 

The narrow street on which Harry Bernstein grew up was seemingly unremarkable; there was nothing to distinguish it from the hundreds of other such working class streets in the industrial north of England – save for an invisible wall down the middle, dividing Jews on one side, from Christians on the other. The geographical distance may have been a couple of yards, but socially, it was miles.

‘But there are few rules or unwritten laws that are not broken when circumstances demand, and few distances that are not too great to be travelled; and such was the case on our street. And I was to play an important part, unwittingly, in what happened…’

The Invisible Wall is the enchanting, true story of Harry's childhood in the mill town of Stockport in the shadow of the First World War. It’s a wonderfully charming – and powerfully moving – tale of working class life, of social divide and of forbidden love…

Arthur Miller

Christopher Bigsby

Weidenfeld ISBN 9780753826157

November 2009

Arthur Miller was a prominent figure in American

literature and cinema for over sixty years, writing a wide variety of plays - including The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, All My Sons, and Death of a Salesman - which are still performed, studied and lauded throughout the world.

Born in 1915 to moderately affluent Jewish-American parents, Miller wrote during a fascinating time in American history. The Great Depression was a period of deprivation for many that left an indelible mark on the national psyche, and, like many, Miller found hope for the beleaguered common man in Communism. The Second World War elevated the common man to war hero, but when the Cold War subsequently began, the ugly elements of American conservatism freely persecuted writers and artists who had embraced Communism. Miller was among them. His refusal to give evidence against others to the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956 gave him a heroic role to play. In that same year, Arthur Miller momentously married the young actress Marilyn Monroe, a marriage that remains famous to this day.

Christopher Bigsby's gripping, meticulously researched biography, based on boxes of papers made available to him before Miller's death, offers new insights into their marriage, and sheds new light on how their relationship informed Miller's subsequent great plays.

After his death in 2005, many respected actors, directors and producers paid tribute to Miller, calling him 'the last great practitioner of the American stage'.

Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life

Philip Davis

Oxford University Press ISBN 9780199270095
September 2007

Philip Davis tells the story of Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), the self-made son of poor Jewish immigrants who went on to become one of the foremost novelists and short-story writers of the post-war period. The time is ripe for a revival of interest in a man who at the peak of his success stood alongside Saul Bellow and Philip Roth in the ranks of Jewish American writers.

Nothing came easily to Malamud: his family was poor, his mother probably committed suicide when Malamud was 14, and his younger brother inherited her schizophrenia. Malamud did everything the second time round - re-using his life in his writing, even as he revised draft after draft. Davis's meticulous biography shows all that it meant for this man to be a writer in terms of both the uses of and the costs to his own life. It also restores Bernard Malamud's literary reputation as one of the great original voices of his generation, a writer of superb subtlety and clarity.

Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life benefits from Philip Davis's exclusive interviews with family, friends, and colleagues, unfettered access to private journals and letters, and detailed analysis of Malamud's working methods through the examination of hitherto unresearched manuscripts. It is very much a writer's life. It is also the story of a struggling emotional man, using an extraordinary but long-worked-for gift, in order to give meaning to ordinary human life.

Philip Davis is professor of English literature at Liverpool University and editor of the Reader magazine.

I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors

Bernice Eisenstein

Picador ISBN 9780330441575  

A searing memoir told in a unique fusion of illustrations and prose

'The Holocaust is a drug and I have entered an opium den . . . I will discover that there is no end to the dealers I can find for just one more hit. My parents don't even realize that they are drug dealers. They could never imagine the kind of high H gives, making me want to dive into its endless depth. Sending me out to libraries to read any and every book that dealt with the Holocaust . . . the paper could all be chopped up into a fine powder, like ash, perhaps, laid down, row upon row, and snorted'

Uniquely structured and uniquely told, I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors is a distillation of Bernice Eisenstein's memories of her 1950s childhood as the daughter of Yiddish-speaking parents whose experiences during the war, while rarely spoken of, were nonetheless a constant presence.

Eisenstein's parents met in Auschwitz as the war was ending, and were married shortly after its liberation. This extraordinary memoir began to take root in her imagination several years ago, almost a decade after her father's death; she began with a series of drawings of her father, but realized that pictures alone could not convey what she had to say - 'And so I entered into a dance between pictures and the written word. I had two languages that worked together - to translate the layered meaning of my past, and that of my parents, on to the page.'

In an amazing synthesis of prose and illustration, and with poignancy and searing honesty, Eisenstein explores with ineffable sadness and bittersweet humour her childhood growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust, while also addressing universal themes of memory, loss and recovery of the past.

Tough Guy: A Memoir

Louis Ferrante

Bantam ISBN 9780553819472

February 2009

Louis Ferrante was a young rogue who made his reputation on the streets of New York and later hooked up with the infamous John Gotti Jr and the Gambino crime family. He pulled off some of the most lucrative robberies in US history, many of which are still unsolved. For Lou, life was sweet, and most of the time he had fun wisecracking his way around town and staying one step ahead of the law.

When the law finally caught up with Louis, he faced a long stretch in some of the most notoriously dangerous penitentiaries and ended up living amongst the most violent, not to mention insane, criminals incarcerated in the US prison system.

But life became more tolerable when, almost by accident, Louis read his first book and quite unexpectedly a new world opened up to him - a world which offered him a sanctuary from the brutal chaos of his everyday existence. During the course of his eight years in prison, he read everything from Danielle Steel to Caesar’s Gallic Wars; he learned the art of writing and studied the major religions, eventually choosing to become an Orthodox Jew. And with only limited access to law books, he somehow managed to successfully appeal his own conviction and win his freedom.

Gritty, hard-hitting, and yet so often hilarious, Louis Ferrante’s memoir is a poignant and incredibly moving slice of life from the insider’s point of view, written in the bestselling tradition of Nicholas Pileggi’s Goodfellas, Wiseguys and The Sopranos.

Ambivalence: Crossing the Israel Palestine Divide

Jonathan Garfinkel

Saqi ISBN 9780863566820

February 2008

This provocative memoir chronicles Garfinkel’s travels in Israel and Palestine and his journey away from a Zionist education in Toronto.

After a screening of a Palestinian film, Garfinkel meets a Palestinian woman who tells him about a house in Israel occupied by an Arab and a Jew. The story compels him to travel to Israel and the West Bank in search of the house with the hopes of discovering a truer sense of life in the Middle East. But the address she’s given him doesn’t exist, and nothing is as simple as it seemed …

Bringing to light the complexities of real life as opposed to the religious or political ideal, this memoir questions what it really means to adhere to a culture or faith. Rife with riotous, sometimes surreal comedy, as well as tragic misunderstandings, Ambivalence offers a vivid and challenging portrait of life in Israel and Palestine.

Jonathan Garfinkel is a celebrated poet and playwright. Garfinkel’s play Blind, about the divided house in Jerusalem, was presented in 2005 at Ottawa’s National Arts Centre.

Churchill and the Jews

Martin Gilbert

Simon & Schuster ISBN 9781416522577

June 2007

Churchill and the Jews covers the whole life of this greatest of Britons -- from his youth, when he was shocked by the anti-Semitism displayed during the Dreyfus Affair, to his last meeting with David Ben-Gurion in 1960, when he gave Ben-Gurion an article he had written about Moses. In the intervening years, during which Churchill cemented his place in history, his affinity with the Jews remained undimmed, even though his championing of Zionist issues and interests was often like a red rag to the bull of the British Establishment. One of those closest to Churchill once confided to the author that "Winston had one fault -- he was too fond of Jews." What does this mean? How did this fondness manifest itself?

Exploring all aspects of his life and career, Churchill and the Jews sheds new light on a key figure of the twentieth century and how his attitudes affected not just the prosecution of the Second World War but the establishment of a Jewish state that followed it.

Leonard Woolf: A Biography

Victoria Glendinning

Pocket Books ISBN 9781416526070 

September 2007

Leonard Woolf was a pivotal figure of his age, whose fierce intelligence touched the key literary and political events that shaped the early decades of the twentieth century and would resonate into the post-World War II era.

The scholarship boy from a prosperous Jewish family would cut his own path through the world of the British public school, contending with the lingering anti-Semitism of Imperial Age Britain. Immediately upon entering Trinity College, Cambridge, Woolf became one of an intimate group of vivid personalities who would form the core of the Bloomsbury circle: the flamboyant Lytton Strachey; Toby Stephen, "the Goth," through whom Leonard would meet Stephen's sister Virginia; Clive Bell, John Maynard Keynes and E. M. Forster.

A headstrong administrator in colonial Ceylon, he lost confidence in the imperial mission, deciding to leave in order to marry the psychologically troubled Virginia Stephen. Glendinning reveals through vivid depiction of their unconventional marriage how Leonard supported Virginia through her breakdowns and in her writing. In co-founding with Virginia the Hogarth Press, he provided a secure publisher for Virginia's own boldly experimental works.

As the éminence grise of the early Labour Party, Woolf became a leading critic of imperialism, and his passionate advocacy of collective security to prevent war underpinned the charter of the League of Nations. After Virginia's death, he continued to forge his own iconoclastic way, engaging in a long and happy relationship with a married woman.

This is a shrewdly perceptive and lively portrait of a complex man of extremes and contradictions .

For Those I Loved

Martin Gray

Hampton Roads ISBN 9781571745279  

We need only to look back to Rwanda, and now to Darfur, to see that once again we are living the worst of times. Who better to guide our understanding and give us hope than Martin Gray—a man who survived the worst of times, flourished, and still managed to find joy in living?

Martin has come full circle since his boyhood world was turned upside down by the German invasion of Poland in 1939. Overnight, the teenage Martin and his family were immersed in the horrors of the Holocaust and held captive in the Warsaw Ghetto. It was a nightmare of brutality, starvation, and death. Martin became a clever smuggler to help his family survive—until the “butchers” of Treblinka took his mother and brothers. Against impossible odds, Martin survived and returned to fight in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. As the Nazis incinerated the ghetto, he escaped to fight with the partisans, and then the Red Army.

After the war, Martin made his way to New York. The cunning and skills he developed during the war enabled him to learn the language and create a successful business. At 35, he retired to France with a fortune and a beautiful Dutch wife, starting a family and living in happiness and peace. But his world was shattered once again by a forest fire that engulfed his fleeing family. In a tragic repeat of history, Martin alone survived.

Martin Gray's past could be our future if we don"t heed his call to be the change. In this 35th anniversary expanded edition of For Those I Loved, a book beloved by millions of readers worldwide, Martin reminds us that the past is connected to the present. Only we can ensure that history is not repeated.

Martin Gray still lives in the South of France and has devoted his life to his family, writing, human rights, and environmental and cultural causes. He received the United Nations Dag Hammar­skjöld Award and the Gold Medal of European Merit.

Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero

Abigail Green

Harvard University Press, ISBN 9780674048805

March 2010

Humanitarian, philanthropist, and campaigner for Jewish emancipation on a grand scale, Sir Moses Montefiore (1784–1885) was the preeminent Jewish figure of the nineteenth century—and one of the first truly global celebrities. His story, told here in full for the first time, is a remarkable and illuminating tale of diplomacy and adventure. Abigail Green's sweeping biography follows Montefiore through the realms of court and ghetto, tsar and sultan, synagogue and stock exchange.

Interweaving the public triumph of Montefiore's foreign missions with the private tragedy of his childless marriage, this book brings the diversity of nineteenth-century Jewry brilliantly to life—from London to Jerusalem, Rome to St. Petersburg, Morocco to Istanbul. Here we see the origins of Zionism and the rise of international Jewish consciousness, the faltering birth of international human rights, and the making of the modern Middle East. With the globalization and mobilization of religious identities now at the top of the political agenda, Montefiore's life story is relevant as never before.

Mining materials from eleven countries in nine languages, Green's masterly biography bridges the East-West divide in modern Jewish history, presenting the transformation of Jewish life in Europe, the Middle East, and the New World as part of a single global phenomenon. As it reestablishes Montefiore's status as a major historical player, it also restores a significant chapter to the history of our modern world.

Roman's Journey

Roman Halter

with a preface by Sir Martin Gilbert
Portobello Books ISBN: 9781846270321

'To lose everything but to retain one's sanity and, more staggeringly, one's love of life beggars the imagination. This is the book of a man who has achieved just that... I urge you to read it.' John Hurt

Roman Halter is an optimistic and boisterous schoolboy in 1939 when he and his family gather behind net curtains to watch the Volksdeutsch neighbours of their small town in western Poland greeting the arrival of Hitler's armies with kisses and swastika flags. Within days, the family home has been seized, 12 year-old Roman becomes a slave of the local SS chief, and, returning from an errand, silently witnesses his Jewish classmates being bayoneted by soldiers at the edge of town.

And there begins the remarkable six-year journey through some of the darkest caverns ofNazi Europe, and the loss of every other member of his family and almost all of the 800-strong community of his boyhood. Roman tells his indelible story with a simplicity and grace that allow the facts of his suffering and survival to speak for themselves.

Living with Mother

Michele Hanson

Virago ISBN 9781844083848  

In Michele Hanson's bittersweet columns in the Guardian, collected here, she explored the physical deterioration of her spirited and resilient elderly mother. From bowel trouble to views on Camilla Parker-Bowles, life is never dull in the Household from Hell.

A glamorous and much-admired young woman, in old age Michele's mother still has power over everyone she meets. She alternately despairs of and adores her grand-daughter and treats her daughter, now sixty-three, as though she is twelve. Michele observes the very slow decline of her mother, as she changes from vibrant, bossy, hilarious fault-finder general and head chef to frail, bedridden, helpless, speechless, but still formidable and brave old lady - who is able, to the very end, to have a laugh.

Also included here is a piece by Amy, Michele's daughter, by turns hilarious and touching, about living with her grandmother and coping with the changes that come. Speaking with emotional candour and gentle poignancy, Michele tells it like it is: somewhere between anguish and hope, tragedy and comedy, tears and laughter.

My Happiness Bears no Relation to Happiness: 

A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century

Adina Hoffman

Yale University Press ISBN 9780300141504

March 2009

Beautifully written, and composed with a novelist's eye for detail, this book tells the story of an exceptional man and the culture from which he emerged. Taha Muhammad Ali was born in 1931 in the Galilee village of Saffuriyya and was forced to flee during the war in 1948. He traveled on foot to Lebanon and returned a year later to find his village destroyed. An autodidact, he has since run a souvenir shop in Nazareth, at the same time evolving into what one leading American critic has dubbed 'perhaps the most accessible and delightful poet alive today'.As it places Muhammad Ali's life in the context of the lives of his predecessors and peers, "My Happiness" offers a sweeping depiction of a charged and fateful epoch. It is a work that Arabic scholar Michael Sells describes as 'among the five 'must read' books on the Israel-Palestine tragedy'. In an era when talk of the 'Clash of Civilizations' dominates, this biography offers something else entirely: a view of the people and culture of the Middle East that is rich, nuanced, and above all else, deeply human.

Some Sort of a Life

Miriam Karlin

Oberon Books ISBN 9781840027808

October 2007

"I have never, ever wanted to write an autobiography. The number of times I have been approached and every time I said no, no, it's a wank"

Miriam Karlin is a pillar of the British acting establishment and, at the same time, a thoroughgoing maverick. During sixty distinguished, workaholic years of acting, she has been a West End regular and RSC company actor, a pioneering performer on live television, half of a radio double-act with Peter Sellers, a stand-up comic, a scene-stealing character actor in such films as The Entertainer and A Clockwork Orange, and, of course, the truculent, whistle-blowing shop steward Paddy in the long-running TV sitcom The Rag Trade, with her catchphrase "Everybody Out!". Parallel to her career as an actor are her lifelong socialist beliefs, her unerring sense of justice and her political activism.

Some Sort of a Life is compellingly candid about the people in her life: her family, her friends and the eminent figures she has worked with, such as Laurence Olivier, Stanley Kubrick, Tony Hancock and Barry Humphries. Above all though, she is utterly honest about herself: her love affairs and abortions, her battles with eating disorders and illness, her gradual disillusionment with the Labour Party and the state of Israel, and her own compulsive nature, which accounts for many of the highs and lows of her fascinating life.

Farewell, Babylon: Coming Of Age In Jewish Baghdad
Naim Kattan

Souvenir Press ISBN 9780285638426  

2007

Farewell, Babylon is a story of roots and exile, of a teenager's thirst for life and experience, an engaging record of a youth's artistic development.

It is a memoir of a lost world, Baghdad, the magical city in which Iraq's Kurds, Bedouins, Muslims, Jews and Christians lived together in a rough sort of harmony. The Iraqi Jewish community dates back 2500 years, to of Biblical Babylon, but by Kattan's childhood in the 1940's anti-semitism was on the rise and Nazi-sympathisers were threatening Baghdad's Jewish community.

Naim Kattan takes readers into the heart of Baghdad's then-teeming Jewish community, his Baghdad is a hot, quarrelsome city beset in equal parts by fear and desire. Its politics are frantic, its street life a mystery.

In this beautifully written work, a young boy comes of age and describes his discovery of work, literature, patriotism, the joys of lazy Sundays swimming in the Tigris and of his greatest discovery: women and love.

Kattan evokes the colonial, Muslim-dominated society of his childhood and leaves an unforgettable portrait of Baghdad's exoticism, and the political forces that shape it today.

Naim Kattan has written more than 30 books of fiction, poetry, and criticism. He has received many awards, including France's Légion d'Honneur and the Order of Canada.

House Music : The Oona King Diaries
Oona King

Bloomsbury Publishing  ISBN 9780747590934

September 2007

How does it feel to lose your job in front of 10 million people? To become an MP in your twenties? To ask a Government Whip for time to see your husband? To sleep on the floor while waiting to vote in the middle of the night? To represent the Secretary of State for Health at a family-planning clinic on the day you fail your 5th IVF cycle? To be the second black woman elected to Parliament? To be a Jewish woman representing a largely Muslim constituency? To be the only MP who likes house music?

The 1997 Labour victory changed British politics for ever, ushering in a new generation of women into parliament. The most high profile of ‘Blair’s babes’, Oona King, won a prized London constituency and became an MP at 29.

“Pacy, perceptive, frank, funny, free of the sludge of most political diaries. This is authentic Oona. It would make a good novel — but people would think it a little far fetched.” Neil Kinnock

'This is a tremendous book - funny, revelatory, and above all authentic - about a normal person who tried to make a go of parliament, triumphed unexpectedly, crashed unexpectedly and somehow got out with a life.' — David Hare

My Father's Roses

Nancy Kohner

Hodder & Stoughton ISBN 9780340960257 

June 2008

Nancy Kohner spent two decades piecing together her familys history from the suitcase of diaries, letters and photographs that her father brought out of Prague before she died in 2006. The result is the extraordinary and touching record of a Jewish family caught up in the tumult of two world wars. Nancys grandparents and their three children find their sanctuary in the garden of the small town where they live between Prague and the German border called Podersam. There they have their happiest times at the reunion when the eldest son returns from the trenches of World War 1, when their youngest son joins them in the family linen business, and when their daughter gives birth to their first grandchild. But instability and danger are the permanent backdrop. When the Nazi Storm Troopers march into Podersam their lives will never be the same again. The daughter commits suicide while the two sons escape to England and Ireland. The last batch of letters from the grandmother make it poignantly clear that her fate is destined for the death camp of Treblinka.

Nancy Kohner was a respected health writer on bereavement. She was born in Bradford in 1950. Her father, Rudolph, was a Jewish refugee from prewar Czechoslovakia who married a local girl, Olive. The Podersam Garden is the result of decades of work by Nancy reasearching family diaries and letters and piecing together her family history. Nancy died of cancer in 2006, aged 55. Her daughter Bridget McGing, a historian and archivist for the Horniman museum, completed the manuscript after her mothers death and now provides the link between the past and the present. Bridget lives in London and now works at the Wiener Library.

A Lover of Unreason : The Biography of Assia Wevill

Yehuda Koren & Eilat Negev

Robson ISBN 9781861059741  

'Assia was my true wife, and the best friend I ever had', wrote a heart-broken Ted Hughes, after Assia Wevill surrendered her life and that of their four-year old daughter to the fumes from the gas oven in her London flat, in March 1969 six years after Sylvia Plath had suffered a similiar fate.

Diva, she-devil, enchantress, muse, Lillith, Jezebel. The exquisitely beautiful Assia Wevill inspired or provoked many epithets in the course of three marriages and in pursuit of a destiny that took her from dark pre-war Berlin, to Palestine during the British Mandate and then to London in the swinging 'Sixties. In the end, none would prove to be more fitting than the epithet- and epitaph- she chose for herself: 'Here lies a lover of unreason, and an exile'.

The story of the ultimately tragic failure in the marriage between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, twentieth-century poetry's most celebrated literary couple, has always been related from one of two conflicting points of view: hers or his. Missing for more than four decades had been a third, equally relevant and no less fascinating perspective: that of Ted Hughes's mistress, Assia Wevill.  

The Lover of Unreason, the first biography of Assia Wevill, views afresh the Plath-Hughes relationship and marriage with a keen, revisionary eye, and at the same time, recounts the journey that shaped her life. Hers is a complex story, formed as it is by the pull of often contrary forces: fatal attraction and obsessive love, fidelity and adultery, cruelty and tenderness, dependence and rebellion, envy and self-sacrifice. 

Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev are both distinguished literary journalists and authors, and have been researching Assia Wevill's story for 15 years. In the course of their research they have unearthed a mass of personal documents, and interviewed all the key witnesses, most of them speaking here for the first time. Koren and Negev's previous book, In Our Hearts We Were Giants, a dwarf family's survival of the Holocaust, was published in eight languages, and inspired two documentary films.

The World is a Wedding: From East End to Soho 

Bernard Kops

Five Leaves Publications ISBN 9781905512331

January 2008

A welcome re-issue of Bernard Kops’ autobiography of his early years in London’s East End through to his emergence as a major writer in Soho in the 1950s through to his drug-induced madness in the 1960s.

The re-publication after forty-four years of The World Is A Wedding, Bernard Kops’s memoir of a East End childhood, a Soho youth and the birth-pangs of a writer, is a significant event. Not only because Kops, the least lauded of his generation of Jewish playwrights, is at last being recognised as a master, but also because it sees the light of day as the East End itself enjoys a new lease of life...

...Kops’ book stands out because it recounts an archetypal, mythical story. A young man leaves his émigré community to pursue his literary vocation. Disappointments and triumphs ultimately affirm his love of life....It is as a modern classic, a text of self-making, rising through the post-war debris of blitz and breakdown, that I propose to treat it. Not so much a review, this will be a re-consideration, a kind of Talmudic re-reading, of Kopsian insights that speak urgently to us now.

'My father said poor people couldn’t afford to be religious,' we read in the opening pages. The Kopses were dirt-poor and there is little in Anglo-Jewish writing to compare with Kops’ description of their harassed, hand-to-mouth existence, between the soup-kitchen, the pawnbroker and the Jewish Board of Guardians. Kops bends down in search of sixpences on the pavement, but he also warms to the memory of a close community particularly the vivid language they coined and used with each other, in the pre-television age. And he understands the drive to excel that thrust East End Jews into the wider world, pushing and sometimes pushy, clever and sometimes criminal....
Michael Kustow

In Search of Jerusalem
Michael Kustow
Oberon Books ISBN 9781840028720
February 2009

In Search of Jerusalem is a chronicle of a seismic year in the life of writer and
producer Michael Kustow who, shaken by the sudden discovery he has cancer, finds he has to reinvent all his beliefs, ranging far and wide in time as the influences of his life flood back.
His reflections lend him a dissecting eye on the conflicts and issues of his times: on the day of his mother’s death, Israel begins blitzing Beirut. A British Jew openly critical of Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians, Kustow acts and argues against Israel’s policies, sparking conflicts within his family and with fellow-Jews.
Another of Kustow’s obsessions is theatre, and he portrays and debates with his
contemporaries and friends - Peter Brook, Arnold Wesker, Bernard Kops, Adrian Mitchell
– and reflects upon the places that have formed him – Paris, Jerusalem, India and the
multiplicity of London.
Ranging across the years, In Search 0f Jerusalem conjures up the spirited encounters of a
many-sided life; evocations of actors, painters, film-makers and travel; starting Channel 4
television; and new insights about his self at a moment of challenge and change.
A life shaken up is reassembled in Kustow’s poignant cavalcade of survival and renewal.

Michael Kustow is a writer and producer. His books include Peter Brook, a Biography (Bloomsbury), theatre@risk (Methuen) Tank, An Autobiographical Fiction (Cape), The Half: Actors Preparing to Go on Stage - text for Simon Annand’s photographs (Faber). He has been Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Associate Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and of the National Theatre, and Arts Commissioning Editor for the first eight years of Channel Four television.

Then Again: Travels in Search of My Younger Self

Irma Kurtz

Fourth Estate ISBN 9781841156941 

March 2004

A memoir from Irma Kurtz, the author of The Great American Bus Ride and internationally renowned agony aunt.

In 1954 18 year-old Irma Kurtz left New Jersey to travel across Europe, intent on transforming herself and changing the world. She looked to the Old World for an alternative destiny to that mapped out by the traditional expectations at home. On her post-war grand tour she found what she believed in: art and culture, and beauty and love, and some horror as a Jewish girl encountering the seat of much of her family's destruction

Two years ago, sifting through a cardboard box filled with memories at her mother's house, she rediscovered the journal of her first journey, the one that marked the beginning of a life of writing and living abroad. Gripped by intense recollections of sailing across the Atlantic, and intrigued by the exuberant remarks of her adventurous younger self, she decided to leave her London home and retrace her footsteps, this time with herself as a guide. Testing her theory that older women are invisible, Kurtz's journey is peppered with acute observations of human behaviour.

The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit

My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World

Lucette Lagnado

Ecco ISBN 9780060822187  

July 2007

In vivid and graceful prose, Lucette Lagnado re-creates the majesty and cosmopolitan glamour of Cairo in the years between World War II and Gamal Abdel Nasser's rise to power. Her father, Leon, was a boulevardier who conducted business on the elegant terrace of Shepheard's Hotel, and later, in the cozy, dark bar of the Nile Hilton, dressed in his signature white sharkskin suit. But with the fall of King Farouk and Nasser's nationalization of Egyptian industry, Leon and his family lose everything. As streets are renamed, neighborhoods of their fellow Jews disbanded, and the city purged of all foreign influence, the Lagnados, too, must make their escape. With all of their belongings packed into twenty-six suitcases, their jewels and gold coins hidden in sealed tins of marmalade, Leon and his family depart for any land that will take them. The poverty and hardships they encounter in their flight from Cairo to Paris to New York are strikingly juxta-posed against the beauty and comforts of the lives they left behind.

An inversion of the American dream set against the stunning portraits of three world cities, Lucette Lagnado's memoir offers a grand and sweeping story of faith, tradition, tragedy, and triumph.

Born in Cairo, Lucette Lagnado is a senior special writer and investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where she has received numerous prizes for her work. She is the coauthor of Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz, which has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. Lagnado resides with her husband, journalist Douglas Feiden, in Manhattan and Sag Harbor, New York.

Parallel Lines
Peter Lantos

Arcadia ISBN 9781905147571 

July 2007

This is a story of a young boy’s journey from a sleepy provincial town in Hungary during the Second World War to the concentration camp in Bergen-Belsen.
Accompanied by his parents, he found himself uprooted from the cocoon of a secure family home in the wave of deportation of Hungarian Jews during the Nazi occupation. Unlike other books dealing with this period, this is not a holocaust story, but a child’s recollection of a journey full of surprise, excitement, bereavement and terror. Yet this remains a testimony of survival, overcoming obstacles which to adults may seem insurmountable but to a child were just part of an adventure and, ultimately, recovery. After having established a career in the West, the author decided to revisit the stages on his earlier journeys, reliving the past through the perspective of the present. Along the way, ghosts from the past are finally laid to rest by the kindness of new friends.

Peter Lantos is a clinical neuroscientist who has recently retired from a Chair at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London. He is internationally renowned in his field and edited the leading textbook on neuropathology. Born in Hungary, he has been living in London for nearly four decades.

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Mendel's Daughter

Martin Lemelman

Jonathan Cape   ISBN: 9780224078566  

Just as Art Spiegelman’s Maus presented a dramatic new framework in which to view the Holocaust, Mendel’s Daughter combines an unforgettable true story with elegant, haunting illustrations to shed new light on one of history’s darkest periods. In 1989 Martin Lemelman videotaped his mother, Gusta, as she opened up about her childhood in 1930’s Poland and her eventual escape from Nazi persecution. Now, in Mendel’s Daughter, Lemelman lovingly transcribes his mother’s harrowing testimony in her own words. He brings her narrative to life with his own powerful black and white drawings, interspersed with reproductions of actual photos, documents and other relics from that unsettled era. The result is a wholly original, authentic and moving account of hope and survival in a time of despair.

Mendel's Daughter opens with a picture of shtetl life, filled with homey images that evoke the richness of foods and flowers, of family and friends and Jewish tradition. Soon, however, Gusta’s girlhood is cut short as her family becomes witness to the rise of Hitler, rumours of war, invasion, occupation, roundups and pogroms. We follow Gusta into flight, hiding and survival: into the unfolding uncertainty of those terrible times.

As solemn and as hopeful as a prayer, Mendel’s Daughter is Martin Lemelman’s testament to Gusta’s bravery and a celebration of her perseverance. The devastatingly simple power of a mother’s words and a son’s illustrations combine to create a work that is both intensely personal and universally resonant.

On the Contrary: Leading the Opposition in the New South Africa

Tony Leon

Jonathan Ball Publisher ISBN 9781868422593

August 2008

Controversial, principled, plain-spoken – Tony Leon, leader of the opposition for thirteen years, is all that and more. Destined from early life as the son of a High Court Judge to make a major impact as an ironclad liberal, he has nonetheless interrogated his idealism in strategic terms and left the political arena strewn with defeated adversaries and old-style conservatives content to let human rights slip for the sake of an easy life.

Without fear or favour he also confronted the new elite wherever or whenever they exceeded the bounds of parliamentary, political or private probity, as they often did.
On the Contrary records in his finely-focused prose an adventure in ideas that involves vivid, real people – friends, colleagues and remorseless opponents alike. Many are famous names. Readers will be startled at Leon’s freshness of approach and grasp of the intricate realities and compromises that go into the making of a politician and into the leadership of a political party. Fresh light is cast on a half-century of figures who have shaped modern South Africa: from the dour Nationalists to the abrasive personalities of the liberation fold. Themes, events and personalities emerge from five decades of memory, participation and intellectual struggle. They are unique in our records, told from very near the centre of power.

He lifts the lid on many of the most important chapters of the recent epoch: the constitutional negotiations, the birth and near death of the Democratic Alliance, his struggle with Thabo Mbeki over AIDS, Zimbabwe and race. In a no-holds-barred assessment he provides an insider’s account of the dramas and events which have helped shape and define modern South Africa. He also charts the future course of South Africa after the rise of Jacob Zuma and the struggle for power inside the ANC.

Leon’s book offers an almost forensic examination of how corruption, crime and unemployment corroded the high ideals of the Constitution and of Parliament itself. He is also not afraid of allowing glimpses of his rich, private life – the brilliance of this book rests in its careful balance of the public and the private and how they nurture each other.

Past It Notes

Maureen Lipman

JR Books ISBN 9781906217754

September 2008

This is the first book for nine years from the bestselling author and award-winning actress. In her inimitable, stylish, witty way, Maureen entertains us with stories from her personal and professional life over the last 25 years - an autobiographical feast for her many fans. Life the Lipman way is always unexpected. Her self-deprecatingly titled Past-it Notes is the ultimate Maureen Lipman Collection, drawing on choice material from her six previous books (re-visited and re-worked) and lacing this with a heady dose of extremely funny new autobiographical material.

Past-it Notes is packed with beguiling showbiz anecdotes, wonderful stories, eccentric characters, bizarre situations and memorable encounters - all recalled and recorded with gusto and relish.

To compliment all this, Maureen has also included affectionate recollections of her late husband, the playwright Jack Rosenthal, and of her mother and Muse, the inimitable Zelma, source of so much rich comic material. From entertaining the neighbours at the age of four with impressions of Alma Cogan to entertaining the nation on TV, from struggling with her laptop to film-roles and award-winning stage triumphs such as re-Joyce and Oklahoma (and even the Vagina Monologues!) - and not forgetting her iconic creation Beattie, star of thirty five British Telecom commercials - Maureen combines stories of her whirlwind professional life, and confessions of the chaos that often threatens to engulf her personal life, with a style and wit that is utterly and uniquely her own.

How to Survive Your Mother

Jonathan Maitland

Simon & Schuster ISBN 9780743430302 

February 2007

In 2004, a chance encounter led TV broadcaster Jonathan Maitland to uncover a disturbing incident involving his parents in the 1960s. The subject of a huge local scandal at the time, they were ordered to close down the chain of old people's homes they owned. They'd been extorting money from their clients.

As he attempts to find out the truth about what happened, Maitland peels back the layers of his extraordinary childhood, revealing how he coped with the outrageous and unpredictable lifestyle of his larger-than-lifemother: her marriages, her public suicide attempts, her outlandish money making schemes. (Having a mother who ran a hostel for gay men can't have been easy for a Surrey schoolboy in 1974!)

Entertaining, humorous, disturbing and revelatory, How to Survive Your Mother is a movingly honest book about what it feels like to find out things about your mother that you weren't supposed to know. It will strike a chord with anyone who has ever had issues with their parents.

If I Am Not For Myself : Journey of an Anti-Zionist Jew

Marqusee Marqusee

Verso ISBN 9781844674350

November 2007

If I Am Not For Myself is a passionate, thought-provoking exploration of what it means to be Jewish in the twenty-first century. It traces the author’s upbringing in 1960s Jewish-American surburbia, his anti-war and pro-Palestinian activism on the British left, and life as a Jew among Muslims in Pakistan, Morocco, and Britain. Interwoven with this are the experiences of his grandfather’s life in Jewish New York of the 1930s and 40s, his struggles with anti-Semitism and the twists and turns that led him from anti-fascism to militant Zionism. In the course of this deeply personal story, Marqusee refutes the claims of Israel and Zionism on Jewish loyalty and laments their impact on the Jewish diaspora. Rather, he argues for a richer, more multi-dimensional understanding of Jewish history and identity, and reclaims vital political and personal space for those castigated as “self-haters” by the Jewish establishment.

Mike Marqusee’s books include Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the 1960s, War Minus the Shooting and Anyone But England. He is a regular contributor to the Guardian and writes a fortnightly column for the Indian newspaper The Hindu. He lives in London.

The Earl of Petticoat Lane

Andrew Miller

Arrow ISBN 9780099478737 

April 2007

When Henry Freedman met Miriam Claret in 1929, he was a barrow boy and she was a milliner's apprentice.

In 1953, they  were presented to the Queen.

In this remarkable and moving work of narrative non-fiction, Andrew Miller tells the story of his grandparents, the children of Jewish immigrants to the East End, tracing their fortunes from Poland and Lithuania to their arrival in Regent's Park and the world of Astors and Parker-Bowles. It is a story of immigration and Anglicisation, of the significance of race and class and language and accent in our country, of how it has been possible for people in this country to change themselves and their lives.

Born in London in 1974, Andrew Miller studied literature at Cambridge and Princeton. He worked as a television producer before joining the Economist to write about British politics and culture. He is currently the magazine’s Moscow correspondent. The Earl of Petticoat Lane is his first book.

This is a truly delightful book, full of colourful and moving details. It also has great resonance in the present ongoing debate on immigration.

Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector

Ben Moser

Haus Publishing ISBN 9781906598426

August 2009

Born in 1920, in the nightmarish landscape of post-World War I Ukraine, her family driven to a distant country by the fearsome pogroms that killed her mother and ruined her father, Clarice Lispector triumphed over her origins to become, virtually from adolescence, a person whose beauty, genius, and eccentricity intrigued all of Brazil’s writers and artists.

Why This World tells how this precocious girl, through long exile abroad and difficult personal struggles, matured into a great writer and demonstrates, for the first time, the deep roots in the Jewish mystical tradition that make her the true heir to Kafka.

Against a sweeping historical panorama, from the Ukraine to Brazil, from Naples and Berne and Washington to Rio de Janeiro. Why This World is an essential introduction to the work of one of the twentieth century’s most important writers, indispensable for students of Jewish, Latin American, and women’s literature. Stripping away the mythology that has accreted around this extraordinary figure, it shows, above all, how Clarice Lispector transformed the personal struggles of a single woman into works of universal resonance. As she said: ‘I am all of yourselves.’

Benjamin Moser is the New Books columnist of Harper’s Magazine. He was born in Houston in 1976 and currently lives in the Netherlands. He is a contributor to the The     New York Review of Books, and he has written for Condé Nast Traveler and Newsweek, as well as many other publications.

A Garden of Eden in Hell

Melissa Muller and Reinhard Piechocki

Pan Macmillan, ISBN 9780330451598   
August 2007

The compelling and moving story of a brilliant pianist who survived the Holocaust through her music.

Alice Herz-Sommer was born in 1903 in Prague, the Prague of the Hapsburgs and of Franz Kafka, a family friend. Musically very gifted, by her mid-teens Alice was one of the best-known pianists in Prague. But as the Nazis swept across Europe her comfortable, bourgeois world began to crumble around her, as anti-Jewish feeling not only intensified but was legitimised.

In 1942, Alice's mother was deported. Desperately unhappy, she resolved to learn Chopin's 24 Etudes - the most technically demanding piano pieces she knew - and the complex but beautiful music saved her sanity. A year later, she, too - together with her husband and their six-year-old son - was deported to a concentration camp. But even in Theresienstadt, music was her salvation and in the course of more than a hundred concerts she gave her fellow-prisoners hope in a world of pain and death.

This is her remarkable story, but it is also the story of a mother's struggle to create a happy childhood for her beloved only son in the midst of atrocity and barbarism. Of 15,000 children sent to the camp, Raphael was one of the 130 who survived. Today, Alice Herz-Sommer lives in London and she still plays the piano every day.

A LIfe: Isaac B. Singer

Florence Noiville

Translated from the French by Catherine Temerson

Farrar Straus Giroux ISBN 9780374178000

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991) is widely recognized as the most

popular Yiddish writer of the twentieth century. His translated body of

work, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, is

beloved around the world. But although Singer was a very public and

outgoing figure, much about his personal life remains unknown.

Florence Noiville offers a glimpse into the world of this much-beloved

but persistently elusive figure.

An astonishingly prolific writer, Singer was able to recreate the lost world of Jewish Eastern Europe and also to describe the immigrant experience in America. Drawing heavily upon folklore, Singer’s work is noted for its mystical strain. But he was also heavily concerned with the problems of his own day, and through his novels and stories runs a strong undercurrent of social consciousness. Unafraid to celebrate peasant life, Singer was often accused of being vulgar, yet he was also recognized for a deeply moral sensibility. And much like his work, Singer’s personal life was marked by contradiction: the son of a Rabbi, he struggled with warring currents of devotion and doubt. Solicitous of affection, he was also known for his philandering. Devoted to the notion of family, he abandoned his own son before the Second World War.

Drawing on letters, personal recollections, and interviews with Singer’s friends, family, and publishing contemporaries, Florence Noiville speaks to these paradoxes. More appreciation than comprehensive biography, her narrative is rich in detail about the people, places, and ideas that shaped Singer’s world. A remarkably vivid portrait of the man and his work emerges—a compassionate, vivid, and insightful vision of one of the twentieth century’s greatest storytellers.

Florence Noiville is a journalist and literary critic for Le Monde. She has written books on Greek and Roman mythology and a biography of Paul Faucher.

Once Upon A Country: A Palestinian Life

Sari Nusseibeh with Anthony David

Halban Publishers ISBN 9781905559053

November 2007

Sari Nusseibeh's family history is inextricably interwoven with the city of Jerusalem, and his own life with the Palestinian nationalist struggle.

A dreamer by nature, he was always curious about what lay beyond the barbed wire of No Man's Land of divided East Jerusalem, and only too aware of the competing claims of the three great religions in his beloved Old City.

Reluctantly, he became involved in politics, managing to be termed "the smiling face of Palestinian terror" by some Israelis whilst also provoking Palestinian death threats - such were the angry responses to his independent thinking. 

Through his deeply moving personal story, Nusseibeh reveals the terrible consequences of war, partition and terrorism.  He also charts, from the inside, the life of the embattled Palestinian leadership under Arafat, with a penetrating analysis of the workings of the Palestinian Authority.

Sari Nusseibeh is a philosopher and the President of Al-Quds University in Jerusalem.  In 2002 he co-founded The People’s Voice, an Israeli-Palestinian grass-roots organisation which advocates peace between Israel and Palestine.  He was the PLO's chief representative in Jerusalem in 2001-2.

A Tale of Love and Darkness

Amos Oz

Translated by Nicholas de Lange

Vintage ISBN 9780099450030

August 2005

Love and darkness are just two of the powerful forces that run through Amos Oz's extraordinary, moving story. He takes us on a seductive journey through his childhood and adolescence, along Jerusalem's war-torn streets in the 1940s and '50s, and into the infernal marriage of two kind, well-meaning people: his fussy, logical father, and his dreamy, romantic mother. Caught between them is one small boy with the weight of generations on his shoulders. And at the tragic heart of the story is the suicide of his mother, when Amos was twelve-and-a-half years old. Oz's story dives into 120 year of family history and paradox, the saga of a Jewish love-hate affair with Europe that sweeps from Vilna and Odessa, via Poland and Prague, to Israel. Farce and heartbreak, history and humanity make up this magical portrait of the artist who saw the birth of a nation, and came through its turbulent life as well as his own. This is a memoir like no other, and one that cries out to be read and wept over.

Take Off Your Party Dress: When Life’s Too Busy for Breast Cancer

Dina Rabinovitch

Pocket Books ISBN 9781416527886
March 2007

Journalist Dina Rabinovitch had just turned 40 when was diagnosed with breast cancer in September 2004. At that point she didn't know a thing about the disease. She soon became an expert. Her experience of the condition and its treatment, from diagnosis through mastectomy to recovery, is recounted in this down-to-earth memoir covering everything from trialling Herceptin to what to wear that's stylish after surgery. Warm, lively, at times irreverent, Rabinovitch's story of juggling a hectic career and a large, extended family while living with cancer is a strong and engaging narrative that will be essential reading for anyone affected by this most prevalent disease.

Sadly, she passed away in October 2007.

Personal Terms

Frederic Raphael

Carcanet ISBN 9781857545 357
August 2001

In 1951, when he was twenty, the novelist, screen-writer and homme-de-lettres-to-be Frederic Raphael bought a spiral-bound notebook and started keeping a curious kind of writer's journal. Raphael includes reflections, sketches for stories and other projects, vignettes of people and places. Some entries are pages long, some are pithy aphorisms, all in one way or another illuminating the vocation of writer and the equally urgent and vital vocation of reader. A writer's chief tools are watching, listening, guessing, keeping an open mind, reading the present and rereading the past to keep contact and faith with the works which until recent times constituted the imagination and critical discourse of our cultural
tribes.

Personal Terms is a generous collation from 1951 up to 1969, that year of political crisis and disillusion. By then the eighteen-year-old boy had become the author of eight novels and much else for the page and screen.

Personal Terms II

Rough Copy

Carcanet ISBN 9781857546 576

May 2004

'My notebooks are my conscience,' writes Frederic Raphael. 'They contain a writer's letters to himself.' This second volume of his notebooks covers the first three years of the 1970s: years of slump, treacheries and deceits in the film world, of literary achievement and private tragi-comedies - the storm that washes away weeks of hard work in the garden of the Raphaels' French farmhouse, the serious accident in which his father nearly dies, before being unexpectedly restored to alarmingly irascible life.

Raphael's sharp wit spares no one, not the sacred monsters of the movie business and the literary world, nor the incidental characters whose unguarded stories and personalities become the material for fiction. Least of all does he spare himself.

Personal Terms III

Cuts and Bruises

Carcanet ISBN 9781857547085
June 2006

Cuts and Bruises concerns the 1970s, during which Raphael travelled

widely (not least to Hollywood, which yields a mordantly sweet and sour

account of figures such as Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and John

Schlesinger) and wrote the acclaimed television series The Glittering

Prizes. Raphael is only incidentally concerned with the world of the

famous, though, and has little interest in 'names' and gossip except to

notice the discrepancies between public and private faces and to convey the texture of life around him. Greece remains an abiding passion, and the conduct of Greek friends during the last months of the Colonel's tyranny leads to surprising reflections on exile and return.

Personal Terms IV

Ticks and Crosses

Carcanet ISBN 9781857549300

November 2008

Ticks and Crosses covers the years 1976 to 1978. Raphael observes the inner workings of film studios with the cool acuity of a classicist; he records his thinking on philosophy, Jewishness, and Greece ancient and modern, with the tough irreverence of a Hollywood operator. Among the pleasures of Ticks and Crosses are an account of a farcical summer afternoon spent floating down a French river on a lilo in the company of Shirley Williams; an alarming trip up the wrong (and by no means dormant) volcano in Guatemala; meeting Nabokov; taking part in Any Questions with Enoch Powell… The eminent are caught off-guard; aphorisms sparkle, and throughout, Raphael’s love of French life and culture, his delight in the human comedy of social life, illuminate his unfolding chronicle.

Leading from the Front: My Story

Gerald Ronson with Jeffrey Robinson

Mainstream Publishing ISBN 9781845965099
June 2009

The last of the great British tycoons reveals how he fought his way to the top of the business ladder, lost everything twice, then clawed his way back up again.

Amazingly for a man who now holds an iconic status in British business,

Ronson quit school before his 15th birthday to work with his father in the family’s furniture factory, and as a young boy he and his friends were street fighters, using their fists to take on the British fascist movement. This propelled him into a role as a leader in the country’s Jewish community, and he is now considered to be the most influential secular Jew in the UK.

Ronson will forever be associated with the famous Guinness Affair, which was the biggest financial scandal of the ’80s. He was found guilty after a media circus of a trial in which the cards were stacked against him, and he spent six months in jail. After Guinness, which Ronson calls the greatest crisis in his life, he suffered a major financial crash that nearly bankrupted him, and he has spent the last two decades rebuilding his empire and reputation.

Now 70, Ronson spends a great deal of time raising money for charities. His company, Heron, was for a time the second-largest private company in the country, and he is arguably one of the most respected property developers in Europe.

Walter Rothschild: The Man, the Museum and the Menagerie

Miriam Rothschild

Natural History Museum ISBN 9780565092283
February 2008

This compelling biography reveals the extraordinary life of Walter Rothschild – the best known zoologist of his day and one of Britain’s great eccentrics.

Born into what was one of the wealthiest families in the world, he amassed the largest single accumulation of zoological specimens ever collected by one person. Walter’s life traversed the fields of politics and finance as well as zoology and was packed with both achievements and incident.

From his involvement with the Balfour Declaration to his prodigious personal scientific output, Walter's life was anything but commonplace. He established his own private Museum in 1892, now the Natural History Museum at Tring, drove a team of zebra down Piccadilly and into the forecourt of Buckingham Palace, and was a victim of blackmail for many years.

With the help of evocative photographs Miriam Rothschild has produced an absorbing narrative which reveals the complexities and conflicts this remarkable man faced during his life.

Miriam Rothschild was the niece of Walter Rothschild and, a renowned naturalist herself, shared her uncle’s passion for the natural world. In 1995 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and was made a Dame in 2000. Dame Miriam died in 2005.

Israel Through My Lens

David Rubinger with Ruth Corman

Abbeville Press ISBN 9780789209283

November 2007

Today, photojournalist David Rubinger stands at the peak of his profession: a winner of the Israel Prize for services to the media and a fixture on the masthead of Time, he is the only photographer whose work is on permanent display at the Knesset, Israel's legislature. In this fascinating volume, he reports his own story, which in many ways reflects the history of Israel that he has recorded so faithfully with his camera. Born in Vienna in 1924, he emigrated to British Palestine in 1939 and developed a passion for photography while serving in the British army's Jewish Brigade. After fighting in Israel's War of Independence, he became a professional news photographer, reporting on each of his young nation's subsequent wars from the front lines, at first for the Israeli media and later as a correspondent for Time-Life. He photographed all of Israel's leaders, many of whom have allowed him a remarkable degree of access to their lives; Ariel Sharon said, "I trust Rubinger even though I know he doesn't vote for me." But Rubinger has not confined his reporting to war and politics; by photographing the successive waves of Jewish immigrants from Europe, the Arab world, Russia, and Ethiopia, he has also created a valuable record of Israel's transformation from a country of six hundred thousand to one of seven million.

Koestler: The Indispensable Intellectual

Michael Scammell

Faber & Faber ISBN 9780571138531

February 2010

Best known as the author of the classic "Darkness at Noon", Koestler was one of the most influential and controversial intellectuals, involved

in and commenting on almost every political movement of the twentieth century. As young man, he was a committed Zionist and moved to Palestine; he was imprisoned and sentenced to death in Franco's Spain; escaped Occupied France; and, was a member of the Communist party for seven years, later becoming one of its fiercest critics with the publication of "Darkness at Noon". Without sentimentality, Scammell gives a full account of Koestler's turbulent private life: his drug use, manic depression, the frenetic womanizing that doomed his three marriages and led to an accusation of rape, and his startling suicide pact with his wife in 1983. Koestler also gives a full account of the author's voluminous writings, making the case that the autobiographies and essays are fit to stand beside "Darkness at Noon" as works of lasting literary value. Michael Scammell creates an indelible portrait of this brilliant, unpredictable, and talented writer, once memorably described as 'one third blackguard, one third lunatic, and one third genius'.

Michael Scammell won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for biography in 1985 for his life of Solzhenitsyn, and is the translator of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Nabokov, and Solzhenitsyn, among many others. He is a former president of PEN American Center and a vice-president of International PEN, and has written regularly for the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books and the New Republic. He teaches non-fiction writing and translation in the School of the Arts at Columbia.

Memories of Eden: A Journey Through Jewish Baghdad

Violette Shamash, edited by Mira and Tony Rocca

Forum Books ISBN 9780955709500

February 2008

Memories of Eden evokes a bygone era – when pre-WW2 Baghdad was one-third Jewish and inter-faith relations were harmonious.  When Violette was born, Mesopotamia had been Ottoman for some 400 years, until redrawn as Iraq by the British when she was eight years old. This bittersweet memoir, based on unpublished letters and diary entries, tells of a childhood spent in the City of Caliphs, Scheherazade and the land of the Garden of Eden, and of traditions passed down over the generations. It captures vividly the elusive quality of a scene totally at odds with our image of Iraq today, just as The Kite Runner  portrays a Kabul that is no more.

Violette re-lives the excitement of a vibrant society coming to terms with life, first under Ottoman, then British, and finally, pro-Nazi rule, which ended in disaster for the Jews of Iraq who were brutally attacked in two days of slaughter in June 1941 – shockingly, while British troops stood by. While the pogrom tolled the death-knell for the oldest community in the Diaspora, the question of why the army did not intervene has ever since remained a mystery. The truth is now finally revealed in the book’s final section.

Like Anne Frank’s diary, Memories of Eden tells of an easy and happy childhood, of growing maturity and sophistication, and then shrinking circumstances, victimisation and, finally, flight.

Violette’s memoir is drawn from recollections and notes she sent over a period of 20 years to her daughter Mira (born in the pogrom), and edited by her son-in-law, Tony Rocca, a journalist whose Fleet Street career spanned two decades with the Daily Mail and Sunday Times. He is the author of Catching Fireflies (Random House).

Footpaths in the Painted City: An Indian Journey

Sadia Shephard

Atlantic Books ISBN 9781843546047

September 2008

Sadia Shepard's mother was Muslim, her father Catholic. But when she found out her Pakistani grandmother had been born Jewish in Bombay, she set out to discover the disappearing Jews of India - and uncover her own roots...

Sadia Shepard grew up in a joyful, chaotic home in Boston. Her father, a white Protestant from Colorado, and her mother, a Muslim from Pakistan, cherished their disparate customs and religious backgrounds, and created a household full of stories and storytellers, where cultures intertwined. But at the age of thirteen, Sadia learned that there was another story which she had never been told.

Her beloved maternal grandmother was not born a Muslim like the rest of her Pakistani family. Instead, she had begun her life as Rachel Jacobs - a member of a tiny Indian-Jewish community. The Bene Israel believe they are descended from one of the Lost Tribes of Israel, shipwrecked on India's Konkan coast over two thousand years ago.

Sadia headed to India in search of the Bene Israel community, wanting to understand their unique traditions, and to fulfill a promise she made to her grandmother before she died. Weaving together the story of her grandparents' secret marriage with an evocative account of a little-known and dying Jewish community, Footpaths in the Painted City is a beautifully affecting depiction of a young woman's attempt to come to terms with her family's past in order to shape her own future. It is an unforgettable story of lost stories, shrouded identities, forbidden love and, above all, self-discovery.

Before I Forget: A Family Memoir

Brian Tesler

Mind Advertising Books ISBN 9780955451508 

Brian Tesler was one of the major figures in British television from the 1950s until his retirement in 1994. His professional career encompassed the medium's entire post-war evolution from a single-channel BBC to today's explosion of satellite and cable channels.

Before I Forget reflects Tesler's career throughout, but is not a record of it. Instead it is a very personal account of his family, of the East End's vibrant Jewish community in the early decades of the last century, and of the life of a youngster in London in peacetime and in war, immersed in the radio, theatre, movies and music hall of the 1930s and 1940s.

Inheriting Anne Frank

Jacqueline van Maarsen

Translated from the Dutch by Brian Doyle

Arcadia ISBN 9781906413491

January 2010

My Name is Anne, She Said, Anne Frank ends in 1947, two years after the death of her close friend Anne. But Anne’s death did not spell the end of the friendship. Otto Frank clung desperately to his deceased daughter’s dearest friend. Having remained silent about her friendship with Anne Frank for decades after the war, Jacqueline van Maarsen finally decided to tell her story, hoping to expose half-truths and fabrications surrounding her former friend and to respect Anne Frank’s legacy for what it is. While her books have been written in close cooperation with the Anne Frank Foundation, there are times when she has felt obliged to disagree with the Foundation and she has not shied away from confrontation.
In her second book, van Maarsen returns in detail to the most dominant person in her life, her French mother who died in 1992 at the age of 101. The aftermath of an inheritance question in France in which the author had an important role to play, takes on tragic proportions, although the hilarity of the sometimes grotesque situation surfaces now and then. Inheriting Anne Frank is an important documentary contribution to our knowledge of Anne Frank and what happened to and on account of her renowned diary. It is also a stirring portrait of a woman’s turbulent life in the twentieth century.

My Name is Anne, She Said, Anne Frank

Translated by Hester Velmans

Arcadia ISBN 9781905147427

March 2008

Jacqueline van Maarsen's father was Dutch, her mother French; he was Jewish, she a Catholic. In 1938, after unremitting effort, he succeeded in registering his wife with the Jewish Council in Amsterdam. From that moment on, his two daughters were also considered to be Jewish. Jacqueline was forced to go to a special school for Jewish children - it was there that she met Anne Frank and they immediately became friends. Unlike Anne Frank, Jacqueline van Maarsen escaped deportation thanks to her strong willed mother who persuaded the German Registration Board to undo her listing as a Jew. She left the school a few months after Anne Frank went into hiding (or 'went to Switzerland', as Jacqueline believed.) It was only after the war when Otto Frank told her what happened that she found out the truth about Anne's fate.

A Life, a Memoir

Simone Veil

Haus Publishing ISBN 9781906598235

January 2009

As France's Minister for Health Simone Veil introduced the law to

legalize abortion in 1975.  She was elected first female President of the European Parliament and was Minister of State for Social Affairs until 1995.  In 1998, aged 70, she received an honorary damehood (DBE) from the British government for her contributions to humanity.

'This is a riveting memoir by an extraordinary woman.  With exemplary forthrightness, Simone Veil charts her trajectory from her pre-war childhood in a secular Jewish family in Nice, through the misery of her year in Auschwitz and into the cut and thrust of French and European politics.  This document of a life is also a compact history of post-war France.'

- Lisa Appignanesi

Baghdad Memories

Ivy Vernon

In Tune Publications ISBN 9780956102003

November 2008

This book is a first hand record of the saga of the good life of the Iraqi Jews after 1950, followed by their demise and fall – indeed total extinction in the seventies. The author and her family lived through it all sheltered by the cohesiveness and resilience of the community, finally escaping along with thousands of others through the mountains.

In an attempt to recreate this bygone era and how it negotiated seamlessly within the country’s Moslem laws and wider society, Ivy narrates multiple facets in chapters; they give an autobiographical account of how this charmed life degenerated rapidly after the 1967 war and the rise of Saddam Hussein. Apart from two seriously researched chapters of sad history (gleaned from English and Arabic sources both), the author has interspersed her memories with an excellent sense of humor to make of the whole book a very interesting and enjoyable read.

And Then The Music Stopped Playing

Ken Ward

Braiswick ISBN 9781898030119

July 2006

The heart-rending story of a German of liberal Jewish descent who was one of the last to escape to England under the Kindertransport scheme where he first made army uniforms, fire watching in London during the Blitz. Joining the army he fought his own countrymen in the Royal Tank Regiment. He describes his life in Germany under the Nazis, life in action with the Desert Rats as a wireless operator in a Firefly tank from the Normandy beaches to Hamburg, surviving the loss of four tanks on the way, and his life with the British and Russian occupation forces, in the devastated city of Berlin after the war.

Isaac Rosenberg: The Making Of A Great War Poet

Jean Moorcroft Wilson

Weidenfeld ISBN 9780297851455

Siegfried Sassoon praised Isaac Rosenberg's 'genius' and T.S. Eliot called him the 'most extraordinary' of the Great War poets. Yet it is over thirty years since there has been a full-length biography of Isaac Rosenberg. This major reappraisal of his life and work by one of the First World War literature's leading authorities, Jean Moorcroft Wilson, is long overdue.
Rosenberg dies on the Western Front in 1918 aged only twenty-seven, his tragic early death resembling that of many other well-known poets of that conflict. But he differed from the majority of Great War poets in almost every other respect - race, class, education, upbringing, experience and technique. He was a skilled painter as well as a brilliant poet. The son of impoverished immigrant Russian Jews, he served as a private in the army and his perspective on the trenches is quite different from the other mainly officer-poets, allowing the voice of the "poor bloody Tommy" to be eloquently heard.
Jean Moorcroft Wilson focuses on the relationship between Rosenberg's life and work - his childhood in Bristol and the Jewish East End of London; his time at the Slade School of Art and friendship with David Bomberg, Mark Gertler and Stanley Spencer; his visit to Cape Town, where he was staying when war broke out in August 1914 and where he fell in love with the divorced wife of South Africa's future Prime Minister; and his harrowing life as a private in the British Army.
This monumental new life is published to mark the 90th anniversary of his death. Based on all known Rosenberg material and a mass of important new discoveries, Dr Wilson's biography has been authorised by Rosenberg's family and written with their blessing and help. It is also beautifully illustrated, including some hitherto unseen self-portraits, bringing together for the first time all that is known of this outstanding poet-painter.

Jean Moorcroft Wilson lectured in English at the University of Munich and is now lecturer at Birkbeck College, London.

The Eitingons

Mary-Kay Wilmers

Faber & Faber ISBN 9780571234721

November 2009

Who were the Eitingons, and what part did they play in the secret dramas of the twentieth century?
Leonid Eitingon was a KGB killer who dedicated his life to the Soviet regime. He was in China in the early 1920s, in Turkey in the late 1920s, in Spain during the civil war, and, crucially, in Mexico when Trotsky was assassinated. ‘As long as I live,’ Stalin had said, ‘not a hair of his head shall be touched.’ It did not work out like that.

Max Eitingon was a psychoanalyst, a colleague, friend and protégé of Freud’s. He was rich, secretive and - through his friendship with a famous Russian singer - implicated in the abduction of a white Russian general in Paris in 1937.

Motty Eitingon was a New York fur dealer whose connections with the Soviet Union made him the largest trader in the world. Imprisoned by the Bolsheviks, questioned by the FBI, was Motty everybody’s friend or everybody’s enemy?

Mary-Kay Wilmers began looking into aspects of her remarkable family twenty years ago. The result is a book of astonishing scope and thrilling originality which throws light into some of the darkest corners of the last century. At the centre of the story stands the author herself - ironic, precise, searching and stylish - wondering not only about where she is from, but about what she’s entitled to know.

Rosenfeld's Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing.

Steven J. Zipperstein

Yale University Press ISBN 9780300126495

May 2009

Born in Chicago in 1918, the prodigiously gifted and erudite Isaac Rosenfeld was anointed a 'genius' upon the publication of his novel, Passage from Home; someone expected to surpass even his closest friend and rival, Saul Bellow. Yet when felled by a heart attack at the age of thirty-eight, Rosenfeld had published relatively little, his life reduced to a metaphor for literary failure.

In this deeply contemplative book, Steven Zipperstein seeks to reclaim Rosenfeld's legacy by opening up his work. Zipperstein examines for the first time the small mountain of unfinished manuscripts the writer left behind, as well as his fiercely candid journals and letters. In the process, Zipperstein unearths a turbulent life that was obsessively grounded in a profound commitment to the ideals of the writing life.

Rosenfeld's Lives is a fascinating exploration of literary genius and aspiration, and the paradoxical power of literature to elevate and to enslave. It illuminates the cultural and political tensions of post-war America, Jewish intellectual life of the era, and - most poignantly - the struggle at the heart of any writer's life.