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

Hutchinson ISBN ISBN: 0091796334

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 978-0330453530

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 1-84408-319-5

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.

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

Marina Benjamin

Bloomsbury ISBN 9780747586920    Published 5 February

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

Hutchinson ISBN 0091795435

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…

Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland
Carmen Callil

Jonathan Cape ISBN 0224078100

Carmen Callil tells the story of one of history’s most despicable villains and conmen – Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Nazi collaborator and ‘Commissioner for Jewish Affairs’, who managed the Vichy government’s dirty work, ‘controlling’ its Jewish population.

Born into a politically moderate family, Louis Darquier (‘de Pellepoix’ was a later affectation) proceeded from modest beginnings to claw his way to power. He was the ultimate chancer: always broke, always desperate for attention, status, women and drink, he became ‘one of the few men to put on weight during the Second World War’. After it was over he decamped to Spain and would never be brought to justice for having sent thousands of Jews to the camps.

Early on in his career he married the alcoholic Myrtle Jones from Tasmania, equally practised in the arts of deception. Together they had a child, Anne Darquier, whom they promptly abandoned to grow up in England under an oppressive mantle of silence. Her tragic story is woven through the narrative. Darquier’s ascent to power during the years leading up to World War II mirrors the rise of French anti-Semitism and the role it played in the horrors that were to follow. The book is a portrait of a society that was desperate and fragmented and which was collectively guilty in choosing to turn a blind eye.

Carmen Callil founded the Virago Press. Among the writers she published were Iris Murdoch, A.S.Byatt, Angela Carter, David Malouf, Rosamond Lehmann, Amos Oz, Edward Said, Michael Ignatieff, Marina Warner and Toni Morrison. She is now a critic and wri

Ariel Sharon: An Intimate Portrait

Uri Dan

Palgrave ISBN 1403977909

In 1954 reporter Uri Dan met a young military commander named Ariel Sharon and followed him closely for more than half a century. Dan became Sharon's trusted advisor and a witness to the defining moments of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- from secret meetings with heads of state, to open warfare in the Sinai.

This riveting combination of political history, narrative biography, interviews, and correspondence sheds new light on the conflict in the Middle East and provides an intimate, definitive portrait of Ariel Sharon, a man whose life is inextricably intertwined with Israel's destiny. With Hamas governing Palestine, Ariel Sharon gravely ill and the party he founded, the Kadima, in control of the Knesset, this book couldn't be more timely.

Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life

Philip Davis

Oxford University Press ISBN 978-0-19-927009-5
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 0330441574 

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. I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors is striking, original and unforgettable; it has the makings of a classic.

Ambivalence: Crossing the Israel Palestine Divide

Jonathan Garfinkel

Saqi ISBN 978-0-86356-682-0

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 0743294939

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.

Vivien Goldman

Aurum Press ISBN 1845132106

Recorded in London after an assassination attempt sent him into exile from Jamaica, and named by "Time" magazine as the album of the century, "Exodus" is Bob Marley's masterpiece of spiritual exploration. Much more than just a making-of-the-record story, The Book of Exodus takes in the history of Jamaican music, Marley's personal journey from Trench Town ghetto to global superstardom, his political involvement, Rastafarianism, and the biblical roots of the "Exodus" story, culminating in his triumphant return to the stage in Jamaica at the Peace Concert of 1978.

As PR for Island Records, Vivien Goldman was instrumental in introducing white audiences to the Rasta sound of Bob Marley. Here, she provides a unique first-hand account of the album "Exodus", from its conception in Jamaica to the intense, sometimes raucous all-night studio sessions in London. The Book of Exodus is an unforgettable portrait of Marley from a member of his intimate circle and an acutely perceptive appreciation of his musical and spiritual legacy.

Leonard Woolf: A Biography

Victoria Glendinning

Simon & Schuster ISBN 0-7432-4653-5

A man of extremes, Leonard Woolf was ferocious and tender, violent and self-restrained, opinionated and non-judgmental, always an outsider of sorts within the exceptionally intimate, fractious, and sometimes vicious society of brilliant but troubled friends and lovers.

Leonard 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; and Clive Bell. Glendinning brings to life their long nights of intense discussion and charts Leonard's lifelong friendships with John Maynard Keynes and E. M. Forster.

She unearths the crucial influence of Woolf 's seven years as a headstrong administrator in colonial Ceylon, where he lost confidence in the imperial mission, deciding to abandon Ceylon 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 in whom passion fought with reason and whose far-reaching influence is long overdue.

Einstein, His Life and Universe

Walter Isaacson

Simon & Schuster ISBN 0-7432-6473-8
April 2007

This is the first full biography of Albert Einstein since all of his papers have become available.

How did his mind work? What made him a genius? Isaacson's biography shows how his scientific imagination sprang from the rebellious nature of his personality. His fascinating story is a testament to the connection between creativity and freedom.

Based on newly released personal letters of Einstein, this book explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk -- a struggling father in a difficult marriage who couldn't get a teaching job or a doctorate -- became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe. His success came from questioning conventional wisdom and marveling at mysteries that struck others as mundane. This led him to embrace a morality and politics based on respect for free minds, free spirits, and free individuals.

These traits are just as vital for this new century of globalization, in which our success will depend on our creativity, as they were for the beginning of the last century, when Einstein helped usher in the modern age.

Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, has been chairman of CNN and the managing editor of Time magazine. He is the author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life and of Kissinger: A Biography.

For Those I Loved

Martin Gray

Hampton Roads ISBN 1571745270

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.

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World

Alan Greenspan

Allen Lane ISBN 9780713999822

September 2007

The most remarkable thing that happened to the world economy after 9/11 was ... nothing. What would have once meant a crippling shock to the system was absorbed astonishingly quickly, partly due to the efforts of the then Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Alan Greenspan.

The post 9/11 global economy is a new and turbulent system — vastly more flexible, resilient, open, self-directing, and fast-changing — than it was even twenty years ago. The Age of Turbulence is an incomparable reckoning with the nature of this new world — how we got here, what we're living through, and what lies over the horizon, for good or ill, channelled through Greenspan's own experiences working in the command room of the global economy for longer and with greater effect than any other single living figure.

Greenspan shares the story of his life taking full measure of the individuals who made strong impressions on him, including every US President from Nixon to George W. Bush, and the great crises and challenges that they faced. But his other goal is to draw readers along the same learning curve he followed, so they have a grasp of his own hard-won, layered understanding of the dynamics that drive world events. The distillation of a life's worth of wisdom and insight into an elegant expression of a coherent worldview, The Age of Turbulence will stand as Alan Greenspan's personal and intellectual legacy.

Alan Greenspan was born in 1926 in the Washington Heights neighbourhood of New York City. After studying clarinet at Juillard and working as a professional musician, he earned his BA, MA and PhD in Economics from New York University. From 1974 to 1977 he served as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Gerald Ford. In 1987 President Ronald Reagan appointed him Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, a position he held until his retirement in 2006.

Roman's Journey

Roman Halter

with a preface by Sir Martin Gilbert
Portobello Books ISBN: 978 1 84627 032 1

'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 1-84408-384-5

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.

Suburban Shaman – Tales from Medicine’s Frontline

Cecil Helman

Hammersmith Press ISBN: 1-905140-08-8

‘Medicine is not just about science. It’s also all about stories, and about the mingling of narratives among doctors,

and between them and their patients.’

So writes Cecil Helman after 27 years as a family practitioner in and around London interlaced with training and research as a medical anthropologist, comparing a wide variety of medical systems and other forms of healing.This unique combination of frontline health worker and detached academic informs the many stories that make up this fascinating book. It also informs the author’s insights into what human suffering can teach us about ourselves and our own attitudes to health and illness, whether we are deliverers or recipients of health care.

With insight and compassion, Dr Helman’s stories take the reader on a journey from apartheid South Africa, where he did his medical training, to the London of the early 1970s, where for a short time he foreswore medicine to become an anthropologist and poet; from ship’s doctor on a Mediterranean cruise to family practitioner in London; from observing curative trance dances in the favelas of Brazil to interviewing sangomas in South Africa.

While trained in the Western tradition and with many years of practice in that system, Dr Helman’s anthropological insight leads him to view illness in a wider personal, social and cultural context, considering elements beyond the purely physical. In pleading for this holistic approach he celebrates family medicine which ‘in its quiet and unassuming way, and every day of the week, is still at the very frontline of human suffering’.

Dr Cecil Helman was born in Cape Town, South Africa into a family of doctors. He studied medicine there during the apartheid era before moving to the UK where he studied anthropology at University College London. After a spell as a ship’s doctor he became a family practitioner in London while also developing a distinguished academic career. He has been a Visiting Fellow in Social Medicine and Health Policy at Harvard Medical School and a Visiting Professor in Multi-cultural Health at University of New South Wales. He retired from clinical practice in 2002 and is currently Professor of Medical Anthropology at Brunel University and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Primary Care & Population Sciences, Royal Free & University College Medical School, London, UK. He is the author of the leading textbook Culture, Health and Illness which has been used in 42 countries, and of a book of essays, and several books of poetry. Suburban Shaman is the story of his experiences.

Some Sort of a Life

Miriam Karlin

Oberon Books ISBN 978-1840027808

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-10: 0285637800

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.

A Lover of Unreason : The Biography of Assia Wevill

Yehuda Koren & Eilat Negev

Robson ISBN 1861059744

'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.

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

The World is a Wedding: From East End to Soho

Bernard Kops

Five Leaves Publications ISBN 978-1905512331

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

The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit

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

Lucette Lagnado

Ecco ISBN 0060822120

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 1905147201

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: 0224078569

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.

Cecil B. DeMille and the Golden Calf

Simon Louvish

Faber & Faber ISBN 9780571229000

October 2007

Cecil B. DeMille is Hollywood's most enduring legend, remembered, and often reviled, for his grandiose Biblical sagas, such as Samson and Delilah and his 1956 version of The Ten Commandments, with its cast of tens of thousands before computer graphics made the modern epic mundane. Many judged DeMille a dinosaur both for his movies and his ultra-conservative politics. But in his vision of the Bible as an American frontier narrative he recast this old trend in American culture as a cinematic precursor of the 'neo-conservatism' of our own times.

The paradox of DeMille goes deeper, as despite his fame, most of his 70 films, of which 50 were silent pictures, remain unknown even to avid film fans, though his first 1923 version of The Ten Commandments and his 1927 tale of the Christ, King of Kings, linger in the imagination. A founder-pioneer of Hollywood as an industry, DeMille was an unsung auteur, a master of increasingly bizarre narratives, with tales of adultery and divorce, hedonism and sin, in an age in which modernity, the consumer society and the pursuit of money made America a battlefield of clashing values and temptations.

Simon Louvish tells the tale of Cecil B. DeMille through his work: a major re-examination of Hollywood's most monumental founder. Savant or sinner, artist or hack, defender of freedom or a hypocritical opportunist who embraced the golden calf of sheer commercialism, DeMille is a pervasive puzzle - a mirror of the larger puzzle and contradictions of America itself.

How to Survive Your Mother

Jonathan Maitland

Simon & Schuster ISBN 0743219988

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

Bill Marqusee

Verso ISBN 9781844672141
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

William Heineman ISBN 0434013307

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.

A Garden of Eden in Hell

Melissa Muller and Reinhard Piechocki

Pan Macmillan, ISBN 9780230528024 
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 0-374-17800-3

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. In Isaac Bashevis Singer, 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 978 1 905559 05 3

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.

Listen to Sari Nusseibeh interviewed by David Frost on Al Jazeera

A Tale of Love and Darkness

Amos Oz

Translated by Nicholas de Lange

Vintage ISBN 978-0099450030

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 978-1-4165-2788-6
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.

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 978-0789209283

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.

Memories of Eden: A Journey Through Jewish Baghdad

Violette Shamash, edited by Mira and Tony Rocca

Forum Books ISBN 978-0-9557095-0-0

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).

This Has Happened: An Italian Family in Auschwitz

Piera Sonnino

Translated by Ann Goldstein

Palgrave ISBN 1403975086

December 2006

Ten years after her return home from the lager, Piera Sonnino found the courage and the strength to tell the story of the extermination of her family by the Nazis' the tragedy of deportation, the death of her parents, her three brothers and two sisters in the concentration camps. Extraordinarily written, this account is strikingly accurate in bringing to life the methodical and relentless siege, the erosion of the freedoms and human dignity of the Italian Jews, from Mussolini's racial laws of 1938 to the final catastrophe of Auschwitz. In describing her arrival at the death camps, her writing dwells on the sea of mud, on a 'dimension that is completely contrary to all that which is human, a dimension that has even absorbed its own creators'. But the strength of her testimony rises from the mud, the personal diary becomes a universal voice that gives a name to that which cannot be expressed. Through her words, memory has the power to disarm this unspeakable evil.

2006 National Jewish Book Award Biography Category

Piera Sonnino was deported to Auschwitz in 1944. She was later transferred to Bergen Belsen and Braunschweig. The sole survivor of a family of eight, she returned to Italy in 1950. She died in 1999.

Ann Goldstein is an editor at the New Yorker. She has translated works by Roberto Calasso, Alessandro Baricco, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Aldo Buzzi. The recipient of the PEN Renato Poggioli Translation Award, she is the editor of the forthcoming collected works of Primo Levi. She lives in New York, USA.

My Life with George

Judith Summers

Michael Joseph ISBN 9780718153274
August 2007

When Judith Summers's husband and father both died within the space of two weeks, she found herself floundering. Life for her and her eight-year-old son Joshua seemed relentlessly bleak. Then George bounced into their lives.

A loving Cavalier King Charles Spaniel with film-star looks, George reawoke their joie de vivre. Yet Judith soon discovered that living with George had its drawbacks. He was a full-time job and as expensive to run as a Ferrari. Wilful and badly behaved, he refused to eat anything other than roast chicken, preferred travelling by car to walking, and became as jealous as a spurned lover if any man dared show an interest in her. And when a near-death tangle with a Staffordshire Bull terrier resulted in costly sessions with an animal psychologist, Judith found that it was she who was put on the couch . . .

My Life with George is the hilarious and moving story of the impossible but adorable George — recounting how he filled the huge void in Judith and Joshua's lives, while driving them absolutely barking mad along the way.

Judith Summers is the author of four novels, a prize-winning history of Soho and two biographies. A freelance journalist, she has also written widely on the eighteenth century and the history of London, where she lives with her son. And, of course, with George.

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.

The Children of Belsen

Hetty Verolme

Politico's ISBN 1842752057

January 2007

A painfully poignant, ultimately uplifting and highly unusual Holocaust story

When their father and then their mother was taken away, Hetty, Max and Jacky had to fend for themselves. Initially separated from her brothers, Hetty later joined them in the 'Children's House', a barrack room which directly overlooked one of the open mass graves. Under the inspirational figure of the children's mentor Sister Luba - 'The Angel of Belsen' - it came to form an oasis of hope and humanity amid the horrors.The children were finally liberated by the British in April 1945 - just too late for Anne Frank, who had died in the same camp the previous month.

Hetty Verolme, oldest of three children of a Jewish family in Amsterdam, was thirteen when in 1943 she was transported with her parents and brothers to the repatriation camp at Westerbork, and from there to the concentration camp at Belsen.

L'Oreal Took My Home: The Secrets of a Theft
Monica Waitzfelder
Translated from the French by Peter Bush (Preface by Serge Klarsfeld)

Arcadia ISBN 1905147112

A legal case led by a lone woman against one of the largest multinationals. A personal and explosive true story.

'L'Oreal took my home,' Edith Rosenfelder was always saying. This claim affected her daughter Monica, who decided when she grew up she'd try to understand what lay behind it. It was the start of true investigation leading to action in the French courts. Prior to 1937, Monica Waitzfelder's family lived in Germany. Being Jewish, they were forced to flee the country, abandoning all their possessions, and their property was looted in the same way as happened to many other European Jews, who were victims of persecution prior to the Holocaust.

This is the story of how the Rosenfelder family never recovered their house, which was located in the centre of Karlsruhe, Germany. It was a wonderful location in which the L'Oreal cosmetics firm opened its head office. It refused - and refuses - to recognisie the legitimate owners.

And Then The Music Stopped Playing

Ken Ward

Braiswick ISBN 978-1898030119

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.