Found and Lost E-Book

Alison Leslie Gold

• Herausgeber: Notting Hill Editions
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Internationally acclaimed holocaust writer, Alison Leslie Gold has never written her own story until now. Following the deaths of those closest to her, including her great friend Miep Gies (who risked her life to shelter the Frank family), Gold begins to write her way out of grief. In this compelling memoir, told through letters, Gold relates her descent into addiction, and the fateful meeting that ultimately led to her salvation.

Leseprobe

Alison Leslie Gold’s works include Anne Frank Remembered, written with Miep Gies, Memories of Anne Frank: Reflections of a Childhood Friend, A Special Fate and Fiet’s Vase and Other Stories of Survival. Her non-fiction work has received numerous tributes including a Best of the Best Award, a Notable Book for a Global Society Award and a Christopher Award. She has also published fiction, including Clairvoyant and The Devil’s Mistress, the latter being nominated for a National Book Award. She divides her time between Manhattan, Hydra (Greece) and British Columbia.

Alison Leslie Gold

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FOUND AND LOST

Mittens, Miep, and Shovelfuls of Dirt

Contents

– Prologue –

– Part I: Lost and Found –

– Interlogue I –

– Part II: Gone but Not Forgotten –

– Interlogue II –

– Part III: Hungry Birds –

– Interlogue III –

– Part IV: Snow Goose Weathervane –

– Interlogue IV –

– Part V: A Curtain Blows into the Room –

– Epilogue –

– Characters and Correspondents –

– Acknowledgments –

– Prologue –

Not long ago a dear friend died, and shortly after that an aged aunt. So began a series of deaths. I became unmoored, I was being left behind in a much altered world. These losses were happening against a backdrop of various events, large and small, faraway and near, to be remembered, negotiated, endured. (Even my own identity was erased at times, as a result of spending time with my aunt who was suffering from dementia.) In the midst of the reckoning came unexpected sources of strength, accommodation, even joy.

These were not my first experiences of loss. Several decades before, I had lost most of myself. I was a woman seriously adrift, before I washed up on Anne Frank’s shore on what, coincidently, would have been Anne’s birthday – a cloudy June 12th in flower-filled Amsterdam. A life-altering encounter took place on that day with an aging couple, Miep and Jan Gies, who had risked their lives to protect Anne Frank and her family. This venerable couple had never been willing to step out of the shadows into the spotlight. I subsequently convinced them to do so, and the result became the book Anne Frank Remembered that would be translated far and wide.

Having begun to peer into the murk of lost, partial, and often painful memory with Miep and Jan, I began collecting other untold or little-known stories, many but not all from World War II and the Shoah, at a time when the fact that witnesses were nearing their life’s end seemed to endanger these stories with forgetfulness. More fateful meetings ensued – with Claude Boule, Leo Bretholz, Zahava Bromberg, Dan Fante, Solly Ganor, Hannah Goslar, Marianne Christine Ihlen, Iakovos Kambanellis, Jane Mayhall, Padric McGarry, Irena Vrkljan Meyer-Wehlack and Benno Meyer-Wehlack, Jules Schelvis, Emilie Schindler, Yukiko Sugihara, Simon Wiesenthal, among others – resulting in further books, and a personal calling that continues to this day.

During these subsequent excavations, I always kept my personal life apart from my writing. Until today.

What I have ventured to do now is to gather fragments, materials, and letters to the living and the dead; letters to and from family, friends, friends of friends, strangers, associates, a translator, an editor, a lover. (I have occasionally used pseudonyms in order to protect an individual’s privacy.) All these bits and pieces spilled through my life and heart within the space of a few years.

Yesterday, I came across the magnifying glass that allows me to peer into my micrographically reduced Oxford English Dictionary. As I have been moving between countries recently, like I did when I was younger (if for less desperate reasons now), and as I’ve been wondering in what form to write to the dead, the first word I chose to look up was ‘translate’. I was surprised to find, as its first definition: ‘To bear, convey, or remove from one person, place or condition to another; to transfer, transport … to remove the dead body or remains of a saint, or, by extension, a hero or great man, from one place to another.’ Although I’m not sure I would recognize a saint if I met one (I’ve met a few whom I consider heroes), and though I have been far too desultory in my learning of languages, in what I have been gathering here, it seems I too have been translating.

Once, around the time when Miep and Jan and I were at work on what became our book, I asked Jan, who was almost ninety years old at the time, to comment on an event in the news. Jan shrugged and made a sweeping gesture with his arm that encompassed his living room and his then eighty-year-old wife Miep who was seated on the couch. ‘This is my world,’ he told me. ‘That other is not my world any more.’

Though I’m much younger than he was at the time, what he meant is beginning to dawn on me.

Part I

– Lost and Found –

DEAR DENNY,

Hope the back is a little better each day: too much sitting at your desk, all that close editing, is not good for you. Please stop agonizing over semi-colons and hyphens and use the Spa Gift Pass before it’s out of date.

I’m just back from the Greek island of Hydra where as you know I’ve owned a little fisherman’s cottage for the past almost forty years. Upon my return, I see that the situation with my Aunt Dorothy gets worse. Perhaps the end is coming. It hurts to look at her body, so diminished. Only her face, especially when she smiles, which she so radiantly does when I bring my face close to hers, is a source of uplift. For a brief moment I feel like a flying fish.

While my aunt, aged ninety-three, is failing, Miep Gies, aged ninety-nine, is independent and clear- headed. Her centenary is approaching in a few months. My long-time friend on Hydra whom I’ve mentioned many times to you, Lily Mack, only in her eighties, died while I was in Greece. When I’d mentioned her, you asked me who she was. As I knew she was dying, I did not feel able to tell you. And now she is gone.

She was the first child of White-Russian parents who fled the Revolution by travelling east, ending in Tehran where her father, Paul Mack (or Mak), painted miniatures for the Persian Shah. The exotically beautiful mother, Hélène, was never seen without a black silk scarf across the right eye socket. Several versions circulated about how she had lost her eye in the Revolution. Lily, her mother, and her brother Vladimir, were caught in Athens when the Italians attacked in October 1940. She worked with the Underground (though still only a teenager), giving clandestine assistance to a British airman who had been shot down over Greece and was on the run. She was caught, spent seventeen months in a prison cell adjacent to the area where executions by firing squad were conducted each day at dawn. The experience of listening to those daily executions, she always said, altered – ‘polluted’ – her being forever.