Miriam Gold’s first book is a kind of magic trick. Outwardly, it is so deceptively simple: some pictures, a (very) few words. In the hand, small and solid and scrappy, it feels like something its author might have pulled from an old cedar trunk or the back of a lavender-scented drawer. But don’t be taken in. It brings with it an unfathomable power and richness. Even the flintiest heart could not possibly be immune to its beautifully stitched charms. I want to wrap it in brown paper and string, and give it to everyone I know.
Part memoir and part biography, it tells the story of Gold’s beloved granny, Dr Elena Zadik. By the time her granddaughter knew her, Zadik was a longstanding GP in the former mill town of Leigh in Lancashire: a woman who knew all her patients by name, who loved her job so much she would not retire until she was 70. She liked knitting, walking in the countryside and telling slightly filthy stories. But behind such cheery normality was unimaginable pain. Zadik, who was born in 1919, was a refugee twice over. Her Jewish parents first fled Kharkiv in what is now Ukraine for Leipzig in Germany during the Russian civil war (she was 20 months old). By 1936, however, her family had dispatched her alone to London, where she hoped to pass enough exams to qualify for medical school. She would not see her parents again. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1944, they died in Auschwitz.
In Sheffield, where she does indeed study medicine, Elena falls in love with a fellow student, a German Jew called Frank. The war parts them: he’s sent to an internment camp, and later serves abroad as a doctor in the British army. But somehow, through all this, Elena, now married, presses on, qualifying as a doctor when her first baby is just six months old. In a strange way, there isn’t much to say about all this – she does what she has to – and Gold is wise enough mostly to show rather than to tell. Each page of her book illustrates, in however small and quotidian a way, her grandmother’s stoicism and determination; her conviction that in life it is best, if at all possible, just to keep busy.
Gold seems to have been carved in Elena’s image. A teacher in a secondary school in east London, she made her book on her days off – and “made” is the only word. The joy of it for the reader lies in the incredible range of media she deploys in her narrative, from old photographs to airmail letters, from smocking patterns to paper cut-out dolls to embroidery samplers. If this gives her story a marvellous economy, doing the work of a thousand words, for the reader it’s both a visual and a nostalgic treat. I know Sheffield, and when I came upon it, I gasped at Gold’s watercolour of the tram Elena and Frank used to take out into the Peak District in their free time. The sweet shock of it! A Hand Made Life is a quietly political book; it is determined to remember the great scars of the 20th century, and to ask what inheritance violence leaves. But it’s also an elegy for a north that’s long gone now; a world of canals, cooling towers and lung-busting rambles on Stanage Edge that Elena came profoundly to love.
Elena: A Hand Made Life by Miriam Gold is published by Jonathan Cape (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
