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.
