My grandmother died in October 2019, the day after her 97th birthday. She must have been born within a few months of Howard Jacobson’s mother, who, as the moving preface to his memoir Mother’s Boy explains, died in May 2020 at the same age. Jacobson’s mother was an autodidact with a passion for poetry and a burning drive to write that her circumstances – living in Manchester as a working-class woman, wife and mother – ultimately thwarted.
My grandmother was able to live out her commitments in her younger days, inspired by the socialist ideals of the Jewish youth movement to travel to what was then British Mandate Palestine, via a stint in a British prison camp in Cyprus, to help found and establish a kibbutz. She returned to England when my father was a toddler, however, living in Southport, just down the road from Jacobson’s family. She worked as a dinner lady, her sharpness of mind and love of words finding an outlet only via the endless games of Scrabble that we played. I thought often of her and her life as I read Mother’s Boy and its insights into the frustrations, possibilities and intensities of human lives and of the lives of British Jews in particular.
