MIriam Gold’s first book is a kind of magic trick. From the outside, it’s so deceptively simple: a few pictures, a (very) few words. In the hand, small and solid and shabby, it feels as if its author pulled it out of an old cedar chest or from the back of a lavender-scented drawer. But don’t be fooled. It brings with it an unfathomable power and richness. Even the hardest heart could not be immune to its beautifully stitched charm. I want to wrap it in brown paper and string and give it to everyone I know.
Part memoir, part biography, it tells the story of Gold’s beloved grandmother, Dr Elena Zadik. By the time her granddaughter met her, Zadik was already a long-time general practitioner in the former factory town of Leigh, Lancashire: a woman who knew all her patients by name, who loved her job so much that she didn’t retire until she was 70. She enjoyed knitting, walking in the countryside and telling slightly raunchy stories. But behind this cheerful normality lay unimaginable pain. Zadik, born in 1919, was a refugee twice over. Her Jewish parents fled first from Kharkiv in what is now Ukraine to Leipzig in Germany during the Russian Civil War (she was 20 months old). But in 1936 her family sent her to London alone, where she hoped to pass enough exams to gain entry to medical school. She was never to see her parents again. They were arrested by the Gestapo in 1944 and died in Auschwitz.
In Sheffield, where she is actually studying medicine, Elena falls in love with a fellow student, a German Jew named Frank. The war separates them: he is sent to an internment camp and later serves overseas as a doctor in the British army. But somehow Elena, now married, manages to carry on despite all this, graduating as a doctor when her first baby is just six months old. Oddly, there’s not much to say about it – she does what she has to do – and Gold is wise enough to mostly show rather than tell. Every page of her book illustrates, albeit in small and everyday ways, her grandmother’s stoicism and determination; her belief that the best thing in life, if at all possible, is to simply keep busy.
Gold seems to have been carved in Elena’s image. She is a secondary school teacher in east London and has written her book on her days off – and “written” is the only word. The reader’s delight lies in the incredible range of media she employs in her narrative, from old photographs to airmail letters, from smocking to paper-cut dolls and embroidery patterns. If this gives her story a wonderful economy and achieves the impact of a thousand words, it is both a visual and a nostalgic treat for the reader. I know Sheffield, and when I came across it, I gasped to see Gold’s watercolour of the tram Elena and Frank took to the Peak District in their spare time. What a sweet shock! A handmade life is a quietly political book; it is determined to remember the great scars of the 20th century and to ask what legacy the violence leaves behind. But it is also an elegy for a North that no longer exists; a world of canals, cooling towers and lung-sapping walks along Stanage Edge that Elena has grown deeply fond of.
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