Invisible Ink: A Family Memoir by Martha Leigh
| Invisible Ink: A Family Memoir by Martha Leigh | |
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| Category: Biography | |
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Reviewer: Jill Murphy
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| Summary: The story of two sides of a Jewish family before and after World War II, together with a love affair separated by conflict. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 239 | Date: January 2021 |
| Publisher: Matador | |
| ISBN: 978-1800460386 | |
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Gosh. This is quite some book. I'll probably ruin it by reviewing it, so just buy it and read it.
End of review.
That's all I wanted to say, honestly. But I will try to explain myself.
Martha Leigh begins her book talking about a childhood spent in a slightly eccentric, immediately recognisable upper middle class English family. Her father is a Cambridge don, forever clacking away on his typewriter as he edits the complete correspondence of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, his life's work. Her mother is a concert pianist who practises for hours every day. Neither parent is hugely interested in the practicalities of life. There is love in the house but also darker undercurrents that a child does not fully understand but knows is there.
It is only after her father dies and Martha begins to sort through his collected papers and correspondence, that she begins to make sense of these things that were never spoken. Ralph, her father, was a poor but gifted Jew from the East End of London, given a scholarship education. Edith, her mother, was a child with musical talent from a middle class Jewish family in Eastern Europe. They had met in Paris during the 1930s and been separated by World War II. Somehow, they'd managed to keep in touch throughout the war years during which Martha, and only some of her relatives, managed to escape the Nazis, and Ralph joined the army.
This journey takes us from what is today Chernivtsi in Ukraine and was then Czernowitz in Romania, to Paris, Vienna, Switzerland and London. The correspondence between Ralph and Edith is full and rich and tumultuous, as you'd expect any love story to be but it's also underwritten with allusion and implication, partly because of wartime and censorship but also because of personal secrets. Ralph is carrying a big one: he is homosexual at a time when it is illegal. His attempts at explaining his "condition" to Edith so that she goes into a marriage with open eyes are both constrained with his own shame and fear at alerting authorities. Reading them so many years later provides clarity for Martha.
There is so much detail in this book. From her father's papers and her own detective work, Leigh has pieced together a clear and compelling story of the war years and two families during the years leading up to the war. On her mother's side, there is the heroic resistance work done by her uncle, who later went on to be a medical pioneer, the survival of her grandmother and cousin, and the deaths in the Holocaust of others. On her father's side, there is poverty, anti-semitism, and the tragedy of suicide. And there is a marriage borne of these years, with both parents brilliant and talented but scarred by experiences most of us could never fully understand.
The tone is clear and direct for the most part but punctuated with small asides that humanise it, sometimes laconic, sometimes sad, sometimes loving. The weight of history settles on every page. Recommended.
You can read more about Martha Leigh here.
You might also look at The Testimony by Halina Wagowska - the life of a Holocaust survivor that carries on much further, showing the growth of a warm, humanitarian heart that could not be extinguished.
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