Flickerbook

by leila-berg

Leila Berg re-experiences her Jewish childhood and adolescence, from the early 1920s until the day the first air-raid siren sounded. This vivid memoir describes a sad, funny, passionate child who grows into a fiercely independent young woman.

Genres: Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Ian Durant]

Growing up in a Jewish neighbourhood in Manchester. Shards of light through rain. Fragmentary thoughts of a girl growing up in a puzzling world of convention and separateness. A guileless encounter with all that growing up entails. Fresh and honest, this is a flickerbook of thoughts - isn’t that how we actually think? Rather wonderful.

[Sibyl]

I enjoyed the fragmentary style of this autobiography - in some ways it was like a collection of flash memoirs. It worked especially well in the earlier sections conveying the disjointed - and intense - nature of childhood memory.

Leila Berg is brilliantly accurate. Disturbingly so, when it comes to evoking the sensuality of childhood experience, the way in a young person registers both pleasure and pain.

The brutality of teachers, parents and other children is recorded unflinchingly.

I found the style a bit less satisfactory in the sections dealing with the author's adolescence and her early adulthood. On the one hand I liked enjoyed reading about the political struggles of the Left in the 1930s as seen through female - rather than the usual male - eyes. And there are some vivid passages which convey the thrills and dangers of sex.

Ultimately I found the book disturbing. There is something scarily dissociated in the portrayal of a girl who was neglected and emotionally abused, before suddenly being courted - both by her father and by other men.

I was left hungering for some kind of postscript. Although perhaps that's a tribute to the power of this memoir.