A Life

by Gabriel Josipovici

Sacha, by her death, seemed to have taken my life with her as well. Because of the strange circumstances of our existence - she had been the only witness to all the important events of my life. Now, with that witness gone, it was as though the past had begun to grow dim and dissolve. Until that moment I had not realised the importance of witnesses. And the importance of stories. When Sacha told me stories about her childhood and youth she was doing so in part because she herself had never had any parents. When she told me stories about my childhood it was because I had no brothers and sisters, no grandparents, aunts and uncles who had known me from my earliest years. Now she is gone and I have tried to tell her story I find a kind of calm descending on me and I have begun to reconstitute my own.' Part memoir, part biography, part autobiography, this remarkable book is also an exploration of the role of memory and story-telling in our lives. At the same time it is an account of the life of an immensely strong, resourceful, yet vulnerable woman, who was born into the comfortable world of wealthy Egyptian Jewry before the First World War, who, with her infant son survived the Second World War in France, and who ended her days in the peace and quiet of the English countryside; and of an extraordinary relationship between mother and son which spanned more than fifty years.

Genres: Biography

320 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2001

About the author

Gabriel Josipovici was born in Nice in 1940 of Russo-Italian, Romano-Levantine parents. He lived in Egypt from 1945 to 1956, when he came to Britain. He read English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, graduating with a First in 1961. From 1963 to 1998 he taught at the University of Sussex. He is the author of seventeen novels, three volumes of short stories, eight critical works, and numerous stage and radio plays, and is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. His plays have been performed throughout Britain and on radio in Britain, France and Germany, and his work has been translated into the major European languages and Arabic. In 2001 he published A Life, a biographical memoir of his mother, the translator and poet Sacha Rabinovitch (London Magazine editions). His most recent works are Two Novels: 'After' and 'Making Mistakes' (Carcanet), What Ever Happened to Modernism? (Yale University Press), Heart's Wings (Carcanet, 2010) and Infinity (Carcanet, 2012).

Reviews

[Jeff Bursey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an evocative and sensitive look at Gabriel Josipovici's mother. Well worth reading.