Single Journey Only by Ursula Owen (Salt, £12.99)
Pioneering feminist, co-founder of the Virago publishing house, stalwart of Index on Censorship, Labour Party cultural adviser, social worker — Ursula Owen has had a rich and satisfying career, becoming a significant figure in the progressive politics of the late 20th century. Now in her eighties but as vigorous as ever, she details it all in her fascinating memoir. But the book is much more than that: it is also an honest and insightful study of assimilation and mental illness.
The assimilation was that of her German Jewish family, prewar refugees from Nazism, the mental illness that of her mother. Both issues dominated her childhood and have continued to affect her throughout her life.
She was born Ursula Sachs in 1937 and spent the first 18 months of her life in Berlin, then Heidelberg with her grandparents, before she and her older brother joined their parents in England.
Thus began the assimilation process, a double one in this case because the family were not only trying to shed their German identity but their Jewish one, too. They converted to Anglicanism and celebrated Christmas in a rather grimly organised German fashion, with none of the spontaneity that Ursula’s friends enjoyed.
As Owen notes, they fitted Isaac Deutscher’s definition of “the non-Jewish Jew” to perfection, but it is a hole in her life that she has always regretted. “I had no education in the Jewish religion at all,” she writes, “and the first Seder I attended was with my ten-year-old granddaughter in 2003… I wish now I’d made an effort to learn more.”
She charts her mother’s slow decline into mental illness, assailed by the lingering fear that she might follow suit, suffering as she did from sudden blind rages and endless uncertainty about her own identity. This hugely affected her love life, from her troubled marriage to her Oxford boyfriend Roger Owen to a succession of affairs and relationships. Her list of lovers, all duly noted, reads like a list of the First XI of the left-wing British intelligentsia: the economist and Labour MP Stuart Holland, the Guardian’s literary editor Bill Webb (shared with his wife for a decade and a half), arts minister Mark Fisher and the academic and critic Frank Kermode.
Her involvement with the birth of the British women’s liberation movement, and with Virago, a remarkable success story, makes vivid reading. But it is her unflinching insights into her personal traumas that remain in the memory.
Robert Low is executive editor of ‘The Critic’, a new monthly magazine launching this month.
