Artist and teacher Miriam Gold has got restless hands. “I’ve got a complete inability to sit still, which I inherited from my grandmother. And, like her, I crochet. It’s a huge part of my life and how I relax.” Even watching football, she says, “I’ll be crocheting.”
Gold’s maternal grandmother, Dr Elena Zadik is the subject of her exquisite graphic memoir, Elena: A Hand Made Life, a funny, heartfelt and poignant story told using a variety of multimedia art forms, from watercolours and drawings to papercuts, collage and archive photographs. “I’m an artist who learnt to write, so that’s probably why the book is in this format,” explains the softly spoken Gold, 50, over Zoom from her Hackney home. “When I did a part-time MA in Fine Art about 12 years ago, I was terrified at the dissertation part. But then, completely by surprise, I fell in love with it and really adored writing. Putting words and pictures together was such a natural progression that I did more of it.” This also coincided with an interest in graphic novels. “Grown-ups telling grown-up stories and adult lived experiences, such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. It seemed to be this wonderful, burgeoning genre.”
Examples of the multi-media work in the biography Miriam Gold (pictured) created
Born Elena Moisieyevna Mackeviciute in 1919, in Kharkiv, now in Ukraine, Gold’s “Granny” was a refugee twice by the age of 17. An only child, in 1936, she arrived in the UK, having left her parents behind in Leipzig where the family had moved to from the Soviet Union: she would later discover that her parents were murdered in Auschwitz. Elena trained as a doctor in Sheffield, eventually finding belonging as a GP in Leigh, a mill and mining town in Lancashire.
Zadik’s life is, in part, the story of pre and post-war Britain: deprivation, the establishment of the NHS, the devastation wrought by pit closures and the consequential demise of these industrial, mining communities. It conveys the challenges of Zadik’s professional life and addresses the institutional antisemitism and sexism she experienced as a newly qualified doctor. Did she talk much about this? Not as such and certainly not with bitterness or anger, Gold replies. “She was passionate about her career and spoke a lot about it but, as I say in the book, mostly as unfiltered anecdotes or stories about patients.”
Life was exceptionally hard for her as a young mother: Zadik had her first baby six months before her finals and her second child during the war when her husband, Franz, a surgeon and fellow German Jewish refugee, was far away, stationed abroad with the British Army.
“She was working in a time before maternity rights. I think she was focused with the business of survival. As a working mother myself, I thought so much about her juggle, working with four children.
More images from the biography, including Elena's view on the NHS
“How did she do that? She really wasn’t a very reflective woman, which sometimes was tricky as a family member, but I do see that reflecting would not have got her anywhere.”
If we are lucky enough to know our grandmothers, says Gold, they can have an incredibly potent role. Elena: A Hand Made Life is written with love but also with honesty. What was Elena really like? “She was a very funny, intelligent woman but prone to an explosive temper, which was probably born out of going through a fractured and difficult early life at a time before therapy and conversations around post-traumatic stress and generational trauma.” She could be fantastic company; she loved to knit and play Scrabble. She had opinions on supermarkets, on politicians and was a committed doctor, firmly rooted in her community, says Gold. In the book, she recalls that walking with Zadik in Leigh was like accompanying a celebrity. Patients would stop her for a chat, and a trip to the post office could take most of the morning. She was also a very loving Jewish grandmother. “In that she loved to feed us and worried and cared about us, but she wasn’t a soft woman, if that makes sense.”
As Zadik spoke little about her past, Gold discovered much about it from her own parents and other family members. Towards the end of her life, Zadik did, however, set out a chronology and wrote down brief memories. It was not that she refused to talk about it, says Gold, but “when I was a young girl, I felt empathetic towards her. I didn’t want to [upset] her, for example, by asking how it felt when she found out her parents had been killed. My natural response was one that we all have of not wanting to hurt someone that we love. She certainly never said, ‘my mother was like this’ or ‘there was a time when my father and I did that’. Those were painful closed doors for her, and we all sensed and respected that.”
For Zadik, citizenship and nationality were always labyrinthine, confusing and difficult, whereas her Judaism was a constant, explains Gold. “But I suppose she wore it quite lightly. I see it coming out in her strong sense of justice and the way she lived.” Although Zadik led a secular life and lived in a town where there were few other Jewish families, in her later years, she participated in activities at a Reform synagogue in Manchester and took great comfort in that, Gold says. “I’ve still got this hilarious card that she sent me on Rosh Hashanah, which I found the other day. It was just of a painting and in it she put, ‘Sorry, I couldn’t find any Rosh Hashanah cards. No Jews in Leigh, love Granny.’”
Gold is speaking to me from what looks like a studio-office but is in fact the back of her lounge. “I’ll gladly call it my office, Anne. Well, my atelier,” she laughs. Hanging up on the wall behind her are four children’s smock dresses, stitched by Zadik’s’ busy hands, two pictures of which appear in the book. “They’re a real pain to draw because they’re so involved,” says Gold. “But like with so many things that my grandmother did incredibly skilfully, she was, ‘Oh, it’s nothing.’ I think it was generational too. Women just got on with it.”
A page from the book
In her book, Gold refers to “the lot of the inheritor”. What she means, she says, is, “I have the privilege of being two steps removed from the Holocaust, able to explore it more from a side-ways angle. So [my generation] can perhaps see the effect it has had on our grandparents and parents [from that perspective].
“Being a parent myself, I’ve been thinking about what we pass on and what informs our patterns and behaviours.”
Gold has worked as a visual artist for many years. As well as exhibiting in solo and group shows, she has also participated in public engagement projects with several galleries, including the V&A and the Barbican, and in schools – retraining as an art teacher when she started a family. She currently teaches art and is also head of photography at a large, east London secondary school. “I work a four-day week and I wrote and illustrated the book on my day off over two or three years – ignoring the domestics in order to work on it.”
Elena: A Hand Made Life is obviously a Jewish story, but it is also about a young woman searching for agency and selfhood, says Gold. I suggest that the book has the potential to be of interest to a wide readership and tell Gold that I gave it to my 12-year niece/ to read. “Did you really? I love that!” I say that she thought it was relevant for readers of her age and above. Does Gold agree? “I think your niece is probably spot on,” she replies. “My big wish is that it has crossover appeal.”
More images from the book
There is a moment when Zadik, then an elderly woman, unexpectedly tells Gold that if she met the people who killed her parents, she would not harm them and, moreover, that she bears no grudges. “A door had been flung open to the past and now the kitchen was full of death,” writes Gold. What prompted this seemingly out-of-the-blue comment? “It might have been triggered by something on the radio about what we do with people that have committed heinous crimes who are now old and frail,” she says. “I think she and I debated it and she had said, “I don’t hanker after a reckoning.”
Elena Zadik died in 2006 aged 86. What does Gold think she would have made of her book? “I think she would’ve been utterly bemused,” she says with a smile.
“She did not consider herself in any way extraordinary. She was a woman with a lot of integrity, who strove to be a good doctor, was really committed to her family but in no way, would she have thought that she was worthy of a book.”
Elena: A Hand Made Life (Jonathan Cape) by Miriam Gold is available now
