I was born into a family with few written records, but stories and the art of storytelling were deeply valued: tell the authorities what they want to hear, whether it’s an immigration officer or a bank manager. The ability to tell a plausible yarn was a requirement for survival and the honest, unvarnished truth was considered a liability that wouldn’t always work to your advantage when you were fleeing from persecution or trying to avoid creditors. The story of Jossel saving Louis on the battlefield and promising him his sister has its origins in an apparently real event as related to me by one of my relatives. However, when I told it to another of my cousins, she scornfully dismissed it.
‘Who told you that?’
‘Your brother.’
Parts of the family were lost to one another for many years, and only rediscovered two generations later. Then there were those unknown, unnamed relatives left behind in Poland and Ukraine when my grandparents left their homes of centuries and arrived in Britain on their way to the New World, their ambitions thwarted by not having enough money to complete the voyage. Correspondence arrived until the outbreak of the Second World War, then an abrupt silence uninterrupted to this day.
My father, who left Poland as a baby in 1904, never had a birth certificate and his real age was a matter of dispute. It was said that his parents knocked off a few years to help evade conscription in the First World War. One document we did have, carefully preserved, was the letter I have reproduced in full, signed ‘Anti-Jew,’ which arrived through our suburban letterbox after the notice appeared in the London Gazette of my father’s naturalisation, precipitating the change of name from Ginsberg to Grant, taken from the whisky bottle. My father always implied that the name was something else before: changed to aid their escape from pogrom-ridden Poland, or possibly Ginsberg was assumed when they took over the rent book of the house they moved into on Brownlow Hill. Either way, without that original name, any attempts at tracing my family tree peter out at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Among my mother’s effects after we cleared her flat in 1996 was a typewritten manuscript, signed Jack Levy, a memorial to the shops and little businesses of Brownlow Hill where the Jewish community of Liverpool settled before lighting out for the suburbs of Childwall and later Allerton. My recreation of Jewish life on the Hill draws on Jack Levy’s account, and I am grateful to Michael Swerdlow for identifying the author and giving me a fuller account of his life.
This novel was started in February 2020, most of its whole prepublication life was spent in the strange, lonely isolation of lockdown, and my deepest thanks go to the friends and family who got me through it: writing comrades-in-arms Natasha Walter and Susie Boyt; my sister and brother-in-law Michele Grant and John Boughton; my nephew, Ben Ari, his wife, Farnaz, and their daughter, Talah, the repository of the DNA from Ashkenazi Eastern Europe, Persia, and the Celtic lands. Some stories she will have to tell!
Thanks to Lennie Goodings, Susan de Soissons, and Zoe Gullen at Virago, and Jonny Geller at Curtis Brown. My thanks, too, to Gráinne Fox and Kelly Karczewski at United Talent for their determination that this novel should find a home in the US; to Erin Wicks, Caolinn Douglas, and Chloe Texier-Rose at Zando Books for their support and enthusiasm; and to Sarah Jessica Parker at SJP Lit for reading and finding something that touched her.
London, July 2024