In the 19th century, clever Jews from all over Europe went to Egypt. They went to help the country turn herself into a European nation. Among those who went were the ancestors of Gabriel Josipovici, the well-known English academic and author. His parents - Sacha Rabinovitch and Jean Josipovici - were assimilated, Arabic-speaking but still culturally Jewish, and part of the high-caste milieu in Alexandria and Cairo anatomised in Lawrence Durrell's master work, The Alexandria Quartet.
Sacha and Jean met and married in the 1930s (Durrell's epoch, and it is possible he met the couple; he certainly would have known people who knew them) and moved from Egypt to France. As fully paid-up Francophiles they regarded France as the navel of the world. The anti-Semitism of the French petit bourgeoisie soon put paid to that conviction.
Sacha and Jean had one child, Gabriel. His birth in Nice, in 1940, prevented their return to the relative safety of Egypt, and trapped them in France. They subsequently drifted apart. Sacha and Gabriel miraculously survived the war and, perhaps because they were welded into one unit by virtue of what they survived, they stayed together for the rest of their lives, this mother and her only son. The author speculates that though neither was a camp survivor, they merged psychologically in the war (like so many survivors and their children) with the result they never parted.
After the end of the war they returned to Egypt and stayed for eleven awkward but blissful years. Knowing the writing was on the wall, and that in the new Egypt that was emerging only Moslems were welcome, Sacha got herself and her clever son to England. He prospered academically (as she predicted), obtained a scholarship to St Edmunds, Oxford, and the rest, as they say, is history. They finally settled in Lewes, convenient for Sussex University where Gabriel Josipovici spent his working life teaching literature. In old age the remarkable Sacha became Mrs Rabinovitch, a Jewish lady of immense gravitas, an accomplished poet (poems in the Independent, that sort of thing) and a feted translator. She died of heart failure in 1996. The life described here in A Life is not the author's (as I assumed at first) but his mother's. This is her story, from her birth in Egypt to her death in Brighton Hospital. However, it is not a biography, for two reasons. One, Gabriel Josipovici, the writer, lived his whole life with Sacha, the subject, so obviously he appears in it. He tells us quite a bit about himself: the rows they had about girlfriends of his; his feelings on the holidays they took together. His sense that his inability to form a lasting attachment away from his mother, sprung not so much from her preventing him as his fear that if he married and then she died, he would be alone. The other reason this is not a biography is this. Gabriel Josipovici's re-creation of his mother's life (from documents, from family photographs, from his mother's letters and poems, from her translations and from the memories of her friends) while as complete as he can manage, is not authoritative - or if you prefer, as over-detailed, as so many modern biographies are. He has followed the advice of Samuel Johnson to those who write about the life of another. He has grasped the shape of Sacha's life and fashioned it into a relatively brief narrative. He also doesn't demand respect by demonstrating his knowledge. When the author doesn't know, or can't remember something, he just says so. However, the acknowledgement of lacunae does not this a memoir make. Josipovici is emphatic on that point, almost tetchy (which is unusual, as he is a most genial writer). This isn't some touchy feely representation of what he feels about his mother or the truth of their life together as he remembers it. The author has no truck with the sort of self-serving clap-trap that modern pseudo writers, who have mined their own their families, like to trot out to justify their actions. This is her life with him in it, interacting with her, arguing with her, loving her, being loved by her, reproduced as accurately and as fastidiously as he can manage. The woman who emerges from the end of Josipovici's pen was capable, practical, infinitely patient, loving and generous. She was ingenious when it came to getting through, making do. At the same time, despite her remarkable achievements, she was also melancholy and at times suicidal. In Nice, during the war, she gave birth to a second child when Josipovici was an infant. The baby was a girl, named Elizabeth. She was sickly and under-nourished on account of Sacha's having preferred to feed her son rather than herself (and the foetus) during her pregnancy. The baby, died after 10 days. In later life Sacha told her son that if she hadn't had him she would have killed herself. But she didn't. They got through the war. They got through Egypt. They got to England. They survived. They prospered. Yet for all that she did, Sacha was permanently crippled by a lack of confidence. She could never read even her published verse in public. Durrell (the best known English chronicler of the Egyptian world from which Sacha sprung) would definitely have recognized this combination of bravura and modesty (so like that of his greatest fictional heroine).
HOWEVER, this isn't high literary text like Durrell produced. This is at the other end of the spectrum. It is a very simply written (but superbly readable), genial, modest book. It is also heart-breaking. For instance, fleeing Nice and the Gestapo in 1943, Sacha sat in a different compartment to her son, lest the train was stopped and she blurted out that she was Jewish. At least with Gabriel in a different compartment, Sacha believed he just might survive if she was taken. Or again, her last words on her deathbed to her son were these: "I just wanted to tell you how happy you've made me, how completely the happiness of the second part of my life has wiped out the pain of the first part. But now I'm tired of my body and want to let go." One of the least attractive aspects of modern western European life is how little regard we have for motherhood, and for close family relations. Mothering is increasingly seen as a disgusting compulsive act that damages the child. Careers are so much better. As for family members who chose to live together throughout their lives, that's fine for the Aboriginal but in modern metropolitan society, it is at best suspect and, at worst, perverse. How nice, important, valuable and salutary therefore, to get A Life. It is set in our times, more or less, but it goes completely against the grain of our ghastly modern solipsisms and it moves the heart. The kind of mutual nurturing Josipovici describes is fast disappearing. At least we have a record here of one case where a mother and son were happy together, lived a long and productive life together, and didn't need to get their heads shrunk. Hallelujah. It worked. Modern misanthropes take note. It isn't all gloom on the mother and child front.
Carlo Gebler is a novelist. His memoir, Father & I, was published last year