The River of Angry Dogs: A Memoir PDF
Preview The River of Angry Dogs: A Memoir
Hamer-FM.qxd 1/28/04 11:03 PM Page iii The River of Angry Dogs A Memoir Mira Hamermesh Introduction by Fay Weldon Hamer-FM.qxd 1/28/04 11:03 PM Page iv First published 2004 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA www.plutobooks.com Copyright © Mira Hamermesh 2004, Introduction © Fay Weldon 2004 The right of Mira Hamermesh to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7453 2233 6 hardback Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd, India Printed and bound in the European Union by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England Hamer-FM.qxd 1/28/04 11:03 PM Page v Contents Acknowledgements viii Introduction by Fay Weldon ix 1 Before the War 1 2 Crossing Borders 56 3 Reunions 117 4 Tearing Through the Iron Curtain 188 5 After the Pilgrimage 248 Epilogue 299 Index 305 v Hamer-FM.qxd 1/28/04 11:03 PM Page vi In memory of my parents. For my son Jeremy and his family: Lulu, Benjamin and Anna. And for all my parents’ other grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren. Our continuity. Hamer-FM.qxd 1/28/04 11:03 PM Page vii Mira’s family together before the war. Inset: Mira before the war. vii Hamer-FM.qxd 1/28/04 11:03 PM Page viii Acknowledgements My thanks to my literary friends who devotedly kept an eye on my progress during the writing of the book, reading and rereading, cor- recting and like ‘literary midwives’ assisting in the birth of the book. To Joanna Goldsworthy who had planted the idea of writing the memoir, special thanks. Also to David Elliott, the most patient of readers without whose encouragement the book could never have been completed. My gratitude to my literary angels who had spread their protec- tive wings: Alan Sillitoe and Ruth Fainlight, Gil Elliot, Naomi Shepherd-Laish, Mai Ghoussoub, Peter Jonson-Smith, Lili Pohlman and Stoddard Martin (Chip). Thanks to all others whose help made all the difference. Eddie Hamilton, Amanda Sarrant, Tirca Loewenstein, Eugene Wolstoneholme, Frederick Roll, Marie-Ann Lindenstaadt, Anna Macnotchine. And Keith Meehan who taught me how to build. viii Hamer-FM.qxd 1/28/04 11:03 PM Page ix Introduction Fay Weldon This is a most extraordinary and moving memoir, written by an extraordinary woman. Mira Hamermersh strikes one as being Anne Frank as she could have been, would have been, had things turned out just a little differently. Had Anne Frank, after the manner of so many teenagers, been just a little more unruly and wilful, just a lit- tle more enraged by her mother, to the point that she actually ran away from home before the prison walls closed in, what then would have been her future? Much, I imagine, as was Mira’s. Mira, by a mixture of delinquency, ingenuity and good luck, as national borders changed around her and Jewishness became ever more dan- gerous, escaped the fate the Nazis had in mind for her, and lived to face another day, another era, by virtue of a single act of disobedi- ence and apparent ingratitude. In the face of her mother’s despair, she left home. She ran away, and so lived to become a wife, a mother, a filmmaker, an artist and writer. Her family, staying behind, perished. It was, for Mira, a bitter irony. Mira was born and brought up in Lodz in Poland – not an attrac- tive town to all accounts, not in the least like Anne Frank’s Amsterdam, with its silvery canals, but industrial, and horribly pol- luted, even pre-Communism. ‘In the Polish city where I was born,’ writes Mira, of her early childhood, ‘there were no lakes or swans. The only pools of water I was familiar with were discharged from factories and coloured by dyes. Blue, purple, or blood red. I thought the waters of the world were as colourful as the rainbow.’ But she came from the same kind of family as the Franks, prosperous, kindly and concerned, thoroughly Jewish by ritual and custom, yet inte- grated with the community. When she runs, with her elder brother, it is to get to Palestine, where her elder sister has gone before her. It is to be two years before she gets there. In the meanwhile the family, the friends, the schoolmates, every- thing she knew and recognised, were to be obliterated. Even her nationality was gone. Mira was as much Polish as she was Jewish, but by the end of the war the Poland she knew did not exist. Part had become Germany, part was annexed by Russia, and the Jews were welcome nowhere. Frontiers shifted and changed. ‘In Central ix Hamer-FM.qxd 1/28/04 11:03 PM Page x x Introduction Europe,’ writes Mira ‘People got used to the fact they go to bed in one country and wake up in another.’ When Mira, at the time barely 15, leaves Lodz with her brother, all Central Europe is crumbling about them. Their ambition is to get to Palestine. Their first destination is smart, cosmopolitan Cracow, only to find the whole country has been crossed off the map of Europe. ‘Defeat had a foul smell and stank of blocked lavatories.’ They share a compartment on the journey with a genteel woman and her young daughter: the woman dies of a heart attack. It was to be the first of the many deaths, many misadventures, that are to mark their long journey to the Promised Land – already barred to them by British warships. They are without papers in a now hostile land – other than a forged school pass from Mira’s school. There is no way back and the only way forward is through a network of friends, Jewish and non-Jewish politicos and casual travelling companions: they are blessed by strange coincidence, and the unex- pected kindnesses shown to the very young. Maps are rare and of great significance: letters somehow get through. They steal across the murderous river of angry dogs to safety, only to find no safety there. Mira’s idealistic brother gets converted to Communism, and enrols – no questions asked – as a mine worker in the Soviet Union, in the belief that this is the proper place for a young man in the new world. He is soon to learn differently, is arrested and vanishes into Siberia. In the meanwhile Mira is on her own. She comes to womanhood on the road: on the Soviet- Romanian – once Polish-Romanian – border, attempting another illegal crossing. She wonders what it was like for Joan of Arc, to turn into a woman inside her coat of mail. The story has as happy an ending as there can be for such a one. Reaching Palestine eventually, Mira’s artistic sensibilities and talent for painting become obvious even to the uninitiated: she is taken up, helped, educated, trained. She goes, unsurprisingly, into denial. She puts the past behind her. She goes to Britain, where she has fam- ily. She marries an aspiring chartered surveyor who reads poetry, has a child, becomes part of the thriving London art scene of the 1950s and 1960s, studies under Josef Herman (I have her powerful, bold, very black, very white, drawings on my walls). And then, one day, she goes to see a film. It’s Generation, directed by Andrzej Wajda, a love story set in Poland during the German occupation. The background of the story is the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, and its terrible end. The film has been processed in Lodz. And Mira’s life Hamer-FM.qxd 1/28/04 11:03 PM Page xi Introduction xi changes. She makes a pilgrimage to Poland, to face and perhaps regain the past. She joins the Polish Film school – no easy matter, for a British national in a Soviet-ruled country – but she is not to be deterred. She finds true love. She makes films. Thrown out of Poland for being in the wrong place and the wrong time, and having the wrong friends, she comes home and makes dramas and documentaries for the BBC. The world by now is in its flamboyant pre-feminist stage: Mira has another fight to fight, for recognition and independence. She engages boldly. Her subjects, not surpris- ingly, are conflict, dispossession, death, injustice, lost love between mother and child, the state’s cruel intervention into personal lives. This is not a book about a holocaust survivor, but of what hap- pened to the others, who trailed the edges of death, and were flung out as if by centrifugal force, to places they could never have expected to be. There is no self-pity here, in this inspiring tale of courage and perseverance, honestly and skilfully told. It reads like a novel.
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