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Red Saint, Pink DaughterSylvia Rogers
I was born in the Berlin that Stephen Spender called `the centre of the world', yet I was always off-centre. I was a Polish child in the German capital, a Communist child in a Fascist state, a Jewish child in a German school, an atheist child in a Jewish orthodox school, a refugee child in England, and later, when I was the wife of a British MP, Cabinet Minister, co-founder of a new party, peer of the realm, I may have looked an insider but that was misleading. Always, and from birth, I was on the periphery.
Robert Harris, The Sunday Times: 'This is a remarkable book, not least because its author managed to live long enough to write it . . .'
In this celebrated biography of her mother and autobiography, Silvia Rodgers gives a warts-and-all account of what her off-centre life was like, most always in the wrong place at the most perilous time, almost always in the most difficult company.
Her mother is the Red Saint of the title, a Polish Jewish Communist in the Weimar Republic as the stormclouds gathered. In a political sense she was a Saint: dedicated, monomaniacal, with an unbending sense of right and wrong. That saintliness did not include much in the way of conventional maternal feeling for her children; and her relations with her husband were less than harmonious. Race and politics became a problem as the Nazis rose to power: Silvia Rodgers remembers the book burnings, the marauding Brownshirts, the knock at the door. The narrative gathers pace, and the account of her family's flight from a Berlin turned into a nightmare city is heart-stopping. They arrived in an England less hospitable than it remembers itself as having been. The cultural shock of wartime and post-war Britain is vividly recalled; also, the gathering sorrow of loss, as news arrives of friends and relatives killed in the concentration camps. Silvia Rodgers gradually made her own life, moving out from under the shadow of the Red Saint, marrying the Labour politician Bill Rodgers of the 'Gang of Four', and eventually herself becoming a writer. The new Afterword written for this paperback edition speaks of this transition, and of the book as a memorial and an exorcism astonishing in its candour. |
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