This is a podcast I produced for Notting Hill Editions with Alison Leslie Gold, who is perhaps best known for her book Anne Frank Remembered, which she wrote with Miep Gies, one of the people who protected the Frank family during the war.
Before her collaboration on that book, Alison had experienced a lost decade, in which she descended into alcohol addiction. Writing the Anne Frank book represented a return to life, a rediscovery of interest in other people and their stories.
Other stories were to follow. She became, as she puts it, ‘a miner, a midwife, a salvager of other people’s stories’. But, as she writes in the Prologue to her new book, Found and Lost:
She goes on:
When I met Alison in London last autumn she began by telling me more about the book’s origins:
Alison Leslie Gold
The book started as a kind of treatise on close friends dying. It’s in five parts and it’s about six deaths; the first part was initially published by a small press connected to the American University in Paris. But after experiencing these first two deaths – one, my aunt and the second, my mentor – more people died. So I continued in the style, in the unusual style, of the book, and my fellow actors on the stage were falling off the stage and dropping dead and declining and suffering and something I hadn’t ever prepared myself for. And it kind of went on and on.
One of the key people who died was my co-author and friend Miep Gies, whose book I had written, which had kind of launched my career as a book writer. And threaded through these deaths was the fact of all these losses, but also the idea that I had at that point spent twenty years writing about Miep and Anne Frank and the Holocaust and very dark subject matter.
And at the point that my loved ones started dying, I had said that I wasn’t going to write about the Holocaust any more. I had actually published a book a few years before about love to try to cheer myself up, but I kept being drawn back. But also as I was in the process of writing this and the deaths were happening, I was ageing. I was approaching my 70s. I really began writing the book as Obama won the election in the United States and it kind of ends when the unmentionable won the election last year. And I tried to deal in some way with the devastation of the state of the world and my sense of being marginalized and not really feeling like I belong in the world any more. Nor do I want to.
George Miller
Some of the material, as you say, you were writing very close to the events that you describe. In order to bring it together as a book, do you think you needed to have the distance of a few years to put it in perspective?
ALG
Not really because it’s like a collage, but it’s kind of current. As I was putting bits and pieces together, letters and e-mails and kind of surreal little moments, I was also dropping in other materials that related to readers of mine writing to me and an editor friend of mine declining and also dying and then another translator friend constantly sending me Holocaust stories and begging me not to give it up because that was the end of the lives of the last of the surviving stories. So somehow everything was current and then it threaded together.
GM
How did you decide how much detail to go into about your personal life and other people’s personal lives that have intersected with yours? Did you have any sort of ground rules for yourself or was it more instinctive?
ALG
Well, it was totally instinctive. I’ve always been very discreet in my writing about other people’s lives and always prided myself on protecting secrets and also allowing people to censor whatever they want. I’ve never tried to expose anyone.
And I’ve been criticized by other writers I know in my career for not revealing more about myself and staying kind of in the closet per se and not writing about my addictions and just being this sort of passive onlooker in life.
And as I start telling the story the limits seem very natural to me. I mean it wasn’t as though I was tempted to go further with anything or more sordid detail. It was only afterwards that I was shocked at myself and Anguished about ‘What have I done?’
GM
I wanted to talk a little bit about Miep Gies, because she emerges from a book as an extraordinary character, and a character who had a transformational effect on your life. At one point in the book an agent writes to you and suggests you write a memoir about your friendship, which I guess is one of the other directions that your writing could have gone in. Is it too reductive to say that your meeting Miep and deciding to collaborate with her, really transformed your life, saved you in a sense?
ALG
Is it too reductive? No, it isn’t. It may seem kind of fairytaleish but it’s is totally true. I feel like I’ve lived two lives. I was a child who ran this little Lost and Found in my school and liked doing that. And then when I got a little older I was an activist in civil rights in the South. But then I discovered intoxicating drugs and alcohol and lifestyles and I lost any altruistic leanings and I was drawn into this life of dissolution. I had had some talent as a writer in school and got some little awards and things like that. But once I became this kind of ne’er-do-well, bum, playgirl…
I mean my theme in life was, ‘I want to have a good time’, and somehow that really connects to my alcoholism. It’s one of the keynotes of my alcoholism, which was that as my my thirst grew larger and larger, I became extraordinarily selfish and self-centred and lost interest in the world and other people. I think I’m not the only one that that happens to.
Then after a ten-plus year binge, I bottomed out and had no money left. I’d gotten a divorce settlement when I was very young. That’s why I had the money to roam around the world and live all over the place and kick up my heels. And I had a son. And as I tumbled down to the end of it, I’d run out of money and ended up in rehabs and in spite of myself started to recover.
I was very lucky – it was a long time ago, 1975, just before my thirtieth birthday and it was in New York – treatment centers were brand new and I was so fortunate to get into the one treatment center. I almost died before my thirtieth birthday. I should have been dead. I come from a teetotalling family, so no one really knew what was going on with me, and I was very independent and willful. And then I was trying rehabilitation.
I just thought if I can kind of whiteknuckle it and find some menial kind of work and find a way – this was just like at the end of the 70s, just when homelessness was starting in the Reagan years in the United States – And I was a wreck and I at that point a nine year-old-child and I just thought somehow maybe I’ll be able to have this peripheral life and then fate snuck in at different moments.
GM
It seemed to me that you had shown remarkable… I don’t know quite what the word is… You had burst out of that bubble, that sort of selfishness that you described, because you could have just done some kind of job and got your life together. But you conceived of a really quite ambitious projects.
ALG
No, no, no. It happened slowly. At first I just did a little writing because it was something I could do. I wrote some articles using pseudonyms to make quick thousand dollars and meanwhile did temp work and sort of did anything, but I didn’t have any aspirations. I didn’t mind writing schlock. I didn’t care. I really didn’t have any any dreams.
For three or four years I just did various writing and then around ’84 when I was sober I guess about seven years or eight years, through kind of an accident of a job, I got into television as a researcher and I stumbled on the story of Miep [Gies] and her husband. And even though I come from a Jewish family, we were secular. I’d been in a synagogue once in my entire life and had no interest in the Holocaust. I’d read The Diary of Anne Frank when I was a child, but I hadn’t thought about it twice.
And suddenly there I was in this job and I was developing ideas for them and I stumbled on an idea connected to the Holocaust and the next thing I knew I was drawn into this story and became aware there was a connection in the story to Anne Frank and became aware that these two ‘chunks of history’ [Miep and Jan], who at that point were the only surviving members of the group that had surrounded Anne Frank and her family. She was in her 70s he was in his 80s and it was like I was struck with an arrow of purposeness.
GM
This is a really interesting moment, I think, where you think, ‘not only is there a story here, but I want to, I could work with them to make something of this so it’s not lost’. You talk a lot about the stories which are in danger of being lost, preserving stories and bringing them into the light.
ALG
That was the first time I felt it and it was visceral. When I went I went to Holland, they said I could come and interview them for an article. I didn’t have any idea what sort of big story it was. It just seemed that it needed to be saved. It needed to be preserved. I suddenly had a purpose in life and it was like my soul woke up, truly.
And since then, doing that book, the three of us working for two years on that book, was you know a study that I did I was sort of an innocent and they were innocents, because soon as an agent saw the the idea for what I thought would be an article, a long article, like a New York Times feature story, they said ‘book!’ and then suddenly sold it for a huge amount of money.
And the three of us held onto each other because none of us were interested in money or had any imagination that this was a commercial subject. But as it turned out the timing was absolutely perfect. It came out in 1987. We start working on it in ‘84 and Otto Frank had died in ‘80. And it was that perfect moment when thousands of Holocaust survivors who’d remained mute after the war were aging and some of them for the first time started talking. The subject sort of came into the spotlight somehow.
It was a perfect moment but it gave me a sense because I felt after several years of sobriety I began to realize how lucky I was. I did start to get well and feel a bit better about life.
And I just felt this sense of purpose and that I needed it, that I felt better with it, and that I was so lucky to have stumbled into all this, and that it had fallen from the sky, that I made a pact with myself for whatever time I had left on earth to try to only write books and tell stories that I felt were meaningful and needed to be told. Not to just write to write or to make money, and because I just felt so good to be of use in the world. It just sounds very corny, I guess, at heart. I was really a good fellow citizen!
GM
Your relationship with Miep went very much farther than subject and author. I think in the book you refer to her as a role model…
ALG
Kind of, yeah. She was a role model because she was clear about what her values were, and what was right and what was wrong, and her modesty that she hadn’t done anything special. Because this is what, even though she’d risked her life for twenty-one months and really exhausted herself and so had her husband to try to feed these people and keep them cheered up, she said, ‘this is what you do for friends, period. No discussion. I’m not a hero. ‘That’s really her kind of iconic line: ‘I’m not a hero.’ And you don’t have to be special to help people, which is an incredible message.
GM
You talked a little while ago, Alison, about writing stories that matter, not just doing things for commercial gain, but stories that you really felt needed to be told. Did you ever feel an overpowering weight of responsibility, because even in this book people are often suggesting stories and trying to encourage you down particular paths. Having taken on that mantle, was it sometimes rather onerous?
ALG
Yes, it was. With the Miep and Jan’s story I felt a huge responsibility. You know, we worked together and I’d go back to my little hotel and collapse every day. I was scared to death. And I did feel this terrible responsiblity. And then, right after the book came out, a film company, a coproduction between a Hollywood company and an English company, bought the film rights. And I was an associate producer or something like that, but I was like the policeman and I spent an entire year angry and in a bad mood and fighting with them because they started taking dramatic license. I felt like I was sort of police to protect the people, the story, the authenticity.
GM
What about the untold stories, though? You clearly get offered, suggested lots of stories. Do you feel the weight of those voices that have not been recorded or have you managed to find a way to deal with that?
ALG
No, because I’m burned out. I’ve published, I think, six other books connected somehow to the Holocaust. I have one book called Fiet’s Vase and other stories of survival that is twenty-five stories of survival.
And some of them were the same kind of discoveries, of salvaging and rescuing stories, and finding these incredible stories that needed to be told and telling them. All my books have some of that in them, so I’d done it for twenty years, and at that point all my relatives were dying and I just I just didn’t want to write about the Holocaust any more.
GM
I want to talk about something a bit happier. Let’s go from the grey skies of Amsterdam to the sunlight in Greece, because Greece is another very important place in your life. I wanted to ask you about a woman called Lily; if you describe Miep as your role model, you describe Lily as your mentor. She’s an amazing character of the sort they do not make any more, I think. Tell me a little bit about her.
ALG
Well, in 1970 when I was twenty-five and my little son was five, we sailed across the Atlantic on a ship called the Queen Anne Maria, a Greek ship, to meet two friends, a German friend and an American friend, to spend a month in romantic Greece. Or poetic Greece.
And my friends had driven from Spain and hated Yugoslavia, so they got to Greece early and they figured, we don’t want to hang around Athens and they accidentally went to Hydra because it was one of the closest places to Athens. And the German ran into this mad Russian woman and said, ‘Oh, we’re here for a few hours looking for a house’, and Lily knew a house and arranged a rental for us.
So when I got off that ship under the full moon on June 21st 1970, the next day we went to Hydra and the house we’d rented was right above Lily’s, where Lily lived with her children and her husband. And I was just mesmerized by her. I guess she was forty-five and beautiful and wild, so erudite and riveting. I listened to her. She never stopped talking so.
GM
She would recite poetry and the variety of languages from memory .
ALG
She spoke I think four or five languages. She knew poetry, she knew songs. She had wisdom, she had gossip. She seemed to know everything. She was just incredibly bright and she drank too.
And she kind of took my son and me under her wing and realised, kind of got the picture that I hardly ever ate, and was always chasing me with food. And we went for a month and stayed two years on that island without leaving. And then until her death at age 85 we went back at least twice a year. A few years later I bought a house there and I would go for at least a month or two twice a year, sometimes three or four months. And she was always there. So this friendship, like my friendship with Miep, continued and grew and became a lifelong friendship.
GM
And indeed in the book you continue writing to her even after her death.
ALG
I do. She was a great influence and meant a lot to me and to my son. She also instilled a lot in me. When I started being sober and trying to form a personality, trying to find out who I was, she was a very good influence, even though she was kind of mad and impossible. But like my friendship with Miep, which went on until she was almost 101, with Lily she was 85 and I spent the last day of Lily’s life with her and I spent the day before Miep died with her too. These things don’t happen again.
GM
There are wonderful little vignettes that you recall in the book, such as such as the helium balloons on the day of Miep’s 100th birthday. I loved that little detail, which otherwise would be lost, they would just be gone into the ether.
ALG
Totally, and I have a million more of those. I really have a million more of those about her, about Lily. I’m not a scholar, I’m not erudite in any way, I don’t speak any languages, I’m not particularly educated, but I have a good sense of story and, you know, little vignettes.
And I could do another book about Miep, wonderful moments with Miep and we also had a lot of fun.
GM
And in a book which is punctuated by deaths and some of it is very sober and reflective, you nonetheless allow light in in various ways, sometimes by putting in a seemingly random piece of correspondence from a member of the public or a scam or some of the text is written in red. It could be a little dream or a aperçu – see the philosopher Spinoza with his dog and all sorts of things like that. You must have had fun with that in order to you know release the pressure for you and and thereby for the reader?
ALG
Oh, totally. I mean everything I’ve written I have fun with. There’s always a moment of sort of surrealism or levity or something that gets shuffled in with the rest of it. I’m really lucky because I’m not particularly ambitious or perfectionistic so I don’t put pressure on myself and it always sort of comes around in its own time.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download