Free A Woman on the Edge of Time by Jeremy; Gavron

head. He was the wisest man, at least in the ways of the broader world, I have known, and I loved talking to him, listening to him. And as I read, I find, tucked away in his portraits of interesting people and times, occasional mentions of his family. From these fragments, and others in his published books, along with clues Susie continues to send, and conversations with her, I begin to piece together Hannah’s early life.
    SHE WAS BORN , I know, in Palestine, but I learn now how my grandparents had come to be there. They had met and married in London, where my grandfather had lived since his wandering Zionist parents had brought him there at the age of thirteen, and my grandmother had come from the small town in South Africa where she had grown up to ‘go to the theatre and see art galleries’. My grandfather was working as a floorwalker, or trainee manager, at Marks and Spencer, and writing a novel. When his novel was published without much notice, he threw in his job and they sailed to South Africa to visit my grandmother’s family, and it was on the way back that they stopped in Palestine.
    They had meant to stay only a few weeks, to see my grandmother’s brother and sister, and my grandfather’s father, who had settled there. But my grandfather was still working out what to do with his life, and through his father’s Zionist connections he got a job at the Jewish Federation of Labour. My grandmother also found work at a school run by a disciple of Freud in Tel Aviv, and it was in this modern city rising out of the sands, on 19 August 1936, that Hannah was born.
    Two early influences on Hannah’s life emerge from my grandfather’s writings. One is a memory of standing at the glass looking at his newborn daughter, and his sister-in-law beside him saying, ‘ Das Kind ist klug ’ — that child is clever. It was something Hannah had to live up to all her life: that she was clever, precocious, that things were expected of her.
    More immediate was the world into which she was born. My grandfather was reading newspaper reports from the Spanish Civil War when a nurse came to tell him that he had a daughter: ‘I was only too well aware that in Hannah I had acquired a new and special responsibility and there was world war looming ahead.’ Hannah was always known as Hannah, but the name on her birth certificate was Ann — the English, non-Jewish, version of the name.
    There is nothing more in my grandfather’s writings about Hannah’s first year and a half, but among the material Susie brought is a small photograph album that gives a sense of her early life in Tel Aviv. Here are my grandparents holding Hannah proudly in a flat furnished with the sparse austerity of settler life. Here is her nanny pushing her in a wicker pram along dirt roads past low stone apartment buildings. And here she is, a year or so later, riding a tricycle, toddling into the sea, with the broad smile I know from later photographs, looking at different times remarkably like both my daughters.
    An ‘enchanting sprite’, my grandfather wrote, in his one written recollection of her in Palestine:
    Small, slender, agile, she was enormously precocious. At eighteen months, when we were passing a kindergarten, Hannah ran inside, insisted on joining in the game and there she remained and held her own. Now she was twenty months, she was running in an imagined game through our apartment, she spoke in clear sentences and then started out on what she unfortunately already knew was her parlour trick: reciting from her Babar books, which she knew by heart, and turning the pages at the right word, as if reading.
    By now, my grandfather had given up his job to write a book about the prospects of Palestine. He had grown up in a Zionist household, and he writes of falling ‘under the passions of that insecure little land’. Returning from a tour of kibbutzim, with their utopian dreams, he