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

‘felt suddenly and uneasily aware of the barrenness, the hollowness, of Western middle-class life’. But it is interesting that his Zionism didn’t blind him to the aspirations of the Palestinian Arabs, and the prescient thesis of his book, with its equally prescient title, No Ease in Zion , was to advocate a combined Jewish–Arab state.
    In his later years, he followed Israel’s progress closely, still arguing for more pro-Arab policies, increasingly saddened by how those utopian dreams had turned out, but it is only now that I realise how close he and my grandmother came to throwing in their lot with Zionism and staying in Palestine. How differently Hannah’s life would have turned out, though I wouldn’t be here to write about it. But as it was, more powerful than my grandfather’s attraction to Palestine was his desire to be a writer. When the news broke that Hitler had annexed Austria in March 1938, the ‘action for a writer’, he decided, was in Europe, and he flew back to London, my grandmother and Hannah following more slowly by sea.
    IN LONDON , my grandparents rented a little house in the Vale of Health, on the edge of Hampstead Heath. Hannah, now nearly two, ‘briefly produced a sleep disturbance and crying fits’. Removed from her home and her nanny, this was hardly surprising, but my grandmother’s work in Tel Aviv had turned her into a confirmed Freudian, and hearing that the Freuds themselves were living only a short walk away, she wrote to Anna Freud for help.
    Anna Freud ‘wrote back with exquisite politeness that she could not yet take cases’, but suggested another refugee psychoanalyst, Marianne Kris, who agreed to see Hannah. My grandfather recalled with a mixture of amusement and fascination how ‘the eminent Dr Kris at once gained Hannah’s attention, gave her a Daddy doll, a Mummy doll, a Hannah doll and a nanny doll, and asked her to play a game’. Separation anxiety was duly diagnosed, and after being prescribed some extra cosseting, Hannah was soon running about with her ‘usual zest’.
    My grandmother enrolled her at a nursery school in Highgate, and in the mornings, waiting for the school bus to pick her up, her excitement ‘was so great she could not contain herself, hopping madly from leg to leg’. She soon acquired the ‘precise, high pitched enunciation of English upper-middle class children’.
    This new life was not to last long, though. To my surprise, I learn that in the summer of 1939, whether with the intention of escaping the looming war or of taking Hannah to see her parents before war made this impossible, my grandmother and Hannah sailed for South Africa. Equally surprising, my grandfather set off on travels around Europe, taking in, among other places, Berlin, where he wandered ‘among the “No Jews Desired” notices like a spook’. He had spent his early years in Strasbourg and Zurich, but he was born in Cologne, and he wrote how grateful he was for his British passport.
    Whatever her intentions in travelling to South Africa, my grandmother must have decided to outrun the war back to Europe, for by the winter of 1939 the family was together again in a guest house on the Ridge in Hastings. Perhaps they had chosen that spot so my grandfather could gaze across the sea to France, ‘the waters silvery in the moonlight along the blacked coast’. In September 1939, he had ‘stood for a day in a senseless queue of volunteers outside the War Office’; but in his efforts to sign up, his German birth counted against him, and instead he began writing a book about racial equality, influenced by what he had seen both in Germany and South Africa, to which he had taken a dislike from the moment his ship ‘arrived in Cape Town and I saw the black African porters in their cast-offs standing on the dock below like accusing dark shadows’.
    In the mornings, he or my