Feature: Author - Miriam Frank at Owl Bookshop in Kentish Town on Thursday December 2

Published: 25 November, 2010
by DAN CARRIER

Miriam Franks speaks of her early years travelling with parents displaced by upheaval

TO call author Miriam Franks well travelled does not quite do her wanderings justice. And her voyages, spelt out in her new memoirs, have nothing to do with the Paul Theroux school of travel writing.

Instead Miriam Frank, who worked as an anaesthetist at the Royal Free Hospital, was sent from one corner of the globe to another – because of the political maelstrom that engulfed the world during the mid-20th century, and her parents’ attempts, firstly, to escape persecution and then come to terms with the loss of home and identity.

Writing about her life has proved enlightening, says Miriam, who will be discussing her memoir at the Owl Bookshop in Kentish Town on Thursday. But she did not simply want to tell the story with the death of an Old Europe, a civilised place, or say “I was there”. “I am a doctor and academic and I wanted to consider memory and how you feel about it,” she says. “I did not want to look up archives. There are enough books about the facts of the war already.

“I wanted to go and feel, remember what it was like to live through these times. Gaze back through the eyes and consider the feelings of a little girl who was being moved about and shifted from place to place by events way beyond her control or under­standing.”

It took her years to tackle the story, and she completed the first draft in the third person. 

“I have now got various versions of it”, she admits. “I started writing  and kept moving it about. 

“At times it was very difficult, and  I did not want to continue – but I thought it would be interesting to write a story of the life of a person who had been shifted about a lot due to historic events out of her control, who had gone around the world, from her birth onwards.”

Her journey saw her in Spain during the Civil War, watching with her parents as refugees left Barcelona as the Fascists moved in, to occupied France where she and her mother lived on their wits. 

They became the real life characters at Rick’s Café in Casablanca, having got to Morocco, which spelt the checkpoint for freedom if you could just clamber over the correct barrier. 

A ship took her on to the brightness of Mexico, far from the horrors of the Holocaust, and then to study medicine in the safe confines of New Zealand. Israel and the US crop up, and finally the city of refugees, London. Our city appears as a place that has offered a home to so many over the centuries, a haven this book reminds us about. 

Miriam Franks’ memoirs remind us we should rightly be proud of our city’s global background.

• Miriam Franks will be at the Owl Bookshop, Kentish Town Road, on Thursday December 2 at 6.30 to read from her book