A small child escapes from the sombre fate selected for her. Though she is too young to know it, let alone comprehend it, it radically alters the rest of her life.
Born from expatriate parents, each, by then, already twice uprooted across Europe and the US, Miriam has scarcely mastered walking and her first language when her own odyssey into exile begins. By the age of eleven she has escaped two wars, crossed three oceans, lived in four continents, and switched languages four times. She belongs to no country till she reaches the age of seventeen, by which time Miriam is already studying medicine in her resolve to relieve pain and enhance life, in opposition to the trail of suffering and death, ordained and executed by humans to fellow humans, that has shadowed her life and become ingrained in her memory. The reader follows Miriam’s vividly evoked experiences in war-torn Spain and France, and on to Casablanca, Mexico and New Zealand, while family members are murdered in Germany or flee to Holland, Palestine and Italy. Along the way she encounters renowned communists and anarchists, writers and artists of the period. On completing her medical studies she visits Jerusalem and settles in the UK, where she marries an artist - formerly Kokoschka’s assistant - who teaches in Austria and starts a school in Italy. In the course of her academic medical work, she also visits China and Argentina, where an Andean author’s writing inspires her launch into literary translation.
My Innocent Absence traces Miriam’s journey from fragmentation to wholeness, revealing history’s role in the formation and fate of the individual, along with the individual’s inherent strength and resourcefulness to thrive in the face of adversity, and – beyond it – to break down barriers towards a more connected and compassionate world.
