In this Jewish “matrilineal love story”, TV writer Bess Kalb channels the voice of her Brooklynite late grandmother, the irrepressible Bobby Bell. Nobody Will Tell You This But Me Bess Kalb Currently Waterstones nonfiction book of the month, this is a scrupulous work of storytelling, radiant with profound empathy and filial affection. To an extent, the deceit was rooted in social hypocrisies characteristic of interwar Britain, but the book also invites us to consider the extent to which propaganda plays a role in every family saga. Art critic that she is, she picks up her cues from pictures – in this instance, the family photo album, in which she finds averted gazes and evasive expressions, gaps and absences, all of which help point to betrayals and deceptions that the quiet village of Chapel St Leonards kept hidden. As Cumming’s transfixing account of family secrets reveals, the initial mystery shielded another, more profound puzzle, and the true explanation for the disappearance took decades to emerge. Five days later, she was found unharmed, just 12 miles way, and brought home. In 1929, the author’s mother, then three, went missing from a Lincolnshire beach where she was playing beside her mother.
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