Elena Lappin

"It is our family tradition to leave gifts by the birthday child's bed late at night, so that they wake up surrounded by presents. On my tenth birthday I pretended to be fast asleep while my mother placed a mountain of new books on the chair by my bed and tiptoed out of the room. As soon as she closed the door I started reading them by the light of the street lamp just outside my first-floor window....By the time the milky greyish-white of morning I had read all my birthday books cover to cover....I absorbed all the stories, characters, illustrations: it was like a night full of vivid dreams."
This memoir of a much travelled editor and writer's life was most interesting to me in the first half where she describes her life in the Czech republic as a child: growing up in Prague before 1968, seeing the crack down. Her family emigrated to Germany and her descriptions of her adaptation here too made for good reading.

I found after that it lost focus on the linguistic aspect of her story, despite her shift onto Hebrew when she moved to Israel and then English in Canada and the US. She mwntions skme of the books she has helped get translated into English as a literary scout, but more of this as a 'book about books' would have been wonderful given her numerous languages (hopefully she'll write another like this!)

Her family history (a grandfather a soviet spy in China in the 1930s) was fascinating but as she didn't have enough detail from the record probably would make more sense as fiction. For example, he was part of the Soviet forces in the Spanish civil war - but writes that she has little more detail. Given the controversy of the role of the USSR, this is tantalising.… (meer)