Living with Shadows

In this short memoir, Merilyn Moos, who was born towards the end of the Second World War, reveals how her life was framed by the two ‘isms’ of the 20th century: Nazism and Stalinism. Her parents had grown up in the political cauldron of early twentieth century Germany and became committed anti-Nazis before fleeing to Britain. In a series of brief autobiographical chapters, Merilyn Moos writes about how she was deeply affected by her parents’ political and cultural heritage and teases out the pains and joys of being the child of refugees: 'the second generation'.

Living with Shadows is a succinct and emotionally revelatory book which translates the 'grand events' of recent history into the personal details of lived experience.

Some early reviews

Ian Patterson,: author of Guernica and Total War (Profile Books, 2007), Time to Get Here: Selected Poems 1969–2002 (Salt, 2003) and many other books of poetry
I've just finished reading ‘Living with Shadows’. I wanted to write immediately to say what a terrific book it is: moving without being sentimental and brilliantly able to communicate the nature of our imbrication in the cultural and political air and shadows we inhabit and absorb.

David Hencke, journalist:
...The author Merilyn Moos is the daughter of two refugees who fled the Nazis in Germany to live in the UK and this short book describes in a thematic way her childhood here and how extraordinarily she only found out the full story about her parents’ past after they died.

Her father, Siegi ,was a lapsed Jewish Communist theoretician and director of an agit-prop theatre group performing plays by Brecht and a workers opera in Berlin. He went underground on the night of the Reichstag fire and fled Berlin minutes before the Gestapo raided his flat and walked over 1000 kilometres from Berlin to the Saarland to escape, only catching a train to cross the French border at Saarbrucken.

Lotte, her mother, met Siegi in Berlin and also escaped to the UK. But in 1936 she decided to go alone to Russia to visit a lover and friend, Brian Gould-Verschoyle, just at the time Stalin ordered show trials of Trotskyists. Both were put under house arrest .... She... fled the USSR coming back thoroughly disillusioned to the UK only to arrested as a suspected spy.

You would think with such a rich history her parents would tell Merilyn about their past. But as the main point of this memoir reveals, the opposite was true. So traumatic was their past they pretended to her that it never happened. Her parents were overprotective of her and paranoid....Her father denied he was a Communist and pretended his family was Swiss. His mother never discussed her relationship with Brian.

...She had an unhappy childhood, going to bed early until she was a teen and hardly ever allowed out alone from the house except to go to school. Her parents also did not want to her to become involved with boys and effectively pressured her to break up up her first serious relationship with a boy after she got to Oxford University. No wonder she hardly spoke or visited them for 20 years.

The fascinating part of this book is that despite all of this Merilyn rebelled and followed in her parents footsteps becoming an active trade unionist campaigner and supporter of left wing causes. She is obviously now proud of their hidden past. ...

...This book has real insight into the trials and tribulations of refugees driven out of their country by hostile regimes and the dilemmas they face. Published at the same time as Europe faces its biggest war since the time the Nazis invaded the rest of mainland Europe.... It is also an intensely personal and honest account of a child of a refugee’s life in the UK and all the better for it.