Red saint, pink daughter - Silvia Rodgers

In this celebrated biography of her mother and autobiography, Silvia Rodgers gives a warts-and-all account of what her off-centre life was like, most always in the wrong place at the most perilous time, almost always in the most difficult company.

Her mother is the Red Saint of the title, a Polish Jewish Communist in the Weimar Republic as the stormclouds gathered. In a political sense she was a Saint: dedicated, monomaniacal, with an unbending sense of right and wrong. That saintliness did not include much in the way of conventional maternal feeling for her children; and her relations with her husband were less than harmonious. Race and politics became a problem as the Nazis rose to power: Silvia Rodgers remembers the book burnings, the marauding Brownshirts, the knock at the door. The narrative gathers pace, and the account of her family's flight from a Berlin turned into a nightmare city is heart-stopping.

They arrived in an England less hospitable than it remembers itself as having been. The cultural shock of wartime and post-war Britain is vividly recalled; also, the gathering sorrow of loss, as news arrives of friends and relatives killed in the concentration camps.

Silvia Rodgers gradually made her own life, moving out from under the shadow of the Red Saint, marrying the Labour politician Bill Rodgers of the 'Gang of Four', and eventually herself becoming a writer. The new Afterword written for this paperback edition speaks of this transition, and of the book as a memorial and an exorcism astonishing in its candour.