Information
I spent over 30 years teaching and managing curricula in higher education, retiring in 2021. I am now a full-time writer and visual artist living in Macclesfield, on the edge of the Peak District National Park in the north of England.
My creative practice has greatly informed my knowledge and understanding of my genealogical history and how this relates to the wider Jewish narratives of diaspora and displacement, emancipation, and assimilation. It has also precipitated an expanded notion of self and identity relative to my own past, particularly as someone of mixed antecedence, with a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother.
Through my creative practice of writing and drawing, I continue to explore my Eastern European heritage, which deepened when I first visited Krakow in 2013 and felt curiously connected to the city and in particular to the Jewish quarter of Kazimierz. It seemed strangely familiar. Soon afterward I found out that my paternal great-grandparents Isaac and Rosa had left Krakow for England in the late 19th Century, settling in North Manchester - initially in the Red Bank area adjacent to Victoria railway station, and later in Cheetham Hill, where I was born in 1959.
My PhD thesis entitled THE HAPPENING OF DRAWING: An Exploration of Holocaust Sites Using Phenomenological Applications of Drawing and Writing Practices outlines my methodological approach and is available to read here on my website accessed through the External links to further writing tab which will take you directly to my Academia.edu page.
I am currently writing a book entitled The Red Heart which is a part fictional, memoir and travelogue. It centres on Isaac and Rosa and their ‘flight to emancipation’ from Krakow - then in Austria-Hungary - fleeing Russian persecution in the late 19th Century to escape hardship and in serach of greater opportunity. They could not have known then that 60 years later 6 million european Jews would be dead, systematically murdered by the Nazi’s. Undoubebly if they had stayed they woukd have perished, and I wouldn’t have existed.