“An astonishing
personal journey
within a turbulent
world history”

However you’ve found your way to this page, welcome! This is my way of telling you a bit about my book, Songs from the Suitcase: Inhabiting an Inheritance, which brewed for many years and was written during the Covid lockdowns and in the year or so after we emerged from that profoundly strange time.

You will find here the book blurb, a bit about me, some reviews, some extracts, and some of the photos that appear in the book. I hope they tempt you to buy it, and if you like it, to spread the word.

I am committed to making donations to Safe Passage from any profits I make from book sales. They campaign for child refugees to be reunited with family members. As the child of two child refugees, I commend their excellent work to you.

— ROSANNA MOSELEY GORE, SEPTEMBER 2024

Link to buy

“This is a gem of a memoir; sparkling, multifaceted, and full of depth and colour. At once a memorial and a meditation, it celebrates one unique family, and the power of ties that bind”

— HEIDI THOMAS, SCREENWRITER

Home life in suburban London in the 1960s and 1970s for Rosanna Moseley Gore was both ‘normal’ and quite the opposite. With a German Jewish father who had escaped Nazi Berlin on a Kindertransport in 1939, a Russian mother who was born in Manchuria, and a beloved Russian grandmother who fled her homeland during the post-revolution civil war, she grew up feeling legally British but never English. Driving holidays in Europe were normal, friends and family with strong accents were normal, baked beans and rice pudding were not.

When her parents died in 2015 and 2017, and the huge family archive of letters, photographs and documents found its way back to her, memories of childhood came rushing back. Alongside those memories came also a growing awareness of how her family background, the inherited gifts and inherited traumas, had moulded the way she thinks, feels and acts.

This is more than a family story. It is a story of individuals and of how huge world events act upon them. The ‘songs’ resonate as much now as they did when they were first stashed away in the suitcase.

Excerpts

“Food is important in its way in all families.  But when you have a combination of Russian and German Jewish cultural influences, the crossover of currents creates a pretty potent mix of emotional charges.  Pass that through the magnification of insecurity, lost home base, and only peripheral and sporadic connections with others loosely of your clans … well, it seems hardly surprising that food memories are top of the heap.  Cooking and serving food that reminds one of home is a powerful way of connecting to one’s deep sense of identity, and of saying “Everything else has changed, has been lost – but I can make this remain”.  Because to buy ingredients, and cook them in the right way is something that can be kept in your control, circumstances allowing, even when everything else has ultimately been decided by others, and by the grand sweeps of history, politics, war and famine.

And the experience of surviving famine was clearly of huge significance for my grandmother – well, it would be, wouldn’t it? Like many of her generation, and quite rightly, she abhorred waste and had no patience for squeamishness and fussiness. We would watch her in some dismay as she picked up a chicken drumstick which had been picked clean of meat, and proceed to nibble every last ‘molecule’, as she’d say, of skin and gristle. We would squirm as she defiantly chewed the cartilage with the loud “hryoom hryoom” (“хрюм”) noise that is the Russian onomatopoeic word for the sound of horses munching something crunchy. Apples sound fine, cartilage less so. But she was making a point, consciously or unconsciously, sitting at table with her safe and comfortable granddaughters.”

“And as I water our vegetable garden and look at my small patch of sweetcorn (always known as Kukuruza – кукуруза – in our house, and always accompanied by the story of how passionately Nikita Khrushchev loved it and how his Corn Crusade to grow cattle fodder ended in disaster), I can’t help remembering the time we were driving across Germany and needed a “comfort break”.   So Pa stopped the car by an enormous field of maize.  We all piled out – Pa, Ma, Whaplik, Anya and me – and each made our way down a wide gap between the towering plants.  Just as we emerged, feeling a lot better, the farmer came by on his tractor, spotted us and – shaking his fist in outrage, shouted “Das ist ein Schweinerei!” which the dictionary tells me means a mess, but I can’t help feeling he felt we had been behaving in a disgusting porcine way.  “But it would only do his plants good, what was his problem?” was the general tenor of our conversation as we drove off.  But I never have liked being told off unfairly, so I remember the sense of grievance still, and the unfairness to the pig too!”

“You could take Whaplik out of the countryside, but you could never quite take the countryside out of her.  Old remedies for recognizable ailments were occasionally rustled up out of weeds growing in the garden – like the infusion of Rosebay Willowherb (chistotel’ –чистотель in Russian, meaning ‘clean body’) with which she ministered to our teenage spottiness.  And growing up in the London suburb of Ealing, with its large Polish immigrant community, had an interesting side-effect.  Quite how it was discovered by Whaplik I have no idea, but the local chemist shop – a fifteen minute walk from our house in one of those ubiquitous 1930s shopping parades with metal-framed windows in the flats on the first floor – was the source of supplies of Tincture of Valerian without which our household’s mental equanimity was clearly not thought to be able to survive.  Tincture of Valerian, a murky brown alcoholic essence of quite disgusting sharp pungency (think odour of tom cat, crossed with flavour of burned bitter chicory, crossed with ammoniac smelling salts, crossed with … well, never mind).  Valerian the herb widely known as Nature’s Valium.  It has many properties, but its main purpose is to calm and sedate – and quite frankly, as children and teenagers we were sedated with drops of Valerianka (Валерианка) in water at the slightest sign of what?

Getting overwrought? Angry? Distressed? Tearful?  Well, probably all of the above, and more.  We never thought anything of it, but both my sister and I have retrospectively had cause to ponder on what on earth was going on with all that.  It reminds me of those scenes in old Hollywood movies when a female character starts to get a bit hysterical, and the manly shall-we-call-him-hero slaps her in the face to bring her to her senses.  We never got slapped (well, it happened to me twice, both occasions burned into my soul because of how unfair the punishment felt to my five-year-old self), but we were definitely kindly, but firmly, sedated.  Is it fanciful to ponder on why it felt so important to keep things on an even keel, at least on the surface?  I sometimes think that every single adult member of our family could so easily have collapsed irreversibly into the deepest of emotional pits, if they had just allowed themselves to indulge in pressing the huge bruises they carried.  But there was work to be done, food to be put on the table, a future to be planned for, and a deep past not to be dwelled upon.”

“Waiting to be called to our train, I got my knitting out and had a charming conversation with a German man (also knitting: we compared green yarns) with an English wife.  He worked in Biotech, and his special area was strawberry cultivation.  Charmingly he was off to Antwerp to attend the 4th International Strawberry Congress (who knew?) on behalf of his company, and he was the first of a string of Europeans we met whose reaction to Brexit was – how to say? – ‘head-in-hands bewilderment’.  “Why?”  “Disaster” “What were you thinking of?”  We didn’t yet know that we’d have to get used to that, nor to repeatedly having to say, “It’s a nightmare for us, we didn’t want it”.  We did also discuss biological pest control and emission-free sustainable strawberry cultivation, so at least there was something cheerful to act as leaven in the unpalatable mix of embarrassment, even shame.

Knitting Strawberry Man and I said our goodbyes and went our separate ways.  And then we were on the train, masked by choice, and a blink of an eye later we’d emerged from the tunnel speeding over flat northern France.

I shed the first of many tears that trip.  I suppose I could have predicted feeling emotional about being back on the soil of the European mainland after the longest gap in my entire life.  But though I’d missed it, I hadn’t actually been aware quite how much relief I would experience.  An outbreath, and dropping of the shoulders, a recognition of comfortable rightness.  And of, let’s not be too restrained British about it …  joy!  By the time we arrived at the Gare du Nord and were wheeling our cases the 15 minutes to our hotel near the Canal St Martin, my head was fair reeling with the sheer familiarity of Gauloise cigarettes, coffee, vanilla and baking aromas.  Even though the area was a bit seedy, it just felt so good to be there.  We just grinned.  Even though the cheap hotel’s tiny lift felt worryingly rickety, we just grinned.”

Now available as an audiobook

Download from Audible/Amazon, Apple, or direct sale from me (just email me and we can organise that).

Listen to an excerpt

Reviews

“Once started it was hard for me to stop reading this book”

A surprise because we think we know so much of the last century’s atrocities and no more reading is necessary.

But once started it was hard for me to stop reading this book. Wanting to know more about the lives of people who are like us living calmly in suburban London. But not.

People wanting to make the most of their abilities as we do, but with such shocking obstacles in their way, which they tackled bravely and overcame . It will be hard to forget about their suffering.

But it was also fun to read about their family-lives here. So like ours in some ways. But not .

About the author

Rosanna was born in London in 1960, grew up in suburbia, and studied Geography at Cambridge University.  She has spent most of her adult life working as an acupuncturist, now practising in Cambridge.  She has two adult children, and lives in Cambridgeshire with her writer husband Charles Moseley and their labrador, Milo.  She writes a regular column for the Reach Village magazine, is extraordinarily passionate about pebbles, and loves ceramics, yarn and craft gin.