Dora B: a memoir of my mother, by Josiane Behmoiras

My mother, who lives in England, will be 80 next April. She regularly rings me with cheerful news of her bingo friends, her grandchildren, the goings-on of the neighbours in her block of council flats and what she’s growing in her patch of garden. Every time I speak with her I feel an overwhelming thankfulness for her health, her independence, her intellect, her optimism and her enduring love.

Josiane Behmoiras also loved her mother dearly. It’s a testimony to the strength of their love that mother and daughter remained firmly connected through terrible hardship and poverty, prejudice and violence.

Josiane was born in Paris in 1953 and spent her first few years with her mother wandering, scavenging for food, sheltering in hostels and eventually being arrested for vagrancy. Short sections of the book capture poignant moments of childhood memories of rejection and desperation. Dora lived in France for thirty-six years, but being Jewish, she is deported to Israel. Dora struggles to make a living for the two of them in the stark landscape of a migrant camp, but every time she begins to make progress, her difference is identified by a tormentor, and her enterprise is crushed.

At times, Dora appears simply eccentric. But eccentricity develops into full-blown mental illness for which she receives no treatment, and which Josiane manages at great cost to herself. Growing older, Josiane works to support her mother, eventually meets her partner and moves to Melbourne to have children of her own. Dora thwarts every effort to bring her to Australia, and ends her years living rough as a bag lady in Tel Aviv.

The book opens and closes with descriptions of the painful, disconnected phone calls that Dora makes to Josiane.

One question remains unspoken but always present while reading this book - what more could Josiane have done to relieve her mother’s suffering? And the answer is nothing. Josiane navigated the opposing pulls of the need to respect her mother’s choices with the need to force care upon her. In general, protecting her mother’s freedom was the overriding responsibility. Even if that freedom exposed her to personal danger and ill-health.

A beautifully written, brave and very moving book, which I read with a feeling of sorrow for Josiane Behmoiras and a guilty sense of gratefulness for never having to face such pain. I’m going to send it to my mother. No doubt she’ll ring me and tell me how much she enjoyed it.