A heartfelt graphic memoir of love, family and fearless women
Lives were bent in the furnaces of the twentieth century, but Granny was unbroken. With a stethoscope, a jar of herring and a hearing aid occasionally switched on, she forged an extraordinary life. Elena Zadik ran through the twentieth century without looking back.
A refugee twice before she was 17, training in medicine in Sheffield during World War 2, she was as brilliant a doctor as she was terrible a driver (she never took a test). Following her childhood in Ukraine during the Russian civil war in a tiny Jewish family (her parents were first cousins) to a briefly peaceful childhood in Germany, then to the UK as lone teenage refugee in 1937, the story shows Elena breaking glass ceilings to become a doctor. Practising in working class Sheffield she sees terrible deprivation and rejoices at the founding of the NHS, to which she gives 40 years- service.
She finds belonging in a Lancastrian mill
