Autograph diaries, 1940-1945, correspondence, papers, ephemera

1940-1945. 6 vols. 677 pp total. Vol. I: 1940; Vol. II: 1941; Vol. III: 1942 (31 December 1941 to 19 January 1943); Vol. IV: 1943 (12 January to 30 December); Vol. V: 17 February to 23 June 1945; Vol. VI: 24 June to 29 October 1945. Approximately 1/2 linear foot total. “I am at this stage of my obscure existence, sixteen years old ….”A remarkable and vivid self-portrait of the development of a deeply thoughtful, intelligent and talented young Jewish girl in wartime Liverpool and London. Written between the ages of 14 and 20 while Froma is living first at the family home in Liverpool (5 Sefton Park Rd) and attending Aigburth Vale High School for Girls, whose loathed headmistress is Miss E.M. Curry. Later, Froma is stationed in London while serving in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS). We see Froma grappling with her Jewish identity and sexuality (including strong attraction to several older women), experiencing frequent trouble with authority at school and home (her father appears to have been psychologically, and possibly physically, abusive). She is a talented pianist and artist (many examples of her sketches are included here), well-read (reading Bertrand Russell, Freud, Voltaire, Huxley, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, whose A Room of One’s Own gives her “an itch to write a book & so much so that I wrote some notes on the same”). She is a self-described atheist and anarcho-syndicalist internationalist. She attends Young Communist and Zionist meetings (while holding a skeptical attitude towards both movements), listens to Elgar, Beethoven and Mendelssohn, plays Bach and Chopin (for whom, in 1942, she is “cultivating a hungry taste’), and sees Ibsen plays in London with “B.I.B.”, a woman for whom she has a particular crush. While in London serving as a switchboard operator in Olympia as a private in the ATS, Froma hears Aneurin Bevin, C.E.M. Joad and H.G. Wells speak, sees Churchill and General Alexander, takes part in the VE and VJ Day celebrations, and begins applying to medical schools to pursue her dream of becoming a doctor. Details of the rest of Froma’s life, besides her death in London in 1999, are unknown.The diaries cover roughly the years 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943 and 1945. In addition to the diaries are a quantity of incoming letters from various correspondents, including Froma’s sometimes love interests Benson Russell, “B.I.B” and “Wad” (more on them below). Also included are numerous pen and pencil sketches by Froma, original poems, school reports, and various ephemera and clippings.What follows are some highlights from the diaries, grouped by subject.LOVE, SEXA series of infatuations with adults, both men and women, are described through the course of the diaries. 7 Jan. 1941, she declares that she is “Oh so passionately in love with Ben [her cousin Benson Russell, serving in the British Army]. Russell, in a letter of 1942, returns the affection, “notwithstanding red herrings about grammar, quotations from T.S. Eliot, asterisks and scary footnotes.” The diaries also obsessively detail Froma’s infatuation with a number of older women, including “Wad” [her teacher Mrs. Waddington] and “B.I.B” [Mrs. Beatrice I. Barnes, killed in 1944 in her home, along with her son, in a bombing raid east of London. This is perhaps an explanation for the lacuna in the diaries between 1943 and 1945]. 20 April 1942: the culmination of a long entry on her feelings towards B.I.B, “Oh Mrs. Barnes I do so love you.” With a later note “N.B Three months later I read a book on homosexuality. I’m writing this quite honestly for the mistaken reader, if any. There was no sex or anything in loving B.I.B. But definitely an overwhelming yearning to be loved an guided by a ‘mother.’”27 April 1941: Two soldiers come for supper, one of them being attracted to FS. “It is obvious that Warren Simon likes me very much and I like him very much also, he said it was a pity I wasn’t a bit older and joked he could wait for me, he said he loved me but he is 30 years older than me, but he is extremely handsome, terribly intelligent, amazedly [sic] strong and isn’t religious and love travelling.”6 April 1942: she likes Mrs. Barnes “more and more…. This last three weeks I have felt this feeling continually growing inside myself. So much so that it hurt me to think of her, and yet the hurt was so nice at the same time that I am afraid I continually thought of her.” 3 February 1943: “In her letter B.I.B. accused me of putting her on a pedestal, and being disillusioned about her …. I had an advanced ‘crush’ on somebody with a strong character, and that affection for Wad did me a lot of good…. I’m awfully glad that I was as innocent as an infant then because otherwise I would have brooded about homosexuality and all that; without any possibility of getting it off my chest. I still like Wad, and I am indebted to her to the end of my days for giving me a disease which I am now cured of, and which also has provided me with sufficient antibodies to counteract it and make me completely immune from it ….”29 June 1945: goes with friends Fagin & Anne to a gay bar. “I was determined to go to this Pub & find it …. These people are a bit queer but they are nothing compared to with those in ‘The Wheatsheaf.” … Fagin & Anne were enthralled with the people they saw. So were the 3 sailors who sat opposite us and looked around absolutely amazed at the assembly….”As the first volume (1940) opens there are difficulties at home with periodic family rows (parents quarreling “about the business”). FS draws, plays games, writes letters, takes photographs, does her homework, etc.WAR, THE LIVERPOOL BLITZ15 November 1940: “Over a thousand people were killed in one night in an air-raid in Coventry”2 January 1941: “Some bombs had been dropped in Dublin last night as well as on Merseyside. Gurt the German refugee boy came but daddy wouldn’t even lend me the money to go to the pictures with him. 9 May 1941: “It was a bother travelling by train, at last I got to Liverpool, Lewises looked a terrific mess and Lewises district was still smoking. St. Lukes church was gutted yet one could get a 15 car from there through. Everywhere in the house was dust, soot, fragments of glass and untidiness and unwashed dishes …”22 June 1941: “Guess what! Russia! is fighting Germany. Russia! is our Ally!”14 March 1945: “Today I heard a flying bomb (not a rocket) for the first time it whistled over the depot & then we heard it stop chugging. It landed on Greenford Ordnance Depot quite near & we’ve just heard that it killed amongst others thirteen A.T.S. I hope the two Scotch girls Russell & Macpherson who were posted there from Park Street at the same time as me are not hurt”9 May 1945: VE and VJ celebrations: “I spent V. Day in London with Leon yesterday. We were two of the few people fortunate enough to see the Prime Minister. He looked a very great man — far greater than I would have thought him to look — let this suffice. He sat in his car looking amazing, cool & serene. And yet there really seemed to be light shining from his face. It simply was the effect of what he felt in his hour of triumph. A certain radiance which made him look really remarkable. Everybody in the crowd had the appearance of having made the mistake of wearing European clothes in the tropics. Everybody looked ruffled. And plenty were histerical [sic] with joy. And yet there he sat. We went all over the West End & winded [sic] up the whole thing in one of the few Pubs that had anything left to sell (in Holbourn). I was just halfway through a port when the wireless announced the king’s speech. It was astonishing how quiet the place became when the king spoke…. I’ll never forget the crowds of people — those also clinging on high lamp-posts or advertisement ladders on buildings, the stoical look on the faces of the police & First Aid men. The grins on people’s faces. The glazed look on the faces of those that had drunk too much — & so on ….”19 August 1945: “I spend the first V.J. day with Lionel … a good lunch in a Jewish Restaurant …. We then walked to Piccadilly — as Lionel had not seen it on the European War V. Day. It as quite a different type of crowd to the one I had seen with Leon. the mood it had was hooligan, & almost nothing else. The people hardly seemed to be laughing, but just literally banged into each other like cattle. Believe me it takes a lot to make me feel without an urge to laugh at something or other but the crowd of panic-crazy struggling people in Piccadilly made me feel like Frankenstein.”RELIGION, ZIONISM, POLITICS2 March 1941: “I’ll be frank I see nothing at all in Zionism. Splitting one race up and taking it to some holy stew pot and isolating it from the rest of the world no the land of the chosen people. I am an out and out Atheist and so will my children be (if I have any).16 April 1942: “I went to a very enthusiastic meeting at the Central Hall …. Joad [C.E.M. Joad], Aneruin Bevin, E. Wilkinson, Michael Foote [sic, for Labour politician Michael Foot], H.G. Wells & Rose Macaulay spoke.”11 October 1942: spends evening with “a Palestinian soldier, a bigot Caplan and the Secretary of the Zionist movement and his wife…. I had previously told this secretary in my last Zionist meeting that I loathed Zionism but was interested in the psychology of the people that yelled hebrew songs like animals or rather savages. I was struck then by the way he took that. Tonight he talked about Zionism and then for the first time I saw that my idea of internationalism could come through it.”2 February 1943: goes to a Young Communist meeting. “The meeting was much warmer and far more enjoyable than the young Zionist meeting I went to with Jessie. I can see the reason for this. The Jewish girls of the Zionist meeting knew themselves to be in a very precarious position — they must either snatch up a Jewish boy whilst they had a chance or finish their lives as their own bedfellows…. They spoke in platitudes, and knew nothing of the actual position in Russia today. During the debate they gasped when they heard that there were slums in Russia. Instead of accepting such a thing as a natural factor in a developing system…. When I spoke I know enough to speak for every existing system in turn — even including veiled anarcho-syndicalism.”23 November 1943: “This week for the first time except a momentary one with Mr. Schevach, I heard somebody tell about Zionism and it felt it was worth more consideration. And that Raphael (a thorough Communist) thought it was worth a lot of thought shows that what I head must have been convincing…. The man really did know what anarchism & anarcho-syndicalism was but he believed that for the sake of the persecuted Jews it was only right to bring them to a place where the children could grow up healthy in mind & body again…. I wish I was not Jewish so that there might be no danger of my being influenced by my position.”3 December 1943: on getting in trouble in school, “I was a fool to think that people in responsible positions were worthy of them. I see now the relation in almost everything (beginning in school) to the tyrant & the slave, the dog and the master, the masochist & the sadist. What a fool I was to trust these people or to try to be part of their world. I will neither lead or serve such despicable beasts ….”