Alison Leslie Gold (born July 13, 1945) is an American author. Her books include Anne Frank Remembered,[1]Clairvoyant: the Imagined Life of Lucia Joyce, The Devil's Mistress, and Memories of Anne Frank. She has written literary fiction as well as books for young people on a wide range of subjects including alcoholic intervention and the Holocaust as experienced by the young.[2][3] Her work has been translated into more than 25 languages.
Gold has three siblings: poet Ted Greenwald,[9] bed-and-breakfast owner Nancy Greenwald[10] and film director Maggie Greenwald. Her son Thor Gold[11] is a film-maker.
Gold has described herself as a "salvager of other people's stories"[12] and is most widely known for her work related to the Holocaust. Her book Anne Frank Remembered was co-written with Miep Gies, the employee of Otto Frank who hid Anne Frank and rescued Anne's diary.[13] Gold similarly worked with Anne Frank's childhood friend Hannah (Hanneli) Goslar to write Memories of Anne Frank: Reflections of a Childhood Friend.[14] On the occasion of the publication of Anne Frank Remembered, Elie Wiesel said of Anne Frank Remembered: "Let us give recognition to Alison Gold. Without her and her talent of persuasion, without her writer's talent, too, this poignant account, vibrating with humanity, would not have been written."[15]Isaac Bashevis Singer commended Ann Frank Remembered as "Beautifully written".[16]Fiet's Vase, Gold's collection of Holocaust survival accounts, was described by one reviewer as having "language as transparent as pure water";[17] according to another reviewer, each story "reads like a miracle, a silver chalice excavated from dust."[18]
Gold's non-Holocaust work has not been as consistently well received. For example, some critics did not like the blend of historical fact and fictional elements in The Clairvoyant, an "imagined history" of the life of Lucia Joyce, the daughter of James Joyce. The Los Angeles Times observed that "so much is fabricated in Clairvoyant that anyone who reads it unaware of the real lives of James and Lucia Joyce will be led far off the mark".[19] However, Irish author Padraic O'Farrell described Clairvoyant as "brilliantly innovative and movingly written".[20] According The Times Literary Supplement, Gold's most recent work, the autobiographical Found and Lost, "captures the rough texture of lived experience in a way that often eludes more straightforward autobiography".[21]
Clairvoyant, the Imagined Life of Lucia Joyce, 1992
The Devil's Mistress, the Story of the Woman Who Lived and Died with Hitler, 1997, also translated into Greek, Hungarian and Romanian
The Woman Who Brought Matisse Back from the Dead, 2014
Not Not a Jew, 2016 (novella)
Ransom Notes, 2022
Young adult
Memories of Anne Frank, Reflections of a Childhood Friend, 1997, also translated into 22 languages
A Special Fate, Chiune Sugihara, Hero of the Holocaust, 2008
Elephant in the Living Room (co-written with Darin Elliott), 2014
References
^Blair, Jon (June 8, 1995), Anne Frank Remembered (Documentary, Biography, War), Anne Frank House, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Disney Channel, retrieved November 9, 2021
