I was not born Linda Grant. First I was Ginsberg. “I’m probably related to the poet,” I boasted when I grew old enough to value lies and exaggerations.
My father arrived in England as a baby with his family as part of the waves of turn-of-the century Eastern European pogrom immigration. His father had deserted from the Russian army and as family legend told it, changed his name from (possibly Rosen?) to Ginsberg to evade capture. This story, rooted in the history of persecution and flight, was assumed by me to be true until one of my older cousins suggested that, on arrival in Liverpool, they had made their way to the Jewish neighborhood of Brownlow Hill and took over the name Ginsberg from the rent book of the house they moved into.
So how did I become Grant when I was three years old? In frightened response to an anonymous threatening letter signed “Anti-Jew?” Or to disassociate the family from a rogue brother who had embezzled from the family business? There was patchy agreement that Grant was chosen in homage to the whiskey bottle. I was brought up with the great truth, “always tell the authorities what they want to hear”—the immigrant’s charter. Honesty and integrity were luxuries you couldn’t afford when you’re escaping from what would become, for those left behind, inevitable elimination.
I learned from my parents that the ability to tell a good story was both a pleasure and necessity. There were few family documents; even the official entry on th.