Becoming Katherine Talbot
Christoph Ribbat
In 1935, when she was just fourteen years old, Ilse Gross fled Germany on her own. Seventeen years later, she published her first novel Fire in the Sun under her pen name, Kathrine Talbot, carefully concealing her German Jewish identity.
Becoming Kathrine Talbot explores the life of a refugee who lost her parents and her sister in the Holocaust and who resisted telling their stories until it was almost too late. Only at the end of her life did she start to write about her family’s fate. Christoph Ribbat follows a nearly forgotten 20th century novelist from an Isle of Man internment camp to post-war Cornwall, New York, and California, and then to Midhurst in Sussex. She married an English painter Kit Barker and clashed with macho bohemians. She achieved literary fame before she fell back into obscurity. As Ilse Barker, she shared a close friendship with the American poet Elizabeth Bishop and in their extraordinary letters the two women talked about the mundane to the traumatic and everything in-between.
Becoming Kathrine Talbot fuses a literary biography with a concise account of a German Jewish refugee’s experience in Britain. It presents an engrossing tale of creativity, joy, and pain.
Ilse lived in The Old Cottage on Bexley Hill, three miles north of Midhurst, between the 1950s and the late 1980s when she moved to Pitsham Wood in Midhurst.
Becoming Kathrine Talbot is available from www.vmbooks.com