My Innocent Absence

Exile on Three Continents

The routine for Miriam Frank as a child was to flee without family or home, except her mother. She was born in Barcelona, in the year the Spanish Civil War broke out. Her mother was German and her father American, both were of Jewish descent. But when Franco won she and her mother had to flee to France, only to flee again from the Nazis to relative safety in war-time Casablanca. From there on to Mexico, New Zealand, Israel, and, ultimately, Britain, where she was finally able to make her home. In this poignant memoir Frank paints a vivid portrait of a life as refugee through the colourful images of a child’s eye from Collioure and Oran in France; from the Casablance immortalised by Bogart and Bergman, to markets from Mexico’s Xochilmilco and Rome’s Campo di Fiori.