Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told?
JENNY DISKI
(BLOOMSBURY, 448 PP, £18.99)
Tablet bookshop price £17.09 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Perhaps, Jenny Diski speculates, to be Jewish is necessarily to be lonely. Jahweh is not a good communicator: though happy to dish out 10 rules of behaviour, he will never answer questions or explain why things are going so very wrong. Catholics understand this failing, and have “a bevy of approachable under-managers, each with their own speciality, willing and able to ­intercede with the most high on behalf of the baffled individual”.

Thus begins Diski’s review of a new edition of the diary of Anne Frank, whom she considers the only Jewish saint. And, as in most of these superb essays, published in the London Review of Books between 1992 and 2014, she approaches her subject obliquely, sidling unexpectedly towards it from somewhere deep within her exceptionally agile and kaleidoscopic brain. She is kind, funny, furious, unforgiving, brilliant, brave, contrary, irresistible and magnificent.

The LRB wisely gave Diski freedom and space to follow her genius wherever it led. She writes about her heroic defeat of arachnophobia, and of her fantasy of being entombed in a mausoleum, made comfy and inviting enough for friends to pop in on damp afternoons for a game of poker. In the longest essay, she intersperses an account of a trip to Antarctica with documenting her efforts to discover more about her own childhood. This proves to have been abusive and terrifying, largely explaining why Diski had herself been treated for mental illness. Even here, she takes an unexpected stance, writing of being comforted by her fellow patients, and her sense of peace when she was locked up.