Seligman Swartzman Gillis Sandman Joffe Yachad Lederman Fleishman

Augusta Samson (1901-1989) wrote several books under the pen name Janet Dunbar; and was one of the first writers for BBC Woman's Hour. She also kept up a fiction throughout her life to her husband and children, about her background. Augusta was a forbidding character, so it was only after her death that my mother felt able to investigate. She found that Augusta was not in fact the only daughter of a Scottish gentleman farmer and a Spanish opera singer (!!). She was the eldest of the seven children of Elias and Lena Samson (nee Gillis). Elias had run a yeshiva in the Gorbals, Glasgow. Augusta ran away, aged 21 and enrolled at the University of London's Birkbeck College. She met my grandfather (West Country Methodist background) through a university amateur dramatics club and they married in 1923. She never told him or their three children anything of her childhood, beyond hints about unhappiness and the tale of a brother killed in WW1 (also untrue). My mother traced her tribe painstakingly - I find it hard to remember how slow this was, now in the age of online trees and DNA tests. After about three years, her query on a footnote to a publisher led her to a distant relative who put her in touch with her aunt, the only remaining child of the seven. So Mum found the tribe, for herself and for us - we were Suddenly Jewish. I am guessing that initially she feared discovery and being hauled back to look after her six young siblings (her mother died around the time that she ran away). When she first arrived in London, she was mentored by a doctor who may have advised her to keep schtum. Then, she met my grandfather (very liberal, later drawn to Communism, but maybe she feared his family's reaction), she started writing for magazines and had children. Then, as she approached 40, the War began. She hid her background because she could; because she had shucked off the old restrictive life for a new, exciting one; and because it was never the right time to tell. It would have been impossible for her to dismantle the tangle of lies which was the basis of her life and career. Jennifer Peterson (Facebook, December 2017)