LISA APPIGNANESI (b.1946)
Losing the Dead. London: Chatto & Windus, 1999.
Signed and annotated first edition of Lisa Appignanesi’s memoir charting the wartime experience of her family as Jews in occupied Poland. Losing the Dead tells the story of the author’s parents, Hena and Aron, her grandmother and uncle, and their struggle to survive under the Nazi regime. The book is also a meditation on the role of memory in family life, a theme to which Appignanesi returns in a prefatory note here, also reflecting upon the book’s publication before the advent of internet genealogy and online wartime archives, before ‘something of a genre’ of personal holocaust history arrived in literature. Annotated with 204 words across 8 pages, the author also appends a four-page printed ‘Afterword’ signed, the text taken from a later edition of Losing the Dead.

Octavo. Original sea-green cloth, spine lettered in gilt, pictorial dust jacket.