Alison Leslie Gold

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Alison Leslie Gold
Alison Leslie Gold.jpg
Alison Leslie Gold, New York City, 2016
Born (1945-07-13) July 13, 1945 (age 80)
New York City, U.S.
Notable works
  • Anne Frank Remembered
  • The Clairvoyant
  • The Devil's Mistress
Website
www.alisonlesliegold.com

Alison Leslie Gold (born July 13, 1945) is an American author. Her books include Anne Frank Remembered, [1] Clairvoyant: the Imagined Life of Lucia Joyce, The Devil's Mistress, and Memories of Anne Frank. She writes literary fiction as well as books for young people on a wide range of subjects including alcoholic intervention and the Holocaust as experienced by the young. [2] [3] Her work has been translated into more than 25 languages.

Contents

Biography

Gold was born on July 13, 1945, in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Bayside, Queens. [4] [5] She was educated at the University of North Carolina, Mexico City College and the New School for Social Research in New York City. For several years, she shared her time between her main home in New York City and Hydra, a small island in Greece. [6] [7] [8]

Gold has a son, Thor Gold, and three siblings: poet Ted Greenwald, [9] Nancy Greenwald and film director Maggie Greenwald.

Writing

Gold's books have been reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement , The Guardian, The New York Times , The New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and O, The Oprah Magazine, among others. Anne Frank Remembered was on the May 17, 1987, New York Times best-seller list. [10]

Gold has described herself as a "salvager of other people's stories" [11] and was most widely known for her work related to the Holocaust. Her book Anne Frank Remembered was co-written with Miep Gies, the employee of Otto Frank who hid Anne Frank and rescued Anne's diary. [12] [13] Gold similarly worked with Anne Frank's childhood friend Hannah (Hanneli) Goslar to write Memories of Anne Frank: Reflections of a Childhood Friend. [14] [15] On the occasion of the publication of Anne Frank Remembered, Elie Wiesel said of the book: "Let us give recognition to Alison Gold. Without her and her talent of persuasion, without her writer's talent, too, this poignant account, vibrating with humanity, would not have been written." [16] Isaac Bashevis Singer commended Anne Frank Remembered as "Beautifully written". [17] Fiet's Vase, Gold's collection of Holocaust survival accounts, was described by Sigrid Nunez as having "language as transparent as pure water"; [18] according to another reviewer, each story "reads like a miracle, a silver chalice excavated from dust." [19]

Gold's non-Holocaust work has not been as consistently well received. For example, some critics did not like the blend of historical fact and fictional elements in The Clairvoyant, an "imagined history" of the life of Lucia Joyce, the daughter of James Joyce. The Los Angeles Times observed that "so much is fabricated in Clairvoyant that anyone who reads it unaware of the real lives of James and Lucia Joyce will be led far off the mark". [20] However, Irish author Padraic O'Farrell described Clairvoyant as "brilliantly innovative and movingly written". [21] According The Times Literary Supplement, Gold's autobiographical Found and Lost, "captures the rough texture of lived experience in a way that often eludes more straightforward autobiography". [22]

Recognition

Adaptations

Bibliography

Adult non-fiction

Adult fiction

Young adult

References

  1. Blair, Jon (June 8, 1995), Anne Frank Remembered (Documentary, Biography, War), Anne Frank House, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Disney Channel, retrieved November 9, 2021
  2. "Writers, Translators, and Artists of the Center for Writers and Translators | The American University of Paris". www.aup.edu. Archived from the original on September 14, 2016. Retrieved August 31, 2016.
  3. "Mentors: Alison Leslie Gold - Los Angeles Review of Books". December 28, 2011. Retrieved August 31, 2016.
  4. Via Newsday . "Story of Anne Frank's life retold by woman who helped hide her", The York Dispatch , May 11, 1987. Accessed May 12, 2023, via Newspapers.com. "Gold who grew up in Bayside, Queens, was working on a TV project about Bergen-Belsen four years ago when she learned about the Gies family and their role in the Frank story"
  5. "Biography - Alison Leslie Gold". www.alisonlesliegold.com. February 28, 2014. Retrieved August 31, 2016.
  6. "hydraecologists: Literary lions and lines of Hydra". hydraseal.blogspot.no. Retrieved August 31, 2016.
  7. "Alison Leslie Gold | mediterranean poetry". www.odyssey.pm. May 27, 2010. Retrieved May 9, 2016.
  8. "Alison Leslie Gold, Kluitman".
  9. "Remembering Ted Greenwald, The Poetry Foundation".[ permanent dead link ]
  10. "Best Sellers: May 17, 1987". The New York Times. May 17, 1987. pp. Section 7, p. 52. Retrieved September 17, 2025.
  11. Miller, George (March 7, 2018). "Alison Leslie Gold, 'salvager of other people's stories'". Podularity.
  12. Des Pres, Terrence (May 10, 1987). "Facing Down the Gestapo". The New York Times . Retrieved December 12, 2018.
  13. "Overheard (National Geographic podcast series), Episode 18: How Anne Frank's diary survived (transcript)". National Geographic Overheard. May 2, 2023. Retrieved September 14, 2025.
  14. "Memories of Anne Frank: Reflections of a Childhood Friend". Publishers Weekly . September 29, 1997. Retrieved December 12, 2018.
  15. Sandomir, Richard (November 3, 2022). "Hannah Pick-Goslar, a Presence in Anne Frank's Diary, Dies at 93". The New York Times. pp. Section A, p. 28. Retrieved September 17, 2025.
  16. Wiesel, Elie (April 9, 2015). "From the archives: Elie Wiesel on Anne Frank". Chicago Tribune . Translated by Hauptman, Martha Liptzin. Retrieved September 5, 2016.
  17. Quotation published on back cover, first hardcover edition of Anne Frank Remembered, Simon & Schuster, 1987
  18. Quotation published on back cover of first hardcover edition of Fiet's Vase, Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2003
  19. Medwick, Cathleen (September 2003). "Fall Fiction". O, Oprah Magazine: 202.
  20. Maddox, Brenda (August 9, 1992). "Messing with History". Los Angeles Times . Retrieved December 12, 2018.
  21. O'Farrell, Padraic (July 6, 1991). "Book review". Langford Reader.
  22. Kelley, Stephanie (April 20, 2018). "Book review". The Times Literary Supplement.
  23. Carter, Betty (1994). "Best of the Best: Twenty-Five Years of Best Books for Young Adults". The Library Connection. 22 (1).
  24. "Past & Present NBGS Books" . Retrieved September 24, 2025.
  25. Erman, John (April 17, 1988), The Attic: The Hiding of Anne Frank , retrieved August 31, 2016