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Christina Stead met my grandmother Lina Lewin by chance at a restaurant in Paris in early 1929. In a letter to my mother Nadine Mendelson following the death of Lina, Christina writes from her home in Elmers Court, Surbiton in January 1970: "Lina was so very kind to Bill and me from the first time of meeting - by accident, as you must have heard from us both, in a little restaurant in Paris: and then there were the years we were in Paris and I came to know Lina's story and to meet you. Dear Lina! People loved her. She was so gallant. The last time Bill and I were in N.Y....we called upon Lina and she received us beautifully and elegantly in the old Russian way, with tea, brilliant conversation, entertainment on the piano, a whole culture in one afternoon, as she did know how to do it. I was thrilled and touched."
This description evokes so well my own visits to my grandmother in her apartment on 68th streetSixty-Eighth Street where she would play Chopin for me, and I would draw or sometimes dust for her as she told me the stories of where each object in her apartment came from: the samovar from the Marché aux Puces in Paris, the old painted wooden egg that looked like a hut from Riga, objects that I now keep carefully in my own home, hoping to share their stories with my own grandchildren some day. Reading through the correspondence between my mother and grandmother and Christina Stead brings this back to me and perhaps sheds some light on Christina's life for those readers who seek further memories about the great novelist. Stead was called by Edmund White "The Woman Who Loved Memory": "Memory, not observation, is Stead's mode - and memory causes her vision to be heightened, mythic, often operatic."1 In this brief reflection, I cannot rise to the operatic, but can perhaps provide some background notes.
A photograph that my mother took of Christina Stead and Bill Blake sitting at a café in Paris, quite likely similar to the one at which Christina met Lina, shows Christina beaming into the camera while Bill lounges comfortably, arm draped over the back of a straw...