"Harrowingly raw, this poignant memoir tells of a Romani woman’s remarkable resilience and tenacious determination to educate herself to freedom."
Documenting horrific experiences of child abuse, violent misogyny and racism, the unflinching truths of this memoir might make for harrowing reading, but it’s delivered in engaging prose and underpinned by a spirit of resistance propelled by the author’s desire to educate herself.
Eliska was born in Slovakia to a thirteen-year-old Romani prostitute and a twenty-three-year-old German whose friends paid for her mother as a birthday present. For Eliska home was never where the heart was. Rather, it was “where I was shaken awake by my drunk Ma’s dirty foot getting tangled in my matted hair”, and worse. Though a racist brute, her father – who’s described as being “as dirty-dicked as my conception implies” - insists she attends school, with her visits to him in Germany opening a life-changing window on the world. As a result, she’s thrilled when her mother sends her to England.
Filled with dreams of becoming literate, the reality is that thirteen-year-old Eliska was trafficked. Though life in England initially sees her become a “beaten shadow of myself”, even longing “for the decay of my home”, Eliska somehow survives and takes herself through university, despite the most brutal of attacks, and against the most awful odds. In her poignant, timely epilogue, the author raises the issue of rising anti-immigrant attitudes in contemporary Britain and reiterates the central tenet of her affecting memoir: she was saved by an irrepressible desire to educate herself, and “nothing will break me”.
| Primary Genre | Biographies & Autobiographies |
| Recommendations: |
My mother was a prostitute. My grandmother and great-grandmother were prostitutes.
Maybe I should have given the family business a chance...
BBC RADIO 4 PICK OF THE WEEK, Katie Puckrik
'Eliska's story is an extraordinary and powerful read. It's the ultimate book about survival and an against-all-odds fight to make it in life. Highly recommend.' Clover Stroud
'A scintillating, devastating memoir, and a fiercely witty and unabashed tribute to the toughness of the human spirit.' Damian Le Bas
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To westerners, being Gypsy means being wild, romantic and free.
To Eliska Tanzer, it means being rented out to dance for older men. It means living without running water. It means not being allowed a job or an education. It means being stuffed into a bare room with all your aunts and cousins, fighting over the thin, stained blanket the way you fight over the last piece of half-mouldy bread.
It means joining the family prostitution ring when you're still a child.
But Eliska was given a way out. Slung out of Hoe School and shipped to England in a washing machine box, she thought she had made it. But her dream soon turned into a nightmare.
A moving and timely memoir from a powerful new voice in literature.
The Girl from Nowhere features in the following genres: Biographies & Autobiographies, Non-Fiction Books of the Month, Biography, Literature and Literary studies, Recommendations
The Girl from Nowhere is available in Paperback, Digital (delivered electronically), Hardback
The Girl from Nowhere was written by Eliska Tanzer and published by Mirror Books
£8.09
