The Brilliance Of Sybille Bedford
Brenda Wineapple writes: ‘“Survivors pay with their conscience,†Sybille Bedford (pictured) observed in her memoir, “Quicksands,” written in 2005, toward the end of her very long life. Born in 1911 outside of Berlin in Charlottenburg, Germany, she died in London in 2006…She’d endured two world wars and the heedlessness preceding each of them as well as the Holocaust, though from afar, and the painful, impossible, and sometimes exhilarating reconstruction of several cultures: she understood firsthand the burdens of survival. Perhaps as a result she developed her remarkable talent for making the inchoate circumstances we retrospectively understand as “historical forces†seem real, palpable, human.’
