‘One day I will have to tell (my daughter) … that her grandmother is a bag lady.’ Josiane Behmoiras’s exquisitely crafted memoir of her mother, Dora, delivers its punchline in the opening chapter. Behmoiras’s childhood and youth were shadowed by her mother’s untreated mental illness and by their descent into chronic penury, loneliness and fear. Nonetheless, the overall effect of this work is of warmth and colour, and of a keen sense of the absurd. The pleasure taken in recapturing each vignette seems to reflect its subject’s irrepressible fighting spirit. Dora fostered her daughter’s artistic gifts, as well as her capacity for love, joy and compassion.

Dora was born into a large middle-class Turkish Jewish family whose fortunes appear to have declined after migrating to France in the 1920s. In Behmoiras’s first snapshot, Dora is well on her way to pauperisation. A single mother in her forties, she keeps house for an elderly Parisian doctor, sleeping with her child under the kitchen table and keeping watch for her enemy, the ‘Algerian’. The death of her only surviving brother tips her over the edge. Soon she and her daughter are sleeping rough in the French countryside. Under archaic vagrancy laws criminalising homelessness, Dora, a French resident for thirty-six years, is picked up by the police and threatened with ‘repatriation’. On observing that she is Jewish: ‘alors, the solution to your problem is simple’: emigrate to Israel. In old age, life repeats itself. She is picked up off the streets of Tel Aviv to fade away in a nursing home.