FOUND AND LOST: MITTENS, MIEP, AND SHOVELFULS OF DIRT, BY ALISON LESLIE GOLD
Alison Leslie Gold's memoir, Found and Lost: Mittens, Miep, and Shovelfuls of Dirt, is a compilation that reflects on the decline and the loss of loved ones and the memories and possessions that they once held dear. Gold is best known for Anne Frank Remembered, an autobiographical account, written with Miep Gies, over Gies' and her husband’s time spent protecting the Frank family from Nazis in Amsterdam. Themes of remembrance pervade every line of Found and Lost, including the moments from Gold's life that brought her to the Gies family. Gold’s desire for a sense of purpose, to move beyond her struggles as an alcoholic and single mother, led her to them. Her memoir re-sketches the aging process, the loss before and after dying, and the grief and acceptance that surrounds what comes to pass: “Though every clock in the house shows a different time since Jan died, she [Miep] lives apart from time, sails quietly on, contending with old, older, oldest age.”
Found and Lost is littered with an array of descriptions via letters, vignettes, and essays, including other scattered details like—a scam email, her parents' canceled NYT subscription, piccolos in pipes, and Medvedev's cat Dorothy. Surely by this memoir, Gold finds who and what was lost to her, as well those who know her now: “As a writer, I've tried to 'translate' what's been rescued into wordswords addressed sometimes to the living, sometimes to the dead, picking from little bones, skulls, and relics tossed from graves.”
