Marika Sherwood 1937-2025

My grandmother

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Now on to this week’s musings…

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Marika Sherwood was a lot of things to a lot of people. Friend, colleague, mentor, teacher, historian, activist, sister, mother, grandmother. To me she was Gaga, an inspiring, complex, brilliant, and beloved grandmother who never once rejected the silly but loving nickname of my earliest childhood.

She died a few weeks ago on the 16^th of February. She was at home, in her own bed, with her family gathered around her. She was beautiful, loving, and graceful to the end.

She came to that end with the same determination she had lived having completed all the research she had left in her. Since she died tributes both private and public have rolled in. Each one is a moving testament to the lives she touched and the worlds she changed. They tell the stories of her as a researcher and historian, an activist and campaigner.

There is so much I could say to tell the story of her as a grandmother, but I find the words hard to find. She was a pillar of strength and love who taught me to swim as a child by putting me on her back in the Lido on Hampstead Heath.

She took me seriously, as a child, as a teenager, and as an adult. And while she didn’t always understand who I want to be or what I want to do in the world, nonetheless she supported me. A life dedicated to creating art didn’t make sense to her. She couldn’t align what I do with the way she understood researching, or campaigning, or speaking to the issues of our time. None of that really mattered though, as understand it or not, she believed that I could achieve whatever I set out to and celebrated those achievements. There was a particular sound of unadulterated joy that she would make whenever my sister or I rang to tell her of our academic or professional achievements. The fact that I won’t hear it again breaks my heart.

As does the fact that I won’t get to share my finished van with her. Of everything I’ve ever chosen to do, it is my van that she understood best. Wanderlust, the desire to follow the horizon as it disappears from view, to understand the world by experiencing it, is something she knew well and spent her life doing. I will always wish I’d managed to complete my van in time to take her out in it.

Of every memory I have of Gaga my most treasured are travelling to Budapest together to sit in the famous cafes and eat sour cherry ice cream. Marika was a Hungarian Jewish Holocaust Survivor much of whose childhood was spent hiding from the Nazis and Arrow Cross under an assumed name. My great grandfather survived the labour camps, and our family photo albums are filled with the faces of those who were murdered.

When Marika and I walked along the banks of the Danube together, first at the age of ten and again in my early twenties, I understood the dark history of our family and the unlikeliness of my own existence in a way I never had before. It was a powerful and empowering experience, at once both achingly sad and gloriously happy. Here we stood, together, despite it all.

In the last days of her life, I spent a lot of time wondering from room to room in her little home crammed full of books. On her desk, taped to her lamp I found a note that read:

Until the lion has a historian the hunter is always the hero.

That was who my grandmother was, the lion’s historian, the woman who never stopped fighting for what she believed was right. It is also who she taught me to be, I just took the proverb more seriously as its the literal lion I fight for. I took the note home with me to remind me of her strength on the days when the darkness of this world is hard to face. Gaga didn’t shy away, and neither will I. After all, how could I and still call myself Marika Sherwood’s granddaughter.