Anna Mendelssohn, was a Jewish British writer, poet and political activist.whose poetry has also appeared under the names Anne Mendelson and Grace Lake, who was born near Manchester in 1948. Anna also wrote fiction, drama, and life writing; and was also a visual artist, musician, and translator.
She came from a left-wing political family,amd was the daughter of Maurice Mendleson, a market trader from Stockport in Cheshire. According to Peter Riley, writing in The Guardian, her father was from a "working class Jewish" background,who fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, and was a Labour councillor in Stockport.Her mother had worked with Holocaust survivors and was an activist with Manchester International Women for Peace. Both were involved with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
Anna was educated at Stockport High School for Girls, where she became Head Girl. She was reported to have been a "brilliant and unruly pupil". Mendelssohn was the first of her family to attend university when she enrolled at the recently opened University of Essex in 1967 reading English and American literature,.There she encountered radical poets such as Tom Raworth and Ed Dorn, who reportedly led a party of students, including Mendelssohn, to Paris during the May 1968 protests. That same month, Essex students shut down the campus to protest a visiting lecture from chemical defense scientist Thomas Inch, who worked at Porton Down, the world’s oldest chemical weapons research facility. Mendelssohn appears in footage of the occupation included in British Sounds (1969), a film that London Weekend Television commissioned from Jean-Luc Godard but then refused to screen because of female nudity. She left without a degree in 1969.
She spent the following year in Turkey teaching English and French and translating 1930's Turkish poetry, surrealistand social realist. Then Anna worked for dispossessed groups in London in 1970 such as the Claimants’ Union and working for the underground press, at the same timeshe moved into a house in Stoke Newington with a mixed group of activists. They were aligned with an urban guerrilla movement called The Angry Brigade a small, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist left-wing group who took aim at various representatives of the ruling class or establishment..They were more moderate than some of their European counterparts, such as the Red Army Faction76. Their actions were organised according to the tenet that ‘we attack property not people’. No-one was killed or badly injured by Angry Brigade actions whose small, purely symbolic bombs were planted at different locations: embassies, politicians’ residences and a BBC van at a Miss World beauty pageant.
The Angry Brigade’s high-profile bombing in 1971 of the house of Robert Carr, the
Conservative Minister responsible for the Industrial Relations Bill, precipitated a large-scale
police investigation into British counterculture. Over the next year the police raided up to forty organisations including the offices of the International Times, the International Marxist Group and the International Socialists. Communes and squats were also raided. According to the radical newsletter Conspiracy Notes, a partisan and therefore not wholly reliable source, the police confiscated private address books, diaries and letters, and detained scores’ of activists for questioning. In order to cope with the scale of the operation, the Bomb Squad was formed, the original counter-terrorist policing force in Britain. After following a paper trail of cheque fraud and various tip-offs, on the 20th August 1971 Anna Mendelson (then going by the name of Nancy Pye) was arrested along with Jim Greenfield, Hilary Creek and John Barker at 359 Amhurst Road, Stoke Newington, London.
In the days and months that followed, a further four (Kate McLean, Stuart Christie, Angela Weir and Chris Bott) were arrested on the same charge - conspiracy to cause explosions. Together, they became known as the Stoke Newington Eight.
Along with John Barker and Hilary Creek, Anna courageously defended herself at the Old Bailey/ Though she pleaded innocent in what was then the longest criminal trial in British history. Mendelssohn was convicted and sentenced to ten years tin London;s notorious Holloway Women's Prison.She always maintained that this was a gross miscarriage of justice.(a position she defended throughout her life) Her impassioned and eloquent self-defence at the Old Bailey is still remembered with pride by her then comrades.
It seems clear that the police planted incriminating evidence, with one of the defendants saying afterwards “they framed a guilty man”. Angry Brigade bombings took place after the trial.
Anna was quietly released on parole in November 1976, just four years after the end of the trial, partly as a consequence of her teaching her fellow inmates literacy and drama. The news was not disclosed by the Home Office until 13 February 1977, causing a storm of press coverage which one reporter described as "scandalous and distasteful".The issue was raised in Parliament with Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees, saying that Anna was no longer a danger to society; William Whitelaw criticised the decision and asserted that protection of the public and police morale came first.
Anna moved to Cambridge to live with friends as a condition of her parole, and remained a Cambridge resident for the rest of her life. Her father gave an interview to BBC Radio explaining that prison had had a terrible effect on her, making it impossible for her to concentrate. He also said that she had taken no part in the bombings and that she and the other defendants were "good young people" who tried to help others.
After her release,In 1983 she changed her name by deed poll to 'Grace Lake' (Sylvia Grace Louise Lake) to avoid exposure to her past and published much of her poetry under that name. Anna subsequently withdrew from political groups and devoted herself entirely to art and writing. She spent some time in Sheffield, where she started a family and had three children. Anna moved to Cambridge in about 1985, studying poetry at St Edmund's College, Cambridge,She became opposed to technology and disliked judgments based on rationality in favour of those based on an artistic judgment, which led to her life becoming increasingly disconnected from the rest of society.
Such a lifestyle meant she was not greatly interested in seeing her poetry published, but others thought that her work deserved a larger audience. From the early 1980s, Anna composed nineteen poetry collections and published in journals receptive to her experimental, charged lyrics, among them, Parataxis, Critical Quarterly, and Jacket. Her work appeared in seminal anthologies including Denise Riley's Poets on Writing (1992), Iain Sinclair's Conductors of Chaos (1996), and Rod Mengham and John Kinsella's Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems (2004).
Often situated within the British Poetry Revival, Anna retained a marginal, if constant, presence in the poetry community in Cambridge, England, where she lived from 1983 until her death in 2009.
Anna's poetry is bound up with her prison experience, the poverty that came with release and her severe ill health.
In 1988, struggling to cope with the demands of single parenthood and simultaneous academic study, she gave permission for her children to be temporarily fostered. They were never returned to her care. The following year, she sabotaged her finals exams, writing out a screed on the university’s childcare provision, and once more failed to graduate..
Like her life, Anna's poems are shaped by modes of refusal. Her texts often hover on the edges of communicability, yet testify to a consistent belief in the transformative power of aesthetic form;.
Labelled surrealist and ludic, Anna's poems draw thematically and stylistically on an expansive lineage that encompasses an international array of post-1850 avant-garde figures such as Charles Baudelaire, Gertrude Stein, Anna Ahkmatova, Nâzim Hikmet, Federico García Lorca, and Tom Raworth.
Closely attuned to the fraught legacy of the female vanguard writer, as well as to disparities of class and race, her poems are impassioned, acute, probing, allusive, and unparalleled. Part aesthetic treatise ("a poem is not going to give precise directions"); part antipolitical manifesto ("the war is too close / for revolution to be understood"); part lament ("softly the sound of woe / gallops"); part celebration of the possibilities of poetic noise and possibility, replete with "scoopydoo sounds", "night[s of] pouring gold", and "high walk[s] into fantasy",
Anna's writing resolutely resists containment or category and become her form of resistance to state power, patriarchy and middle-class feminism. Grammar and punctuation are often unconventional in the poems and the absence of linear narratives or arguments make them difficult to paraphrase. Her voice, though, is loud and clear. It is indomitable, restless and fierce, with sardonic one-liners and cryptic allusions counterpoised by a tenderness and a solipsism that protect the rage from self-destruction: “crowds / locked invisibly leading their largely miserable lives /in stiff cultural patterning”.
A poem beginning “This is the reason why I do not conform” refers to “people without minds”.The language twists and turns, “goes forwards by backwards” as she says, and barely conceals feelings of fear, hurt and trauma. The reader will often be uncertain of what is being said, confused even, and political concerns are more often on the periphery than openly stated:
Politics destroy art. / That is to not to say that / my art is not political, it is / highly political, but it is not /politics.
She had no time for predatory males, whatever their ideological leanings, and was able to use the word ‘gentleman’ without sarcasm. Well-heeled women who spout feminist notions but at no personal cost earn only her derision.
In 1997 she officially reverted to her original name of Anne Mendleson but called herself 'Anna Mendelssohn', the name under which she published her principal work, 'Implacable Art', and used for most of the remaining years of her life
Mendelssohn collapsed in February 2009, and was subsequently diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour on her cerebellum. As the tumour developed, she became incapacitated by it and dependent on hospital care, being almost unconscious for the last two weeks before her death on the 16th of November 2009 at the age of 61.
She left behind nearly 800 notebooks and thousands of loose sheets, among them, coffee filters, napkins, and pizza box linings, on which she inscribed everyday musings, research, poetry, and visual art. Taken together, undated loose-leaf pages such as Untitled (“The world of poetry inhabits and moves in a world of its own”) and Untitled (“my eroticism is stirred by paint”) reveal the complexity of her poetic style and interior life.
In 2010, her vast archive of writings and drawings was generously donated by her three children to Special Collections at the University of Sussex.
An anthology of writing that celebrated Anna Mendelssohn. “I’m working here” by Anna Mendelssohn is published by Shearsman Books in 2022. Anna Mendelssohn is increasingly acknowledged as one of the most important poets of her time.
