Showing results for "Julia" in Cultural & Regional

Ever since she was a child, every aspect of Julia Haart's life—what she wore, what she ate, what she thought—was controlled by the orders of ultra-Orthodox Judaism. At 19, after a lifetime spent caring for her seven younger siblings, she was married off to a man she barely knew. For the next 24 years, he would rule her life. Eventually, when her youngest daughter, Miriam, started to question why she wasn't allowed to sing, run or ride a bike, Julia reached her breaking point.

Lynn Knight tells the remarkable story of the three adoptions, spanning three generations, within her remarkable family: of her great-grandfather, a fairground boy, given away when his parents left for America in 1865; of her great-aunt, rescued from an industrial school in 1909; and of her mother, adopted as a baby in 1930, and brought to Chesterfield from London.

When interracial romance novels written by her long-dead father landed on Julia McKenzie Munemo’s kitchen table, she - a White woman - had been married to a Black man for six years, and their first son was a toddler. Out of shame about her father’s secret career as a writer of “slavery porn”, she hid the books from herself and from her growing mixed-race family for more than a decade.