The "Holy" Spark?

Muriel Spark died Friday at a hospital in Florence, Italy. She was 88.

Ms. Spark's death was announced Saturday, The Associated Press reported, by Massimiliano Dindalini, the mayor of the Tuscan village of Civitella della Chiana, where she had lived for almost 30 years.

But what's my interest in this?

Well...

She was born Muriel Sarah Camberg in Edinburgh on Feb. 1, 1918, the daughter of Bernard Camberg, an engineer whose Jewish family had settled earlier in Scotland, and his wife, the former Sarah Elizabeth Maud Uezzell, a Protestant from a country village near London.

Later in her life, the issue of her religious heritage became a persistent irritant.

The AP skips the Jewish parentage of the father.

And...

In 1965 she published "The Mandelbaum Gate," a heftier book and one that seems overstuffed by her standards. Set in Jerusalem against the backdrop of the war-crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann, "The Mandelbaum Gate" tackles questions of religion, memory and history superimposed on a torturous plot.

The Mandlebaum Gate is a novel by Muriel Spark set in the territories of Jerusalem and Jordan during the Eichmann Trials. Within the novel there is a character "Barbara Vaughan" who is a Gentile Jewess (oh, really?). She travels within Israel and Jordan on a pilgrimage to see the holy shrines and has various adventures and encounters during her trip. It is clear from the first few pages of the novel that Jewish identity is a key theme and continues to be as such throughout.

But, there's more...

In her later years it became clear that she and her son, Robin, were irreconcilably estranged over various issues, including what he referred to as her abandonment of him, as well as her opinions about his ability as an artist and his public statements about their heritage.

Ms. Spark was harsh in her public criticism of his work and open about their estrangement. She told a newspaper: "He can't sell his lousy paintings, and I have had a lot of success. He keeps sending them to me and I don't know what to do with them. I can't put them on my wall. He's never done anything for me, except for being one big bore."

Robin Spark, an Orthodox Jew, survives her. Their public feud spilled into letters to newspapers and became a part of her literary history when she donated letters from her son to the National Library of Scotland. The issue was whether Ms. Spark's mother was a Jew. If she was, then Robin Spark's matrilineal inheritance would make him a Jew by birth. Ms. Spark maintained that she was half-Jewish and that she had nothing to prove.

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UPDATE

Muriel Spark was born Muriel Sarah Camberg in the genteel Edinburgh suburb of Morningside. Her father, Bernard Camberg, an engineer in a rubber factory, was a Jew whose family had settled in Scotland. Her mother, Sarah Uezzell, was an English Presbyterian from Watford, who was later to take to drink.

The religious divide in her parents’ marriage was to influence Spark’s imagination considerably. In her only long novel, The Mandelbaum Gate, set in Jerusalem during the trial of Eichmann, a Roman Catholic woman finds herself in peril because of her part-Jewish ancestry.

In later life Spark was to become involved in a bitter feud with her son Robin (a painter) about her Jewishness, and the quarrel snowballed in a blizzard of birth and marriage certificates, claims and counterclaims. (Spark’s relationship with her son was not improved by her comments about his paintings: “He always wanted me to say they were good but I didn’t think they were”, she said. “Art is important to me and I’m not going to commit perjury

.”