A fine, graceful balance

When Ian Jack took over the editorship of Granta in 1995, the literary magazine was considered an interesting and sometimes compelling showcase for new writing around the world. It has a habit of being prescient in picking promising new authors""Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Monica Ali and Hari Kunzru among them""who became hot literary properties afterwards.

Jack continued that tradition""adding in an American version of the young novelists in 1996. But he also expanded and honed Granta to give it a more enduring appeal so that in the 12 years under his editorship, Granta grew as a quietly respected voice of writing and talent.

Jack chose a nuanced approach, retaining some of the earlier attractive dilettantism and anchoring it in sound judgement. Luckily, he never sought to make Granta an authoritarian judge of writing""that was mostly left for readers to decide. As he writes in his farewell Introduction to this issue, "...Granta never had a literary manifesto or mission statement."

Jack worked with a light but instinctive touch that kept these quarterly editions finely balanced between the stolidly conservative, the interesting and the excitingly new and experimental. Orhan Pamuk, one of the best of recent authors, first found a voice in Granta. But John Le Carre's writings also featured in one excellent issue on intelligence.

In that sense, this last issue, The Deep End, is a fittingly subtle coda to Jack's stint.

The issue kicks off with "Somewhere towards the End", an excerpt from Diana Athill's forthcoming memoir to be published by Granta in January 2008. Now grande dame of that avante-garde but hard-nosed business of publishing, Athill takes a wry and factual look at ageing and sexuality.

Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "On Monday Last Week" is a wonderful portrait of immigrant life in the US with all its confusions, expectations, unexpected delights and disappointments.

"Dear Old Dad" presents a more thoughtful Paul Theroux writing a moving account of his father. A god-fearing shoe salesman, the quintessential good guy and underachiever, Theroux's father never read a thing his son wrote, nor pretended to understand his alien and bohemian lifestyle. Yet, he remained vaguely and amiably affectionate, neither influencing his son nor distancing himself from him.

Refreshingly different in tone from his other writing""and especially his pruriently awful My Secret History""Theroux writes with gentle regret of a relationship he took for granted.

"Ida and Louise" by Louise Carpenter proves the most interesting of the selection. Ida and Louise were spinster sisters with a passion for the opera. This alone was hardly a remarkable fact, except that they managed to save painstakingly to travel to the US and Europe to indulge this passion. In the process, they befriended many leading stars of the day""among them Amelita Galli-Curci in the thirties and Maria Callas in the fifties.

But the sisters had a double-life and one that, curiously, Ida scarcely mentions in her autobiography. Both sisters, ordinary and unglamorous, were able to play a central role saving Jewish families from Hitler's Holocaust.

One of the less-publicised aspects of British and American immigration policy in the thirties was the requirement that Jewish families had to raise hefty bonds and furnish a sponsor before they were granted permission to immigrate.

All through that decade till the war broke out the sisters flew in and out of Germany ostensibly to visit the opera (which they did), but also to smuggle out jewellery to help Jews raise money in England and find them sponsors. German immigration authorities scarcely paid attention to two obviously ardent opera fans, in their dowdy clothes and glass baubles.

In all, Ida and Louise managed to save some 30 Jewish families from the concentration camps, an achievement that earned them a special place of honour in Israel when that country came into being.

Even less-known was the fact that the sisters' later trips abroad""including a stay at the famous Adlon Hotel, where Ribbentrop gave Louise the glad-eye""were financed by Ida, who, under the pen-name of Mary Burchell, was one of the most-sought after writers of the romantic fiction hotshop Mills & Boon.

The articles in this edition of Granta are, the blurb on the jacket says, "by people, and about people, whose experience of life suggests that they have something to tell us about survival". Like "Ida and Louise", several of the pieces here talk about grace rather than desperation, which makes this issue uniquely British in its understated impact.

GRANTA

Granta Publications
Price: £9.99; Pages: 255