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Galya Diment, author of A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury, is today's guest blogger.
Catherine Anne Stoye passed away on June 12 at the age of 83, her memorial service was held in Oxford on July 12. I worked very closely with Catherine Stoye when writing my book, A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky, which came out last year. She was H G Wells’s granddaughter and the daughter of Koteliansky’s closest friend, Marjorie Wells. Following her mother’s death in 1962, Catherine took over as the executor of Koteliansky’s estate, but her important role in his history predates that event. After Koteliansky, a translator from Russia and a friend of many most prominent English writers and artists, tried to kill himself in 1947 during a particularly severe bout of depression, it was the young Catherine, adored and trusted by him, who was often delegated to reason with “Kot” when he refused to eat or let anyone else see him.
I stayed in touch with Catherine Stoye the whole time I was writing my book, and I spent several weekends during two successive summers interviewing her and going through her private archive of Koteliansky’s documents and personal items at the house in Oxford she shared with her husband John. She was a very honest, very genuine human being (undoubtedly the very qualities that Koteliansky so cherished in her) and a supremely intelligent and reliable source of information. She was also a dream executor to work with, not just in relation to Koteliansky’s materials, where she gave me blanket permission to quote anything I found necessary, but also when it came to the correspondence of her grandfather, whose literary executor she likewise was. A fiercely private person, just like her mother, she was nevertheless a strong believer in allowing personal letters and diaries, warts and all, to serve as important historical and cultural documents.
As Koteliansky would say (and he used this Yiddish word, which was the highest praise he ever bestowed, very sparingly and regardless of gender), Catherine Stoye was “a real mensch!”
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