Dina Rabinovitch:Dina Rabinovitch, who has died aged 45, had planned to write fiction when her youngest child, Elon, started school. Instead she was diagnosed with breast cancer and turned her wry, novelistic eye on the indignities, absurdities and brutalities of the illness that finally overwhelmed her.
Though she made her name as a highly original and elegant journalist, it is for her remarkable writing on cancer, first in Guardian columns, then a book and a blog, that she will be best remembered. Honest, funny, warm, sometimes angry, rarely self-pitying, her columns drew a huge and devoted following. When she appealed for the Mount Vernon cancer centre in north London, readers donated more than £70,000.
Dina was admired for the quiet determination and composure with which she balanced the demanding threads of her life: orthodox Jew, journalist and, above all, devoted mother of four and stepmother of four more - "the beats of my heart" she called them in her book, Take Off Your Party Dress.
The daughter of the rabbinical scholar Nahum Rabinovitch, she was passionate and uncompromising about her Jewish identity. Her support for Israel sometimes put her at odds with Guardian colleagues, but she relished this. "It's one of the reasons I feel so at home on the Guardian," she wrote in the Jewish Chronicle recently. "Internal dissent, one of the oldest Jewish traditions."
One of six children, Dina was born in Charleston, South Carolina. The family moved to Toronto then to London, where Rabbi Rabinovitch, now based in the West Bank, was appointed dean of Jews College.
Her father's intellectual rigour rubbed off. Dina had a forensic mind that would rarely accept conventional wisdom or a lazy proposition. Dina attended Hasmonean high school, the Jewish comprehensive in Hendon, northwest London, then Henrietta Barnett grammar school, Hampstead, in the sixth form.
Her journalistic ambition was quickly evident. While still a pupil she persuaded the Observer to introduce a schools section, for which she commissioned work by other pupils. At the London School of Economics, where she studied international relations (1990-93), she threw herself into student journalism.
Her enthusiasm for fashion and looking good was a constant, defiant theme running through the later columns about her illness. "They call this the fashionable cancer," she wrote after her mastectomy, "but nobody's tackling the basic fashion question: what do you wear?" After leaving university, Dina worked as a freelance before taking a job as deputy features editor on the newly launched Independent in 1986. By then married to the financier Guido Rauch, she often met the Orthodox requirement of married women to keep their heads covered by wearing a beret.
Soon after giving birth to Sara-Jenny, the first of three daughters she had with Rauch, she returned to freelance work. She was a mischievous but compassionate interviewer, teasing something fresh from seasoned subjects. Often, she laid bare a subject's vanity, only to disclose that she rather liked them.
She also developed a passion for children's literature, and was among the first to recognise a flowering of the genre. She interviewed all the major authors, many of whom became friends.
After a protracted and painful divorce from Rauch, she also wrote angrily and knowledgably about the family court system, which she felt failed children.
She and the lawyer Anthony Julius, best known for representing the Princess of Wales in her divorce, married in 1999 and moved into the only north London house they could find big enough to accommodate their sprawling family: his four children by his first marriage, her three girls by Rauch and, in 2001, Elon too. Friends talk warmly of the elaborate Friday night dinners that Dina would cook for the multitude.
Though by no means the first of its kind, Dina's Enemy Within column, written for G2, was distinctive from the start in September 2004. Her gift as a storyteller made each vignette compelling, whether it was about shopping for wigs or having a breast bandaged after biopsy. She wrote about the granular detail of life with cancer that you did not hear about, but was adamant from the start that the column should be more than personal. If this disease were killing men, it would be recognised as a political issue, she said.
Anger flashed through the columns periodically, at the hoops women had to jump through to get the best treatment, at the doctors whom she mostly admired but sometimes found crass and insensitive, at what was happening to her ravaged body.
But right to the end her Guardian dispatches and blogs were infused with an almost preternatural breeziness that belied her growing acceptance that the end was near. In an interview in the spring, she was more frank: "I feel sad and sometimes very scared. I feel intensely jealous of other women who I see walking their children to school. I look out on a beautiful sunny day and think: 'I'm not ready'."
Her final blog post, on October 23rd, featured a photograph of a hat. One of the unforeseen problems of life in a wheelchair, she reported, was that her old hat kept sliding off when she looked up to talk to people. She had found the answer: "the perfectly chic, perfectly on-trend colour for this season, which is also cut close enough to the scalp to disguise newly falling hair and not slip off mid-gossip." Dina is survived by Anthony and her children and stepchildren.
Dina Rabinovitch, journalist and writer, born June 9th, 1962; died October 30th, 2007