Yom HaShoah - Holocaust Commemoration Day

We observed yesterday Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day in Wellington, with music instead of speeches. Julian Baker and Xin James Jin, two students at the New Zealand School of Music played six pieces, one between each candle lighting, from Bartók's 44 Duos for Violin. They played these on the two violins that Clare Galambos Winter, a survivor of Auschwitz, bequeathed to the School of Music. The music was very appropriate. We remembered not only the approximately six million Jews killed, but an entire civilized world that was lost.. These violin duos are like a sketch book, a source book for Bartók's music, and they represent the greater Hungary that he loved, a land that was a mosaic of many ethnic communities living side by side, with mutual respect. The collection included Slovak, Vlach, Ruthenian, Rumanian, Serb, and even Arab music as well as Hungarian folk music. The people of this music were not 'tolerated', a word widely used in discussing the response to the Holocaust, they were respected. Bartók's musical world was not filled with mythical heroes, titans, supermen, grand romantic notions, but with myriad references to the music of the many people living at peace with each other. So we remembered that the Holocaust was not a huge lost just to the Jewish world but to the entire liberal, humanist Western civilization.

Loyalty

Shane Jones, one of the senior figures in the Labour Party, resigned from Parliament suddenly, Murray McCully, the National Government's Machiavellian fixer as well as minister of foreign affairs offered him newly created ambassadorial post as ambassador to the Pacific Islands with special responsibility for fisheries. This was seen by commentators as a cunning and underhand move to destabilize the Labour Party by removing one of its high profile members with supposedly special appeal to Maori and blue collar voters. McCully may feel pleased with himself, but I believe that he did the Labour Party a favour. There is no room in a political party for public display of disloyalty. Whatever is agreed on in caucus meetings or at party conferences is the accepted policy of the party. Dissenting voices can argue their case at these meetings, but once the policies are agreed on the entire party membership, and senior politicians in particular, should present a united front in support of these policies. Shane Jones, one of the three contenders for party leadership last year, could not accept his defeat, and has continuously criticized the Party's alignment with the Green Party. In the end, he accepted the National Government's blatant bribe, walked out on Labour, creating as much havoc and damage as he could. In the short term his departure is front page news, but when the dust settles it will become clear that the Labour Party is much better off without Shane Jones. The labour Party would have found it difficult to get rid of an embarrassing senior member of the caucus. Murray McCully did them a favour by removing him without the messy business of the Party having to fire him..

War is good

Anzac Day 2014

Ian Morris argues in his book WAR: WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR? that whereas in the Stone Age 10-20% of people died violently, in the 20th century despite its world wars, just 1-2% died violently.¹  (How he got his statistics for the Stone Age I don't know. I suppose I would have to read his book.) This suggests that war is good, that it reduces casualties because it develops stronger societies. Yet to me, a Jewish historian, seeing history through Jewish eyes, this is a hollow, even meaningless argument. (Read the book!) Between 1941 and 1945, between the German invasion of the Soviet Union and the defeat of Germany. some 40% of the Jewish population of the world, 6 million out of about 14 million were killed. It is of little comfort to know that this is part of the 1-2%. And later on in the Listener article Morris says that had Hitler won the war, he  'would have faced a retreat from violence and plunder'. True, by then 'instead of killing most of Europe's Jews, he would have killed all of them.' No thank you for such benefits of war. If Jews would be some endangered bird, lizard or frog, the whole world would agitate to protect them. The whole gene pool, the whole ecological system would be threatened by their extinction. Who can even attempt to calculate the damage that the murder of such a high proportion of the Jewish world had caused to the human gene pool and the ecology of human society. 

1 NZ Listener, April 26 2014 p36-37

Hoax or provocation in Donetsk

Donetsk is an industrial city in Eastern Ukraine. On the eve of Pesach armed men handed out leaflets calling on Jews in the city to register their religion and property with the interim pro-Russian government or risk deportation and the loss of their citizenship. No one claimed responsibility for this incident and it was dismissed as a hoax or provocation. But as a hoax it was in spectacularly bad taste. Within living memory, in December 1941, Einzatzcommando-6 murdered several hundred Jews. In April 1942 the Germans took the Jews from the ghetto to the abandoned Maria mine and threw most of them down the shafts alive. They also used gas vans, throwing the bodies into the mine. Some 15,000 Jews were murdered. Provocation it might well have been. Russians have been accusing extreme right wing Ukranians of anti-Semitism. What better way of getting back at the Russians than cooking up this incident to show that the Russians are even worse anti-Semites. There is a precedent of the proposal that the Jews be registered. A Jobbik, right wing member of the Hungarian Parliament came up with such a suggestion. He backed down, he implied that he was misunderstood, but the idea might have taken wings. The Jews of Donetsk have no more involvement in the showdown between the Ukrainian government and those Russian sympathizers who occupy public buildings than other citizens of Donetsk, but yet again, as so many times in the past, Jews are used to confront issues of society that have nothing to do with Jews.

Sanity

I watched The Soloist, a powerful film based on a true, factual account of a talented cellist, Nathaniel Ayres, who had a breakdown while studying at Julliard, and ended up living rough, homeless, in Los Angeles, When Steve Lopez, a Los Angeles Times feature writer came across him. Ayres was obsessed with Beethoven. There are snippets from Beethoven's late quartets and his symphonies right through the film. Perhaps Ayres felt that the discipline imposed at the Julliard School came between him and Beethoven. With the help of Lopez, Ayres was accepted by the the LAMP Community on Skid Row in Los Angeles and there he lived among men and women with severe mental illness.

Whether the perception of mental illness presented in the film is true is something I can't comment on, but there were some interesting insights. When Lopez told David, the director of the institution to take Ayres to a doctor and make him take his medicine, David said that the last thing these people needed was to be told to see a doctor and take their medicine. They chose to live the way they lived. One of the women said that she hears voices talking to her, and these voices are very comforting. If she takes lithium the voices disappear, but to her great regret, so does the reassurance they provide. When Lopez found an apartment for Ayres, Ayres at first refused to move in. He thought that it limited his freedom. He was terrified of being institutionalized. 

Do we treat the schizophrenics and those suffering from a bipolar condition because it suit us, suits society, to make them conform, or do we treat them for their own good? There was no question about it, the mental patients suffered from a sense of insecurity, loneliness. The best thing that Lopez could do for Ayres was to befriend him without trying to change him. He had to accept that for better or worse Ayress is the way he is, would have to live with his mental condition for the rest of his life, but could still get ecstatic joy from the music of Beethoven.

Lost for words

Today, in the middle of a brief conversation, a word dropped out of my mind, the word that would have given purpose and meaning to the conversation. Names have been dropping out of my mind for some time. People have reassured me that this is common, everyone forgets names. But mine is different. I know the name when I started to say what I mean to say, but when I come to articulating the name it is not there. Today the same thing happened to a word. Dementia is a fearful, threatening thing. Losing words is, or could be the beginning of incipient dementia. I try to keep my mind alive, I try to exercise it. But there in the background is the threat that I will end up on a world with no words, with thoughts I can't express and memories I can't share. 

In every generation

We had two lovely Seders at my son's Ben's and daughter-in law's. Geraldine's place. Seders always bring back powerful memories, and this year, as we handed over the responsibility for the Seder to the next generation I thought of the Seders at my grandparents' place in the 1940s, which had a powerful influence on me and my view of my Jewish roots. I must be thinking of about 1940 or 1941, but certainly before 1942, by which time my aunt's,Marta's, first husband, was gone, had died in a military hospital on the Russian front in the wake of the battle of Voronezh where the whole Hungarian army was wiped out. 

I was thinking of the people sitting around the Seder table. They included my grandmother, grandfather and my handicapped aunt, Margitka, us, the four Czegledis, my aunt Marta and her husband Anti, my other grandmother, Matild, then friends and relations, Maca and Sari, my mother's cousins, daughters of my grandfather's sister, Roza, who moved to Budapest from Lugos, where their father, Tauszig, was a municipal officer, a rare occupation for a Jew, such occupations were usually reserved for the gentry or the Christian middle class. The girls virtually grew up with my mother and her sisters, and were like older sisters to them. Then there was the Gross family, Janka, the grandmother, a friend of my grandfather form his bachelor days, Toni, Janka's daughter and my uncle Jules's sister, her husband Kalman, killed in 1944 during the Holocaust, and their son, Andris, I am fairly certain that my grandfather's sister in law, Ella, widow of his late brother, Pali, was also there. My grandfather had such a soft spot for her that he named his daughter after her. Ella starved to death and died in the Budapest ghetto. Her daughter Erzsi was certainly there, with her son, Gyuri. Erzsi was deported in 1944,  died somewhere and, never returned. Gyuri, orphaned, was cared for by my aunt Marta, but as a university student, perhaps even a a lecturer in pharmacology, got involved in the politics of the 1956 uprising. My grandfather and Marta advised him to keep out of politics, but as a hot-headed young man, didn't listen. He was arrested, spent time in prison, and blamed my grandfather and Marta for this. My grandfather's clerk, Policer, was there; a young bachelor, my grandfather's only employee apart from my mother, perhaps the one who looked after the accounts while my grandfather was the sales and marketing man and my mother the secretary. He died somewhere serving in a Jewish labour unit. 

Among the nineteen people, and possibly more, sitting around the table, there were only four children: Jancsi and I, Andris and Gyuri. We were a family already dying out, perhaps the Jews of Hungary and indeed, Europe, were dying out even before they were murdered. 

I found the Seder interminably long. There were no concessions for children, we just sat, listened and ate. Yet the memory of the lavishly set table, the rich meal, the warm family circle left me with such an indelible memory, that there was something I could pass on to my children after all these years.

John Key as Storm trooper

Chris Trotter discussed in today's paper the poster of John Key as a Storm trooper, painted on a background of the Nazi flag, with a $ sign replacing the swastika. It was created by an anonymous artist calling himself Toothfish.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/comment/columnists/chris-trotter/9928806/Unintended-irony-in-Key-Nazi-poster

I find this poster not clever art, but sheer stupidity, ignorance, and offensive. Whatever you think of neo-liberal monetary policy, it has nothing in common with Nazi ideology. Far from it, and this is a point Chris Trotter makes, it is the very opposite of the Nazi approach to economics. But this poster says more. It says, or implies, that John Key is a Jew, that Jews and money go together, Jews control the world through money, and here we are coming closer to Nazi ideology.

It so happens that John Key is a very popular Prime Minister, possibly the most popular Prime Minister in the world, with consistently more than 50% approval rating. He is a charming likeable man and a consensus politician who manages to keep the divergent political views of the National party in line with a moderate middle-of-the-road approach. No political opponent ever attacked him for his Jewish background. It was just never an issue. This is New Zealand, a tolerant, broad minded country. There is no room for the Toothfish sort of mindless propaganda.

Man with three wives

Kia Ora Torah is a Limmud-style series of lectures and discussions bringing together different religious and academic perspectives for members of the Wellington Jewish community and their partners. We meet at the Realm, a pub in HataItai, a kosher pizza with a range of topings is available, We have a regular attendance of between 20 and 30, sometimes more. The talks cover a variety of topics and you never know where the discussions would lead. This week I hosted the speaker, Noam Greenberg, Associate Professor of mathematics, Rutherford Fellow, and Turing Fellow, a very bright young man indeed. His research interests focus on set and computability theory. He is Israeli who graduated from Hebrew University in 1998, and with Ph.D from Cornell in 2004. He is young to be one of the outstanding scholars of Victoria University.

He talked about the story of the man who had three wives and on his death didn't have sufficient funds to fulfil his obligation to each according to  their kethuba  (Babylonian  Talmud: Tractate Kethuboth, Folio 93a) The first wife was entitled to 100 maneh,the second  200 maneh,  the third 300 maneh,  but the entire estate amounted to only to 200 maneh so it was divided not proportionally according to each claimants entitlement but in proportion of 50:75:75. On the face of it this seemed unfair, inequitable. Noam explained the mathematical logic behind this seemingly unfair division. The first claimant received half the claim she was entitled to, leaving the remainder of the estate between the other two claimants, who divided it equally. He likened it to a series of connected vessels, where the vessels are filled in a similar ratio until they can all be completely filled.

There were questions about fairness, about distribution according to needs, but the mishnah didn't talk about that. The mishnah looked at a real life situation, and came down with a ruling using an unexpected and complicated mathematical formula. I don't know what one can learn about life from this. I don't know what the receiver of a bankrupt firm would make of this. The gemarra argues about the case. Some say that the case was exceptional. Noam said that this Mishnah is not halacha, and we don't follow it. Whatever, it was an interesting evening, and marvellous to have such a discussion on an ordinary miserable wet and stormy Monday night in Wellington.

Monkey noises

A football player was was sent off for making monkey noises at an African opponent (Dominion Post, April 10 2014, p.1) Capital Football, the governing body, suspended the player for 10 weeks. It is right that they took what might seem like a trivial offence seriously. There were similar incidents in England recently at Premier League level, where an anti-Semitic gesture was shown to an Israeli player, and the offending player was suitably disciplined. 

We don't know what provoked the incident in Wellington. Perhaps the player who made monkey noises outplayed the African player, or perhaps it was the other way around, the African got the better of the offending player. Clearly the offending player did not appreciate the significance of his gesture. The smart ass argued that making monkey noises was not racist, as monkeys are not a race. But what if other players had followed suit, or the onlookers joined in. A stupid, idiotic gesture could have lead to an ugly incident. Such racist gestures have no place anywhere, but particularly not in sport, and especially not in football or rugby. Both these sports have brought people of various ethnicity together. There are outstanding young Somali and Ethiopian footballers waiting in the wings to become professionals. The A League is full of players of all colours from all parts of the world. The same is true of rugby, where the game is a way for Polynesian and Maori players to climb out of poverty and gain universal respect. There is a Japanese player playing for the Highlanders in Dunedin. There is a Fijian Indian and a Costa Rican of African origin playing for the Phoenix in the A League. It is bringing people of all stripes together that is the great virtue of football. 

But what of the parents of the player who made the monkey noises. They were possibly on the sideline cheering him on. There are few others on the sideline at these games. What sort of values are they teaching their son? And worse, the investigation found allegations of at least 50 racially abusive comments recorded in the district in the past three years. Perhaps in other countries, other places, this would have hardly been noted, but one of the most attractive  aspects of life in New Zealand is that people of all races, from all parts of the world live in harmony with little friction. Monkey noises are disturbing signs of an ugly racist undercurrent seldom acknowledged.

What is "Europe"?

So far, Martin Halliday is the only one who told me that he had read my book review in the Listener. He took me to task when I met him, for saying that from the sixteenth and the eighteenth century there were virtually no Jews in Europe. Most had been either murdered or driven out. Clearly, Martin is right. I should have said 'in Western and Central Europe". A geographer would tell you that Europe reaches as far as the Urals in Russia. It includes Poland, Belarus, Lithuanian, and all the countries of Eastern Europe. Yet when we talk about European civilization we really mean the civilization of Western and Central Europe. The line that divides the European heartland from Eastern Europe runs down along the borders of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. It includes Lviv, Krakow, Czernowitz, old Austro-Hungarian cities, but go further east and you are in the Slav world of onion dome churches, and a different view of European civilization. So Martin is right, but perhaps I am not entirely wrong. 

This division is reflected in the Jewish world too. The Jews of Western and Central Europe hardly felt any commonality with the Ost-Juden. The Ost-Juden, the Polishers looked different, wore different clothes, had manners that appeared uncouth to those who modelled themselves on the middle class or the gentry of their country. These Jews were an embarrassment to the Jews of Germany, France, and indeed, Hungary. For the Ost-Juden, the Polishers, the emancipated Jews of Western and Central Europe hardly seemed Jewish. What defined you as a Jews? Surely it is the way you lived, davened three times a day, fasted on fast days, ate only food that was kosher, felt at home in the synagogue, the shul, the shtiebel. In Imre Kerttesz's film and book, Fatelessness, the orthodox Jewish prisoners in the concentration camp, Buchenwald, thought of the others who came from emancipated backgrounds as goyim, not worthy of their help.

But even within the confines of the orthodox Jewish world, Samson Raphael Hirsch, one of the greatest rabbinical authorities of his age, was perceived as a Yakke, a German, writing obscure, difficult, ever so Germanic texts, even if this was founded on unimpeachable Jewish sources. Not for him the colourful comforting Hassidic tales. Grappling with being Jewish was a serious challenging intellectual pursuit.

Zlata Ibraimovic

Zlata Ibraimovic is apparently a celebrated footballer, captain of the Swedish team and plays for Paris St. Germain. I had never heard of him, but he is a big name in European football with a salary of 15 million Euros. Zlata Ibraimovic is not your typical Swedish name. There was an interesting article about him in this week's Sunday Star Times. It describes how, born to Bosnian and Croatian parents in Malmo, Sweden, he grew up in a home where his father listened to Croatian music, where the people they knew were Croatian and he didn't know how to socialize with the Swedish children he went to school with. He was an outstanding sportsman, a great footballer, but he didn't know how to talk to the beautiful Swedish girls around him. In the end he did marry a beautiful Swedish blond, but that is another story. 

My footballing career never reached the heights of that of Zlata Ibraimovic, but I could relate to his story. Living in Palmerston North as a teenager, most of the people we socialized with were Europeans, The Gabriels, from Berlin, the Sibels, the Goots, and the Wises from Poland, and I could include the Raines in this list. They were English, but ever so different from the New Zealanders we knew. Arch was a great talker, a cultured man in a British Fabian tradition. You could talk with him about politics, books, ideas, Bertrand Russell. There was nothing about him that was like the New Zealanders we came across, who talked about the weather, sport, anything to avoid touching on serious topics. We did have real New Zealand friends, Bert Bowman, a retired bus driver from Gisborne, who worked with my father. Bert and others gravitated to my parents, because they were such hospitable people, totally confident in who they were. They didn't try to be like others, assimilate, be real New Zealanders. They always believed that people have to accept them as they were. People liked my mother's Hungarian cooking and baking, my parents' unassuming life style, their European sense of  humour. The Jews of Palmerston North, some of whom had lived in New Zealand for generations, were not close friends. We were different from them. We were very European, proud of being European, proud of our culture. If I didn't know the latest pop songs or radio serials (there was no television), I did know the Beethoven concertos and the books of Thomas Mann. 

Good on Zlata Ibraimovic for succeeding so spectacularly in an alien world. This is one of the great things about football. The only thing that matters is whether you can score goals or stop the others from scoring.

Films as history

I went to hear Giacomo Lichtner's talk at the weekly history seminar on The Double Historicity of Historical Film: Revisiting Rosenstone. I went because I am on the mailing list and thus was invited, and because Giacomo is a friend. I had never heard of Robert Rosenstone, who is a film historian, so I didn't know what Giacomo's argument with Rosenstone was about, but I could certainly follow the crux of the argument: do films represent the past as history. Can films serve as historic evidence?  In a very limited sense they, of course do. Did Bismarck bow to the Russian flag? There was evidence on the contemporary documentary film that he did. But in a broader sense, does the TV series on the Tudors represent a true history of the age, no matter how much trouble the producers went to to replicate costumes and props. The series is apparently awful, and they certainly didn't capture the essence of history. On the other hand Attenborough's film on Ghandi has some very valid things to say about Ghandi and the spirit of the age, even if some totally fictitious matter was introduces and details do not conform to things as they were. Giacomo saw al lot of films, but the argument was not hard to follow. He didn't touch on one of the great documentary films, revolutionary in its way at the time, Claude Lanzmann's Shoah. It is a documentary, radically different from other films on the Shoah. Is it a true representation of the Shoah or an interpretation of it? Nor did Giacomo touch on the issue that films are of their very nature tell a story to present a case, because the cost of making a film, unlike that of writing a book, is such that a film is always the product of an institutional interest. But all told, it was a very interesting talk, to a full seminar room, and elicited numerous learned comments and questions.

The seminar was held in the F. L. Wood Seminar Room. Fred Wood was a long serving Professor of History, and professor in my time in the 1950s. He was an excellent and caring teacher. His photo looked down on those assembled in the seminar room, and I thought that he, like Peter Munz, his colleague, would be bemused by the way this generations of young historians like Giacomo see and teach history.Would they think that arguing about the way Samson and the Pirates, a film Giacomo quoted, deal with historical issues is history in the academic sense?

Being different

Malcolm Gladwell discussed the Branch Davidians, the followers of David Korsh, residents of Mt. Carmel, Texas, in an article in the New Yorker (Sacred and Profane, New Yorker March 31 p.22 ff). The Branch Davidians were attacked by a vast force, tanks, heavy arms, gas cannisters, and in the end 73 people, including women and children, were killed. The Branch Davidians believed that the end of the world, as prophesied in the Bible, and in particular,the Book of Revelations, and especially in the difficult passages concerning the Seven Seals. Such faith and such devotion to study, long periods at a time, was quite beyond the comprehension of the FBI agents who came to arrest David Koresh and clear the compound. When negotiating with the members of the Branch Davidians the FBI agents were talking about one thing and the faithful were talking about something quite different. There was no common ground, no possible way of understanding each other. 

Malcolm Gladwell draws parallels between the Mormons of the mid-nineteenth century and the followers of Koresh. The Mormons were also vilified, hounded and perceived as different, and they themselves saw themselves as different from the rest of Americans. And the story of Jews is glaringly similar. No matter how tolerant a society sees itself, tolerance goes only so far. If you make an attempt to assimilate, be like the majority, you may be allowed to join a golf club, but if you persist in being different, forget about golf, you are on the outside looking in.

Douglas Lilburn and I

There was an article about a new play by David Armstrong about the relationship between Douglas Lilburn and Rita Angus. I know little about Rita Angus, and all I knew about Dave Armstrong is that I  share many of his prejudices and enjoy reading his columns. I didn't know that he was a trumpet player and a playwright. But I knew Douglas Lilburn slightly, very slightly.
My brother was in his Harmony class in the late 1950s and through that I knew him well enough to greet him whenever I ran into him, and he knew who I was. But what I really remember was marching alongside him from the Wellington Town Hall to Parliament protesting about New Zealand's participation in the Vietnam war. I don't think that we had a profound conversation in the course of the march, but I felt that it was a great honour to walk beside New Zealand's greatest composer. Perhaps I should qualify this, New Zealand has had no great composer, no Sibelius of Finland, Nielsen of Denmark, Liszt of Hungary, Smetana and Janacek of the Czech Republic, but Lilburn did have a modest international recognition, so there I was, walking beside him, telling the Holyoake government what we thought of its participation in the war.
Now, much older if not wiser, I have a measure of sympathy for Keith Holyoake. He was as reluctant to go to war as Douglas Lilburn and I, but being in a block lead by the US, he had little choice. He had to be seen to provide support, even if only a token one. And this made me think of poor old Horthy, Regent, nominal ruler of Hungary from the 1920s to 1944, when he was kicked out by the Hungarian fascists. He was a leader of a country that whether he liked it or not, was part of a block lead by Nazi Germany. If Britain or France would have offered to restore the lands taken from Hungary at the Treaty of Trianon, he would probably jumped at the opportunity. If these countries would have been able to guarantee the integrity of Hungary, he would have been tempted. But Britain and France did not help Czechoslovakia in its hour of need, or Austria, or Poland. So Horthy had little choice but hitch his wagon to Hitler's even if, as an Admiral and adjutant to the emperor, Franz Joseph, he despised the crude, uneducated little Austrian corporal.