Naftali Fraenkel, Gil-Ad Shaer and Eyal Yifrah

The bodies of the three Israeli teenagers Naftali Fraenkel, Gil-Ad Shaer and Eyal Yifrah were found today in a field near Hebron. They were kidnapped three weeks ago and shot apparently soon after. It is impossible to get inside the minds of the two Arabs who were responsible for the kidnapping, and I don't want to go there. Whether they were members of Hamas or some other crazy fringe group is immaterial. It is also immaterial that the two men have served time in Israeli prisons and were released in a prisoner exchange. They were killers. What did they try to achieve? Did they hope that the Israelis would release more prisoners in exchange for the three boys?  Was it a kidnapping that went wrong? Were these hapless men trying to kidnap soldiers and found only three school boys? Whatever they had in mind, they only undermined the cause of the Arabs and made the lives of innocent people, Hamas or otherwise, more miserable. Hundreds were arrested, the lives of prisoners were made more difficult, and they confirmed the image of Palestinians as blood thirsty savages with whom negotiations are futile. But although I don't believe in collective punishment, and certainly don't approve of using the death of these boys as a political weapon to score points against Hamas, I agree with the message that murdering Jews is not OK, throwing lethal rocks at Jews is not OK, and feel much less sympathy for those who were killed in the course of protests or were caught in the cross fire than I do for the families and friends of the murdered Israeli boys. I can't condone soft-hearted pity for my enemies. I reserve my pity for my people. The boys could have been my grandchildren, the soldier killing stone throwers could be my grandson.

The trouble with the World Cup

The World Cup plays havoc with my daily schedule and gets in the way of my blogging. I get up at 4.00 in the morning to watch the games. I am awake anyway and the games are a marvellous way of distracting my mind. There is so much drama, drama that it is impossible to explain to anyone not brought up with football. Twenty-two men run around for 90 minutes and more and have only one, may be two goals to show for it. How can this be anything but boring. But if you follow the game every movement of the ball is poised with possibilities. There are near misses that the outcome may depend on, fantastic individual ball skills, watch Neymar cut through the defence, outpace the fastest defender, shift balance from one foot to another and dispatch a powerful shot. Share the youthful enthusiasm of the Brazilian team. What if no one is left behind to protect the goal, they all want to be up the front scoring. Yet my sympathies went out to the struggler's, the Chileans, who played with great commitment. Perhaps no one expected them to get this far in the tournament except their coach pacing up and down the sideline, but having got this far they had the ultimate prize in sight. My hero is the Mexican goalkeeper Guillermo Ochoa, flying through the air, stopping impossible shots with his split second reaction. You don't have to know much about football to appreciate it.  It is a great thrill to participate in this huge Brazilian carnival. It is only 28 days and then it is all over, Then I can sleep in again. Hope that I will be around to enjoy the next tournament in Moscow in four years' time.

Genetic markers and other nonsense

This week Hal Levine talked about Karaites and Khazars at Kia Torah. Like everything Hal says, this was interesting, or rather what he said was interesting, but there was a lot he didn't say that I would have found more interesting. How can you talk about the Khazars without mentioning Kuzari? Most of the Karaites lived in Egypt. How did they get to Crimea? Were the Crimean Karaites the same people as the Egyptian Karaites? Koestler's Thirteenth Tribe got a mention, a weird book, which if I remember rightly, argued that as most of the Jews of Europe are descendants of Khazars, they are not semitic and have no claim to the land of Israel. Someone went a step further and argued that it is the Palestinians who are the Israelis, descendants of people left behind after the destruction of the Temple, who converted to Islam. With all this nonsensical argument we got on to genetic markers that proved or disproved these arguments. I am sure that genetic markers are real, they do exist. But looking at the DNA of people you find whatever you are looking for. The DNA of any organism would contain lots of genetic markers, and you can show that my make up is probably a mixture of Jew, Magyar, Moravian, Turk, Spanish, in other words a whole gulyas of European ethnicity. Talking in the Holocaust Centre about Nazis and racist ideology, I argue that classifying people of Europe, and particularly Eastern and Central Europe, you can't define people in racial terms. They are all a mixture of different races that invaded, conquered or survived in these lands. Imposing a racist classification on them is a Nazi corruption of Darwinism and genetic science. Hal Levine countered my argument that whatever race I belong to, there is not any Polynesian, Far Eastern or African gene in my make-up. I grant you that I am not Polynesian, not Chinese, and not African, but given that I am European, further racial refinement is meaningless. The World Cup underscores my argument. The national team of Germany is studded with players with Polish and Turkish names, the Dutch, French and Portuguese teams have Africans playing for them. I would prefer to define the people of Europe in football rather than racial terms.

History and imagination

I am working on a new edition of my booklet on the Deckstons. I want to expand it and write about the children they brought out to New Zealand and why they did it. Our display in the Holocaust Centre focuses on the children. I made the assumption that Annie and Max Deckston went to Poland in 1932, times were tough in Poland, it was the time of the Depression, they saw something that appalled them and they decided to do something for these poor children. But information came to light as I was rewriting my essay, which showed that they did not go to Poland in 1932, they might have gone there or been there in 1930. More important, they were not that fussed about saving Polish Jewish children, they applied to bring out sixteen Jewish orphans from London. This sheds a new light on the motives of Annie and Max. I need to get inside their minds to understand why they decided to do this. It had nothing to do with conditions in their homeland. Obviously it is impossible to get inside the minds of people who had been dead for some seventy-five years and left no records, yet understanding their motivation is important in telling their story. So I have to imagine whatever might have motivated them. I know that they were difficult, cantankerous people, but they were also charitable, putting up their money to bring out members of  their extended families, even if at times the help they gave to these relatives was less than the relatives expected. So we can assume that their motive might have involved charity. But was there more to it? A letter from the London County Council's Public Assistance Committee says that the New Zealand government had approved the immigration of sixteen Jewish orphans from London. Somewhere in New Zealand archives there must be a record of this, which might explain why the government agreed to the request of the Deckstons. More questions, more research. In the scheme of things this detail hardly matters, but getting it right matters. The original printing of my Deckston Story sold out. The new second edition has to be as right as possible, without losing the flow of the narrative. It is an interesting story of some colourful unusual people.

Anarchists

This week the talk at Kia Torah was by Jared Davidson, who spoke about Philip Josephs, a Latvian born tailor, who came to Wellington from the Gorbals of Glasgow and brought Anarchism with him. His tailor's shop, first in Cuba Street, later on the corner of Willis Street and Lambton Quay was the centre of the New Zealand Anarchist movement. Josephs imported and distributed a broad range of anarchist literature and sunk so much of his money, not to mention his time, into this  that he went bankrupt. Jared Davidson mentioned a film about American Jewish anarchists, The Free Voice of Labor, Freie Arbeiter Stimme, the Yiddish anarchist newspaper that was published in America from 1890 to 1977. By the end readership dropped to the point where the cost of producing the paper exceeded the cost of posting it out. The film, focusing on the final editorial board of the paper, the members of which, charming old people talked about the heydays of the anarchist movement. Jewish immigrants, disillusioned with the conditions they found in America, joined anarchists groups not only to fight for better working conditions, but also to find like minded Jewish immigrants with whom they could share their experiences. The children of these early Jewish anarchists became assimilated Americans, with welfare provisions they grew up with a better life than the world of the sweats shops they parents experienced and Anarchism was no longer relevant to them. These anarchists, including Philip Josephs, were all remarkable people. They worked with needles, they were tailors, they probably had little if any formal secular education, yet they read widely, they were familiar with works on philosophy, economics and politics, and they mastered the English language to such an extent that they became powerful public speakers, Philip Josephs addressing large crowds at Post Office Square. Yet they were gentle caring people, not bomb throwers like some anarchists in Russia. They believed in an ideology that advocated equality between all people, the abolition of the state, and argued that workers' collectives made for a better form of human organisation than capitalism. They were also against all war and many were persecuted during the First World War for their pacifism. There is an ironic similarity between the views of anarchists who advocated the reduction of the power of the state and that of the Tea Party advocates, yet as liberal broad minded thinkers these people were at the opposite end of the political spectrum

Disney, Beethoven and popular culture

Last night I skipped the All Black / England game and went to the third concert of the Beethoven cycle in which the NZ Symphony Orchestra under Pieatri Inkinen played the nine symphonies over four days.  Last night they played  the sixth and the seventh symphonies . Both were superbly played. Inkinen is a young conductor at the early stage of his career. Conducting this series was an opportunity for him to learn, or rather re-learn, re-think these great works.His approach was traditional. He didn't go for authentic early music interpretation, nor for an excessive romantic approach with tempi or phrasing. It was the beautiful sound and the clear phrasing that stood out, the rich string tone and impeccable solos, notably the flute and the oboe, These concerts attracted full houses, and the orchestra and conductor received a standing ovation. It is not often that the Wellington audience responds with such overwhelming enthusiasm. And rightly so, these were exciting memorable performances. The Pastoral Symphony made me think of Walt Disney's Fantasia, a very corny visualization of the sound, but a laudable attempt to reach a broad audience with classical music. Engaging Stokowsky, at the time one of the most celebrated conductors in America, to conduct this film was at the same period as the NBC founded the NBC Symphony Orchestra for Toscanini to present a series of weekly symphony concerts on radio. I can't imagine in our time a similar commitment by the corporation  to presenting classical music, or for that matter any form of high culture to a mass audience. Visualize someone pitching to a boardroom of executives the idea to engage the highest paid, most renowned conductor in the world, and create an orchestra specially for him to conduct hang the expense, to give weekly concerts of classical music. Would that make money? What would the advertisers think. Now you can't eve screen a reasonable intelligent, challenging television program when people are still be awake. Where is progress? And perhaps an unanswered question is: did the millions of people who listened to these concerts by the NBC Symphony Orchestra, and the millions who learned their appreciation of classical music from Disney's Fantasia become more cultured thinking sensitive human beings?

Football and me

The World Cup is under way, and what a beautiful game that was between Brasil and Croatia. Tough on Croatia to encounter Brasil at the very beginning of the tournament. They played well, big, aggressive bruisers, but the Brazilians are artists, dancers, who play a very attractive style of attacking football. The top teams, Germany, Netherlands, may be able to grind them down, but the Brazilians will always be a joy to watch. This made me think of why I enjoy football so much.  On my father's side, I come from a footballing family. As a boy and young man my father played for one of the Ferencvaros amateur teams. He still had huge calf muscles as a middle aged man, and was quite nimble with a ball.  Ferencvaros, the football team of the Budapest 9th District where we lived had an illustrious history. In 1911 the team went on a European tour and my father remembered seeing the team being carried in a triumphal procession through the main street of the district after their return from England where they beat Woking F.C. 3-2 in London, the home of football. I didn't inherit my father's footballing skills, but I kicked a ball around at a nearby waste ground from a young age. When I was about 11 or 12 my parents gave me a real football; nothing like footballs today, it was stitched together from strips of leather, a work of consummate craftsmanship.It had to be inflated with a pump and then laced up like a boot. On the day I got it I couldn't wait go down to the grund, the wasteland and kick it around. I was bouncing it on the way home, when it rolled out of my hand and rolled right under a bus. We took it to a boot-maker, who repaired it, but after that it had a protruding bump, it was no longer like the real thing. At high school in Budapes I played football in the small courtyard, but could never dispossessed Fuhrman, a boy in my class, who was brilliant at dribbling, but could never shoot straight and never scored a goal. Huszti, I can't remember whether little or big Huszti was the goalkeeper. Once I went to a game of real football at the Ferencvaros Stadium. The only thing I remember was the athletic save by the Ferencvaros goalkeeper, and the effortless goalkeeping by the keeper of the other team, Ujpest I think. He seemed to be always in the right position, but on one occasion when the ball went for the far corner, he just flew across the goal mouth like someone shot out of a gun. I listened with my father to the broadcast of a Hungarian - Austrian international. I can't remember who won, but I remember the excitement and the joy of sharing this with my father. I had a team of buttons, chiselled down to make them shoot over the top of other buttons and played button football. Each button was named after a real football player. We played very intense games. Andris, my friend still has my entire button football team. I didn't bother bringing it with us to New Zealand. When we came to New Zealand the Hungarian football team was number one in the world. My school probably had high expectations from me, but I am afraid I was a disappointment. I worked hard at my training, went for long runs to get fit, but never graduated beyond the third (and bottom) team. Perhaps had I stayed for the last year of the school I might have made the second eleven, at what I think was the last game of the season my coach singled me out as the notable player of the team and to my father's delight, his account was published in the Manawatu Evening Standard. School sport was big news, perhaps the only news in Palmerston North. When I came to Wellington to university I played for one of the lowly teams, but we were scheduled to play at a park I couldn't find, I tried to get there by tram but never made it. After that I gave up. That was the end of my unillustrious  football career, though I did coach one of the teams when I went back to teach at my old school. Now I just watch, but get entirely caught up in the game. I love it, love it even when my team the Wellington Phoenix play like a bunch of school boys.

So much talent

Yesterday I went to a concert where some of the violin students of the New Zealand School of Music showcased their talents. Of the ten performers six were Asian, a number form China, one from Malaysia. There was also one from Europe, an exchange student from France. Only one was from Wellington, the rest were from as far afield in New Zealand as Auckland and Gore. The standard of playing was incredibly high. The works performed ranged from a delightful Paganini piece, a bracket of Kreisler, a couple of Wieniawski duos for two violins and Bach's Chacone, a monumental task for a student. There was also a spy in the camp, very talented cellist playing Faure with a broad rich tone. We are very fortunate in Wellington to have such an excellent music school. I don't know whether some of these young musicians will be able to earn a living from their music, perhaps they will end up as successful computer programmers, but their lives will be richer for having played music at such a high level. 

Social Network and loneliness

Last night, after watching the All Blacks beat England with a try in the 78th minute of the game, an unexpectedly close shave, I watched the film Social Network. As followers of movies would know, it is about Mark Zuckerberg and how he developed Facebook almost accidentally. All he wanted to do, according the film, disputed by Zuckerberg, is to impress the elite fraternity clubs, and list the girls in the Harvard dorms with an evaluation of their looks. One thing lead to another, the network was expanded from Harvard to other top universities, then it took off. In no time the site had over a million hits, and by the time Zuckerberg was 23 he was a billionaire. It was a good, amusing film, and in passing it asked some searching questions. What was, what is, the huge appeal of Facebook? The girls (and the boys) at Harvard came from all over the United States, and indeed,.from all over the world. They didn't have the support network that living on a community would have provided. They had to establish who they were, something they never had to do in the communities they came from. Everybody knew them, knew their families, knew their skills, interests, individuality.  On Facebook they could define who they were, and share this with the rest of the world, tell people equally rootless, that they exist, that they have an identity. With families and friends scattered, people seek like-minded companionship in cyberspace. Any flippant, throw away comment or opinion would do as long as there is someone out there in cyberspace who might read it.

Col. George Picquart, Dreyfus and Robert Harris

It is not often that I get so gripped by a novel that I can't put it down, or can't get back to it fast enough, but this was my response to An Officer and a Spy, the latest book by  best-selling author, Robert Harris. Robert Harris writes thrillers, and in the previous book of his I have read, Archangel, there was too much story, too many wild chases and gun fights, and characters were there only to hang a fast moving story line on. But An Officer and a Spy is a real life, true thriller. Robert Harris didn't have to make up the story, the story presented itself in the life and career of Col. George Picquart, head of the French counter-intelligence unit, charged with keeping an eye on the Dreyfus family to make sure that these Jews don't get up to mischief and destroy the honour of the French army. In the course of his surveillance he comes across evidence that there is a German spy operating within the ranks of the army, and he identifies this as Capt. Eszterhazy, a dissolute army officer with a dubious reputation. He refers the matter to his superiors, who order him to desist from further investigation, but he believes that a great injustice had been perpetrated in condemning Dreyfus on the strength of a forged document, largely because he was a Jew. Picquart can't leave the matter alone, he had to ensure that justice was done, and Dreyfus, and innocent man, was rehabilitated. In refusing to follow the orders of his superiors, Picquart presented a sharp contrast to his colleague, Major Henry, in the counter-intelligence unit. Henry said that if he was ordered to shoot he would shoot, and ask no questions. Picquart was persecuted by the army for refusing to follow orders, relieved from his post on the General Staff, exiled to North Africa, where his life was deliberately endangered, and ultimately he was imprisoned on trumped up charges of forgery. His part in the Dreyfus affair divided French society, with the diehard, conservative antisemites on one side and the liberal Dreyfusards on the other. Although he did not set out to write a novel with a contemporary message, Robert Harris sees parallels between the stance of the French Army at the end of the 1890s and present day treatment of whistle blowers, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and Julian Assannge, who are all harassed because they had revealed embarrassing inconvenient material about various administrations that they served. 

Good advice from bad people

Driving home this morning I was listening to an interview with Zac Bissonette, author of Good Advice from Bad People: Selected Wisdom from Murderers, Stock Swindlers, and Lance Armstrong. He gathered 75 examples of high profile people writing books of advice on how to live, but falling way short of what they advocate; among them Lehman Brothers CEO,  Richard Fuld who said that 'When you know what you are talking about others will follow, because it is safe to follow you', gay-prostitute-patronizing pastor Ted Haggard telling readers how to build a marriage that lasts a lifetime, O. J. Simpson telling you that 'The day you take complete responsibility for yourself, the day you stop making any excuse, that is the day you start to the top'.  Clearly such people are not good role models, yet they keep bobbing up, dishing out advice even after being disgraced. Why do people pay money for such advice, buy the books or go to lectures? Jordan Belfort, disgraced stock broker, the subject of the film Wolf of Wall Street is touring New Zealand and Australia dispensing his advice on the essence of entrepreneurship. Who would want to take him seriously and listen to him? Perhaps people buy these books, listen to Belfort, and this doesn't come cheap, because at a certain level these failed gurus articulate notions people believe in and know already. These pieces of superficial advice confirm that those in the audience, those reading the books, know already the teachings of these smart celebrities, and they themselves are just  as smart, and will do as well or better if they keep their noses clean.