Violins of Hope

My son bought me for my birthday the book: Violins of Hope: Violins of the Holocaust - Instruments of Hope and Liberation in Mankind's Darkest Hour, by James A. Grymes. Violins and Holocaust, my son thought, that's me. It is a riveting and sad book with not much hope, more like despair. It starts with the story of Amnon Weinstein, a luthier, violin repairer, who makes it his business to preserve not only violins with links to the Holocaust, but also their stories. Then there is the story of the great Polish violinist, Bronislaw Huberman, who gave up two years of his life and concert career to create the Palestine Philharmonic and use that as a vehicle to save musicians under Nazi threat together with their families, 1000 lives. But he did more than that. He imagined that Jews can preserve their European cultural heritage in the muddy, primitive settlement that Tel Aviv was at the time by creating a world class orchestra.. His impossible dream was like Weitzman's dream to create a world class university in Rehovot. The old Zionist dream of creating a new Jew, a peasant, a worker of the land, was at odds with Huberman's image of the Jew as a fiddler or Weitzman's image of a Jew as a scholar and scientist. Then there is the story of Erich Weininger. a butcher by trade but also a skilled violinist, who fled from Austria after a spell in Dachau and Buchenwald, entered Palestine illegally, where British guards of the internment camp were as brutal as the Nazis he fled, then was deported to Mauritius, until he could return to Palestine after the war. His father, denounced by a family friend, was killed by the Nazis for covering up the yellow star on his coat. Then a chapter is devoted to the orchestras and musicians in Auschwitz. More fortunate, Ernst Glaser was the leader of the Oslo Philharmonic and celebrated violin soloist in Norway. He was driven from his post and was lucky to escape to Sweden. Feivel Wininger from Romania witnessed some of the most horrific treatment of Jews in Transnistria, a strip of land between the river Dniester and Moldova, where some of the earliest and most brutal atrocities of the Holocaust took place. Feivel survived and could provide for his family because he played the violin. But one day, a former judge gave him a very valuable Amati violin because he had no further use for it, he was about to kill himself. Fellow Jews robbed Feivel of this violin. He, like Erich Weininger ended up in Israel after the war. Finally there is the story of Motele Schlein, a 12 year old boy from a small village near the Russian Polish border, a skilled young violinist, who witnessed the murder of his parents and his whole family, escaped and joined Uncle Misha's (Moshe Gildenman's) partisans. Using his skills as a violinist, he played for the German officers in their club. Seeing an opportunity, he obtained explosives and blew up the premises, killing the German officers. He was a feisty little boy, insisted on fighting the Germans, revenge the murder of his parents, and was killed in battle. Because the stories are about individuals and their fates, centred around their violins, the book is especially heart rending. The tragedy of Motele is particularly unforgettable and moving. And you think not only of the small handful who survived, but also about the vast number who didn't.

The Phoenix, loyalty and "us"

When I was young and at an impressionable age football meant a lot to me. The Hungarian football team with its bandy-legged fat little captain, Puskas, was the best in the world and I jogged my heart out around Palmerston North to be fit and perhaps one day move from the school's third, i.e. bottom eleven to the next grade, and perhaps one day even make the first eleven. I never quite made it, I left school early, played for a university team until one day I couldn't find the ground we were to play at and called it quits. But the drama of football stayed with me all these years, even if only at a low, subconscious level. With the establishment of Phoenix, the local AFL franchise  I had a team to be passionate about. I follow their game every week on television, read every article about its players, It is as if I know each of them personally (I saw Paul Ifill once, very smartly dressed, good looking, coming towards me) I agonize when they pass the ball to the opposing team, are too easily dispossessed, I scream when they miss a clear shot on goal. When they win it makes me feel better for the rest of the week. My image is not that of a man who cares about such ephemeral matters as football, football in a place where only Poms and Europeans care about the game. I wear glasses, play chess, listen to classical music, why does football matter to me. To understand that I think of the deep roots of the game in my genes; I remember clearly listening with my father to the broadcast of the Hungarian - Austrian game with the hardly intelligible, rapid, overexcited commentary by Pluhar, the celebrated radio commentator. My father played, as a boy and young man for an amateur youth team of Ferencvaros when Ferencvaros and MTK were the top teams in Hungary, and he witnessed in 1911 the ticker tape parade though the main streets of the ninth district with players carried on the shoulders of supporters when Ferencvaros beat I Woking F.C, in England, at the time one of the best English teams. Schlosser, the greatest goal scorer was remembered in our household. So football is something I feel in my guts. Once I even paid good money and went to a game, but going on my own is not the same as sitting at home in front of the television and letting my hair down.

There is a lot I don't know about Central Africa

There is a lot I don't know, and one of the good things about writing my almost daily blog is that it makes me learn things, so that in the end I know a little more. I knew almost nothing about the Central African Republic until I read Jon Lee Anderson's challenging and interesting article in the New Yorker (October 20, 2014). I didn't know that the Central African Republic with its land area larger than France and a bit of Europe thrown in and with the population of New Zealand it is one of the richest lands in terms of natural resources, forests, gold, uranium, oil. Yet its people are among the poorest and things are not getting better. Blame the French who ruled the land and stole its riches from the time the European powers carved up the map of Africa until independence in the 1960s. But although the French left behind a viable and potentially prosperous country when they ceded power, things went from bad to worse since independence, so that it is now a virtually failed state. Until recently Christians, Muslims and animists lived in reasonable harmony. Muslims made up 15% of the population. Then they formed an Islamist militia, the Seleka, and started murdering their Christian neighbours. The Christians in response formed their own militia, the antibalaka, who slaughtered Muslims indiscriminately. It was not a genocide, Muslims and Christians were not different races. It was a religious war. Most of us being ignorant of large chunks of Africa dismiss such carnage as Africa, what would you expect from these primitive people. But if an African would look at European history, where in my lifetime German protestants and German Catholics, and even German atheists who only believed in the German folk and their glorious Wagnerian roots murdered German Jews, perhaps he would view Europeans as a primitive people despite their flash technology. And would think of Europe of the twentieth century with its ruthless dictators and unbridled carnage as failed states, that failed with the beginning of the First World War, which grew from small skirmishes into a wholesale conflagration just as Africa spawned failed states after the end of the colonial era, and continues to destroy states to the present day as a result of the colonial heritage. States fail because neighbours kill neighbours, because a multicity of ethnic groups vie for supremacy. They kill each other for religion, for ideology, for perceived grievances, but kill each other they do. Militant factions split, with a group always more extreme than the next, so that bringing them together to make peace is an impossibly challenging task. If their priority would be to get richer, live a better life, make the world a better place for their children they would desist from fighting, but irrational hartred is a greater motivator than self interest.

Sixty years ago

In 1954 I had a job at what was then called Whitcombe & Tombs, later. after joining Coulls Summerville and Wilkie to become Whitcoulls, a nationwide chain of much maligned bookshops. After starting in the New Zealand Books and Bibles department working with experienced bookmen, I was promoted, or demoted, but certainly moved up, to the upper floor, to the education department. It was not a bad job, I spent a lot of my time looking up books for customers in Whitakers, the giant catalogue of published books, not to be confused with Joe Whitaker, the profoundly deaf but very knowledgeable head of the department. Spending so much time following up the queries of customers and generally looking after customers was considered by some a great waste of time, but in the relaxed atmosphere of old Whitcombe & Tombs nobody cared. Many of these customers were school teachers, intelligent, stimulating, likeable people, and it reignited my ambition to be a teacher. What profession could be better than moulding young minds. I enrolled at Teachers' College, and as I looked back on it, I was, amazingly, accepted. How anyone could imagine that I would ever make a successful teacher, I don't know; an insecure young man still sorting out his identity, grappling with a language that was by then very familiar as a literary vehicle, but not quite as a medium of everyday colloquial communication. But accepted I was, and I was paid for being there. Teachers' College then was an institution that is now probably beyond the imagination of most, Its main objective was to turn simple semi-educated country people, mainly young women, into educated thinking well-rounded human beings, who then could become stimulating teachers, in many cases in schools that stifled their creativity. Having a few oddballs like me around was part of their education. The mid-1950s were interesting times. Stalin had just died, he was replaced by men who colluded with him but were not comfortable with his heritage. Khrushchev revealed the atrocities of Stalin's time, and with that undermined the faith of old time communists and fellow travellers. In New Zealand students cared about world affairs, strummed their guitars and sang ballads about the working man, wrote biting satires for the annual university extrav, shows that would fill the Opera House, and drank prodigious amounts of of beer. We watched sad, dark Italian, French and Russian movies, and I wrote stories for the Teachers' College student magazine, stories that are now mercifully lost. Idealism was in the air, we wanted to make the world a better place. We sneered at people who wanted to make money. We assumed that we would all live comfortable lives, didn't care about having more than we needed. We went tramping in the bush, some also went hunting, we had a wonderful world at our doorstep and didn't want more. I thought of all this having had a friend from those days over for coffee. It is not that those were happier time, a better world, it is just that it is was a time that is now hard to recapture. The world moved on, become noisier, more competitive, and the hope for a better world in the future is gone.

Who will come to the aid of Israel

In today's news we read about an Arab driving his car into a small crowd waiting at the train station, injuring seven and killing a three months old baby. The murderer was hailed  as a hero and a martyr. Arabs were throwing stones at the light train. There is concern that this may be the beginning of a new intifada. If this happens more Arabs will be killed, more will be considered martyrs, the world will condemn Israel for its necessarily heavy-handed response.  Suppose the entire Middle East gets taken over by an Islamic fundamentalist movement and the conquest of Israel becomes its aim. Suppose it has access not only to a vast motivated army but also to the latest weaponry stolen from Arab regimes armed by the Americans and the Russians; who will then speak up for Israel and who will come to its aid.
Today I talked to a group of senior students from Hastings Girls High School and I mentioned that after the war I could not understand why the Jews did not resist, reported to where they were told to report, lined up when they were told to line up, marched to the bank of the Danube to be shot, and because I could not understand this I became a Zionist and think of myself still as a Zionist to this day. The girls did no know what I meant by Zionist and Zionism. With all the Israel bashing over the last few months in the media, with Zionist being depicted as aggressors, brutal occupiers, as distinct from Jews who are perceived as good law abiding citizens, I was delighted that the girls did not have this image of the Zionist. May be they will grasp that it is not OK to kill Jews, or even to throw stones at them, threaten them, endanger them when they hitchhike, threaten their young children with abduction. It is OK to talk with the Jews, to try to arrive at some resolution to the war the Arabs waged for close to ninety years, it is OK to try to improve the lives of Arabs along with the lives of Jews. It is not OK to hail murderers as martyrs and make the lives of more Arabs miserable.

Timaru, Allan Hubbard, the Volkswagen and the New Zealand psyche

Whenever I have the time I spend as much as an hour reading the newspaper. You might wonder what is there that takes so long to read. The real news items are either not covered or are touched on in brief uninformative paragraphs, while the pages are full of inconsequential stories that border on the personal and intrusive. But tucked away, somewhere in the back pages, there are articles that may have significance beyond the daily gossip. There was an article about the trial of the directors of South Canterbury Fince Co, at which all but one of the directors were acquitted. I find the South Canterbury Finance Co, and its principal director, Allan Hubbard, interesting. The collapse of SCF cost the New Zealand tax payer NZ$1.58 billion, because the funds of SCF were guaranteed by the Crown Guarantee Scheme. That is a lot of money, just under the total spent on Defence, just over 10% of the total spent on Education or Health. Timaru is quite a pleasant country town, with an attractive beach and majestic mountains in the background, but it is hardly the financial hub of the country, yet by the time of its collapse SCF was one of the largest finance companies of the country, and Allan Hubbard, its elderly crumpled chief, driving an old Volkswagen and living in a modest bungalow was thought of as a smart finacial guru. He managed to fool not only 35000 investors, experienced financial advisors, but also Treasury, who never wondered what a small time country accountant is doing footing it with the experienced financiers of this world. There is something in the New Zealand mentality, the No. 8 fencing wire attitude, that there is nothing an ordinary hardworking bloke can't fix with a little ingenuity, that hepled to perpetuate this illusion and gigantic fraud. There was the belief about that good old grandfatherly Allan Hubbard from a small country town that saw no change, no innovation for a generation or more can be trusted more than the flash city boys in their smart suits and resplendent offices. Cheating people who should have known better proved to be so simple that even good old Hubbard could devise such a scheme. You own a number of different companies. One of them is losing money, so you sell it off to one of the other companies just before the annual balance date, so that the losses don't show up in the balance sheet, and the day after the the report of a successful profitable year, the loss making company is sold back again to the original business that owned it before. It is a simple money go round, that even a simple reader of the finacial pages should have seen though, but the experts at the Treasury, and the savvy stockbrokers didn't ask the fundamental questions they should have, how did grandad, working from a modest Timaru office managed to accumulate NZ$1.55 billion of loans and debentures. What was in the water in Timaru that made people there so much smarter?

Kristallnacht Memorial Concert

Over the last few weeks I have worked on organizing a Kristallnacht Memorial Concert. To have a concert to commemorate Kristallnacht, not speeches, came out of the Recovering Forbidden Voices conference arranged by the NZ School of Music and the Victoria University History and Languages departments. For four days we listened to a wide range of music suppressed at the time. Some of this music was so moving, and performed so brilliantly by students of the School of Music, that I thought that these should be heard again by a different, and wider audience. The concert will mirror recent Jewish history, from Bloch's image of the Jewish schtetl and Mendelssohn's tribute to emancipation, to music by composers who escaped or survived Kristallnacht and ended up in New Zealand, Georg Tintner and Richard Fuchs, a moving memorial music for solo cello by Laurence Scherr, and the heartbreaking song cycle of setting of poems by children from Theresienstadt, I Never Saw another Butterfly, by Ellwood Derr. Details of this concert are on the Holocaust Centre of NZ website: http://holocaustcentre.org.nz/

Among the big boys, New Zealand on the Security Council

After lobbying for ten years, New Zealand was elected to the Security Council by a clear majority. It is not obvious how New Zealand will benefit from this, but I hope that the Security Council will greatly benefit from the presence of New Zealand. There are times when a moderate voice at a divided meeting has a significant influence. The world is no longer divided into two political blocks. The interests of the great powers often overlap, even when they can't agree on a common agenda. Islamic fundamentalism is as much a threat to Russia in Chechnya, to China in Xinjiang, Uygor Autonomous Region as it is to Western interests in the Middle East, not to mention large parts of Africa. New Zealand, a small insignificant nation in terms of global power blocks, is a trading nation, doing business with China as well as America, India, the Arab world as well as Europe and Russia. New Zealand has no history of staking out extreme positions in world politics. And the rest of the world can learn from the way New Zealand is handling its race relations, its benign tolerant acceptance of a diversity of people who settled here. Despite the increasing division between the rich and the poor, irrespective of which party is in government, extreme poverty is unacceptable. The conservative government of John Key considers child poverty as the greatest challenge it faces in its next term in office, not economic growth, wealth generation or GDP. New Zealand is a country with a warm heart. This is something that the others sitting around the table at the Security Council could well learn from.

The generation after

We had a meeting at the Holocaust Centre today to set up a group of children of Holocaust survivors, or rather of anyone whose life was affected by the Holocaust. The meeting was open to anyone, and it was gratifying to see so many people turn up. It was a planning meeting, with no agenda. The aim was to discuss whether there should be such a group, and if so, what purpose of the group should be, what activities the group would have and how often it should meet. All of us in the room had different stories, came from different backgrounds, but there were some common threads that stood out.  All said that their parents did not, would not talk about their Holocaust experiences. Most said that their parents kept quiet about being Jewish, they didn't want their children to be different. Some were quite resentful when their children wanted to find out more of their Jewish roots. And all shared the experience of being children who came from homes that somehow were different, with unexplained Jewish artifacts, and silences, the absences of grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins. Those of us who founded the Holocaust Centre have all turned 80 within the last twelve months. To ensure the future of what we set up we have to look at the relevance of the Holocaust and our programs in years to come. Talking about the impact of the memory of the Holocaust on generations younger than ours and its impact on life in New Zealand will set the future direction of the Holocaust Centre.

How to be unhappy, Richard Nixon and Leonard Bernstein

All sorts of amazing, interesting things happen in my life every day.Yesterday I watched an interview with Allen Shawn talking about his new biography of Leonard Bernstein, and later, in the evening I watched a movie of the play, Frost//Nixon by British playwright, Peter Morgan. The theme common to these two was that late in their lives, both Bernstein and Nixon were deeply disappointed, unhappy men. By everyone else's standards both men were successful beyond the imagination of ordinary mortals.What more can you achieve than to become the President of the United States, or the conductor of the New York Philharmonic and one of the most popular composers of the age. Yet Nixon was so worried about his legacy, so pressured to win under all circumstances, that he let his judgement be clouded and authorized the criminal break-in to the Democratic Party headquarters, which lead to his fall from grace and his resignation as President. Bernstein was concerned that the world would remember him not as a great composer, not included in the canon of great composers of the century, but only as a brilliant conductor (!!!) a fine pianist, and a composer in his spare time. Had Nixon not been so driven by ambition, had he been more at ease with people, more trusting, and less worried by the fear of failure, he would have gone down in history as one of the great Presidents, who ended the Vietnam War that he inherited from his predecessor, bridged the Cold War abyss between the great powers by meeting both Brezhnev and Mao. He had a lot going for him, but he also had a huge monkey on his shoulders, the resentment of the privileged, who never treated him with the sort of respect he believed he deserved, the boy who came from the wrong side of the track who had to foot it with the gilded sons from the right side of the track like the Kennedys. And Lenny Bernstein was the hugely talented Jewish boy among the over achiever goys in Harvard, for whom the whole world was his to conquer. Teaching the Vienna Philharmonic how to play Mahler after the war, composing West Side Story, one of the most popular musicals of the century, would have been more than enough for any other mortal, but not for Lenny. The huge egos of Nixon and Bernstein caused them to be unhappy instead of glowing in their success and treasuring their great achievements.

If only the Arab world would have listened to King Faisal

Last nigh I have watched the the last section of Simon Schama's Story of the Jews. He shows in that the letter Emir Faisal, king of the Arab KIngdom of Syria wrote to Felix Frankfurter, leading American Zionist. In that Faisal said: 'We feel that the Arabs and Jews are cousins in having suffered similar oppressions at the hands of powers stronger than themselves, and by a happy coincidence have been able to take the first step towards the attainment of their national ideals together. ... We are working together for a reformed and revived Near East, and our two movements complete one another.      I look forward, and my people with me look forward, to a future in which we will help you and you will help us, so that the countries in which we are mutually interested may once again take their places in the community of civilised peoples of the world.' If only Arabs of Palestine would have listened to the canny Emir who knew what was best for his people, the whole of the Middle East would have developed differently. The Middle East would now be a prosperous, peaceful part of the world, a powerful economic block with vast oil reserves and a great store of intellectual talent as well as advanced technology. But the myth of nationalism that captured both Arabs and Jews undermined the vision of both Faisal and Weitzman. In an age when after tremendous wars and bloodshed the countries of Europe have largely moved on from nationalism, Jews and Arabs still fight over imagined borders and are deluded by myths about the past. I wonder where the next Faisal, the next leader who puts the self interest of his people ahead of empty words and dreams of revenge will come from.

Baby boomers hang in

The article in the NZ Listener (October 18) tell me that baby boomers don't want to retire. They want to work till they drop dead. And it gives numerous examples of people who are still busy working after their retirement age. Some work because they can't imagine what they would do with their time if they didn't work. Of course, we all want to work and be useful as long as we live. Pottering in the garden, playing golf or bridge as an occupation to fill in time, cultivating a hobby just for the sake of having something to do is too boring. But the downside of being active in old age is that you might find yourself irrelevant, that your frames of reference are no longer meaningful to a generation for whom these are ancient history. I was talking to a friend who celebrated his three-quarters of a century birthday. We first met over fifty years ago, and we both remembered our first conversation. It was about the imminent destruction of the world, the threat posed by the nuclear stand-off  at the time of the Cuban crisis. Whoever remembers now the Cuban crisis? Now people worry about ecological disasters, climate change, pollution, perhaps Islamic fundamentalism, but the threat of a nuclear war has faded. John Kennedy is remembered, if he is remembered at all,as a lover of Marilyn Monroe and numerous other women, but few remember that he faced down Khrushchev, and more important, his own military chiefs, who wanted him to rush into war. There may be merit in drawing on the memories of old people as guides for decision making, but it is important to bear in mind that much of this store of memories, terms of reference that were valid a generation ago, are now past their use by date. Perhaps one of the problems with New Zealand economy and productivity is that the decision makers, the directors of companies are these very same baby boomers who won't let go, won't retire, and run their business as they used to in their time.

Dump unpopular policies, refuse to face issues

So Andrew Little, the new found great white hope of the Labour Party wants to dump unpopular polices such as capital gains tax and the rise in the pension age; anything to win votes, to hell with ideas alternative to the current neo-liberal orthodoxy. Treat voters as ignorant sheep, give them what they want, a little bribe here, a little there, just don't confront the major issues facing the country. The successful Labour politicians of the past never hesitated to introduce radical measures needed at the time, from the welfare legislation of the first Labour government to the radical economic reforms of Roger Douglas, but such radical thinking is not for Andrew Little. He is the face of the new unionism, steady as she goes, but don't ever rock the boat. Are workers any better off with such a policy? Why can't workers working for anything less than the average wage live on their wages? Why do they need government subsidies to live and bring up their children? Why are the unions not crying foul? And why is the Labour Party confortable with this state of affairs? Perhaps David Parker had some sound ideas, presented an economic plan for our time, a plan that would change the financial management of the country, change the objectives and tools of the Reserve Bank, encourage investment in production rather than in speculative property, look at the provision of retirement for those reaching retirement age, without taking from the children of the present. But these policies got lost in the clamour over Dotcom's antics, or those of Whale Oil, or the irrelevant dirt dished out by Nicky Hager. People were not listening, or got lost in the confusion and didn't vote. So chuck out these policies and join the popularity contest, the political beauty parade. With thinking like this the Labour Party, like most formerly socialist parties all over the world, will consign itself to oblivion.

Interaction of history and fiction

With all the interruptions over the last couple of weeks it took me a while to finish reading Zachary Lazar's Pity the Poor Immigrant. I have read James Wood's review of this book in the New Yorker and I was intrigued. The Hutt library had no book by Zachary Lazar, but they got for me from another library Sway Lazar's novel about the early days of the Rolling Stones, Brian Jones, Keith Richards, Anita Pallenebrg, and the avant-guard film maker Kenneth Anger. I was captivated. This is how fiction should be written, a mix of the real and the imagined. This is what I would like to do with my own writing. I asked the Hutt Library to order Pity the Poor Immigrant and now I had a chance to read it. Let's face it, it is a convoluted book, lots of characters, lots of stories, all interwoven. But it is also a book of very great depth. One of the main characters is the Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky. He moved to Israel, claiming the right of return, but Israel was in no need of American gangsters. He was deported to American, where he faced trial and was acquitted. But Lansky was one of the founders of Las Vegas, a city of dreams in the middle of the desert. The parallels with the founding of a Jewish state in the middle of the Palestinian desert to fulfil a Jewish dream is fairly obvious. The novel's fictitious narrator, a New York journalist in Israel writing about the unsolved murder of a fictitious Israeli poet, David Bellen who might have been killed by Palestinians during the Intifada, or by Jewish fundamentalists for his poems about paintings by Ivan Schwebel, a real painter, 'out of place in a foreign context, out of touch with the culture around him but also with the "mother" culture he left behind' (The Report: Abrahamson),whose fictitious series of paintings depicted King David as a contemporary gangster, or he might have been killed by drug dealers who did business with his son, a drug addict, or he might have committed suicide. The link between these is Gila, a survivor of Bergen Belsen, a waitress in the Dan Hotel, who embarked on a liaison with Lansky, and moved to New York to pursue her dream as a fashion designer, where she became the mistress of the father of the narrator. Then there is the informer and guide of the narrator, who is also her indifferent, uncommitted lover damaged by his experiences in the Lebanon  war, who disappears and then returns. This is a very rich thick soup indeed, But complicated as this book is, it is beautifully written with an economy of style reminiscent of Hemingway, and with the power to encapsulate a scene or emoption in a brief apt phrase. Zackary Lazar, though not well known in these parts, is treated as a major contemporary American writer by the American literary establishment, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, and is the recipient of a number of awards and grants.