Thinking about the unthinkable

A lamentation for the State of Israel

There was a powerful, thought provoking article in Tablet Magazine¹, about the threats, possible fatal threats, to Israel. However much we consider these threats unthinkable, they do deserve consideration. Hiding our heads in the sand is not sound strategy. These threats include someone lobbing a nuclear device from a fishing boat off the coast of Haifa at the mainland, attacks from ISIS and other terrorist organizations from places surrounding Israel, or simple low-tech knife attacks on the streets of Jerusalem. Israelis might get sick of living with daily danger from the Arab kids next door with a knife and might decide to move in droves to a safer place. Israelis might decide that they have had enough; the Zionist dream is no longer worth fighting for. The BDS movement, the blatant blindness of Western intellectuals, academics, people who should be the smartest, yet are so easily deluded, present perhaps an even greater danger, because tall walls, anti-missile rockets, or secret agents provide no defence against this. So how can we have faith in the long term survival of Israel. There is no easy answer to this question, certainly no fashionable answer. Can one point to a religious answer, God's special relationship with the Jewish people? You don't have to be religious to see the miraculous nature of a Jewish state coming into existence in the aftermath of the greatest slaughter of the Jewish people and the large scale destruction of the Jewish world. You don't have to see the Divine hand at work in Israel's survival, and indeed its flourishing. There are rational explanations for all these, but the reality is that Israel exists and survives against all odds. And we have to believe that it will continue survive; that the world will recognize, as much of Europe is already recognizing, Israel's special role as the only democratic, sophisticated, progressive society, a bastion of European culture, in a volatile region. It is conceivable that in a generation, perhaps sooner, Israel's neighbours will want what Israel has, a comfortable standard of living, a chance to bring up their children in peace, provide them with education and hope for a better future. They would want, what Israel has, a stable (if divided and argumentative) democratic government, an educated people, and the prospect of a good life. A region at peace, like the formerly war-torn Europe, is not beyond imagination. We can only think the unthinkable and have faith in the future.

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http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/195438/lamentation-for-israel?utm_source=tabletmagazinelist&utm_campaign=97a19c9025-Sunday_December_20_201512_18_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c308bf8edb-97a19c9025-207191705

Pity the bank!

My bank, Westpac NZ made a mere $441 million profit in the last six month. This is up by only nine million over the same period last year. The unfortunate bank had to find some way of making more money. They used to have a nice, smiling young woman who greeted you when you entered the bank, help to direct you to someone who could solve your problems, and sometimes she solved problems herself. She made appointments for you. You, the customer, felt good about being welcomed. As a cost cutting measure this person was replaced by a mannequin, unsmiling, unhelpful, somewhat ridiculous, standing in front of a computer that seems to serve no useful purpose, but then it probably doesn't cost much, there are many discarded computers lying around. I needed to discuss a matter with someone who had the authority to help me, but there was no one, apart from the unsmiling mannequin to talk to. The few staff who were around made a great effort to ignore me. Never mind, I thought, these days you communicate by phone and email. I can't phone my branch of the bank directly, I had to call a call centre. They didn't answer. Talking to customers didn't seem to rank high priority. OK, I thought, I send them an email and ask them to ring me when they could spare the few minutes from their precious time. No one rang back, but two days later I received an email that did not solve my issue. Back went my email, and four days later, I did get a call from an accounts manager, my problem was solved, but not to my satisfaction, but with the additional cost of $400. By then I did manage to get an appointment with a real human being, a helpful young woman in my branch of the bank, and she solved my issue and a number of other issues I didn't know I had, in a few minutes. She explained that though they are busier than ever, the bank cut staff by a significant number, so they are all too busy to attend to customers. Within living memory there was such a thing as a bank manger, who made a point of personally knowing his customers. Such bank managers are things of the past. We used to have accounts mangers, whose job was to look after your accounts should they need some looking after. These days staff don't stay long enough in a job to get to know their clients. Hang customer service, customers are numbers, suckers who contribute to the corporate profit of the institution. This is the face of corporate capitalism. I know that I can't complain, that compared with the New Zealand banking system, those in other parts of the world are worse, but it used to be better, and only the drive to increase the dividends to shareholders accounts for this decline. Perhaps one of there days public companies will compete to satisfy the needs of their customers, and not only to fleece them for increased profits.  

About friendship

It was Malvin Brandler's Yahr-Zeit, the anniversary of her death, last week. Malvin had no family, no relatives left anywhere in the world, so I said Kaddish for her. She was my mother's best friend. In the last years of their lives they rang each other every day to make sure that each of them was still alive. They discussed everything, television programmes, my mother's children, grandchildren, mutual friends. They could be forthright, to the point of rudeness with each other, but this was part of their plain, unvarnished friendship. They didn't mince words, they spoke bluntly. They got to know each other in October 1944, when all Jewish women under 40 had to report to the brickworks in Budapest for slave labour. The Brandlers lived in the same building as us, designated for Jews only, in Bezeredi Street. From the brickworks they were marched off towards the Hungarian-Austrian border to dig ditches to stop the advancing Russian tanks. As ditch diggers these little, unfit Jewish women were not very efficient, but to embitter the lives of Jews this measure served its purpose. Malvin and my mother looked out for each other, shared a blanket, helped each other to survive. They slept together in a pigsty in Kophaza, They survived the the Lichtenwort concentration slave labour camp together. They walked back to Budapest together after the camp was liberated. It was an acquaintance of Malvin whom they met on the way, who told my mother that we, my brother, I, my grandparents and aunt had survived, were still alive, back from the ghetto, living again in Bezeredi Street. Malvin's husband, Miklos, was a prisoner of war in Russia, lucky, because he was spared the fate of being in a Nazi concentration camp. Malvin and Miklos and my parents kept in touch, but they were not close friends. They hadn't had a lot in common. Compared with my parents, who both matriculated form a gimnazium, an academic high school, Malvin and Miklos had little education. You would not meet them at a concert or in the opera. The latest works of great literature that had just appeared in Hungarian translation would not have featured prominently in their lives. They were simple folk, Miklos a skilled tradesman, a hat maker. What they enjoyed was getting on their motorbike, Miklos riding, Malvin in the side-car, and whizzing around the countryside. After some miscarriages, their son, Robert was born, a cherished son, an heir, a future. Adventurous people that they were, they escaped from Hungary after the 1956 uprising. They remembered their friends, my parents, in New Zealand, and they came here. They worked long hours, lived frugally, at first in an almost dilapidated corrugated iron cottage at the foot of Central Park, then once they scraped together enough money for a deposit, in a tidy comfortable house in Karori. Tragically, Robert was killed in a car accident. Miklos couldn't cope with the sorrow. After Robert's death he refused to utter Robert's name. This made the grieving process especially difficult for Malvin. She could not talk about the thing that was most precious in her life. Miklos died three years after Robert was killed. Malvin survived him by nineteen years, alone, with not one relative, anywhere in the world. Yet though alone, she was surrounded by friends. She worked on making and keeping friends. She joined every Jewish women's organization, WIZO WJS, she was active in B'Nai Brith. She was hospitable, invited friends for lavish afternoon teas. Our children were her grandchildren. She was a hard working, down to earth woman full of common sense. She had a hard life, but a good death. She fell asleep with her supper in front of her, watching Gone With The Wind, and never woke up. My mother died two months later.

Hanukkah and Christmas

Take time out during this festive season to think about what is being celebrated. Hanukkah commemorates the revolt of a band of bigots against a formerly tolerant, but increasingly intolerant empire. Christmas celebrates the triumph of superstition, fear of death and afterlife, guilt and sense of sin, over a rational classical philosophical world view. The Persian Empire, and the Alexandrian Greek Empire tolerated the different practices of their various constituent people. This tolerance, however, degenerated over generations into intolerance. The Seleucid successors of Alexander imposed Greek values on people under their rule, including the Jews. The Greek world view might have appealed to an assimilated ruling class, but alienated the simple peasants, the people of the land. They had no appreciation of the rich Greek culture. They wanted simple answers to life's problems, as people did in more recent times, under Nazi rule, under the rule of the Ayatollahs in Iran, as benighted followers of ISIS do now. Similarly, adherents of Christianity wanted answers simpler than the closely argued complex answers of Judaism. This is what you do, this is what you believe in, because the priest says so, the Church says so, the Pope says so. This search for simple answers lead to the destruction of classical civilization. I have just finished reading Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve, [Norton, 2011], an amazingly readable, vivid account of how Poggio Braciolini, a papal secretary, temporarily unemployed, went in search of ancient manuscripts and came across, Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, in 1417, a long epic poem celebrating Epicurean philosophy. For a thousand years this work was lost, known only from extracts and references to it by other writers. The rediscovery of this ancient work had an great influence of the intellectual history of the world. It taught that the world was made up of atoms, that the Gods care not one bit about the lives of humans, that there is no afterlife, no soul, the body just disintegrates into its constituent atoms. The purpose of life is its enjoyment, pleasure. Epicurean philosophy, transmitted through the poem of Lucretius undermined and ultimately destroyed the medieval cultural landscape. The Maccabean revolt also had a huge impact on Jewish culture. Not only were traditional practices and rituals restored, it gave strength to a popular Pharisaic and democratic approach to questions about how to live; Pharisaic as distinct from Sadducean, which was sacerdotal ritualistic. And although the revolt was against Greek domination, the Greek influence was absorbed by the Pharisaic tradition. You arrive at answers about how to live, as Greek philosophers did,  though discussion, in which no opinion is ruled out, every opinion is given weight. Chaim Raphael describes in his introduction to the Passover Haggadah, The Feast of History, Seder as an epicurean discussion with people reclining and exploring the variety of issues raised, and, of course, eating a lavish feast. The impact of Epicurean philosophy and Greek philosophy on Jewish religion is vastly greater than narrow-minded religious bigots would acknowledge. And what started as a peasant revolt, a revolt against the priestly elite, turned into a reappraisal of Jewish religious beliefs.

Otello at the Met

For a mere $25 I attended a performance at the Metropolitan Opera House, or rather a screening of the Metropolitan production of Verdi's Otello at the Lighthouse Cinema in Petone. I had a good cry. If you don't cry listening to the Willow song and Ave Maria in the last act you have no feel for music. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMDa0Ua_KrI The production had its faults. The chorus, like a large phalanx, faced the audience and shouted at it, of the principal singers only Iago, Zeljko Lucic, the Serbian baritone was totally convincing. Latvian Alexandr Antonenko, as Otello, sang loud, in your face, but without subtlety and with little acting skill. Bulgarian Sonya Yoncheva sang with real feeling and wonderful clarity, but perhaps didn't manage to capture the young Desdemona, desperately in love with the arrogant war her, Otello. Huge glass partitions moved randomly around the stage trying to set the scene. But all this didn't matter. It was the music that mattered. After completing his most ambitious opera, Aida in 1871 and his Requiem in 1874, Verdi thought that he had retired. And then, at the age of 73, he was tempted by the text of Boito's, his librettist’s rendering of Shakespeare's Othello to write yet another opera. Boito reduced Shakespeare’s text to a quarter of its length. This focused the the story on its essentials and let the music expand and touch on emotions that words could not do justice to. Wagner has changed the way opera was perceived, operas with beautiful tunes and coloratura singing were considered old fashioned. Wagner's last opera, Parsifal had just been premièred a few years before. After that an old composer, writing a great opera in the Italian style was a major statement in support of the Italian operatic tradition. The novelty of the Metropolitan production was that Otello was not painted black. This added rather than detracted from the production. The important thing about Otello was not that he was black, Elizabethans were largely colour blind; it was only later, once slavery became big business and large number of Africans were shipped to America, that racial prejudice became a real issue, with its implication for money making. The play, but certainly the opera is about the insecurity of the outsider, Otello, a successful warrior, but not part of the establishment, not a member of the Venetian aristocracy. How could he be sure that he was not just exploited and made fun of by those born to privilege. Iago, the Machiavellian villain, with his own ambitions and jealousies works on Otello's sense of insecurity. Cassio well-born, privileged, with high office due to him as of right, was a more suitable lover of the aristocratic Desdemona. Iago could sense that the future belonged to the politician, versed in intrigue and cunning. He was ready to demolish not only the triumphant commander of the army, but also the ruling aristocratic order. The innocent victim of his scheming was the proud simple young woman, Desdemona, in love with the unsuitable outsider, Othelo. You can read a lot into this story, which has universal and timeless relevance. Verdi, in his old age, captured this in the most exquisite music of his entire life.  

About my father

Today is my father's yahr-zeit, the anniversary of his death. He died 39 years ago, peacefully, while my mother was out of the room and I was at my son's David's piano recital. David was seven years old. Playing the piano while his grandfather was dying was very appropriate, the handing on of the baton. The piano was a large part of my father's life. He was given a piano for his bar mitzvah, his thirteenth birthday, and lived with a piano all his life. He had an uncommon flair for music, a natural musicianship. As a young man he was the boy who played the piano. Others would gather around him, sing, dance if there was room, while my father, Joska, sat at the piano and player all the current hits and a vast repertoire of Hungarian songs. In his prime, he also accompaniedin Schubert songs a family friend, General Bauer, who prided himself on his singing voice. His piano playing was curtailed when while cutting a slice of dry bread he cut the tendon of his thumb. He was in the Jewish unarmed unit of the Hungarian army. With this injury he was sent home for treatmen. This might have saved his life, but his hand was never the same again. Nor was he ever in the mood to play as he used to after surviving Mauthausen and witnessing the atrocities that he lived through, after Vadasz Miklos and his son Bandi, Reshovsky Peter, Singer Odon and others, all part of my parents group of close intimate friends were killed. 

I suppose my father had a good death. He died at the age of 75 of lung cancer. He lived to see my brother, Janos again, then had the lung-heart machine turned off and fell asleep. He thought that the years after a bullet narrowly missed him while he was marched from the main camp of Mauthaisen to the sub-camp of Gunzkirchen as bonus. He survived because he had a strong will to live and see his children, Janos and me again. Bringing us up was his life mission. When he was liberated from the camp he was a scarcely living skeleton. For weeks he lay in a hospital unconscious. Against the odds he pulled through, worked to make a precarious living, and ultimately achieved his ambition, emigrated to New Zealand where he enjoyed the stress-free life. He was an unambitious man. He didn't want to make a fortune. Yet as a laborer he worked all the overtime available, trying to set up a business he worked though half the night. Later he valued his leisurely life as a public servant. He enjoyed his garden. He also enjoyed friendship. He was someone whom people and animals loved spontaneously. Wherever he went, dogs, chickens, all animals followed him. And people from all walks of life loved him. There was something about his smile, about his laughter, and about his love of music that endeared him to all. So today I lit a candle in his memory and thought about him. When my mother and father got married my mather wanted to buy him a kittle, a burial shroud, as was customary, but my father said, should they be in such happy circumstances that he could be buried in a kittle it would be time to get one. These were prophetic words. In the end he did get buried in a kittle and despite all the hardships he lived though, he had a good life.

Then destructions of civilizations

An article in the New Yorker by John Seabrook about the problems of deciphering scrolls found in a library destroyed in the Herculaneum eruption made me think of the rise and fall of civilizations. Those who excavated the library had hoped that some of the missing volumes of the ancient world would be discovered among these scrolls. I didn't know that none of the works of Epicurus survived, that Livy's hundred and forty two volumes on the History of Rome only thirty-five survived, of the nine volumes of verse of Sapho only one complete poem remains, only a handful of the many plays of the great Greek dramatists, Euripides. Sophocles and Aeschylus remain. Civilizations come and go, they reach their prime, often for only a generation or two, then Barbarians come and irretrievable destroy them. Bernard Lewis pointed out that in Iran, a modern Islamic name for Persia, no one is called Cyrus, Darius or Nebuchadnezzar, prominent figures of the ancient Persian civilization. The great Persian, Parthian and Zoroastrian civilizations of the ancient world are forgotten. Empires that once flourished in Central and Eastern Europe, Dacians, Thacians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Vlachs, Avars, Magyars, and others are only remembered as calls to arms to restore past great glories at the expense of other local people. With terrorist attacks in the heartland of European civilization, not to mention the Middle-East and Africa, civilizations that we take for granted are in danger of going the way the Roman, Greek, Persian and Egyptian Empires went. People who destroy Palmyra have no compunction about destroying Paris, New York, or Moscow. 

Music banned by the Nazis

An interesting and challenging concert will be broadcast next Tuesday, November 24, at 8 pm on the RNZ Concert Programme. It was recorded at last years NZ School of Music Conference on Suppressed Music. The programme will feature the Cello Concerto of Myeczyslaw Weinberg, a Jewish composer, born in Warsaw, who fled to Russia, became a close friend of Shostakovich, who saved him from Stalin's terror. It will also include the Introduction and Final scene from The Emperor of Atlantis, by Victor Ullmann, a chamber opera that he wrote while in Theresienstadt. Ullmann was one of the group of composers along with Gideon Klein and Hans Kràsa who were taken from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz and were killed there. But for a New Zealand audience, the most interesting work will be the world premier of Vom Jüdischen Schiksal (The Jewish Fate) by German-Jewish composer, Richard Fuchs, a successful architect and composer in Karlsruhe, who settled in New Zealand in 1939, after he was freed from Dachau. This setting of four poems by the great German Jewish poet, Karl Wolfskehl won a prestigious prize awarded by the German Kulturbund. It is written for choir, soloists and a large orchestra, Nazi authorities refused permission for its performance and its score, copied, ready for rehearsal, languished in the Turnbull Library all these years. The Nazis did not have to give reasons for their decisions, but the comments of Michael Haas, scholar of music banned by the Nazis might shed light on it. He wrote after hearing the work performed that 'Fuchs's large-scale work for chorus and orchestra entitled Vom jüdischen Schicksal – of Jewish Destiny, presented listeners with an unsettling challenge. If composers such as Zeisl, Rettich, Schoenberg, Toch and even Korngold dipped a compositional toe into the waters of ‘Jewish’ music, Fuchs offered a more disturbing dialectic. He took a Jewish setting by Karl Wolfskehl and set it to music that was defiantly German. As Prof. Tim Jackson observed in an accompanying documentary, Fuchs wrote music using the language ‘of the perpetrator’. … He wrote the most ‘German’ music he could, which he set to the most Jewish German text he could find. The result was its banning by the Nazi authorities from performance at the Jüdischer Kulturbund. No official explanation was offered, but hearing Vom jüdischen Schicksal it becomes quite clear that Fuchs’s sound-world of Schumann through a Wagnerian prism, was simply too shamelessly German and not sufficiently ‘Jewish’. Incidentally, Karl Wolfskehl also lived the last years of his life in New Zealand. His book Die Stimme spricht, which included the four poems Richard Fuchs set to music, was his response in poetry of a German Jew to the events of 1933, a document of the mood of a cultural stratum of German Jewry in the midst of its final catastrophe. [ KARL WOLFSKEHL, 1933 A Poem Sequence, New York, 1947, Introduction]

Unintended consequences

On March 13, 1881, Ignacy Hryniewiecki assassinated Tsar Alexander II. Alexander II was the most successful reformer, whose achievements, among many other measures, included the liberation of serfs. His assassination was followed by a setback of the reform movement, brutal repression, and anti-Jewish pogroms. On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip shot dead in Sarajevo the heir to the Hapsburg throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The assassination led directly to the outbreak of the First World War. On November 7, 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a Jewish student in Paris, shot dead the Third Secretary of the German Embassy, Ernst von Rath. This was used by the Nazis as the ostensible reason for their already prepared pogrom, Kristallnacht, to intimidate German Jews as well as German people in general. Abdelhamid Abaaoud masterminded the six simultaneous terrorist attacks in Paris this week. It is too early to know what the unintended consequences of this attack will be. So far in retaliation, French fighters bombed the Syrian city of Raqqa, the stronghold and de facto capital of ISIS in Syria, just as Americans attacked Afghanistan after the 9 November 2001 terrorist attack on the twin towers in New York. A few individual;s can set in motion vast events with unimaginable consequences. Perhaps one of the hopeful consequences of the Paris atrocity will be that the Russians, Americans, European powers, and even the Chinese, will agree on a common strategy to eliminate terrorism. Perhaps this will lead to ISIS and its affiliates being wiped out. But don't hold your breath. As long as there are people who believe in the absolute correctness of their beliefs, beliefs that they are prepared to sacrifice their own life for, beliefs for which they are prepared to commit unspeakable acts, for which they will be rewarded in a nebulous afterlife, terrorism cannot be eliminated. Treasure and protect doubt. You may be right, you believe that you are right, but perhaps there lurks a tiny amount of doubt in your mind, which makes you respect other people's beliefs.

The incomprehensible attacks on Paris

The simultaneous attacks in Paris this week are hard to comprehend. It is hard to get inside the minds of the perpetrators, the suicide bombers and assassins, who go in to kill people unknown to them, for no clear reasons, with no objectives or benefits in mind. At present we don't know who these perpetrators were. The media blames ISIS, but they were individuals, most likely young men who grew up in France, who were educated in France, and enjoyed the tolerant liberal culture of France. How could they decide to sacrifice their lives for a vague cause like establishing the Caliphate in Europe? I am looking for parallels in recent European history. In the 1970s the Red Army faction, also popularly know as the Baader – Meinhof Gang even after the death of both Baader and Meinhof, terrorized Europe. They were held responsible for 34 deaths, numerous kidnappings and 296 bomb attacks. Their target was predominantly Germany that covered up its Nazi past, where former highly placed Nazis continued to hold public office and wield power, and supported American policy that they considered imperialist, including the Vietnam war, the support for the Shah of Persia and support for many African and Latin American dictators. Some of the members of the Red Army Faction were trained by Palestinian groups and identified with the fate of Palestinians. One of their leader, Horst Mahler, is a vocal Neo-Nazi and Holocaust denier to this day. The Red Army Faction was a movement hard to understand in its time, and it was impossible to get inside the minds of the perpetrators of their crimes, but at least people had an inkling of their objectives. The terrorism of the the decades between early 1970s and late 1990s in Europe created mayhem, but the perpetrators were clearly identified, their cause, however misguided, was fairly clear. The current attacks on Paris by unknown individuals, belonging to no movement that claims responsibility for the atrocity, with no clear objectives is beyond comprehension.

Recreating the world

I bought a thrown out copy of Diana Ackerman's The Zookeeper's Wife in the library. Our librarian, the head honcho, has a passion for throwing out books. There is now a whole floor without books. Forget stack rooms, storage, floor to ceiling library shelves. Our librarian decided that apart from some light fiction, books don't belong to publicly funded libraries in this electronic age. Whole sections of the library disappeared. I happened to know a little about the The Zookeeper's Wife, a friend talked about it a while ago, so I had to save it from oblivion. It is a fascinating account of the wife of the keeper of the Warsaw zoo, who used the zoo and its cages to save people escaping from the Warsaw ghetto. But it is also the story of Poland, annihilated by the Germans during the war, the destruction of first the Warsaw ghetto, and later by the whole city. But I was particularly interested in the idea of recreating the world in an idealized way fuelled by the romantic Nazi imagination. Underpinning the Nazi rationale for waging war on Slavs, Jews, races they considered inferior, was a false analogy with the animal kingdom. Slaughtering or enslaving the entire population of vast regions was justified by the need for lebensraum for a superior dominant race. The fact that Germans were far from superior or dominant in European history, that until a millennium ago they were scattered primitive tribes on the fringes of civilization, did not enter into consideration. What the Nazis dreamed about was the recreation of an Arcadian German world, with wild animals that roamed the primeval forests that the German tribes had inhabited way back. Some of these animals had become extinct, but using the theories of of the pseudo-science of eugenics, the otherwise sane and educated but sadistic zoologist, Lutz Heck, attempted to breed from existing animals animals that had disappeared. That in the course of recreating the dead he had to destroy the living was of no concern to him. To recreate the idealized Germanic world, the Nazis had to destroy the existing real world. They were amazingly successful. Within five years the whole of Poland and much of the Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, as well as Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and much of the Balkan lands was destroyed. But so was Germany. The crazy romantic dream ended up with the reality of heaps of rubble an ruins throughout Europe. How could this happen? How could so many be swayed by the semi-literate rants of a half educated failed painter is something that is still not really understood.

Films that asked questions about life and history

Over the last week I saw two films, Tito's Glasses (Titos Brille) made by Regina Schilling, and Farewell Herr Schwarz, made by Yael Reuveny.These were part of the Since 1945; Image, Memory, Testimony, series of films put on by the Goethe Institute in association with the Holocaust Centre of NZ, with the German and the Israeli Embassies. Both of these films were autobiographical. Neither of these lives were remarkable. The only reason for making the films is that they said something about the age, about the world since the Second World War. Tito's Glasses is a charming, delightful road movie. Regina Schilling traces the lives of her family, in particular, her father, an eminent doctor, a radiologist, and at one time Tito's personal physician and fellow partisan. She makes great use of old 8 mm films that her father made about the family. Like many families that survived the years since the war, her family had a colourful story. Her parents were both Yugoslav partisans and devoted communists. He was a doctor, she and architect. Then through the capricious fortune of people living in a totalitarian world, he was thrown into prison, the rest of the family escaped and ended up in Germany. Upon his release, he too made it to Germany, where he had a successful career. But they left communism behind. She, Regina Schilling's mother, took up Jewish causes, while her father enjoyed philandering. Tracing her family story takes Regina Schilling though some spectacular scenery in Croatia. She meets her aunt in Italy, who would never set foot in Croatia again, her uncle, who stayed in Split all his life and never wanted to live anywhere else. If there are profound questions about Jews, partisans, bravery and resistance, communism in Yugoslavia, and the failure of the successors of Tito to hold the disparate parts of Yugoslavia together after Tito's death Regina Schilling doesn't ask them. This is where she came from, she implies, with all its unsolved conundrums remaining unsolved. Incidentally Tito didn't wear glasses, her father's claim to have mended them was typical of his unreliable make-believe claims. Farewell Herr Schwarz tackled the burden of the Holocaust on the second and third generations. Yael Reuveny's grandmother survived the Holocaust, moved to Israel, but always harboured the memory of her suffering, but in particular, the memory of her brother, who survived and was supposed to meet her after the war at the Lodz railway station and didn't turn up. She assumed that he died in a fire, but didn't try to trace him. Her brother ended up marrying a German woman in the small town where he was liberated from the concentration camp in which he was an inmate. We meet the second generation, Yael's mother, and the son of her mother's brother, and ultimately, the grandson of her mother's brother, who developed an interest in his grandfather's Jewish roots. The story is not exceptional, there must be many instances of people surviving the camps and leaving the burden of their Jewish heritage behind. There are also many instances of people who define themselves as survivors of the Holocaust. What the film lacked is empathy, an insight to really understand these survivors. The grandmother didn't bother to trace her brother, because she, a devout orthodox Jew from Vilna, was not prepared to accept that her brother married a German woman who was not Jewish and one of the people who perpetrated the destruction of the Jews of Europe. Her brother didn't bother to trace his sister, because he knew that being married to a woman who was not Jewish, having children by her, would not be acceptable to his sister. But there are unexplored questions about both brother and sister. The sister was never completely adjusted to her life in Israel, a secular world so far from the world of Vilna that she grew up in, her children sabras, unable to comprehend the terrible experiences she had had. The brother married a woman from the small town that was the site of the concentration camp where he was incarcerated. What did he see in her? What did she see in him, a prisoner, a member of a downtrodden race? And how did the children reconcile the irreconcilable worlds of their parents? They coped with these issues in silence. They never talked about the past. The past was a forbidden territory.

Murray McCully, the peacemaker

Good news! Murray McCully, the New Zealand Minister of Foreign Affairs, is off to the UN Security Council to sort out the Arab Israeli conflict. In the last 78 years a number of prominent politicians had a go at this, Israeli politicians, Ohlemrt, Barak, Shamir, Gold Meir. were all willing participants in negotiations. For the time being, there is a general feeling that the issues are irreconcilable. Arabs don't want a Jewish state in a land that they perceive as Arab land, Israelis are determined to hang in there and have a Jewish state in which Jews determine their own fate. Still, undaunted, Murray McCully will reconcile the irreconcilable. He looked around the world, and found that the Arab – Israeli conflict is the greatest danger to world peace. There is a war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria, Chad, Cameroon and Niger, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, Donbass in Ukraine, Turkey, Colombia, Mexico, and possibly many other places. Tragically, there were 72 fatalities in the Arab – Israeli conflict this year, 28864 in Afghanistan, 41976, in Syria, 5430 in Yemen, 2145 in the Sinai insurgency, Egypt, But New Zealand is a small country, it is appropriate that it should focus on the smallest conflict. What's more, there is no downside, no price to pay for being the harbinger of peace, or more likely, false hope, to Israel and the Palestinians, whereas bringing peace to Yemen might antagonize Saudi Arabia, a large trading partner, or talking to Indonesia about Papua New Guinea might upsetting them, even meddling in the Iraqi and Syrian conflict may be bad for business, but there is nothing at stake telling Arabs and Israelis to be nice to each other and stop killing each other. The risk of failure is also negligible. No one expects Murray McCully to achieve anything significant. He comes from a country where people don't fear getting stabbed on the way to school or mowed down in a synagogue while praying. Living with such daily threats is beyond the imagination of a well meaning New Zealand politician.

Too much horror

The Goethe Institute is screening a series of German and German co-production films about the Holocaust. Last night I went to see the first of these, In Darkness, made by Agnieszka Holland, a Polish – German co-production. I did ask myself the question: Do I need more depressing Holocaust films? This film was terribly harrowing. It is the story of a group of Jews in Lviv, who survived in the sewers when the ghetto of the city was liquidated. No matter how you tell the story, depicting life in the sewers for over a year, from June 1943, when the ghetto was cleared out, to July 1943, when the Soviet troops liberated Lviv, it is almost unbearably hard to bear. The film also showed scenes of sadistic brutality, which were undoubtedly authentic, but made the film that much harder to watch. Though true, they are almost beyond belief. Yet the film is not about the Jews, but about Leopold Socha, a sewage worker who saved them. For him saving human lives was initially a profitable business arrangement. The Jews paid him, he procured food for them and found them safe hiding places. He risked his life, he gave up the chance to betray them and earn 500 zloty for each Jew handed over to the Germans, and yet the Jews in the sewer just complained and made demands. At one time talking with his wife about how he earned his extra money slipped out. His wife told him that Jews are people just like them. When the priest told them that Jews killed Jesus she dismissed that as church politics. Ultimately Socha stopped thinking of the Jews in his care as just a source of income. They became his Jews. He risked his life for them, put himself at great risk, and when the Jews ran out of money, continues to save them, discreetly, without payment. It is a redemption story. The story of a humble, coarse, simple man, becoming something more than a rapacious, selfish human being, becoming a saviour of others. The film is based on the book The girl in the green sweater by Krystyna Chiger, the last survivor of the group of Jews in the sewer who as a seven year old child witnessed it all. The book was a best seller in Poland, which is not surprising, because it comes to grips with the the ambiguities of being both a victim and a perpetrator, posing 'what would you do if you were in my shoes?' questions, particularly if you were a devout Catholic reared in a climate of antisemitism. And for us, involved with the preservation of the memory of the Holocaust, and talking about it to the next generation, it is important to experience the horror, the unbelievable cruelties and  inhumanity of the perpetrators, otherwise those who claim that the Holocaust never happened, that the horrors were exaggerated would prevail. 

George Orwell, and news about Palestine

Desperate to find something to read I looked though the old, largely forgotten books on my shelves and picked up a selection of essays by Orwell. Orwell died in 1950, at the age of 47. I was 16 at the time. I came across a mention of Orwell in my recent reading, probably in essays by Bernard Lewis or less likely, Simon Schama. Reading these essays I was astonished how relevant they still are some 70-8o years after they were written. Just now, I am particularly taken with Orwell's scathing view of the middle class intelligentsia that swallowed Soviet propaganda uncritically. Not only did it believe in the Communist line, but suppressed all views that did not correspond to that view. Victor Gollancz, that great liberal Jewish fellow traveller, who published Orwell's first books, had misgivings about the second part of Road to Wigan Pier because Orwell didn't see the working class, individual labourers and impoverished strugglers, as Communist propaganda would have wanted these to be depicted. Homage to Catalonia, with its account of the Communist attack on Anarchists, was quite unacceptable to Gollancz and the Left Book Club readers, and it was publsihed by Warburg of Secker and Warburg. And, of course, Gollancz missed out on the chance to make real money from the two books that sold huge numbers and are still widely read, Animal Farm and 1984. It is understandable that the mouth piece of Soviet propaganda, the Daily Worker waged a continuous, biased war against Orwell and all that he stood for, but I would have expected better from the Manchester Guardian, the bastion of liberal broad-minded thinking. Kingsley Martin, the highly respected editor of the Manchester Guardian, one of the luminaries of British intellectuals, accepted Orwell's article on the Spanish Civil War, and in the end refused to publish it. It would have upset his admirers, Communist fellow travellers. And this brings me to the suppression of truth, the craven gatekeepers of the news media, who in this day and age suppress, or refuse to report the truth about Palestinians and what goes on in the Middle East, because blaming Palestinians for their own plight is unfashionable. Blame the Jews instead. For thousands of years everyone blamed the Jews, whatever the truth behind the accusation. 

How to write: advice from Morris Lurie

Some years ago I had the good fortune of having a one on one session about writing with the distinguished Australian Jewish writer, Morris Lurie. I was attending a seminar on Jewish culture or that sort of thing in Hamilton, and Morris Lurie was one of the guest speakers. When I turned up at his talk I was the only one there, so we chatted about writing. If Morris Lurie is remembered at all, he is remembered for the hilarious children's book, The twenty-seventh Annual African Hippopotamus race. He was a serious, thoughtful writer, won the 2006 Patrick White award for authors whose work had gone under-recognized. It is perhaps sad that someone who wrote a number of serious books is only remembered for a slight, short children's story. But such is the fate of authors. He and I discussed the stories of a great Irish short story writer. I thought that these stories were smoothly, fluently written, but Morris Lurie rubbished them. They were not true. A work of fictions may not be true in the sense that it is made up by the author, not based on hard facts, but it should be true in the sense that it is consistent, there is nothing in it that is contrived, artificial, inconsistent. I read some, if by no means all the short stories in the New Yorker as they arrive, and have recently read short stories by a well known local author, and I keep being bothered by the notion that these are not true, they are contrived, odd things happen that do not follow from what we know about the characters or circumstances. People just don't do that, don't behave like that, the actions don't ring true. I have just abandoned a novel by a very well known successful British writer, because he imposed a false story on a setting, characters, circumstances that just were not believable. The dialogue was not right for the people concerned, not right for the period and not right for the place. I have the words of Morris Lurie in my mind whenever I write, which is seldom these days, but perhaps will happen again tomorrow or the day after. It is a yardstick I try to measure my stories by, and if they fail the test, as most of my writing did, I have to leave them or come back to them until I hope that I get it right. Morris Lurie died a year ago, at the age of 75.

The two Israeli students and the pro-Palestinian protesters.

Two fine young men, a medical students and a business student gave a talk this week at Victoria University about their experiences as soldiers in the Israeli army during the 2014 Gaza war. The Australasian Jewish Students' Society (AUJS) organized this talk, something they were entitled to do as a university student club. Nevertheless this was clearly perceived by some as a provocative gesture. In a university environment a free flowing discussion and exchange of ideas should be encouraged, but this is not how some students, and regrettably, 30 university staff saw it. They demanded that the university stop the meeting, and the university to its credit refused to do this. Then they resorted to trying to drown out the meeting with their noise and invaded the meeting. Students, young, immature, and largely ignorant of world history, recent and distant, can be excused for jumping on whatever bad-wagon happens to be passing by. Perhaps as a callow youth I might have done this myself. But scholars, respected teachers like Dougal McNeill, should have known better. How can he, with his interest in Marxism, side with a hide-bound obscurantist, ruthless, autocratic regime, influenced by bigoted Islamic theology? Without doubt, a large number of Palestinians became casualties of war in Gaza, most killed by Israeli bombs and shell fire, though some killed by the Gaza militants, and a number were killed because the Gaza authorities deliberately exposed them to danger. It is also true that the casualties were disproportional, because the Israelis refused to be drawn into ambushes in closely built up areas and used mass destruction rather than expose their troops to lethal street to street fighting. Perhaps the war was preventable. There were negotiations to try to avert the war, but at the same time Hamas kept firing rockets into Israel, hardly the sort of action that would be conducive to peaceful neighbourliness. They also dug tunnels into Israel, one that would have opened into a kindergarten so that they could abduct the children. Not surprisingly, the Israelis perceived this as an unacceptable hostile act. It is not surprising either that the Israelis get tetchy about all attempts to murder Jews. The very rationale for the existence of Israel is that murdering Jews is not acceptable, Jews will never again be unresisting victims. But the conflict has very deep roots, going back to long before the Gaza war, the Israeli occupation and all the present grievances of the Palestinians. When Jews started to settle in the land of Palestine, they brought prosperity to a previously impoverished region. Jews created a market for Jaffa oranges and both Jews and Palestinians benefited from that. They all benefited from the industries that the Jews established. Yet the Arab response to Jewish settlement was to murder Jews. While the Jews of Europe were annihilated the Mufti of Jerusalem, the leader of the Palestinian Arabs, was Hitler's honoured guest. The Arab response to the partition of Palestine was to declare war on the new Jewish state. They waged a guerilla warfare against the new state before Palestinians thought of themselves as a national entity. Living under Jordanian rule they undermined the Jordanian kingdom, but continued their enmity towards Jews. There was no occupied territory before 1967, yet there was no peace. At no time did the Palestinians accept the existence of a Jewish state within Arab and Muslim lands. They were prepared to relinquish the prospects of a peaceful prosperous life alongside a Jewish state. They embraced a nationalist, chauvinistic ideology inconsistent with Arab or Ottoman history. True, the Zionist ideology was similarly chauvinistic, but that was a response to generations of persecution and the refusal of  Christian Europe to accept Jews as equal citizens with equal rights. There was no similar pressure on the Arabs of Palestine to separate themselves from the rest of the Arab world. In fact, they saw themselves as part of that Arab world, but did what they could to destabilize it. So Dr McNeill and your fellow protesters, think about the band-wagon you jump on and learn the history behind your cause.

Maria Dronke and I

When I was at Teachers' Training College in the early 1950s I had trouble with my vowels (I still have). There is no Hungarian equivalent of the New Zealand 'e', 'a' or 'o'. New Zealand 'e' is unlike the Hungarian 'é', 'a' or 'ó'. The New Zealand vowels ar really diphthongs and their middle is flatter. So Sunny Aimie, in charge of speech and drama, sent me to the great local teacher of elocution, Maria Dronke. Sunny Aimie later became Lawrence Olivier's assistant at Old Vic, and when she returned to New Zealand, the Director of the Downstage Theatre in its great halcyon days. Maria Dronke, a German actress, whose career was cut short by the advent of Nazism, was a startling beautiful, widely educated woman and I was quite overawed by her. She was the outstanding local theater producer and eloquent performer of recitations of poetry by the most celebrated poets around. She did her best to teach me how to open my mouth, hold my tongue, utter the sounds that vaguely corresponded to New Zealand vowels. She overlaid my Hungarian accent with her German accent, and perhaps made my words more intelligible. I knew of Maria Dronke before I had met her. Her son, Peter, my contemporary, but an awful lot brighter, was my tutor in my first year English 1 at university, when I came down to Wellington from Palmerston North. He went off to Oxford and then to Cambridge where he became the foremost authority on Medieval Latin poetry. When I worked for the Oxford University Press I had the privilege of selling his book, though I don't think that I sold vast numbers in New Zealand. I also vaguely knew Maria's daughter, Marie, we moved in the same broadly left wing, socialist circles, and knew her husband Conrad Bollinger, who was one of the elder statesmen of the socialists, and a scintillating, witty companion. So my world and Maria Dronke's ever so more sophisticated world, which I greatly admired, intersected time and time again. In 1970 I opened my bookshop in Lower Hutt. I had a vision of a bookshop that would be a haven for thinking, enlightened people, a place where the people who dropped in would be surrounded by the best in contemporary literature, a magnet for like-minded people. My models were Gordon Tait in Christchurch, Bob Goodman in Auckland, to a large extent Roy Parsons in Wellington, all refined, educated men with an air of scholarship about them. Little did I realize that Bob Goodman and Gordon Tait would go broke a few years later, and that Roy Parsons would survive by becoming the foremost purveyor of classical CDs. Nor did I take into account that what migh work in Christchurch, Auckland and Wellington might be harder to make a go of in Lower Hutt, that viewed itself as a dormitory suburb of Wellington with little to offer except for jobs in the freezing works, the railway workshop, the biscuit and car factories. When I opened my bookshop there were already two bookshops in Lower Hutt: Ackroyds, once a fine bookshop that fell on hard times (for reasons I don't need to go into here) and was taken over by Whitcoulls, and a Whitcoulls shop, more interested in getting the local school stationery business than in stocking a good selection of books. I was confident that there was scope for a real bookshop that treated books with respect, not just as yet another line of assorted merchandise. And indeed, in a very short time, my shop became a haven for scientists from the Wild Life Division and the Geological Survey of the old DSIR, who foregathered in my shop at lunch time to meet each other and occasionally engage me in stimulating conversation. The shop also attracted distinguished retired academics, some of whom taught me at university. Colin Bailey, retired professor of Education came. He addressed students on their first day at university, and I remember him telling us not to hesitate writing in our books, not think that we deface them, think of how exciting it would be to find a Bible, no longer pristine, with scribbles by one Martin Luther in it. Unfortunately, the last time I saw Colin Bailey he was a pathetic shrunken little man suffering from advanced Alzheimer disease. Stuart Johnson, retired senior lecturer, or perhaps by then, associate professor of English was a regular, and so was James Bertram, urbane, gentle, a fine scholar, but better remembered as a journalist who attained fame in revolutionary China as a friend of Chou En Lai. And Maria Dronke kept dropping in. She came with a companion. By then John Dronke had passed away, her wonderful husband, a judge in pre-Nazi Germany, who abandoned his native land and his career to save his Jewish born wife by moving to New Zealand, where he eked out a living playing the double-bass in the National Orchestra, and later doing menial legal work in the Ministry of Justice. Maria Dronke that walked into my shop was not the Maria Dronkle I once knew. She looked a little unkempt, somewhat bewildered. Her once brilliant mind and forceful personality were gone. But she came often, perhaps because I remembered her and gave her the welcome that such a distinguished star deserved. I don;t remember whether she ever bought any books, but she came because she felt at home surrounded by books, a reminder of her former life, a reminder of the world that she had lost. 

Policemen

Telling my story in the context of the Holocaust I often mention something that my aunt Marta told me. When we were marched from the international ghetto to the main Budapest ghetto, some time in November 1944, my grandfather approached the policeman escorting us and said to him that my aunt, Margitka, who was handicapped, would not be able to keep up with the column. The policeman told my grandfather not to worry, and he put my aunt Margitka at the head of column, so no one could go faster than she, and we all made it safely to Dob Ucca in the ghetto. I tell this story to show that a man, who was doing a distasteful job, escorting a large group of elderly Jews and children did what he had to do, but did it with a measure of compassion and humanity. I thought of this when I read Christopher Browning's story of the Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, Ordinary Men. Some of these men were career policemen, some were assigned to this unit because they were too old to be in the army fighting on the front. Some were card carrying Nazis, but most of them were neither Nazis, not anti-Semites. One claimed to be a communist. They were given a distasteful task that probably none of them wanted, and none but a very few sadists relished. They were sent from Hamburg to Poland to murder Jews, the entire Jewish population of a small town, Jozefow, 1800 people, men, women, young and old, including children. Their commanding officer, 53 year old Major Wilhelm Trapp, a career policeman, explained the order that the men of the battalion were tasked with, and gave the men the opportunity opt out if they felt unequal to the task. Only a few of the men opted out initially, although many more found after the killings started and they were faced with the victims that they could not carry on. None of them were punished for this or faced consequences. After giving the order for the massacre Major Trapp broke down and cried. He also made sure that the men who refused to take part in the killings were protected. After the Jozefow massacre the men of the battalion participated in a number of other massacres, and hunted down Jews who somehow managed to escape. The men of the battalion were just a random group, many with limited education, but not selected for any cruel, blood thirsty streak. They were just ordinary men, who happened to be from Hamburg, Germany, but could have been from anywhere. Certainly the Ukrainians who helped them with their sorry task were no better, but perhaps the US Marines at Mai Lai, or soldiers from any other place, New Zealanders, British, Israelis, Syrians, facing battle conditions and an enemy that was demonized acted in a like manner. Who is to judge? It is understanding not judgement that is needed. Major Trapp's comment after giving his order to his troops was telling. 'If this Jewish business is ever avenged on earth', he said 'then have mercy on us Germans'. He always avoided being present at the shootings. Yet after the war, of all the personnel of battalion, he was the only one to be executed in Poland.

Music as propaganda

From time to time we at the Holocaust Centre get questions from students about various Holocaust related topics and these usually are sent to me for reply. Recently I had a particularly interesting, challenging questions about the Nazi's use of music for anti-Semitic propaganda. I could not think of an instance of such use of music. Wagner attributed racial characteristics to music performed by Jewish musicians and music composed by Jewish musicians, but Wagner being a spineless opportunist, his comments on Jewish music have to be taken with a huge dose of salt. He did not hesitate to make use of Jewish musicians, accept the help of Meyerbeer, let Levy conduct his music, Jews were OK when this suited him. But does music have the power to influence masses of people? If so, how? I have been greatly moved by music, and I assume that the performance of Beethoven's Ninth when the Berlin Wall fell had special emotional meaning. I cannot think, however, of any Nazi music, perhaps apart from the Horst Wessel song that made any emotional impact on a large number of people. In fact, the Nazis were not good at using music, or for that matter, the Arts, for propaganda. Compare the the way the Soviets used music for propaganda, Shostakovitch’s Fifth, and certainly the Seventh, the Leningrad Symphony, Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky and Peter the Great, Khatchaturian's Spartacus, and innumerable other great works of music with what was produced in Nazi Germany. Very little of Pfitzner or Richard Strauss composed over this period stood the test of time, perhaps with the exception of Strauss's Die schweigsame Frau and that is hardly a work in support of Nazi ideology. Carl Orff's Carmina Burana is still performed, but poor old Orff was broke, unrecognised, he desperately needed the the recognition this work attained, and musically it hardly bears of the hallmarks of Nazi world view. It came close to being deemed 'decadent' with its primitive rhythms. There is virtually no music, composed in Germany during the Nazi era that is still in the repertoire seventy years later. And similarly if we compare German literature under the Nazis and Soviet literature of the Stalinist era there are no significant books published in Germany that can compare with the great Russian books of the period: Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don, Ehrenburg's The Thaw, or Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate. The great German novel about the Nazi Era was written after the war, The Tin Drum, by a young member of the Waffen SS, Gunther Grass. All totalitarian regimes are ruthless and terrible, but they are not all the same.  

How great men shaped history?

Historians are divided, were always divided, on the role of exceptional great men in the fate of nations since Karl Marx promulgated his theory of Historical Materialism, which holds that material conditions and economic factors shape the structure and development of society. American historian, Arthur Herman, is an unashamed champion of the Great Men in History school of thought. His large fascinating book Gandhi and Churchill is subtitled 'The Epic Rivalry that destroyed an Empire and Forged our Age'. Herman is a great storyteller. His book reads like a grand novel with a vast cast of characters and a tragic narrative. He also asks wide ranging questions about how the sequence of events developed. The British Empire didn't exist as imperialists like Churchill understood it until a small force of British troops imposed law and order on India in the wake of the Indian Mutiny in 1857, and they did this to maintain the commercial interests of the British East India Company. India did not exist as a state until the Moghal conquerors unified the disparate communities of the subcontinent. Churchill and Gandhi were both charismatic leader with beliefs rooted in an idealized past. Churchill believed in the role of the British Empire, inspired by parallels with the Roman Empire, of imposing law, order and peace on less sophisticated, inferior people, people with dark skins like Indians and Africans. Gandhi, though entertaining great respect for the British Empire and its institutions, viewed imperialism as materialistic, without spiritual roots. He idealized the simple peasant life, the spinning wheel, the austere diet, and prayer. He was a follower of Tolstoy, Ruskin and the English set whom Orwell described a generation later as 'sandal wearers and fruit juice drinkers'. The peace loving India of pure spiritual values had never existed. There had always been bitter divisions between castes, and religions, with untouchables at the bottom of the heap. The British Empire had never been as benign as Churchill viewed it. Both Gandhi and Churchill lived in an idealized Victorian past, and at the end of their long struggle both ended in tragic failure. By opposing all concessions to British rule Gandhi's India fell apart amidst brutal massacres, with millions of people displaced. Churchill by opposing all concessions to India when there was still some scope for negotiation lived to see the ceding of the Indian subcontinent to ruthless opposing factions and the disintegration of the British Empire that he had held dear. Arthur Herman tells this story in the context of world history, the Boer War, the First World War, appeasement, the fight against Nazism and Japanese imperialism and the decline of Great Britain as a world power. This is historical narrative at its best. 

Who am I to judge?

Conservative Catholics demand that the Pope withdraw his stand on gay marriages. Conservatives of whatever stripe demand that the world should stay still, that the clocks should stop. They have an unshakeable faith in their rightness. Whatever they strand for is right, whatever is different from that is wrong. They have a clear understanding of sin, and sin belongs to others. Pope Francis is a greater man with a broader vision than any of his critics. He said that it is not for him to judge. If it is not for the Pope to judge, whose infallibility is the corner stone of Catholic belief, it is certainly not for anyone else to judge, who is steeped in his or her own bigotry. The world is full of judges, those who call anyone a sinner, a heretic, a traitor, who depart from their own hidebound set of beliefs. It takes the humility of a great man, a Pope Francis, to put such judges in their place.

My friend Sam

Sam Gezentsvey passed away this week quietly in his sleep, a day before his 91st birthday. Sam was a musician, a clarinet player. Some years ago I thought that a Jewish community ought to have people performing Jewish music, a Klezmer band, and asked Sam to get a group together. We were an assorted bunch, some of us could play an instrument with a measure of competence, others were complete beginners, yet others were a bit like me, I knew how to play the violin, but lacked confidence, but it didn't matter, it is people getting together to play Jewish music that mattered. Sam threw himself into the challenge to cobble some kind of ensemble together from this mixed bunch. He wrote music for us, rehearsed us with patience and at time exasperation. We were not the Kiev Philharmonic. But making music was important to Sam. More important for him than for some of us. We just want to have fun as one of us said. To have fun, Sam said, you play cards. Music is serious business. The music he wrote for us was more Red Army Band than Philharmonic, perhaps a bit corny, but Sam was a simple soul, smiling, lovable. In reality, we didn't know Sam. Some of him was left behind in Kiev, where he taught music and played the clarinet and saxophone. Some of him died when Sarah, his beautiful wife, died. Sam and Sarah were a close inseparable couple who complemented each other, Sarah, the assertive school teacher, who was ever prepared to speak her mind and stand up for what she believed, Sam the musician, the artist with a song in his heart. They moved to Wellington when their son, Yury, was appointed Principal First Violin in the NZ Symphony Orchestra. Yury was the apple of the eyes of Sam and Sarah. They gave up their lives in Kiev and followed him to New Zealand. Sarah could get by in English, Sam had to learn the language late in life, but he mastered it in his own idiosyncratic way, and they settled into their new environment with its culture far removed from the culture they were brought up in. They became involved in the Jewish community, Sarah was a vocal and respected member of the Board with strong opinions, Sam taught music at Rongotai College. They made friends, they were local identities. They had the joy of witnessing their son's musical and daughter-in-law's literary success, and above all the pleasure of seeing their three grand-daughters grow into lovely young women. Sam also had the great privilege of knowing his three great-grandchildren and the knowledge of a fourth on the way. Sam was a humble man but he was rewarded with a long full life, and will live in the memories of all of us who knew him. 

Slaughter on the Somme

Last week I went to a talk at the National library at which three librarianas talked about their projects. One of them, Peter Ireland, talked about William Clachan, a New Zealand soldier who fought at the Battle of the Somme and was later killed in Malawi, Africa. In a letter to his mother, Clachan describes the battle. On 15 September, 1916, at 6.20 am 6000 men went over the top, that is, emerged from the trenches and rushed towards the German lines. Eight minutes later, faced with German machine gun fire, 600 were dead, 1200 wounded or missing. He describes the line of men all emerging from the trenches simultaneous and mowed down in a line. The man who gave the order to charge faced an enormous moral responsibility. He was probably never called to account. The battle was the brainchild of the British Commander in Chief, Sir Douglas Haig. To him the hundreds of thousands of men at his disposal were like toy soldiers. He could move them here, he could move them there. The enemy line won't budge throw a few more thousand men at it. No one counted the value of lives lost. This kind of thinking was also reflected in Clachan's letter. He mentioned that his barman was shot, that a lance corporal was killed, but to him they were just bodies, rank and number. They had no names, let alone family, lives left behind. In total, there were 618,257 Allied and 434,500 German casualties. The allies gained 12 km of ground. Haig was loaded with honours and medals, and was buried in 1928 amid great pomp and ceremony, but historians of recent times considered him the worst general of the First World War, someone mired in old strategic thinking. Blaming generals for their folly may be justifiable, but at the root, blame the idea of nations fighting nations, throwing vast resources at murdering each other. It was Napoleon who created the idea of a national army, the Grand Army. At the Battle of Borodino there were 250,000 troops involved and there were 70,000 casualties. There were 850,000 Axis causalities and 1,129,619 Soviet causalities at the Battle of Stalingrad. The damage these huge encounters did to the survivors and the collective memories of the combatant nations is incalculable. With the advances in technology and the consequent rethinking of military strategy it is unlikely that there will ever be such great battles again. At the root of the tragedy is the thinking of the casualties as nameless soldiers, the 'lance-corporal', the 'batman', the poor bugger who copped the bullet.

The doubts of Victor Gollancz, publisher and Englishman.

I have to clear my shelves, and in particular, my bookshelves, and discard what I no longer want. When I was still a bookseller and was interested in the book trade I bought every book on publishing I came across, and I picked up Victor Gollancz two autobiographical ruminations, My Dear Timothy long-winded letters to his grandson, which I have never read. Victor Gollancz was highly respected in the circles I moved in for his liberal views, but in My Dear Timothy he dwells at great length on Orthodox Judaism. This clearly bothered him, and he tried to explain to his grandson, no longer Jewish, where he stood. He himself was the grandson of an eminent cantor and nephew of a great rabbinical authority. His father was a religious, man practising an orthodox religious life. For his father orthodox Jewish observance meant that you followed the rules and never asked the reasons why. If Shabbat came in at an inconvenient time you walked home from school instead of catching the bus. You fasted on fast days even if you had to atone for sins you could not possibly have committed. You ate certain foods and not others even if it meant turning down a dinner invitation by some great dignitaries. This made it hard for Victor to fit into British society, to fully enjoy his schooling at St Paul’s and at Oxford. These required compromises. He would compromise his religious beliefs, because some of them made no sense to him; by seeking rational explanations the compromise was easier. But when his pro-communist beliefs came under scrutiny he was reluctant to compromise. His firm published the early books of George Orwell, but wouldn't publish Animal Farm because that was deemed offensive to Soviet communist ideology. Turning Animal Farm and later Nineteen eighty-four down was not a smart publishing business decision. But living in England as a successful, highly regarded Englishman Victor Gollancz had to jettison his father's values and principles. He was a charming, esteemed businessman and publisher, a colourful prolific writer, but neither quite a Jew nor quite an Englishman.

China and in the context of world history

Recently I attended a talk about Liang Qichao, the Chinese scholar, journalist and politician, and it brought home to me how little I know about Chinese history. With this in mind, I read Rana Mitter's A Bitter Revolution: China's Struggle with the Modern World. Mitter sets what was going on in China in the context of what was happening in the rest of the world, a very broad approach to understanding history. China was the victim of imperialism since the Opium Wars of 1839. The British, and later the French and the Germans, and ultimately the Japanese, saw China as a backward country there to be exploited. In 1919, the Treaty of Versailles, where China failed to regain the Shandong province that was until then occupied by the Germans, brought home the high-handed imperialist view of China, and the resentment over this issue lead to the May 4 uprising. The protest was against imperialism, and colonialism. The protesters demanded modernization, democracy, and the end of Confucian domination of the Chinese social order. These demands kept recurring throughout the turbulent history of twentieth century China, although the meaning of these terms was understood differently by Nationalists, Communists, and other reformers. Just as in the rest of the world, particularly in Europe, modernization could mean the tradition of eighteenth and nineteenth century enlightenment, empirical science, and a rejection of religion, superstition, and myths about nationhood. It could also mean the exact opposite, a romantic view of the myths of the 'volk' the primitive wisdom of the simple people of the land, folk stories, tradition. Democracy was seen as a political system that enfranchised the individual, or alternatively, as seen though Fascism, the embodiment of the will of the people as manifested through a supreme leader. Just as in Europe, these conflicting views are reflected in the history of modern China. Mitter describes the changes in Chinese thinking through a re-evaluation of the writings of a handful of significant writers, Zou Taofen, Lu Xun, Ding Ling, and others, and the way these were interpreted at different times. He also draws parallels between Mao Zedung and his views of communism and that of Stalin, Gorbachev, and the disintegrating Soviet empire. Using a very broad brush, Rana Mitter not only wrote a fascinating account of modern China, but provided an insight into the key developments of world history. 

Palestinians though the eyes of a Zionist

Between the ages of 12 and 14 I was a Zionist and a Communist, a dedicated member of HaShomer Hatzair. I knew how the world worked, I had answers to the problems confronting the world. I had a clear vision of right and wrong. The wrong was the murder of Jews. The right was resistance, fighting back like Bar Kochba. I knew nothing about Bar Kochba's messianic pretensions, about Betar and the tragedy he brought down on the remnant of Jews in the land of Palestina. All that I knew was that he wouldn't put up with Roman persecution and fought back. The heroes were the resistance fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto. I knew of no other instances of resistance. My personal hero was the brother of Julika, who when attacked at the university by his patriotic noble fellow students, lashed out with his knuckleduster, floored one and killed him. He was on the next train, out of the country, but certainly taught that student to show respect to Jews. The answer to the Jewish question was socialism. Fascism was the by-product of Capitalism. Socialism, as practised in the socialist kibbutzim was the way to stop the resurgence of Fascism. And unlike some other Zionists, we recognized that there was an Arab population in the land of Israel, but knew that the Arab poor, the workers, the fellahin, would rise up against their feudal landlords, their exploiters, and join the Jews in their struggle for a just, fair world. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, the leader of the Arabs fighting Jewish settlement, showed his true colours by aligning himself with Hitler. He was the creature of the Arab feudal class, the absentee landlords, the oppressors of the poor Arab peasants. I knew that Jews and the exploited poor Arabs had a common cause. And indeed, the Arab workers working for Jews, the Arab villagers living in villages near Jewish settlements flourished as a result of the skills, the single-minded work ethic and enterprise the Jews brought with them. The Jews brought them prosperity. It was the Arab ruling class and its obscurantist Islamic priests that brought disaster on them. Perhaps there is some truth in this reading of history by a fourteen year old teenager. History is not simple and our understanding of it depends on the narrative framework that colours our views.

A counter-history of Palestine and Israel

Faisal I bin Hussein bin Ali al-Hashimi, King of Iraq, until he died of suspected arsenic poisoning at a young age, was a patron, perhaps a friend of that most arrogant, loud-mouth British imperialist, Thomas Edward Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia. Faisal, a wily Arab desert chief, had a clearer eye for an advantage for his people than most Arab patriots. Like the Japanese and the Koreans, he believed that if the Jews are so smart that they control the world he would want to have Jews on his side. In his letter to Chaim Weizmann he pledged his support for Jewish immigration to Palestine. He wrote “we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home... 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 the civilised peoples of the world." Tragically, some Arab nationalists preferred to long for a distant romanticized past than to live in their time. If you describe the history of the Middle East from the Jewish vantage point you recount a story of Arab hostility, threat to Jewish existence, and ultimately the triumph of Jews over the Arabs. The Palestinian narrative is one of victimhood. But in reality, the story of the Jews, the establishment of a Jewish State, is a minor event in the historic landscape of the Arab world. The Arab story is a struggle against colonialism, and the failure of Arabs to talk to each other and forge an Arab state in the territories formerly ruled by Turks and later by European colonizers, an Arab State, that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Sea, a country bound together by a common language, and shared cultural, religious and historical heritage. Over the years there were attempts to create such an entity. There was a pan-Islamic conference in Jerusalem in 1931 and the Arab Independence Party was formed with the

participation by Palestinian and Iraqi activists to achieve Arab unity and solidarity. They elected Hajj Amin al Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem as their leader. He, far from bringing Arabs together, fomented the Arab revolt that lead to the murder of Jews; instead of noting the new found prosperity of the Arab villagers living near Jewish settlements, he brought destruction on his own people. The attack on the Jewish settlers instigated the formation of Jewish armed resistance,  which ultimately became the strong army that defeated the combined Arab armies. Attempt to form an Arab League was jeopardized by rivalry between Iraq and Egypt. Nasser tried to form an Arab League and brought Egypt and Syria together in the United Arab Republic, but he failed to enlist other Arab states and this joint enterprise only lasted for a short time. Gaddafi attempted to unite Libya, Egypt, Sudan and Syria to form the Federation of Arab Republics, but this like the United Arab Republic failed. The Ba'ath parties of Iraq and Syria, working with socialists and communists failed to unite. The Saudi royals sought to counter the influences of Marxism-Leninism and Arab nationalism promoted Islamism as an alternative. This lead to a bloody religious conflict between sects of Islam and the slaughter of Arabs who were not Muslims. The one thing that all Arab countries agreed on was their hostility to Israel. With the advent of Palestinian nationalisation, the unfortunate dream child of Arafat, the debate was between those who believed that pan-Arab unity would bring about the destruction of Israel and those who thought that the destruction of Israel would bring about Arab unity. Feisal's holistic, broad-minded view was forgotten, yet had the Arabs made use of Jewish know-how, Jewish skills, instead of trying to eliminate Jews, the whole Arab region would have benefited, as the Arabs had befitted from Jewish settlement in the 1920s and 1930s, and all countries that made Jews welcome had benefited. The Middle East, the Fertile Crescent would now be a prosperous region of the world. We can't turn the clock back, history cannot be undone, but looking towards to the future, perhaps this generation, or the next, will learn lessons from the past and embrace Jews, and in particular, the Arab Jews who form a majority of Israelis now, as vital part of the region.

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Ari Shavit's Promised Land

Ari Shavit is a respected journalist, a contributor to Haaretz with an impeccable old Zionist pedigree. His book, My Promised Land (New York 2014) drew fire from critics both on the left and on the right. But although reviewers in the Guardian, the Jewish Journal and The New York Times Review of Books discussed the book in terms of the left and right divide they lost sight of the existential issues at the heart of the book, the survival of the Jewish people in an ever hostile world. 'For as long as I can remember I remember fear' is the opening sentence of the book. 'One day, I dreaded', he continues, '… a mythological tsunami would strike our shores and sweep my Israel away. It would become another Atlantis, lost in the depth of the sea'. The Jews of the Diaspora face an even greater threat. Demography, as Shavit reads it, suggest that Jews face extinction: the Jewish population of Britain, Western Europe and ultimately America will shrink, schools and synagogues will close, the rate of intermarriage will rise, the non-Orthodox Jewish people might gradually disappear. This is a very Zionist view of the Jewish world, after all, the small Wellington Jewish Community in far flung New Zealand survived for 172 years, grew and shrunk over this time, but in its modest small way continues to thrive and if this is true of Wellington it is likely to be even more true of the large Jewish communities of America, Europe, Australia and South Africa. Of more concern, however, for Shavit, is the survival of the essence of the Zionist vision that was the driving force of the modern day political miracle that is the State of Israel. A small, underdeveloped, backward province of the Ottoman Empire, was transformed into a country of Jews, its Jewish population increased ten fold over its seventy years of existence, it became a dynamic economic, scientific, cultural and military power. But there was a great cost involved in this. The Palestinian inhabitants of the land who were driven out paid this cost. Yes, they were driven out, not left voluntarily as the lies fed to me by generation of Zionist propagandists told me. The price was also paid by the immigrants from Arab lands, many of whom left behind comfortable lives, respected stations in society, to be considered second rate citizens in a country dominated by an Ashkenazi Zionist elite, and was paid by survivors of the European Holocaust whose cultural values and their sense of loss were not appreciated by the Zionist pioneers who wanted to build a land of new muscular Jews without the baggage of the old world. And the price was paid in the currency of moral ambivalence. Israel became a coloniser, an oppressor, an occupier of other people, a people of torturers, prison guards, thugs, and thieves. The country changed from a land of idealists, of exemplary moral rectitude, to a country of opportunists, hedonists, with no values other than materialism. The country became divided, with huge gulfs between settlers and peacenicks, orthodox obscurantists who live in an enclosed medieval world and enlightened people in the vanguard of modern enlightenment, people who harbour nostalgia for the uncorrupted vision of early Zionists and corrupt politicians and businessmen who are only out for themselves, and between a younger generation who are out to enjoy life while they can and an older generation who live with the memory of sacrifices.

Shavit describes all this through personal accounts of his own grandfather's commitment to leave his comfortable home in England and settle in Palestine, stories of early kibbutz settlers, soldiers, Arabs who lost their homes and soldiers who drove them out, farmers who grew Jaffa oranges that dominated the European orange market, industrialists who grew a small home based dairy operation into a large multinational corporation, the leading pilot who built a vast software enterprise, settlers who occupy land that belong to others and liberal proponents of peace between Jews and Arabs who would remove these settlements. It is a story of people who turned Israel into the dynamic, economically successful melting pot told through riveting accounts of how people remember events that change Israeli society. But the end of the books, when the Shavit meditates on the present and the future is disappointing. There is no room for nostalgic for the values of a past that is no more. The world moved on and is moving on. It would be disappointing if Israel would still be the country of fifty years ago. There is no peace and no prospect of peace until Israel faces the dark shadows of its past, its treatment of the Arabs they drove out, its treatment of its immigrants from various parts of the world. But Arabs will also have to face their historic mistakes. And the likelihood of this happening any time soon is remote. A hundred years ago King Feisal could talk to Chaim Weitzman and discuss the benefits that Jewish immigration would bring to the Arab world, but Arab nationalism destroyed Feisal's level-headed sensible understanding of the realities of the Middle East and the House of Feisal itself. Nationalism was a poison imported from European romanticism to replace colonialism. As to the Jews, a fear of the future that Shavit starts his book with, is a good thing. Fear, the threat of persecution is the glue that holds the Jewish people together. As long as Jewish people accept that killing Jews is not on, it is not acceptable and it has dire consequences the role of Israel is secure.

A Chinese scholar sees the bankruptcy of Europe

I had a busy few weeks, so I had not blogged for for some time and this made me review my reasons for blogging and my reasons for doing anything else. The challenge as I grow older is to keep going and to keep my mind alive and this is a good reason for writing my blogs. I had to make the effort to go to the National Library to hear a talk by Dr. Limin Bai of Victoria University, about Liang Qichao, a Chinese politician, scholar, writer and philosopher. Learning can involve digging deeper and deeper into a hole that you already know is there and it is only its size and depth that you need to explore, or scampering across a wide field tripping over things that you don't know and see how these can broaden your understanding of the bits you do know. Liang Qichao is certainly someone I didn't know, but found that he had a uniquely Chinese perspective on the world, on literature, the role of journalism, and on history. He was a democrat, a political reformer, and for this, he was exiled to Japan. After the changes in the political environment he returned to China, influenced Chinese reformist politics and politicians, but the talk by Dr. Bai focused on Liang's attendance at the Versailles Peace Conference at the end of the First World War and his great disappointment that Chinese claims were disregarded. What he saw in Europe was devastation, ruin, and he shared the view of an American journalist that Europe was bankrupt, morally, spiritually, and economically. He went to Europe to learn from Europe, but concluded that China had a lot to teach Europeans. Later generations saw Liang not as a reformer but as a conservative. Having fomented revolution he came to be opposed to revolution. In this generation there are some who believe that he was right, that China would have been better off had it not had a revolution. Liang, about whom I knew nothing, posed many questions.

A brief history of the first half of the twentieth century

I am talking to senior students of Tokoroa High School this week. They are studying the 'Rise of Hitler' in the context of 'An event in history, its causes and consequences' and they are coming to the Holocaust Centre. I have to assume that they are familiar with the key facts. I am not there to teach them the material that is available to them from textbooks and was, presumably taught by their teacher. I have to somehow relate their topic to the Holocaust, to New Zealand, and to my own personal experiences. We keep being told that it is this personal note that makes the visit to the Holocaust Centre something special. So where should I start? Hitler was just one of a number of dictators who came to prominence in the decades after the First World War. They included Mussolini, Salazar, Franco, Antonescu. Metaxas and Horthy, and perhaps also Dollfus. They rose to power, like Hitler, because society was torn apart by conflict between those who tried to maintain traditional order, and those who wanted to overthrow that, inspired by the Russian Revolution and ultimately Communism. Going back further, the war was caused by colonialism, the underlying belief that industrial capitalism needed colonies for both markets and raw materials. Countries that did not have colonies were left behind and would be eclipsed. To survive, advanced industrial states needed colonies, and they carved up the world into spheres of influence. The war left winners and losers, and a huge number of casualties as well as disgruntled soldiers who felt betrayed, cheated, and disillusioned. The forces on the right, the forces in the middle and the many factions on the left were divided and at loggerheads. The countries became ungovernable and the myth of the supreme commander, the superman, who could restore order became accepted by a large section of society. So what was special about Hitler, and why was his impact on history greater? Compared with other dictators, he was uneducated, with no social status. But he had a vision that he described in his book, Mein Kampf. Being a man of limited education, he swallowed simplified notions of social Darwinism. His vision was founded on superior and inferior races and the right of a superior race, his, the Germans, to dominate and eliminate inferior races. The more irrational Hitler's ideas were, the easier it was to put these across, and their consequences were more lethal. Thus his ruthless treatment of Polish, Russian and Ukrainian people, people who he had hoped would side with him against the oppressive Bolshevik power turned against him as the greater of evils. His medieval superstitious hatred of Jews deprived his Germany of talent that his country very much needed, and concentrating on the murder of Jews in the midst of a war when his efforts should have been focused on pursuing his military aims undermined his war effort. The Jews were like the canaries in the mines, an indication of the disastrous problems facing society, German society in particular, and European society in general. A brief history of Europe is a very rich stew to serve to 17 – 18 year old students, but I hope that they will come away with more questions than answers.