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.