Herbert Gold

When I was young, i.e. 62 years ago, I had vision of becoming a writer. Before writing, writers had to read, therefore I bought issues of New World Writing, a series of anthologies of contemporary literature from many parts of the world, published by Mentor. When we moved house I chucked out most of these, some have disintegrated. Old literary magazines, Landfall, Mate, Island, and London Magazine had to go too. I haven't looked at them all these years, I am unlikely to look at them in my remaining few years, and there is a limited to what I can cram on to my bookshelf in our new home. But New World Writing No. 6 somehow survived, and I took it with me to hospital to read while I waited for my wife, Judy, to come out of her operation. I was prepared for a long wait. New World Writing No. 6 was published in 1954. I was then 20 years old, at Teachers College, a leading member of the Literary Society. I wrote fanciful stories that were perhaps colourful, but had little to do with my life experience. I think that only one of these stories survived, the loss of the others was no great loss to the world of literature. The first of the stories in New World Writing No. 6 was a longish story by Herbert Gold, The Man Who Was Not Wit It. I think that I have heard of Herbert Gold as one of the post-war American Jewish writers like Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, and many other, who injected new colour into American literature. I can't recall reading anything by Herbert Gold, and none of his books are available in the otherwise very well stocked Wellington Public Library. He is largely forgotten, but he is still very much alive, 92 years old, and published in recent years a series of books on growing old, Still Alive, (2008), Not Dead Yet (2011) and When Psychopaths Fall in Love (2015). He is a relic of the generation of hippy writers, the Beat Generation, which included Allen Ginsberg, Anais Nin, as well as Keruac, Burroughs, Kesey, Brautigan and many other. I don't know whether anyone still reads these writers. Their rejection of material values is alien to the present materialistic acquisitive world in which success is measured by wealth and possessions. The Man Who Was Not Wit It raise some questions in my mind about writing, about the nature of fiction. Why was the son of Jewish immigrants who came to Cleveland from Russia, writing about a drop out pick pocket and carnival factotum, who was influenced by an Italian carnival crier. His father cared for him, had ambitions for him, tried to entice him to join him in the trucking business,but he found the meaning of his life in the bohemian existence of a carnival entertainer. Bellow, Malamud, Philip Roth wrote about the world they grew up in. They wrote bout people who tried to make sense of, reconcile the values and aspirations of the American society lived in with the immigrant culture they were imbued with.  Perhaps age 20, I like Herbert Gold, also tried to write about a world that only existed in my imagination, and this is why I did not connect with the world around me. My strange, European roots would have struck no chords with the people among whom I moved.

Why are there anti-Israel Jews

A recent article in the Jerusalem Post looked at the critical attitude towards Israel of some prominent Jews, in particular, Noam Chomsky, Bernie Saunders and George Soros. The article considered the question of hatred and love, but did not touch of the unease many felt in the face of Zionism. If you saw yourself as an emancipated member of a secular, liberal society, Jewish nationalism was anathema. You were an America or Hungarian, or for that matter international stateless intellectual and your Jewishness was merely incidental to who you were. For those of us who experienced the vast disillusionment with the secular, liberal society that we were part of, those of us who felt betrayed by friends, neighbours and compatriots, our Zionist creed was non-negotiable. We were identified with Judaism, we were Jewish and this is how the rest of the world saw us. Facing antisemitism was the natural fate of Jews and confronting this hatred was incumbent on all Jews. Israel and Zionism will be there when the world turns on the comfortable broad minded liberals like Chomsky, Saunders and Soros who will be perceived as the enemies of the societies they live in, the eternal other who can be blamed for the ills of facing their world. As a Zionist I have to accept that there will be Jewish ganevim, there will be Jews whom I don't like, and Israeli politicians whose policies I don't agree with. I don't have to place Israel on a pedestal as a country superior to others, I don't have to attribute to my fellow Jews qualities superior to all other people. If Israel is to be a state like all other states in the community of nations we have to apply the same yardstick as we do to all others. We must not presume that just because Jews hold a special religious role among the myriad of beliefs  that they are in any way on a higher plain. The fact that the Zionist adventure turned into such a successful state, with all its shortcomings and limitations, is akin to a miracle and beyond all expectations of the original founders and dreamers. That like Jews today, the original founders and dreamers could not agree among themselves is part of this amazing story.

What do we commemorate

Over the last few weeks Donald Maurice and Inbal Megiddo of the New Zealand School of Music put together an interesting and challenging programme for this year's Kristallnacht Commemoration Concert. This concert has little to do with Kristallnacht, just as Yom HaShoah has little to do with the anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising or the UN Holocaust Memorial Day with the liberation of Auschwitz. These all commemorate something much more than the dates of these significant events. Yom HaShoah is part of the Israeli Zionist narrative of 'never again', Jews will never again go to their deaths as sheep to the slaughter. The UN Holocaust Memorial Day is a recognition of the great tragedy that was brought about by the denial of universal human rights.
So what is the Kristallnacht Commemoration concert about. First of all, it is about human experience told in music; not speeches, not ceremonial gestures, candle lighting, just music. Only two of the items to be performed have a direct link to Kristallnacht, Richard Fuchs's setting of Eliot's Song of Simeon and Dachaulied composed by two prisoners as they marched to Dachau. 
Richard Fuchs was a successful, prosperous architect living in Karlsruhe, Germany, but in 1938, like many German Jews, he realized that he had to emigrate. On Kristallnacht he was arrested and imprisoned in Dachau. and was only released when he secured a visa to come to New Zealand. Until 1938 all his songs were set to texts by German authors. As he was planning to move to an English speaking country he clearly thought it appropriate to write music to a setting of a poem by possibly the greatest contemporary English poet, T. S Eliot. The fact that A Song of Simeon was about a New Testament personality and had a clear religious overtone was perhaps less significant than that Fuchs identifies with some of the lines of the poem:

Grant us thy peace.
I have walked many years in this city,
Kept faith and fast, provided for the poor,
Have given and taken honour and ease.
There went never any rejected from my door.
Who shall remember my house, where shall live my children’s children
When the time of sorrow is come?

The other works in the programme are either by composers who were murdered during the Holocaust, works by two composers who were imprisoned in Theresienstadt and later killed in Auschwitz, The Finale of the opera The Emperor of Atlantis by Victor Ullman and Gideon Klein's String Trio. Mieczyslaw Weinberg survived the Holocaust because he fled from Poland to the Soviet Union, but most of his family were murdered. He continually referred in his music to his early life in Warsaw, his Cello Sonata will have echoes of that lost world. Then there will be works by contemporary composers who a generation, perhaps two generations later explore the tragedy of the Holocaust through their music, Lori Laitman's Five Vedem Songs for voice, setting of poems by boys who were murdered,  Strings of Love by Boris Pigovat whose grandparents were among the 31,000 killed at Babi Yar, outside Kiev. Laurence Sherr's Cello Sonata, which uses themes of Jewish resistance. Thus each of these works reflect a different aspect of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was not one event but a whole cluster of events and individual tragedies, so it is appropriate that its commemoration should embrace the many aspects of these tragedies.
 

To fast or not to fast

My father was a simple man, not a learned scholar like Elyse Goldstein of Toronto. Elyse Goldstein wrote a blog published in the Times of Israel in which she explained why she stopped fasting on Tisha B'Av. She doesn't mourn for the destruction of the Temple. Knocking those old and corrupt priest off their perch was a good thing. All the argument about women praying at the wall only leads to trouble. She has no regrets about the destruction of the Temple. Perhaps she has nothing in her life to make her confront the big issues of her existence though fasting and commemoration. My father on the other hand did fast. He would have described himself as an agnostic. He was brought up in a traditional Jewish home, but the question of the existence of God didn't bother him. It was how to live his life and the purpose of living that mattered to him. When faced with a miracle he recognized it. He was fated to survive, to live and to live for a purpose. Early in November 1944 as a slave labourer, he was marched from Budapest, Hungary, towards the Austrian border to dig trenches to stop the invading Soviet tanks.  He then went on to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria. When the camp was full to overflowing with prisoners who arrived from Hungary, a subcamp was set up in Gunskirchen 37 km from the main camp. In April 1945, a few weeks before the end of the war, my father, with 17,000 others was transferred from the main camp to Gunskirchen, Only some 5000 of these men were still alive when the camp was liberated on May 4, 19 The forced march there took as long as three days because it was a march of dying people obliged to carry their dead companions along with them. While the column of men was trudging along in the snow through the narrow alpine pass, one of the soldiers, perhaps only a teenager, a bewildered member of the Hitler Jugend who escorted the group, took pot shot at the men just for the thrill of it.  In the instant when the shot was fired my father stumbled and was left behind for dead on the ground. When the column passed and was out of sight my father got up, and having no alternative, joined the next column of Jewish walking skeletons. My father survived through a miracle, the amazing miracle that the shot missed him. He commemorated this personal miracle for the rest of his life by fasting on the anniversary of that day. He came face to face with the personal miracle of survival. Those of us, who have not had such a personal encounter can only experience the tragedies of the lives of others through fasting and appreciating that we survived while Jews like us were massacred over the generations. It behoves us to remember and through fasting experience the destruction of the Temple, the annihilation of Jerusalem and the murder of Jews in ancient Palestine, and then in various parts of Europe from the early Medieval persecution by the Visigoths, to the Crusades, the expulsion from Spain and Portugal, the destruction of the Jewry of Ukraine by the Cossacks, the pogroms in Russia, the slaughter of Jews on an industrial scale during the Holocaust. When my father fasted on the anniversary of his miraculous survival he knew that fasting has nothing to do with priests of old, or the equality of women; it is about acknowledging the miracle.

A golden age

I watched last night, on my brother's recommendation, Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. It is a weird film. OK, learned critics loved it, it has nice if nostalgic and selected shots of Paris with everything modern and ugly excised, and charming actors impersonating famous people from the past, but the satire and the nostalgia for a golden age didn't work for me.  Hemingway, Faulkner, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stern were in Paris in the 1920s because it was a cheap place to live in and you could get booze legally. Some of them were talented people, others fed of the talents of others. There was a temporary flowering of the arts, as there was in Vienna in the years immediately before the First World War, in Berlin during the Weimar Era, the Belle Epoque from 1871 in Paris, in New York in the 1960s, but I don't buy into such nostalgia. The period was overcast by the shadow of the war and the unsettled sense of injustice, resentment and disillusionment. The Belle Epoque followed the defeat of France in its war against Germany, and was marred by the ugly divisions that were manifested in the Dreyfus case. Golden ages are periods of history without major wars such as the present. There are and were bloody regional wars, Vietnam, the Balkans, Chechnya Iraq and Afghanistan, and numerous conflicts in Africa between countries and tribes many of us had never heard of and certainly had never given much thought to, but the conflicts on the scale of the two World Wars had been avoided. Compared with the history of past centuries, we live in a period of peace. Woody Allen can poke fun at Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Picasso and the rest of the notable characters of that period, and in particular, poke fun at the pompous academic know all, but spare me the nostalgia.

The transformation of America 

A few days ago I watched a documentary about Noam Chomsky, the possibly misguided guru of linguistic theory, but certainly a prominent spokesman for intellectuals who don't like what's going on in the America around them. There was little in what he said that I didn't know, but he had a way of putting things together, organizing his argument to make his points clear. He talked about 10 points that contributed to the transformation of America that essentially made the rich richer and the gap between rich and poor greater. America was a fairer society in the 1960s. Richard Nixon was the last President who believed in the ideals of the New Deal, a fair go for the common man. After Nixon, the rich elite took steps to enhance their power and wealth at the expense of the rest of the Americans. In the 1960s America was a manufacturing country. People made things, cars for example. Gradually with the transformation of economic theories, libertarianism, free market principles, manufacturing was transferred to lower wage economies, China, Mexico, India, wherever it was cheapest to make things. Those employed in America in making things were displaced by people in places where they were prepared to accept lower wages. In exchange for exporting manufactured good, America imported poverty. In the course of achieving such an outcome, America destroyed its infrastructure by underinvesting, destroyed its educational system by defunding, altered the political landscape by removing limits to politcal contribution and thus ppolitical influence, created a philosophical context in which such changes became not only acceptable, but desirable. The creation of wealth through manufacture was replaced by financial manipulation. Financial controls were removed, with the result that financial collapses occurred, something that never happened during times of stringent financial regulations. Financial collapse led to the impoverishment of the already poor and the middle class, while the wealth of the rich were protected through the principle of 'too large to fail' and large financial institutions were rescued by the state. Socialism for the rich, the poor subsidised the losses of the rich. Financial manipulation also enabled the creation of vast monopolies, which stifled innovation. The response of monopolies threatened by innovative start-ups is to buy them and stifle them. Monopolies are of their nature averse to risks. Trump and his large number of followers are the product of the sense of alienation and disengagement that is the result of this transformation of American economy. Chomsky may not always be entirely right, but he is worth listening to.

Too much music

Yesterday I went to a piano duet recital, by two talented Wellington musicians, Fiona McCabe and Catherine Norton. For me, the highlight was Schubert's Grand rondeau, D951. I don't recall ever having heard this piece before. Schubert wrote it five weeks before he died. It is a rondo using a gentle, song like theme. The music just sprouted from the 29 year old Schubert. In the last year of his life he wrote his greatest instrumental works, the piano trios, his three great last sonatas, his cello quintet, and the song cycle Winterreisse, one of the most moving song cycles ever written. The slow movement of the A Major sonata and the slow movement of the Cello Quintet are some of the most melancholy pieces I can think of. Although suggesting that Schubert had his own forthcoming death in mind is romanticising these works, they have a gentle, sad, acceptance of fate  that can only be captured in music, or perhaps more accurately, only the young Schubert, on the brink of his own death could capture. Much of the rest of the music of his last years is sunny, cheerful, but there is always a tinge of sadness that creeps though. Music just poured out of him, even though he felt ill for much of the time. He gorged himself on music and wanted more. He wanted to learn counterpoint. He didn't think he was good enough. What a wonderfully humble little man he was. Since yesterday my mind is full of Schubert's late works. I have listened to the A Major Sonata, the Cello Quintet, the F minor Fantasie for Piano Duet. If there would be music at a Jewish funeral I would select my music from among these pieces, though would not want to rush their perforamnce. 

Israel and music

Inbal Megiddo, the wonderful cellist who teaches at the New Zealand School of Music, gave an interesting and thought provoking talk last night on the role of music in Judaism and Israel. She talked about music in ancient times in the Temple, but it is music in the emerging Israel and the role of music in nation building that was of special interest. The early generation of Jewish composers, the generation of Ernst Bloch drew inspiration from traditional Jewish liturgical and popular klezmer music. The following generation gathered the music of the various ethnic groups in Israel, as Bartok and Vaughan Williams did in their time in their lands. The younger generation are no longer self-conscious about writing Jewish music. They are just contemporary composers. If they draw on the wealth of different musical traditions around them these are building blocks of the language of their music. As important, however, as the works of Israeli composers, performers have a significant role to play in bringing the various people of the land of Israel together. Inbal, a former member of the Western- Eastern Divan Orchestra talked about the orchestra that brings together young musicians from the countries of the Middle East, Egypt, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, to make music together, and incidentally, establish friendships. She talked about the Arab Orchestra of Nazareth that employs Russian Jewish musicians to supplement the Arab musicians playing traditional Arab musical instruments. The orchestra brings together Muslims, Christians and Jews. She mentioned the Polyphony Conservatory, based in Nazareth, with a branch in Jaffa. Most of its 130 students are Palestinian Israelis, but among the students there are  Israeli kibbutzniks who are brought together by their love of music. Perhaps it is in music that we can see the future of a peaceful Middle East. There may come a time when Arabs get sick of murdering Arabs, Palestinians stop murdering Israelis and Israelis murdering Palestinians. and the region will live in harmony and cooperation as they do when making music in their orchestras. 

The future as a guide to the present.

We were fortunate in Wellington to have a visit by Prof. Mark Steiner of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He gave a short talk about one of his many areas of expertise, Rabbi Israel Salanter. One of the great things about knowing so little is that I can always learn a lot. Prof. Steiner talked about Salanter's view on the conundrum of why good people do bad things. (I hope that I got the drift of his talk right). He said that the reason for this is that people are disconnected from the future. He used the analogy of doctors smoking, even though they know its consequences. Why smoke if you know that it is going to kill you? Why do evil when you know its evil consequences? This is a question that is very relevant in considering the Holocaust. The perpetrators, or even the bystanders, were mostly ordinary human beings, who committed evil deeds or condoned them. The question that this raised in my mind is: if such disconnect with the future makes evil acts by good people possible, is there a similar impact on people by a disconnect with the past? We can't know the future, but we can know the past, though that is capable of various interpretations. Would a connection with the past lead to good actions?  And how can we connect with the past in a way that this forges universal connections? These are big unanswered questions. But even if we know the consequences of past actions we may not learn the appropriate lessons. The Americans thought that by changing the political regime they can achieve geopolitical aims, and got bogged down in the Vietnam War. Yet a generation later, wanting to impose 'democracy' a concept not known in the region, they got bogged down in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, You could argue that they got the Ayatollahs in Iran because they thwarted the democratic aspirations of the people a generation earlier. Look to the past and consider the future.

Leonard Cohen

Dear Leonard (or should I call you Len?)

Last night I watched a ten year old documentary about you. It touched me more than I would have imagined it would. You are eight days older than I am, like I, you are Jewish, and not only Jewish, but also a Cohen, though you come from a more distinguished learned Jewish family. My roots are pretty humble, a small time country cobbler on one side, a wine wholesaler on the other. No talmudic scholars in the family tree, though there are synagogue office holders. Our early lives were, however, very different. You grew up in peaceful Quebec, while my life was shaped by war-torn Hungary. In the New Zealand where I landed, I was always something of an outsider, tolerated, even respected, but never one of the in crowd. Like you, I had modest literary ambitions, wrote stories for the Teachers College Students/ magazine. I think I might have been its editor, so had the inside running, wrote poetry, a folder of which I gave to a fairly well-known poet for his opinion. He promptly lost it and I kept no copies. Perhaps no great loss, the poems were probably all rubbish, but posterity will never know. I came across you for the first time when my elderly colleague, John Elphick sold your early books of verse in the mid 1960s. John Elphick represented Jonathan Cape, the leading literary publishers. John, a very earnest patriotic Englishman, who was a dedicated fire watcher during the war, had little sympathy for some of the Jonathan Cape authors, Joseph Heller and his anti-war Catch 22, and your books. As everyone knew, books of poetry don't sell, poetry is hard to understand, it is acquired taste for long-haired intellectuals, obscure, like Eliot, Yeats, Auden, Spender, MacNeice. Yours were different, they were personal, easy to read, and unlike other books of poetry, they sold in large numbers much to the amazement of John Elphick. Somehow our interests, yours and mine, went their separate ways. In so far as I continued to take an interest in literature, I leaned towards the heavy end, while you wrote for the common man, and the young common man and woman for that matter, I was dismissive of writing, like that of he beat poets, and the whole bohemian counterculture, that shared personal angst with the rest of the world. And then you took up song writing and singing. When I was young, I frequented a student cafe where people played guitars and sang songs about the working man, or the war, and always the underdog, lovely gentle songs. Although I had a lot of time for the young people around me, tolerant, free thinking, who by and large shared my world view, I was never part of the crowd.

I took no interest in your kind of very personal music,that is easy to listen to. I was strictly classical, the highlight of my musical experiences were the late Beethoven quartets. As an old man now, I am learning from my children, and this is why I took the trouble to watch the programme about you. I have to admit that I was very taken with your music. You were fortunate with your arrangers and the young performers who sang your songs. I don't know whether your songs have deep meanings, in most cases I couldn't follow your words, but they were lovely gentle music. So Len, it was a pleasure to make your acquaintance.

To forget or remember

Last week I had the privilege of talking to a group of visitors from Warkworth, North of Auckland, at the Holocaust Centre. They were older people from a retirement village and I had to think of something different to talk about from my talks to school students, which usually relate to specific topics within the curriculum areas. So I talked about why the Holocaust Centre came into being. For many years people didn't talk about the Holocaust. Survivors wanted to move on with their lives and didn't want to relive their horrendous experiences, people at large found the accounts of the Holocaust too troubling and disturbing and simply didn't want to be upset. Survivors didn't want to talk, but they also found that people didn't want to listen, didn't want to know inconvenient truths. A generation later, fifty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, a younger generation became interested in the horrendous events that their parents tried to forget. So when we had a service in the synagogue commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz the synagogues was almost full, but largely full of people I didn't know, people who were not part of the Jewish community. This event that brought home to me that the Holocaust touched a great many lives, not just Jewish lives, and that it was not a Jewish story, it was a universal, or at least a Western European story. The rest is history. I tapped on the shoulder some very able people, we formed a committee to establish a Holocaust Centre, which has been successful beyond the wildest dreams of its founders. Visitors, school groups come from all corners of the,  country, visitors from overseas compliment it on the way its small space is used to bring home the essential account of the Holocaust, and make this relevant to New Zealand here and now. But the question of remembering continues to be in the forefront of our thinking. The stories of survivors are important, but those killed must not be forgotten. 'Never again' is too simplistic a lesson. We need to talk about the nature of civilization, and in particular, about the disintegration of a liberal, enlightened culture that unravelled in the wake of the First World War and the events that preceded it. The ideals embodied in the French Revolution, 'Liberty, Fraternity, Equality', which largely underpinned the consensus of European culture in the nineteenth century, were subverted. They were sacrificed to causes like Nationalism, Communism, Racial superiority, dreams of past glory, and to achieve the goals of these causes whatever means were needed were justified to attain the greater end. Talking to the present generation about the Holocaust we have to talk not only about the horrendous tragedy, but also question the values we hold, explore their relevance, and understand the underlying principles of Western civilization and its consensus about the ideals of European liberalism.

Robots are taking over

It is currently fashionable to be concerned about robots taking over jobs, putting people out of work. There was an article about this in a recent NZ Listener, there was a BBC programme about it. I imagine the discussion is not that different from that during the early years of the industrial revolution, Spinning Jenny making skilled weavers unemployed. People losing their jobs, being unemployed, losing their livelihood and their self esteem is nothing new. But we may be better able to cope with this now than we were in the early nineteenth century, or even during the 1920s and 1930s, when automation replaced skilled tradesmen. There is a discussion going on, a recent article in the New Yorker, about Universal Basic Income. The nature of capitalism is evolving. The concept of the capitalist owning the means of production and the worker hiring out his labour is no longer a simple relationship. Capitalism is increasingly about monopoly and not about owning the means of production, monopolies undermine efficiency, access to capital and credit increases profits rather than production, or for that matter, in novation. With the gradual advent of capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the feudal relationships of mutual responsibility broke down. The labourer who hired out his labour had to work or starve. He was probably driven off the land, his link to the land was severed,  and he, she, the children had to find employment to survive. The worth of his labour could be negotiated. The idea of the undeserving poor, the ones who dropped off the poverty ladder was born. Wealth was the reward of hard work and virtuous life. Yet in this day and age, where wealth is often the outcome of monopolistic strategies and a measure of good luck the equation between wealth and virtue, or for that matter, poverty and idleness no longer holds. Fortunately the world is becoming a better place and old certainties about capital and labour, hard work and idleness, employment and redundancy are breaking down. There are currents of thought abroad that might tide the present generation through to new concepts of social relationship and self worth.

Sir Julius Vogel at 180

The United Synagogues (London) is commemorating on Monday, 27 June, the 180th anniversary of the birth of Sir Julius Vogel, and the 140th year of the end of his Premiership as New Zealand's eighths Prime Minister. Vogel is remembered for his policy of borrowing for railway construction and public works. The policy brought the colony out of its economic stagnation and was very popular at the time, although later it was blamed for a period of subsequent recession. Vogel was a man of ideas, and although he is now mainly remembered as a politician, he was also the founder of the Otago Daily Times, the only remaining independent metropolitan newspaper in New Zealand. He was also a writer with imagination way ahead of his time. I wrote the following about him as a novelist in Jewish lives in New Zealand : a history / Leonard Bell and Diana Morrow, editors. Auckland, N.Z. : Godwit, 2012.

Julius Vogel (1835 – 99)

Julius Vogel, playwright and novelist, is much better known as a big spending, think big Prime Minister, ¹ He might have been a shrewd, at times divisive, politician, but at heart he was a writer and by profession a journalist. He founded the Otago Daily Times with W. H. Cutten, and hired Benjamin Farjeon, another Jew from London, whom he might have known from the Australian goldfields, as his manager.

Vogel always nurtured his ambition as a writer. Before entering politics, soon after his arrival in New Zealand, he tried his hand as a playwright, dramatizing, Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon,² one of the most popular English novels of its day. The plot includes madness, bigamy, attempted murder, and seduction. The play was widely performed.

After his defeat in politics, Vogel retired and moved back to London. Severely handicapped by gout and deafness, he spent the final 11 years of his life in a wheelchair. In his retirement he wrote Anno Domini 2000: or Woman's Destiny, (1889)³, usually regarded as New Zealand's first science fiction novel. There was an international vogue for futuristic stories, and Vogel had hoped to make money from his book⁴. In this he was disappointed, he earned a mere £50, but he found an outlet in his writing for his political ideas and his vivid imagination. In the world of the future, poverty would disappear.

‘The writer has a strong conviction that every human being is entitled to a sufficiency of food and clothing and to decent lodging whether or not he or she is willing to or capable of work.’ … ‘An incalculable increase of wealth, position, and authority would accompany an ameliorated condition of the proletariat, so that the scope of ambition would be proportionately enlarged’⁵.

And he posed the question:

‘Should human knowledge, human wants, and human skill continue to advance to an extent to which no limit could be put, or should the survival of the fittest and strongest be fought out in a period of anarchy?’⁶

‘The British dominions had been consolidated into the empire of United Britain’⁷ and women took over the prominent leadership roles.

‘It has, in fact, come to be accepted that the bodily power is greater in man, and the mental power larger in woman. So to speak, woman has become the guiding, man the executive, force of the world. Progress has necessarily become greater because it is found that women bring to the aid of more subtle intellectual capabilities faculties of imagination that are the necessary adjuncts of improvement.’⁸

In the story, a young woman, Hilda Fitzherbert, the Member of Parliament for Dunedin in the Imperial government becomes one of the most influential politicians, an advisor of the Emperor. An eminent Australian soldier, Lord Reginald Paramatta, is in love with her, but his love is not reciprocated, and to have her in his power he plots to overthrow the Empire. The plot is foiled by the Emperor’s spymaster, ‘a very remarkable man. He was on his mother's side of an ancient Jewish family, possessing innumerable branches all over the world’⁹ With Semitic features, he was ‘a tall, slender man, apparently of about thirty-five years of age. His complexion was very dark; and his silky, curly hair was almost of raven blackness. His features were small and regular, and of that sad but intellectual type common to some of the pure-bred Asiatic races.’¹⁰ Mockingly, this saviour of the Empire describes himself as coming ‘of a race of money-lenders’¹¹

Vogel had a visionary imagination. He wrote about air cruisers, driven by engines much like jet engines, the inventor of which was a young Jewish woman, niece of the spymaster. He envisages large irrigation schemes in the South Island, electricity as the prime source of domestic light and heat, hydro-electricity as a major source of power. In political developments, he foresaw a global federation of financial interests that maintained world peace, taxation as the great divisive issue threatening to break up the empire¹², and foresaw the resolution of the issue of Irish Home Rule. There is no limit to Vogel’s seemingly far-fetched ideas.

The Southland Times, reviewing Vogel’s book said:

‘In " Anno Domini 2000," it is easy to detect the hand of a beginner. The plot, if plot it can be called, is not very ingenious, the dialogue is not very brilliant and the characterisation is decidedly poor. The whole story is moreover ridiculously improbable.¹³’

What is interesting is that Vogel, who was reminded of his Jewish identity throughout his life, whom his political opponents described as the “wandering Jew”¹⁴, whose newspaper, the Otago Daily Times, was referred to as ‘that despicable literary dish clout’, “the jews Harp”, created a positive image of Jewishness in one of the leading characters of his work of fantasy.

1 'VOGEL, Sir Julius, K.C.M.G.', from An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, edited by A. H. McLintock, originally published in 1966.

2 Raewyn Dalziel, Julius Vogel: Business Politician, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 1986, p.39

3 Julius Vogel (1889) Anno Domini 2000 - A Woman's Destiny or Woman’s Destiny, London, Hutchinson & Co.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Domini_2000_-_A_Woman%27s_Destiny

4 Roger Robinson, Introduction to Vogel, J. (2000). Anno Domini 2000, or, Woman’s destiny. Auckland, Exisle.

5 Vogel, Anno Domini, p. 329-330

6 ibid p. 19

7 ibid p. 32

8 ibid p. 29

9 ibid p. 126

10 ibid p. 130

11 ibif p. 210

12 ibid p. 153 ‘maintaining the Empire as a whole entailed the sacrifice of regulating the taxation so as to suit the least wealthy portions’.

13 Southland Times , Issue 10164, 23 May 1889.

14 Dalziel, Vogel p.47

Labyrinth of lies - the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of 1963

Went to see the German film, Labyrinth of lies last night, and despite what various critics said I found it a very powerful and thought provoking film. Critics who expected this to be a deep film about Auschwitz, or a courtroom drama, Le Carre thriller or action movie, profound exploration of characters to engage with are bound to be disappointed. This is about facing the past. A young prosecutor, Johann Radman (Alexander Fehling) is appointed by the Chief prosecutor, Fritz Bauer,  to the job to bring those who committed atrocities in Auschwitz to justice because he was young enough, born in 1930, not to have been compromised. It is Fritz Bauer, only a minor character in the story, but in real life the instigator of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, who is the key to what the film is about. The fictitious young investigator puts his efforts into capturing Mengele and bringing him to trial, because he thinks that Mengele encapsulates the horrors of Auschwitz, but Bauer instructs him to forget about Mengele, Mengele was known to live in Argentina, and to visit his family in Germany regularly, but has powerful friends to protect him. Instead the prosecutor should go after the 8000 other Nazis involved in running the camp and committing atrocities. The point Bauer argued, and kept stressing for all his professional lives, was that the atrocities were not committed by monsters, but by ordinary unremarkable people, teachers, bakers, foresters, civil servants, and all who supported the regime and condoned its actions were guilty. Radmann, the young prosecutor and the other characters in the film are fictitou, except for Fritz Bauer, who was himself incarcerated in a concentration camp, escaped to Denmark then to Sweden. After the war he returned to what was by then the Federal Republic of Germany, and entered the justice system, becoming District Attorney in Essen, based in Frankfurt, and there, controversially, he initiated the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials. There were many who believed that it was best to let bygones be bygones, let sleeping dogs lie, but Bauer, a friend of Willi Brandt, considered it important to face the past, no matter how dark, and was greatly disappointed that the way the Frankfurt trials were presented, those found guilty were depicted as monsters, out of the ordinary, not typical average German citizens.

Understanding poverty

Katherine Boo is an American writer, an investigative journalist, who wrote about the disadvantaged. She is married to an Indian academic and this is how she ended up visiting India and spending long stretches of time there. She described here experiences in her book, Behind the beautiful forevers. A small, blond American woman, she stood out in the Annawadi slum adjacent to the Mumbai airport. Making use of translators, she got to know the people there, the boy who was a successful dealer in trash until he was falsely accused of instigating a murder, the younger boy who made a very precarious living by scavenging, the woman whose ambition was to become a local politician and slum landlord, the girl with no prospects except to get married to the man her parents chose for her, She writes about children, orphans who somehow survive by their wits. She also writes about corrupt policemen, who demand bribes for doing their job, corrupt politicians who divert money given by international charities for education into their won pockets, the public prosecutor who tries to extort payment for mitigating the prosecution for a crime that was never committed. It is all powerful stuff. We get to know people who somehow survive in conditions and circumstances that to us, living a comfortable middle class life in a Western society seem unimaginable. The children play games, families quarrel, neighbours fight. They live from day to day for a glimmer of hope, the hope that the slum will not be bulldozed just yeat, or their part of the slum will be the last to me removed, that somewhere, out in the country, if they made a little money by collecting rubbish they might have a better life. It is grim reading, but Katherine Boo never makes judgements. She describes people and their circumstances as they are, with understanding and compassion. A wonderful book.

Hungary 2 - Austria 0

I got up today at 4.00 am to watch the Hungary v. Austria game in the the Euro Cup competition. I wake up in the middle of the night any way, so it was no special hardship, but I watched the game to share it with my late father. One of my childhood memories is listening to the commentary on the Hungary v. Austria game with my father approx 1947 or 1948. There was, of course, no television, we listened to the commentary on the radio. This was the biggest annual sporting fixture. The commentator was Pluhar whose distinctive voice was so well known that people imitated him. He covered sporting events for generations. Football played an important part in my father's life. He witnessed the ticker parade when the Ferencvaros football team was carried on people's shoulders through the Ninth District, the Ferencvaros, after their European tour in 1911 - 1912 when they beat  teams in Hamburg, Bremen, Berlin, and the biggest scalp, the English Premier side, Woking in London. My father was 10 years old. Celebrated players, Imre Schlosser, whose playing career spanned over twenty years, Gyuri Sarosi, who played for Ferencvaros for eighteen years and his younger brother, Bela, not to mention more recent players, Puskas, Bozsik, Hidegkuti,  were part of the family lore. Ferencvaros was a sports club with a number of amateur and youth teams and my father played for one of these teams. He was a skilled footballer even in middle age. I myself kicked a football around on the waste ground in Budapest with friends, on the tiny enclosed courtyard of my school, the Jewish Gimnazium, and when we moved to New Zealand I played soccer, (in New Zealand football is rugby and soccer is football) and my great ambition was to get into the first, or at least the second eleven of my school. Those were the days when the Hungarian national team, lead by Puskas, was the best in the world. It was perhaps a great disappointment to the football coach of our school that I was not made of the same mettle. I worked hard to get fit, pounded the pavement every evening, and though I was a puny teenager with a slightly dickie heart, I made one of the school teams. Once I was even mentioned in the Manawatu Evening Standard, commended for my enthusiastic defence. School sport was big news in Palmerston North. I  played football when I came to Wellington to university. My footballing career came to an end when on one occasion I couldn't find the ground we were meant to be playing at. Who knew where Macalister Park was and how to get there by tram? So when I turned on the TV today to watch the Hungarian team play Austria in Bordeaux there was more to it than watching just any ordinary sporting encounter. I relived part of my life and shared it with my father. That Hungary won against great odds was a bonus.

Inequality and its consequences

It is always a pleasure to read in the NZ Listener the column by Rachel Morris, a New Zealander who is executive editor of Huffington Post Highline. Being an expat, she can see things that are not obvious to those of us living inside the national cocoon. We, that is, the New Zealand media, talk about rising house prices, people sleeping in garages or in their cars, child poverty and deprivation on a scale that New Zealanders have not experienced perhaps since the depression of the 1930s. We all, including politicians, agreed that this is terrible, unacceptable, and then file the problem as too big to tackle. Yet it is not the size of the problem but the political will to solve it that is the issue. The consequence of rising house prices is that wealth is shifted from those working for wages to those who have capital which they can invest in property. The inequality that this leads to changes the way people live, both individually and collectively. There are the "haves" and the "have nots" and their lives diverge further and further, with empathy shrinking across the divide. In the US both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump tapped into this sense of disengagement, and in the UK Jeremy Corbyn and some of his less savoury allies also give political voice to this discontent. In New Zealand, however, there is no appetite for radical responses to the obvious social problems besetting New Zealand society. The housing crisis is eminently soluble. The first Labour government faced an acute housing shortage after the war and they set about building thousands of  state houses, borrowed money, worked with the builder, James Fletcher, and created whole new suburbs that seemed like workingman's paradises. The houses were well designed, strongly built, didn't leak, and were developed around attractive public spaces and communal facilities. If the government would build a few thousand houses, making use of cheap credit available to it, the housing shortage would be solved and the escalating housing prices would come to a halt. Some investors would get burned, the value of their investments would decline and in some cases they would lose their equity. The banks would panic about bad loans. But people, "hard-working New Zealanders", people working for wages, would have roofs over their heads. If there would be a Labour Party in New Zealand that values its heritage, the heritage of Michael Joseph Savage, it would advocate such a radical measure which would do much to alleviate poverty and narrow the gap between the rich and the poor. But this would mean trampling on libertarian sacred cows. It would look to solutions to social problems to the government, not to private enterprise and the market. It would accept that the government and bureaucracy can deliver needed social outcomes more efficiently than private enterprise. The NZ Labour Party lacks the gumption of a Bernie Sanders and risk turning against the prevailing libertarian political canon. 

Salinger and Catcher in the Rye

Last week I watched a documentary about J. D. Salinger. He was one of the generation of young American  writers who went to war and returned traumatised to a greater or lesser degree. Some wrote straight war stories, largely based on their own experiences, Irwin Shaw's Young Lions, Herman Wouk's Caine Mutiny, Norman Mailer's Naked and the dead. Some wrote books reflecting their disenchantment with the war as a great patriotic effort, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5, Joseph Heller's Catch 22, but Salinger expressed his disenchantment differently. in Catcher in the Rye he got inside the head of a rich, spoiled seventeen year old student, a dropout from a prestigous school, who saw the world as one inhabited by phonies. Ambition, success were meaningless for him. He did not want to emulate his brother, a successful writer, who sold out to Hollywood, or his father, a successful lawyer. He could only relate to his younger sister, the embodiment of childish innocence. Generations of teenagers identifies with Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of Catcher in the Rye. Mark Chapman shot John Lennon, then proceeded to read Catcher in the Rye. John Hickley, who attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan had this book with him. Holden Caulfield and I were about the same age when the book was published in 1951 and I must have read the book in my time. I certainly read Franny and Zooey in the New Yorker some years later and I was interested in Salinger as a writer. I appreciated a kind of perfection in his writing. The characters come alive. It is not the story, not the action that matters but the people who inhabit the book. Catcher in the Rye takes place over two days, and nothing much happens, but the narrative is so complete, it would not be possible to add anything to it. Yet I, as a seventeen year old, or perhaps a few years older when I read the book, could not identify with Holden Caulfield. To me he was a spoiled rich brat who had nothing to complain about, he should have got his act together. The world was threatened by nuclear war, the poor of the world ware oppressed by the rich, wars were waged in parts of the world for the aggrandisement of the capitalist  or the communist system and my contemporaries were slaughtered in Malaya, Korea, later in Vietnam. Leaders chosen by their people were assassinated in the Congo, in Iran, in Chile.The challenge for me and my generation was to make the world a better, juster place, Protesting about wars, protesting about injustice was OK, but sulking, withdrawing from the world, killing John Lennon, did not help to make the world and its future any better.

Polish orphans of Pahiatua

There was an article in today's newspaper, taken from The Times about the Brexit debate. It was written by the eminent journalist and political activist Daniel Finkelstein, Baron Finkelstein. He argues that Europe's battle scars should bring Europeans together, an argument to keep Britain in Europe. His grandparents came from Lviv, now Ukraine, then Poland. His grandfather fought in Anders' Army, the Polish army recruited from the Polish exiles in the Soviet Union, which fought by the side of the Russians. The family was transported, from their place of exile in Siberia to Iran together with 77,000 soldiers, and 43,000 civilians, which included 20,000 children [Story of the Polish Children of Pahiatua]. Some of these children left behind in Iran needed a place to go to. The Polish Government in London appealed to the League of Nations for help in finding temporary refuge for the Polish civilians and children. Mrs. Fraser, wife of the New Zealand Prime Minister, Peter Fraser, met socially someone from the Polish Government and was told of the plight of these children and persuaded her husband to bend New Zealand's immigration policy and accept, in the end 733 children and 102 caregivers, which included a priest. The children were Catholic. Although there were many Jewish civilians, including children, like Daniel Finkelstein's grandparents among the Polish refugees in Iran, they didn't make it to New Zealand. The New Zealand government's policy was that no Jews were allowed to come. Jews were perceived as hard to assimilate, even though Jews had lived here since before colonization, before 1840 and had a record of assimilation better than most, many became exemplary citizens and leading public figure. The government was also concerned that by allowing more Jews to enter the country more Jews would bring with them more anti-Semitism. When after the war New Zealand accepted refugees from the Baltic states and other parts of Eastern Europe, many of whom harboured, no doubt, anti-Semitic sentiments, no such concern was evident. Polish Jewish children, stranded in Iran were not allowed to come to New Zealand. They were diverted to Palestine. Three years later New Zealand was one of the first counties in the UN to vote for the establishment of Israel in 1947. It suited the New Zealand Government to wash its hands of the world wide Jewish refugee problem.  They wished it on the Arabs.

The changed world of publishing

Pam, John Hall's wife, is terminally ill. I have John and Pam on my mind a lot and think of our time together with John on the road, selling books, representing our various publishers when he first arrived in New Zealand in the 1960s. That world of publishing and bookselling is long gone. The publishers I represented, the Oxford University Press and Faber and Faber are still around, though much changed, but the ones that John represented, Harrap, Jonathan Cape, and others, if around in name, are only imprints of large multimedia enterprises that had acquired them. The 1960s were colourful times of bookselling and publishing. Every country town had a bookshop, and some of them were outstanding bookshops with wide selection of books, run by well-read enthusiastic book people; Marion Middlemiss in Marton, a town of only a few thousand people, Lewis Cathew in Fielding and his brother, Alan, in Pahiatua, Alex Hedley in Masterton, Dave Avery in New Plymouth, Noeli Mellett in Blenheim, not to mention the large bookshops, outstanding by world standards, Bennetts in Palmerston North and Paul's in Hamilton. And there were the great, scholarly booksellers, Roy Parsons, Blackwood Paul, Bob Goodman, Gordon Tait, whom you addressed with deference feeling ignoramuses in their company. The publishers' representatives were also a colourful lot. For some reason I thought of Johnny Cochrane with who I spent an evening at the Criterion Hotel in New Plymouth in the company of Ralph Gooderidge and John Elphick. Mr. Elphick and Mr. Gooderidge, never John and Ralph, always traveled together and were known in the trade as the 'undertakers' or the 'heavenly twins' because Ralph Gooderidge, representing Oxford, sold Bibles. Johnny Cochrane was something else. He represented the educational publishers, Bell, and Arnold, with no light reading in their list. Johnny came over from Australia and traveled around New Zealand following the races while selling his books. He knew every horse, every jockey, and regaled us with stories about horse racing all evening. I, who knew nothing about racing, was captivated. But Johnny Cochrane was by no means the most eccentric or colourful of the publishers' representatives. There was Michael Catt, who represented Cassels and sold the books of Churchill, Nicholas Monsarrat and many best selling authors, who walked into a room and it was like a tornado that arrived, dressed in velvet jacket, sports trousers, every inch the fast talking salesman. In contrast, there was Richard Hollyier, not only representing Cambridge University Press, but also the British Council, every inch the well spoken English gentleman. John Hall added his personality to this colourful gallery. A real Englishman, previously the regional representative of Jonathan Cape in England, he was a willing exile to the colonies. When he arrived he could not get over the wealth of food available, butter as much as he liked, lashings of cream on his scones at the tea rooms where we stopped for morning tea. He brought with him a degree of professionalism and great enthusiasm for the books he sold. He never left a stone unturned or overlooked a book in his catalogue. Poor John became a victim of the conglomeration of publishers. His empire, Bookreps that sold and distributed books for a wide range of publishers was merged with Random House and he, a senior member of the book trade, was out of a job. He continued hawking books to libraries and reminder books to booksellers, but this was not the same as representing some of the most prestigious British publishers, though it might have been more lucrative.

This is what going old is about, you remember the good old days, even if they were not always that good. And you carry the memories of a whole era, John and I. Pam was there as the constant support for John. She also ran a good second-hand bookshop that now faded into the distant memory of the Auckland book scene.

Who writes the history, why, and who funds it?

This week I went to hear Prof. David Ekbladh talk about Battle for the History of World War II. If you are naive enough you believe that history is history, that there are facts that are indisputable, and all you have to do is to dig out these historical facts and bingo! the story presents itself in all its shiny clean narrative. But things are not like that. The victors are always the ones that tell the story. The questions that interested David Ekbladh however, were the  disputes, controversies that went on behind the received narrative. William Langer, head of the department of history at Harvard, was the voice of the progressive view of history. His monumental works, the history of American diplomacy leading up to the Second world War, The Challenge to Isolation (1937-1940) and Undeclared War (1940-1941) argued that the US had no choice, it had to enter the war to confront Fascism. Charles A. Beard, an equally distinguished historian argued that the US had no business getting involved in a fight among Europeans, their conflicts were their problems. Yet the prevailing view as transmitted in textbooks and popular narratives is that of Langer. The dispute between interventionists and isolations is ongoing to this day. Wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan were seen as wars that touch on America's security, yet conflicts in Rwanda and the Balkans were considered local conflicts and none of America's business. The conflict in Somalia was too dirty, too unmanageable, and the US walked away from it. The question David Ekbladh raised is 'who is telling the story, why, and who funds the narrative'. Langer was a part of the American progressive establishment, associate of Roosevelt and an influential public figure. His books on prewar diplomacy were published by the Council on Foreign Relations, a quasi government body; Beard, from a Quaker background, became one of the leading proponents of American Non-Interventionism. He argued that the United States had no vital interests at stake in Europe and accused Roosevelt of lying to the American people to go to war. Towards the end of his academic career he became a prominent voice of the 'right'; isolationism and an economic interpretation of history. It is his widely used textbooks on the History of the United States that enabled him to steer an independent course. History in totalitarian states is glorified propaganda, but history in democracies tells the narrative that the establishment at the time sees as reflections of its aims and aspirations. In New Zealand there was the curious case of W. B. Sutch's Quest for Security in New Zealand, which was commissioned by the government as a centennial history of New Zealand, but because it did not present New Zealand as a benign Liberal Pacific paradise, the government refused to publish it, and although it was published by Penguin later, it never prevailed as the historical narrative of New Zealand. The Zionist leftist heroic account of Israel was disputed by Benny Morris and the account of the Arab - Israeli conflict is still a work in progress. Read history and ask who is the storyteller. 

Bigotry 

OK! Australian politics are in disarray; four Prime Ministers in five years, back stabbing the norm, and very weird comments from politicians who ought to know better or should have no place among responsible statesmen. Peter Dutton, Immigration Minister, described refugees as illiterate, innumerate, who would take jobs from Australians or would languish in unemployment queues and on Medicare. The fact that many of these refugees are educated, successful middle class people driven out of their countries by social and political upheavals mattered little to the Hon. Peter. Nor did it  enter into his consideration that some of these highly qualified people were prepared to do work that Australians are not prepared to do, cleaning hospitals, caring for the sick, doing menial jobs at minimum wages. The record that refugees come come, by and large, with enterprising spirit and willingness to work hard and create jobs was beside the point. Xenophobia is populist politics, not just in Australia. Read Donald Trump's speeches, Sarah Palin's comments, but also Victor Orban's, the Hungarian Prime Minister's comments on refugees and the stance of many other European politicians. I had a conversation about Brexit, the move for Britain to leave the EU, and was told that it is prompted  by the fear of refugees, who are perceived as criminals misogynists and terrorists. True, established facts, not just hearsay or vague accusations are thin on the ground. The 'sexual terrorists' of Cologne are nameless, vague shadowy figures. Yet people in Britain are scared of these phantom terrorists. They want to leave the EU which underpins Britain's prosperity. And closer to home, though our politics is not as vicious as that of Australia, and our politicians are thought of as more responsible, the race card and xenophobia is not far from the surface. Racial comments resonate with the ignorant, dyed in the wool section of the population, yet very unfortunately, these people also have the vote. Those of us, who believe in a more tolerant, just society, have to go out of our way to fight bigotry.

Egyptian plane falls out of the sky

It is yet to be confirmed that the plane that disappeared over Egyptian air space was a victim of foul play, but the likelihood of that is great. Planes these days don't fall out of the sky. Egypt has some vile enemies. Perhaps it is not entirely coincidental that this occurred a day or two after Egypt's President, al-Sisi offered to facilitate a peace agreement between Palestinians and Israelis. The rise of extreme fanatical forces in the Middle East brought some enemies together on the principle that my enemy's enemy is my friend. The Islamic State is as much of a threat, if not a greater a threat to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Palestine, both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran as it is to their common enemy, Israel. Saudi Arabia offered to open an embassy in Israel should the Palestinians and Israel come to a peace agreement. Jordan and Egypt have both been actively cooperating with Israel on security matters for some time. Only the fertile imagination of a George Orwell could have imagine such a reshuffling of former enemies. But the potential implications of such cooperation are huge for the future of the whole world. With the decline of Europe, Russia and the United States, all fraught with great internal divisions, the centre of economic power and possibly culture and civilization could well shift to the Middle East. The region as a whole has enormous natural resources as well as vast human resources, large population, great underdeveloped land mass, and educated and underutilizers middle class, and in the middle of it there is Israel, world leader in innovative technology. All that is needed is a degree of cohesiveness, cooperation and mutual trust, and the Middle East could become the powerhouse of the world.

My grandmother, Jozsa

We are about to celebrate Pesach, and I think of my grandmother at whose table we had the Seders during the first nine years of my life, Seders that left a lasting impression on me. The Seders were given by my grandfather, Gyula, but it was my grandmother who enabled it to happen. There would have been a large number of people around the table, the immediate family, my two aunts, my uncle, us four, my cousin, Andris, his parents and grandmother who was a friend of my grandfather from his bachelor days, my grandfather's niece Erzsi and her son Gyuri, Politzer, a young man who worked in my grandfather's office, my grandmother, Matild, my father's mother, a widow by then, and perhaps a few more guests. It was a resplendent dinner. My grandmother ruled over it with quiet dignity and made sure that everything was done as it should be.  She was a remarkable woman. There are few photographs of her, and on these she appears as an unsumiling, strict, purposeful small and plump woman. She was one to respect rather than love. She was a country girls with interrupted primary schooling. She was self taught, self educated, who was familiar with the classics of Hungarian literature and could hold her own in any conversation. She set great store on giving her daughters a good education. She came from Veszto, a small country town in Bekes County in South East of Hungary. She was orphaned at a young age. Her mother made a living by selling honey cakes at the local fair. Her father, Reb Lezer Wolf, seems to have done nothing but study and help around the synagogue. Jozsa, my grandmother was largely brought up by Lezer Wolf's second wife. When she was old enough to go out to works she was sent to help distant relatives, who ran an inn in Rackeve, on Csepel Island, south of Budapest. My grandfather, Gyula met her there. He had a  position at the Tallow Marketing Board together with his good friend Karoly. This provided them with good contacts later in life. They traveled to work form Budapest on the horse-drawn tram. One of their fellow passengers was the beautiful young school teacher, Janka. I believe that both young men were smitten by her, Karoly married Janka, while Gyula married the young woman who served them their lunch at the inn In Rackeve, Jozsa, known as Pepi. Jozsa was described by Gyula's friends as 'that little round plump girl'. She was not pretty and would have brought little dowry with her. Perhaps some considered that Gyula, a smart young man with matriculation from one of the best academic high schools, could have done better for himself, but Jozsa, the simple little country girl became the rock of his life, the one who held his various business ventures and his family of four girls together. Jozsa didn't have an easy life. Her second daughter, Margitka was handicapped, a cretin who didn't start to develop, grow and learn to speak until she was in her early twenties, and to the end of her life she was like an affectionate five year old girl. Jozsa devoted her life to caring for her handicapped daughter and sheltering her. Because she could seldom go out friends and relations came to visit her, and she was noted for her hospitality. She also took in and cared for nieces and nephews who moved to Budapest from the country, the two daughters of my grandfather's sister, Sari and Maca, from Lugos, the son of my grandmother's half brother, Laci from Bekescsaba. And it was Jozsa who persuaded my grandfather to buy their delightful holiday home in Matyasfold and their investment property in Fecske Street. When in October 1944, during the reign of the Nyilas government, my mother was deported to Lichtenworth, an Austrian labour camp, my brother and I were left in the care of my grandmother. She also took in and took care of two children in our block of flats, whose mother was also deported and were left on their own. This is the kind of person she was. These two children escaped on their way to the Budapest ghetto. In the ghetto Jozsa took care of us and the family. After the war she was there for us until my mother returned from the concentration camp, then she contracted typhus and died. She lived as long as she was needed. With my mother back to take care of us her task was done. 

 

Kaliningrad in the news

Michael Wieck  taught the violin at Auckland University from 1961 to 1967. Perhaps he injected a little European tradition in a music school that was largely devoid of it despite the competent instrumentalists teaching there. After some years Michael Wieck missed Germany, that was where he felt at home, and returned there. He was leader of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra.  I knew of him while he taught in New Zealand but I was not aware of his Jewish links. In his retirement he published his memoirs, A Childhood under Stalin and Hitler. From this I learned that he was the son of the second violin and viola players of the Konigsberg Quartet, one of the first to play Schoenberg's music. His mother was descended from a distinguished Jewish family, his father was related to eminent Germans, including Clara Wieck Schumann. Some of these relatives were good Nazis. Living in German occupied Konigberg, Michael was persecuted as a Jew, though spared deportation to a concentration camp because he was only half Jewish, After the Russian occupation he witnessed the systematic destruction of old Konigsberg, a centre of German culture in East Prussia. The city was completely destroyed, to be replaced by the Russian city of Kaliningrad. During the months after the war, while the city lay in ruins Michael, a teenager, supported himself and his family by thieving, by claiming to be a carpenter, an electrician, a specialist in demand by the Russian occupiers. He could resume his violin studies only after he and his family managed to get away and move to Berlin. His Konigsberg, a German enclave in the East, founded in the Middle Ages, a seat of leaning, where Emanuel Kant taught, became a Soviet city of strategic importance because it is the only Baltic port that is ice free. Now Kaliningrad is in the news again. A couple of low flying Russian jets buzzed repeatedly over an US destroyer, aggravating regional tension. You might wonder what the American destroyer was doing there, but Putin and his military were undoubtedly showing their muscle and asserting their dominance. 

Paul Russell: The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov

At times I wander among the shelves in the local library, among the many works of chik lit, dystopian fiction, far fetched realism, family stories and murder, looking for something to read. Time and time again I borrow books by renowned authors only to return them unread or only partly read. I am not much of a reader of fiction and for me to get to the end of a long novel it has to have something special to grip me. I stumbled upon Paul Russell's The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov because in this age of cheaply produced books, where publishers skimp on design, this was a stylishly produced well spaced and well laid out paperback. Credit to the publishers, Cleis. I started reading it, and was hooked. Paul Russell recreates magically the world of pre-revolutionary aristocratic Russia. The Nabokovs were eminent unimaginably wealthy nobility. He captures equally vividly Cambridge and particularly Paris of the inter-war years; the world of Diaghilev and the Ballet Russe, the opium snorting gay circle of Cocteau, the blue stocking jealousy riven  vain opinionated salon of Gertrude Stern and Alice Toklas, and intermittently the fear permeated Berlin of 1943. Sergey Nabokov, brother of Vladimir, was gay, a diffident stuttering, self-effacing, caring warm-hearted person. He comes through as a 'supporting character' in his own story, but as such he is a keen observed of the world around him. Or rather, Paul Russell observes with a keen eye for detail the world that he creates for Sergey Nabokov. There is little known about this younger brother of Vladimir, there are passing references to him here and there, and Russell weaves these crumbs of evidence into a narrative that bears the semblance of historical truth. It is a long book, and I am a slow reader, but as I approached the last pages I didn't want it to end. 

S. Y. Agnon and Saul Bellow

Agnon, the Israeli Nobel prize winning writer, and Saul Bellow, the American Jewish Nobel prize winning writer had very different takes on their 'native ground'. Agnon, then known as Shmuel Josef Czaczkes, packed his bags in Buczacz, Eastern Galicia, and moved to Palestine. Saul Bellow, 27 years his junior, was firmly rooted in Chicago. Granted that Agnong then moved to Germany, where he was part of the circle of Martin Buber, Sholem Gershom and Salman Schocken, and absorbed European literature, but he moved back to Palestine, where he wrote stories of magic realism with a traditional Jewish Hebrew background. He mined the cultural landscape of Galicia he grew up in in a new Jewish country that he totally adopted, whereas Bellow, a seemingly completely assimilated American Jew wrote about the Jewish world of Chicago. So which was the native ground of each?  Buczacz of Agnon, which is no more, destroyed in Agnon's lifetime or Chicago of Bellow, or did both only exist in the imagination of these writers?  Agnon grew up among Zionists who could not imagine moving to Palestine, but he moved there and became the preeminent Hebrew writer. Bellow could not imagine living anywhere but in America, where his immigrant parents built a new life and gave Saul the opportunity to succeed. Why would anyone give up the good life in America and move to Israel? Why would anyone move to Israel from a benign peaceful country like New Zealand? Where are our native grounds? Can an imaginary Israel become and immigrant's native ground?

John le Carre's guide to understanding world affairs

By far the best television in a long time is the adaptation of John le Carre's Night Manager. Like other le Carre stories, it is about betrayal, betrayal for self interest, betrayal for a greater cause, betrayal by powerful individuals, betrayal by governments. Roper, the villain of the piece, is an arms dealer. The current big news about Panamanian secret trust accounts, and New Zealand secret trust account for laundering ill gotten funds makes me think that fictitious Roper could have been a client of the Panamanian law firm at the centre of these revelations. He would certainly not have wanted his payments to be traceable. Roper, however, is a figment of le Carre's imagination. How about Serco or Halliburton, corporations that profit from war and human misery? All this is nothing new. As a teenager I was hooked on Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd stories. Upton Sinclair, a muckraking journalist as well as a popular novelist, author of the Jungle, a book that revealed the cruelty and exploitation behind the Chicago meat works, went out of favour during the Cold Warm and his Lanny Budd novels had been out of print for 50 years, but he described the corruption, business interests and politics over the years between 1913 and 1947, a virtual history of the era. The notable characters that appear in the eleven novels include Churchill, Hitler, Goering, Hess, Stalin, and F.D.R. Roosevelt. The world they describe preys on the common man, is cruel and  treacherous. As my old mate, King Solomon, said, there is nothing new under the sun, but people's memories are short. Upton Sinclair and his stories about the dangers that beset his times are largely forgotten.

The Jewish band master - Mahler's 3rd

The performance of Mahler's Third Symphony takes 94 minutes, far too long for any piece of music. I attended the NZ Symphony Orchestra's performance of it and came away with mixed feelings. I thought that the First Movement is full of bombast, powerful brass chords, fanfare, corny popular tunes and romantic calls to action, but what kind of action? It also has distorted references to Brahms's First Symphony, a work that is the very opposite in spirit to this work. Mahler wrote descriptive titles for each movement, then, quite rightly, abandoned them. You should listen to music with your ears and your whole body, not reflect on some presumed extra musical message. After the First Movement the mood changes, and you get beautiful transparent musical passages. In the Third Movement Mahler throws in a mezzo-soprano soloist, at last night's concert Charlotte Hellekant, a statuesque woman with a beautiful, penetrating warm voice. As if this weren't enough in the next movement there is an additional children's and women's choir. This is a rich gulyas indeed. The concluding movement is a long tranquil adagio. Though this symphony is perhaps too long for my liking, it contained some very beautiful sequences. What was Mahler, 'a little German-Czech-Moravian Jewish boy', as the great American Jewish conductor, Leonard Bernstein described him, doing writing such ambitious overblown music? Mahler's ambitions were out of keeping with his humble origins, the grandson of  a Jewish peddler grandmother. He had to be the conductor of the world's foremost opera houses and orchestras, the Vienna State Opera, the Vienna Philharmonic, the New York Metropolitan and the New York Philharmonic. Likewise his music had to be grander, and longer, than any other works in the repertoire. And he would throw in a little ditty about Jesus and Peter to underline his credentials as a Catholic convert, identifying Jesus with the struggling artist, though by then Mahler was far from struggling. He converted to Catholicism because this was a necessary condition for his appointment as the musical director of the Vienna Opera, but was always cynical about his conversion, seeing himself as an atheist [1]. However he was not just any ordinary common and garden atheist, he described himself as 'thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans and as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.' [2] There is the story of the emanicpated Jewish world of Europe in this long symphony 

 1.[Jonathan Carr: From Province to Promised Land,

https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/c/carr-mahler.html]

2.ibid

More questions than answers about the Holocaust

My next talk at the Holocaust Centre is to a Probus group, a group of elderly, (though most much younger than I) probably predominantly women. Talking to students I often start with quoting the title of a picture book that my children had more than thirty years ago: 'Why are there more questions than answers, Grandpa?' and say that I hope that they will go away with more questions than answers. The first question I might put to the Probus groups is why do they care about the Holocaust, seventy years after the event that hardly touched the lives of most of them. I might suggest that the questions are not about history, they can read a library full of books about the Holocaust as a historical event. The questions are about themselves, how they would act in circumstances such as the Holocaust, act as victims, perpetrators or bystanders. They might ask questions about their parents' generation, who would have been, by and large, disinterested bystanders. And they might ask questions about present day issues, Donald Trump, the demagogue, the know little populist, and Bernie Sanders, the eternal Jews, who asks difficult questions about social justice. Donald Trump's politics, and Bernie Sanders's might have faint echoes in New Zealand politics, so the questions are not just about American politics, and the questions could well be about Germany in the 1930s and 1920s, demagoguery, injustice, prejudice, and the hatred of Jews as the answer to questions that have no easy answers. I myself struggle with the question of why people care about the Holocaust, when historical events much closer to home, such as the New Zealand Land Wars of the 1860s struggle to find a place in the New Zealand school curriculum, yet people care, and it is my duty to engage with them and challenge them to think.

Music and conflict

The New Zealand School of Music runs a course on Music and Conflict and next week I will have the privilege of talking to the students of this course about the Holocaust. Thinking about what I might talk about I thought that I might start with the photo of the book burning in 1933. Soon after the Nazis came to power they instigated a bonfire of books. The image of this is part of our display at the Holocaust Centre of NZ. We see a large group of students, the very people who should be the guardians of culture and free discussion, saluting the conflagration of books from all corners of the world by authors whose messages the Nazis disapproved of. Goebbels announced that 'we will put an end to this Jewish intellectualism', though the books were not all by Jewish writers. It was intellectualism that the Nazis associated, perhaps not unjustly, with Jewish tradition. However, with this bonfire they put an end not only to questioning and discussion, but also to German culture. Apart from the solitary work of Carl Orff, his Carmina Burana, published in 1937, I can't think of any major work composed in Nazi Germany that stayed in the repertoire. Richard Strauss, the pre-eminent German composer of the time, fell silent, storing up his years of bitterness to give it voice in his Metamorphosen in 1945, after the war. The Nazi years were barren of culture. Contrast this with the equally ruthless, suppressive regime of Stalin's Soviet Union, just as intolerant of dissent, which however produces great masterpieces that stayed in the repertoire, Shostakovich's great symphonies, his No. 5 and No. 7, Prokofiev's War and Peace, his 5th Symphony, his great film scores. Khachaturian's concertos, Symphonies, and his spectacular ballet, Gayaneh. Not only was music sterile in Nazi Germany, there were no great books or great films produced, except for spectacular propaganda films. Contrast this with the memorable films that came out of the Soviet Union in this period. Why one oppressive regime was completely sterile, while the other managed to flourish is one question which is worth asking, a question about the role of the arts in society.

Pure evil

The Assassins of the eleventh and twelfth centuries murdered prominent figures among their enemies, caliphs, viziers, sultans and leaders of the Crusaders, Anarchists were opposed to centralized states and advocated voluntary associations. In their opposition to the state they murdered prominent political leaders. They advocated violence against their opponents, murdered Tsar Alexander II of Russia, President Sadi Carnot of France, E,press Elizabeth of Austria, King Umberto I of Italy, President William McKInley of the United States, King Carlos I of Portugal, and others. They committed these murders in the belief that such acts would enable them to achieve specific aims. But planting bombs in the Brussels airport, and in a Brussels underground station had no such clear aims. Belgium is not at war with the Islamic State, Belgium is no enemy of Moslems, there is nothing that could possibly have been achieved by these murders. How could anyone imagine what was in the minds of the perpetrator. The number of Islamist militants in Belgium is very small. 451 Belgians had travelled to the Islamic State. Most lived in a small enclave of Brussels. How could they be persuaded to blow themselves up, commit suicide for a nebulous cause with no attainable goals. To understand this one has to fathom the meaning of evil. It is much more than the dictionary of it, morally wrong, bad, or wicked. It is a destructive act without motive or benefit for the perpetrators, executed without regard to the welfare of other human beings. The London underground murders, the Paris murders at a rock concert, the September 2001  attacks on the World Trade Centre, and the 2002 Moscow attacks at the Dubrovka Theatre are twenty-first century phenomenons unprecedented in history. Perhaps the aerial bombing of cities and civilian targets during the Second World War created a mindset that made such indiscriminate slaughter permissible. 

Milk or grass?

A recent article in the NZ Listener about Fonterra, the giant dairy cooperative, had a bearing on how New Zealand positions itself in the world, what sort of country New Zealand perceives itself to be, and some general challenging ideas about business and business practice. You can hardly open a newspaper or listen to the daily news broadcasts without coming across tales of woe about the catastrophic collapse of dairy prices and its impact on farmers and the country's economy.  Briefly, as I understand it, the article maintains that the New Zealand dairy industry is in its current precarious position because it failed to understand the business it was in. It thought that it was in the business of selling milk, milk powder and milk products, but in fact, originally it was in the business of selling grass converted to milk by cows that grazed in open paddocks. New Zealand was one of the world's most efficient dairy producer, simply because the grass grew, it needed little additional investment to turn cows into efficient milk producers. This was very profitable. Then the industry got greedy, stocked more cows than the land could carry, had to buy additional feed, and lots of additional fertilizers. The profit margin, the return on capital plummeted. In hindsight one may ask how seasoned, experienced farmers and business leaders could make such elementary mistakes. But while the going was good it was very good, milk prices were at record levels, the assumption was the more the better, and no one except a few pessimists imagined that the good times would not last for ever. With all the talk of knowledge economy, rock star economy, the dire strait of the dairy industry brought home the fact that despite all the changes in the last fifty years, New Zealand's is still essentially a colonial economy greatly dependent on the exploitation of its natural resources, in this instant, its benign climate. Intensive dairy farming ruined New Zealand's rivers, waterways, with nitrate leaching into the soil and ultimately into the ground water due to excessive farming practices. There is a lot to be said for lack of natural resources. Israel lacks these, so Israeli society was forced to exploit the ultimate resource, human inventiveness. New Zealand could learn a lot from that.