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