Is life getting better or worse?

I read recently a short story about a disgruntled retired teacher who complained that things are getting worse, the world, morality, education, everything is going downhill. I have also read a piece in the New Yorker in which Steven Pinker, cognitive psychologist, argues that by every measurable standard, things are getting better, much better. People are healthier, wealthier and live longer all over the world, poor and rich. Education is better if we don't measure it exclusively by classical Eurocentric essentially British yardstick. Through the internet people have access to infinitely more information, with the ability to sort sound information from from misinformation, the down side of the wealth of information available. Yet there is a wide perception that the world is getting worse. Those of us who have been around for a very long time remember the World War, the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Cold War, the threat of a nuclear war, the divisive 60s when Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and other leading controversial public figures were murdered, the Vietnam war, the Khmer Rouge and the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Kosovo, Rwanda, and any number of murderous historical events. Compared with these Donald Trump's confused boastful war mongering words hardly rate. Yet people harbour nostalgic feelings for a better past. This is hard to understand. Some old people are excused for thinking that when they were young they were more vigorous, enjoyed life more, others like me appreciate that we live in better, more prosperous times, but why are the young despondent. Looking back on my life, I think that when my generation was young we looked forward to a better future, a fairer, more peaceful world. Now the only things to look forward to are gadgets with more unnecessary gizmos. Again In the New Yorker, the letter writer Randy Olson, quoting Studs Terkel and Victor Fankl asserts that 'quality of life and subjective well-being cannot be evaluated without discussing what is at the core of true happiness - that one's life has meaning'. 

The system is broken

Last week I had the privilege of meeting Jenny Salesa, the Associate Minister of Education, who struck me as a very perceptive woman, a good listener who asked searching questions. What I found particularly interesting, however, is what she said about her electorate, Otara, largely Pacifica. She talked about poverty, people, whole families sleeping in their cars because they can't afford to rent in Auckland even in a low decile neighbourhood. These are not bludgers, not addicts, not people on welfare for whatever reason, but people whom National Party politicians would describe as hard-working New Zealanders, couples who work in two jobs for minimum wages. With the free market we imported not only cars, gadgets, cheap gizmos from third world countries, we also imported poverty. Whatever happened to the New Zealand dream of my father's generation, when everyone could get a job and buy a house for three to four times his annual salary? The greedies took over. The way to get ahead is to buy a piece of dirt, limit the land available, so that the piece of dirt would appreciate in value, then leverage the value of that piece of dirt to buy more land, more property, control the availability of land, encourage building monopolies, sit back and watch the value of the assets appreciate. People who prosper on the strength of their assets don't need to worry about the impoverished sleeping in their cars, they can afford to put labels on them, those are improvident, spend their money or drink or gamble their money away. They can be swept under the carpet, ignored. Today's newspaper writes about loan sharks who lend money to the needy at unimaginably usurious rates. There is nothing new about this, colonial New Zealand was built on land speculation. If you had a little capital you signed up for a tracts of land, knowing that the land to be developed was artificially restricted, and watch your money grow. But there was a time when some idealists took over the government and forged a fairer society, riding rough shod over ideas of free market and capitalism. It is time dreamers and idealists unite to forge a fairer society in which people can live in well built, well insulated homes, even if that means entertaining unfashionable economic ideas and taxing unearned wealth more rigorously.

Freedom of speech and related questions

All sorts of 'right minded' people, people whose opinions I thought I would usually respect get their knickers in knots over the question of 'Free speech'. Two speakers whose opinions were considered inflammatory, Stefan Molineux, described as a Canadian journalist, and Lauren Southern, a knock you dead, glamorous 23 year old young woman were refused the use of Auckland City Council owned premises for their address. Some high profile people were up in arms about this, claiming that they were denied their right to say what they wanted to say. Hang on a minute! Who are these speakers and what is their message. We know that they galavant around the world disseminating false and repugnant ideas. Why were they stopped from speaking in the UK, in Australia? Who funds their travel? Whose cause are they promoting? Would anyone argue that everyone has the right to disseminate lies, or would they argue that one person's truth is another's lie. I believe that there is such a thing as fact based truth, and disseminating lies and half-truths to destabilise society is unacceptable. Would the champions of free speech grant the right to people with dissenting opinions to question and comment? I would imagine that such questions and comments would be ruled out of order, or if the person asking the questions persists, he or she would be manhandled and thrown out. But then such rumpus would give the promoters of the event further publicity. For the promoters of extreme causes freedom of speech is a one way street, something they demand for themselves, but as history shows, they answer those who dissent with violence. 

Music of conflict

A group of students taking the Music of Conflict course are visiting the Holocaust Centre on Friday. I will need to talk to them about the Holocaust, but what can I say that is relevant to budding musicians? What is there in my past, in my life that is meaningful. Perhaps I should talk about my mother-in-law listening the Hungarian national anthem with tears in her eyes, or my mother celebrating Horthy riding into Kassa (Kosice) on his beautiful white horse when that part of Slovakia was re-incorporated into Hungary, (white horse for an Admiral of the Fleet? but those were topsy-turvy times), or should I talk about Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra, in which in the Intermezzo he introduces the theme of the Hungarian folk song, 'I set out from my beautiful country', after all these are music students. Or should I talk about patriotism? Orban, the Hungarian Prime Minister, said to Benyamin Netanyahu when he visited Israel, that the thing they have in common is that they are both patriots. Patriots, patriotism are dangerous, pernicious terms. No one can question Bartok's love of his country, his patriotism, but his patriotism was inclusive. It included the music, the dances of all the various ethnic minorities that lived on the land that Bartok called his homeland. The Hungary of the Austro-Hungarian Empire defined Hungarians as people who spoke Magyar, the language of the country. This is very different from Orban's patriotism, which sees Hungary as the outpost of European Christianity, that has to build fences, create separations, the patriotism of exclusion. It dwells on the differences, "us" and "them", and if you are not one of "us" you have no share in whatever defines your nationality. So my mother and us, and all Jews, though we spoke beautiful literary Hungarian, were excluded as Jews. We were the 'them'. Once you were excluded you had no claim on patriotism, no claim on your country, no claim on your society, and finally no claim as a human being that is part of the community of the nation. Such Nazi racist ideology lead to conundrums that would be laughable were they not tragic. Modern physics was deemed Jewish science, the art of Jewish artists, musicians was considered 'degenerate'.

The music of such decidedly not Jewish musicians as Stravinsky, Hindemith and many others had the honour of being lumped in with degenerate musicians such as Mendelssohn. The example of the absurdity of this is Vom Judische Schiksal, the work of Richard Fuchs, German Jewish composer, who lived the final years of his life in New Zealand. The four movements of this large symphonic choral work  includes one movement that is a true German marching songs, another that sounds like a Lutheran chorale. Not surprisingly, the German authorities stopped the performance of this work. How could you tell that this was Jewish, not German music. Even they must have seen the absurdity of the concept of 'Jewish' music. The Soviets put other limitations on music. Good music was the Alexandrov Army Ensemble with its faux rousing folk songs on cossack dances, the degenerate music was the music of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian and a long list of the foremost Russian composers, all because Stalin went to the Opera, watched Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsenks and didn't like it. At least, the thing that can be said for Hitler and Stalin is that they cared. Art mattered to them. Donald Trump caring about John Adams, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, or even Aaron Copland, is beyond imagination. I can't see Winston Peters, or for that matter John Key getting very bothered about Ross Harris, John Psathas or Gareth Farr. So talking about the Holocaust and music, perhaps even the music of conflict, I should talk about music, patriotism, inclusion and exclusion.

My father-in law's Yahr-Zeit (Anniversary of his death)

I have been busy working on my stories, revising them, putting them in a collection, so I have not written any blogs for a while, but now, that my last story is finished, there are a few things I will get off my chest.

 

My father-in-law, George Vamos (Vamos Gyuri) was a wonderful man, a dedicated engineer who pioneered some plumbing techniques in New 

Zealand and became one of the most successful heating and ventilating engineers, specializing in hospital buildings. He was also a devoted father to his three daughters, a devoted loving husband and a loving son and brother. He also had a son, Stephen, who died at a young age, whom he mourned deeply and silently, inwardly. When Gyuri was still a teenager, his father died. Gyuri, living in Budapest, Hungary, said Kaddish (memorial prayer) for his father every day for eleven months. When he emigrated to New Zealand in 1939, he didn't know what to expect, but the one thing he did expect is that Jews will face problems that they always faced wherever they lived and he gave up on his Judaism. From a largely non-practising Jew he turned into a militant atheist, deliberately flaunting every Jewish observance. Like many Jewish immigrants fleeing from European antisemitism, he wanted to blend into New Zealand society. Fat chance! He didn't drink, he didn't watch football, didn't enjoy raucus parties. His close friends were all self-denying Jews like himself. This is the reality of emigration, trying to pretend that you are someone you are not, trying to assimilate. Then when his son, Stephen died, a first, born, a terrible tragedy, he said something odd for an atheist. He said 'Who will say Kaddish for me?' Well, I, another Steven, Pista, Istvan, said Kaddish for him today, thought about him, thought about the terrible decisions he had to make in his life, and how he made the most of his life. He was a man respected by all, his professional associates, engineers, architects, and by his small circle of friends, who appreciated the life he had left behind and the new life he created for himself by dint of single-minded effort and hard work, in face of some humiliation and many obstacles. I also thought that it is not that easy to become a true atheist. When the chips are down you look for some comfort, a consolation that your life was not in vein, that you will be remembered.

What to write about?

I had the privilege of introducing Gigi Fenster's talk yesterday. Gigi is the author of the book Feverish, a book described as a memoir, because you have to know what shelf to put the book on in a library and bookshop, but it is not a memoir in the sense of it being an account of the author's life. It is a meditation on life, on family, friends, the medical history of understanding fever, the history of psychiatry and many other topics, but it is also a meditation on what a writer should write about when she faces writer's block. So Gigi's challenge was to explore what is fever, what people understood by the term over the centuries. She came across Julius Wagner- Jauregg, a now fortunately largely forgotten Austrian physician and psychiatrist who won the Noble Prize for what we know now as a totally misguided treatment of mental illness. In his time, however, Wagner-Jauregg was highly regarded, as were his ideas on euthanasia, National Socialism, and other beliefs that are now considered total rubbish. So the world changes, beliefs change, what is right and what is wrong changes, and as a writer, such changes make up wonderful fodder for subjects for a writer suffering from writer's block. The talk generated lots of questions and comments, and left people with lots of ideas. Perhaps the questions raised will spark more books, but at any rate it will prompt people to dwell into a book that is hard to describe, easy to read but challenging in it scope.

"It is not thy duty to complete the work, but neither art thou free to desist from it"

Rabbi Tarfon, Pirke Aboth, Sayings of the Fathers II, 21

This phrase appears in the funeral service, but it is also a useful guide for the living. When I sold my bookshop 18 years ago and retired, Judy, my wife, gave me a Parker pen and said 'go to it, write!'. Writing was always there in background, something I wanted to do, and have dabbled in. I had a short poem published in the NZ Listener way back in 1957, and a short story some years later, but with the pressure of work and the family, writing got left behind. Having retired I had the time, and did get a piece published on the composer and architect, Richard Fuchs, a short booklet about the Jewish philanthropists, Annie and Max Deckston, I wrote numerous book reviews and a chapter on New Zealand Jewish writers in the book, Jewish Lives in New Zealand, Ed. Leonard Bell and Diana Morrow, (Auckland, 2012), I also kept writing stories that languished on my computer, and indeed, some got lost from my computer and survived only as printed copies. Bearing the injunction of Rabbi Tarfon in mind I am revisiting these stories, and gathering them to make up a collection. They are stories of 2000 - 3000 words. This seems to be my appropriate span. I don't write long stories, novels, with complicated plots and many characters. They are all about encounters between people, native New Zealanders and immigrants, fathers and sons, growing old, values of an earlier generation and those of a younger generation. Music features in some of the stories, but by no means in all. Hardly any is autobiographical, but they all draw on my experiences, people I knew, situations I faced. I may never complete the work, but I do not want to desist from it. I don't know what I will do with these stories, but first of all I have to bring them together, revise them, and then I will see what will happen. I seem to have my own voice and the stories are uniquely mine. If I get a bit slack with my blogs, it is because I am working on completing the work I set for myself.

Heritage

The two concerts I attended within the last couple of weeks raised questions about my cultural heritage. Marta Sebestyen sang old Hungarian songs going back to the sixteenth century. I knew none of them, but there was a sense of the familiar in the idiom. Last night Amelia Hall played Bartok's Second Violin Concerto with Orchestra Wellington. Listening to both of these concerts made me regret the heritage that was stolen from me. My father and my grandmother wallowed in Hungarian folk music, as well as kitschy operettas and popular hits of their time. Hungarian music was an integral part of their personality. They knew hundreds of songs. My father played them all on the piano that was given to him for his Bar Mitzvah. His piano playing, his music defined him, the charming, lovable man sitting at the piano while the rest of the company danced and sang. 

Sixty people saw us off when we left Budapest on 18 October 1948, a hall full of people who attended Bartok's last concert in Budapest sang 'El indultam szep hazambol', 'I left my beautiful country behind' and this homesickness never left Bartok. It cropped up in his Concerto for Orchestra and it was foreshadowed in his Second Violin Concerto which he wrote just before he left for the United States. Unlike Bartok, I didn't leave happy, beautiful memories behind. The mid 1940s was not a happy time in Hungary. But this sense that the antisemites, the Nazis, stole my heritage lingered below the surface. When these antisemites  came to power they declared that Jews, who were so much part of Hungarian society and contributed so much to the image of Hungary, to Hungarian culture, music, literature were not real Hungarians. Serbs, Moldavian, Slovaks, Germans Romanians were all OK, real Hungarians, but Jews were an alien element. I lost this Hungarian heritage, but did not acquire a British, New Zealand heritage. Perhaps the great thing about New Zealand is that I was honored for for what I did, my contribution to the Jewish community and music. Others were recognized for their contribution to a variety ethnic or minority groups. This is something about New Zealanders that my father recognized and this is why he chose to migrate here.

Order of Merit

To say that I was flabbergasted, bowled over, when I received a letter from Government House that said that I had been nominated for membership of the New Zealand Order of Merit is an understatement. Such gongs, medals, distinctions usually go to well known personages with substantial public profiles, and perhaps, as I imagined, egos to match. Who am I, a humble retired bookseller and care giver to get such distinction. But I am very flattered. I particularly appreciate the comments from numerous people, who said how much I influenced, helped or mentored them. Often people do things, say things, that has a great impact on others without realizing this. It may be just the way I do things, the way I think of things, that sheds a new or different light on the perceptions of others. Perhaps my strength is thinking outside the box, where others see problems I see challenges, opportunities and solutions. This is how I got involvement with the establishment of the Hutt Valley Chamber music Society when the national organisation closed down the Hutt Valley series of concerts, this is how I got involved with the establishments of the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand, the success of which exceeded our wildest hopes and imagination. Unworthy as I deemed myself, I obviously cast a longer shadow than I was aware of and I greatly value the honour confirmed on me.

Gaza

Rabbi Donniel Hartman's Blog on the Times of Israel page describes the ambivalence that confronts everybody who is troubled by the casualties on the Gaza border, yet sees no immediate solution to the lethal confrontation. It is not that sixty people were killed in one day, or that some fifty people were killed since the beginning of the protest, had one person been killed it would have been one too many. I feel for the Israeli soldiers, one of whom may be my grandson, who are ordered to shoot to kill to prevent a breach of the Israeli border. They have to bear the burden of guilt for taking a life. Yet I don't want to contemplate the slaughter that would ensue if the militants of Gaza would breach the border and rampage through Israel. I believe in Israel's right to exist. Despite those who refuse to accept Israel's existence and want to relitigate the history of the last seventy years, Israel is there, a prosperous democratic middle-eastern country. The problem is that the hatred of Jews, the delegitimization  of Israel has no cost to the perpetrators. Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the other Arab countries that waged war against the nascent State of Israel seventy years ago, put the issue of Palestinian refugees in the too hard basket. Over the years they have persecuted, murdered Palestinian refugees, isolated them from the rest of their society, resisted their absorption and assimilation, but used them to confront domestic issues that had real costs. Syria is fractured, Persia is divided with the chasm between the urban cultured Persians and the impoverished underdeveloped and superstitious countryside can only be contained by the use of force, but painting Israel as the source of the problems unifies the warring factions.  There were 13 million refugees after the Second World War, which included a million Jewish refugees, there were hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees that fled from Arab lands. They were all absorbed over the years. The only ones who remain refugees to this day are the Palestinians, because it suited the rest of the worlds to keep them separate, keep them in refugee camps. Palestinians and Israelis could live side by side in prosperous cooperation, were it not be in the interest of others to foment this antagonism. I feel sorry for the Arab young men and some women, who in desperation seek a martyr's death in the frontier, though not for those who take their children to expose them to the danger and should they be killed in the skirmish use their death for propaganda. I feel sorry for the young Israeli soldiers who are tasked with holding back the rabble trying to breach the border. I feel for the people of Ashkelon, Ashdod, southern Israel, who would be in imminent danger should the Palestinians rampage across the border. My only hope is that by next week this confrontation will be old news, that the leaders of Hamas would think of those killed and sit down with the Israelis, the Egyptians. the Jordanians, and above all, with their brothers in Judea and Samaria and work towards a peaceful resolution of the conflict and try to achieve a better, prosperous life for their people. 

Liberal humanist ideals

Some years ago I posted a blog about the Relevance of teaching about the Holocaust. I can't remember what prompted this post, but my brother, who is also involved in Holocaust education, in Japan, recalled it, and now. I shared it with volunteers and educators at the Holocaust Centre of New Zealand. It is now posted among the Blogs on its website. It prompted the question by one of my respected senior colleagues asking me what I meant by "embracing the liberal humanist ideals that permeated Western culture". It is a fair question. If I can't explain it to a high school student  it has no meaning for educators. Perhaps I should only use the term “humanist”, the word “liberal” is redundant except in so far it refers to the concept of freedom as understood in the last 300 years, but “humanist' means for me some specific ideas.

• It asserts the right of every human being, as distinct from the group the individual belongs to. Every human being is valued, respected and has rights not as a member of a group, a nation, an ethnic group, a class, or rank, but as a discreet individual.
• Knowledge is based on empirical experience, not on dogma. Knowledge is not absolute and unchangeable, it needs to be constantly evaluated in light of empirical evidence.

I don't know whether this clarifies what I wrote. It is open to discussion, and like most of the things I assert, to argument. So bring it on. Let's argue. That is part of the privilege implied  "humanism".

Paul Wah's Thin slice of heaven

I have known Paul Wah for something like sixty years. I can't recall whether it was Teachers' College or university, but we go back many years. Our paths have crossed from time to time. When I received an invitation to the launch of his new book A thin slice of heaven, I looked forward to meeting there some people from my long distant past. Paul published his autobiography Wooden man Stone Heart five years ago. It traced his story from the grocer's boy in a small Taranaki town to his very successful career in education. For the last five years he worked on his historical novel that had probably certain parallels with the story of his own great-grandfather and grandfather. A Chinese immigrant, a successful merchant in New Zealand, goes back to the village in China he came from and takes his grandson with him to give him a Chinese education. There the grandson is abducted by bandits. A lot of cowboys and Indians murder, mayhem and bloodshed enhances the action, but in the end the grandson is saved, the ransom money is not called on, and grandfather and grandson return to peaceful prosperous New Zealand. There are vivid descriptions of the simple life and poverty in the Chinese village, as well as the breakdown of law and order. For the villagers, New Zealand is the Golden Mountain. But there is a dark side to the lives of Chinese in New Zealand, gambling and opium, which ruined the business that the grandfather bequeathed to his son. 

It took five years for Paul to research and write this book. He explained that he wrote it for the Chinese children of a younger generation in New Zealand to tell them about their roots and heritage. I, as a Jewish immigrant saw parallels between the stories of Chinese and Jewish immigrants. Being like everyone else, assimilating, had a price to pay. The looked down on  tailor in the back street tailoring shop, or the garment worker, the hawker trying to make a living from the back of a cart, the labourer working long hours too make a living and get out of poverty and give his children a better chance in life, was probably a man learned in Talmud, speaking five languages, but with an accented version of the the Queens or the BBC's English. In many ways, the Chinese became the new Jews. The former image of the Chinaman, who for my grandmother was synonymous with the greengrocer became in this generation the image of the doctor, the successful lawyer, the brilliant musician, the overachiever, and the Chinese mother became the Tiger Mother, the driven Jewish mother of a generation ago. The great difference is that the descendant of Chinese immigrants has a village in China to go back to, where remnants of his family history is still remembered. The roots of the Jewish immigrants have been almost without exception annihilated, destroyed, and the people in these places had betrayed their Jewish neighbours that had so enriched their world. 

Refugees in South Tel Aviv

Refugees are a world wide problem. This week's discussion that Rabbi Mizrahi organised focused on Israel's refugee problem. Ann Beaglehole outlined the international convention on refugees, who is a refugee, a displaced person, an economic refugee, and all the other terms used for people who for one reason or another had to get away from their homeland. There are some 50,000 refugees in South Tel Aviv. Most of them are from Africa, predominantly from Eritrea, Sudan and Somalia. Many of them had been there for some years. There are no more arriving because Israel put in place a border fence and came to an agreement with Egypt whereby Egyptians shoot refugees on sight. Now Israel is negotiating with Rwanda and Uganda to take the refugees already in Israel. Why someone who fled one of the war turn countries in Africa would want to give up a relatively peaceful life in Israel to move to yet another unstable country in Africa is a question Israeli politicians do not address. All over the world, refugees are useful punching bags for politicians who face difficult problems that they want to divert attention from. Don't worry about public corruption, concern yourself about the problems of getting rid of 50,000 benighted, impoverished, harassed Africans in Tel Aviv. Israel of course has a vast wealth of experience in settling refugees. These refugees make up the fibre of Israeli society. But these were refugees who were more or less Jewish, or claimed to be Jewish. They were not necessarily upright, moral citizens. Some were criminals and introduced international crime to a country that was largely proud of its ethical record. The Halacha is clear, the strangers among you have to be accepted and accorded rights. Ann suggested that the answer to the refugee problem is to convert them all, let them be Jewish refugees. Arguing that the treatment of refugees in israel is not worse than it is in many countries of Europe or the treatment of boat people by Australia is an argument hard to accept. Israel is a country of refugees and must do better than others.

Taika Waititi and racism

Taika Waititi, also known as Taika Cohen described New Zealand as a racist country (DomPost April 10, A5) and undoubtedly racial profile occurs. People have their mindset about Maoris, Polynesians, Chinese, Indians, Africans, Middle Easterns, and these mindsets are not based on personal experiences or scientific knowledge, they are received opinions from  elders, mates, people around. Does mispronouncing Maori place names amount to racism? After all a generation earlier people, including such notable people as the conductor, Thomas Beecham, made a point of mispronouncing German and French names. Perhaps this was part of a British ethos, a snobbish pride in not being too intellectual, too smart for their own goods, characteristics associated with Europeans, and particularly Central European Jews. Anglicising European names somehow implied British and New Zealand superiority. Not even attempting to utter unfamiliar names, was a way of putting people in special boxes marked 'different'. Mispronouncing Maori names is in this category. But is it racism? When talking of racism Taika Cohen doesn't mention that he is Jewish. Jews know more about racism than most, but he doesn't mention antisemitism.  Is it because antisemitism is totally absent in New Zealand? I doubt it. It is just that New Zealand society is accepting, taking people as their are with all their different ways. Put the odd derogatory remark down to ignorance, put it down to ingrained prejudice, a relic from an older, obsolete social order. Shrug the odd racist incident off. Racial prejudice is ingrained in humans. Don't make a big thing of it provided it does not involve violence, or legal and economic discrimination. 

Remembering and forgetting

It is appropriate that the Holocaust Centre should host Diana Whichtel talk about her book Driving to Treblinka a few days before Pesach, Passover. Pesach is about remembering the Exodus from Egypt. But we remember it as a miracle, as a mark of God's special relationship with the Jewish people. Diana Wichtel's book is about her search for a lost father. Her father escaped not from the land of bondage, but from a cattle car on a train taking him from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka to be murdered. That he managed to crawl through the small window of the cattle car, that he managed to jump off the train and not be killed by the fall, that he was not shot, not betrayed, managed to somehow join a partisan group in the forest and survive was a miracle. That he made it to America and join his cousins who were ready to help him was against the odds. Perhaps he had  too much faith in his ability to survive using his wits, living on his own resources. Finding a girl from New Zealand, much too young to appreciate all that he had been through, innocent of the slavery he witnessed, he thought that he found the promised land. But he was a damaged man. He was maimed by his experiences. He was charming, warm hearted, but the betrayals, the suspicions, and the sense of guilt were there shadowing him. His personal tragedy left its mark on his daughter. Many chose to try to forget the dark past. Living with harrowing memories is a burden inflicted on the survivors and their children who choose to remember. Jews are obligated to remember their ancestors as slaves in Egypt, but Diana, and others of her Second Generation group had a choice. They could remember, or forget. Diana Whitchel made the decision to seek out the scattered pieces of her father's life and remember. 

Gigi Fenster: Feverish

Gigi Fenster gave up a career as a lawyer to write. She enrolled in a creative writing course, completed a Masters, then a PhD programme, but ran out of inspiration. The stories wouldn't come. She was not a Gigi Grisham who could turn out pot boilers about crooked lawyers. She never expected to make enough money to recoup the cost of her writing courses. She read. The bibliography at the back of her book would put off most creative writing students who think that creative writing is about letting your imagination roam. Gigi's imagination was in the doldrums. She was preoccupied with her family, her children, her psychiatrist father, her friends with their own problems. This was what she knew, this is what she decided to write about. She thought that if she could induce a fever that would kick her imagination into gear, so she explored the history of medicine and what people knew about fever. If illness was all in the mind, she explored the history of psychiatry. Above all, she looked at her own history, the grandfather who moved from his shtetl somewhere in darkest Eastern Europe to Vienna to study medicine and shared his lecture theatre with Sigmund Freud and Julius von Wagner-Jauregg, two pioneering psychiatrists, whose treatments were at the opposite end of the spectrum, empathy and understanding versus ruthless and painful coercion. Somehow the same issue cropped up in Pat Barker's Regeneration, which I have read recently, far too belatedly. In that, one doctor tried to rehabilitate his psychologically damaged patients with care and sympathy, while another tortured his patients until they preferred the trenches and front battle lines to the psychological treatment. Reading Feverish is like being part of a random conversation. I kept thinking, I know what you are talking about, I know someone like that, I've been there, done that. It is described as a 'memoir', but it lacks the structure of a memoir, this happened, then that happened. It is a collection of incidents, imagined conversations, reflections about books, and in particular, Wuthering Heights. There is more to it than the chatty style would indicate. Listen to Kim Hill's interview with Gigi Fenster.

Barak Obama, Lyndon Johnson and me

I am afraid that through an oversight I didn't get my invitation to the dinner with Barack Obama. Perhaps this was just as well, because I couldn't have gone anyway, I had the children visiting and I had to mind my charming, brilliant grandson, George, and spoil him for the rest of his life by exposing him to some Mozart. He stood, watched and was transfixed. But although I missed my chance to meet Barack Obama, the occasion made me think of my encounter with Lyndon Johnson on 19 October 1966. Apart from feeding the hungry, that is, the hungry former President and his 1000 best mates in New Zealand, Barack Obama's visit had no special purpose. John Key and Obama can play golf in Hawaii any day of the week. President Johnson on the other hand, the good second-hand car salesman that he was, came here with the purpose of persuading the New Zealand public, as well as the government to go along with a war in Vietnam that nobody really wanted.  He drove down Willis Street, and I, with many others, stood on the balcony of the old Empire Building. He drove past in his large open car and waved to the crowd, and to me personally.  He was a larger than life personality, a huge, tall man with an infectious charm. Nothing wrong with Barack Obama's charm, I have a great respect for him, both as a politician and as an ethical human being, Lyndon Johnson on the other hand, was someone I was suspicious of. I was not prepared to buy the product he was peddling. I had more time for Ho Chi Minh, the son of a Confucian scholar who didn't find it beneath his dignity to work as a cook's aid in France while a student there, and became the revolutionary leader of Viet Nam, or General Giap, who defeated the French colonial forces  in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu with his peasant army. Yet there is a lot to be said for used car salesmen. President Johnson achieved more, and left a more lasting legacy in his one term in office, then President Obama did over two terms. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 which he pushed through by wheeling and dealing, against against vigorous entrenched opposition, his War on Poverty, his educational reforms, his Voting Rights Act of 1965, which stopped the exclusion of coloured voters from voting, were all watersheds in shaping the United States of today. It was his inability to extricate the U.S form its involvement in the Vietnam war that defeated him. By comparison, Barack Obama had an easy ride, and is remembered more fondly. I am sorry that he had to eat his dinner without my company, but I relish the memory of my encounter with Lyndon Johnson.

All This by Chance

Vincent O'Sullivan gave me a copy of his new novel, All This by Chance and very kindly inscribed it for me. Vincent and I go back to the 1960s when I worked for the New Zealand office of the Oxford University Press and Vincent was an up and coming young scholar. Oxford published a successful anthology of New Zealand Short Stories in the World's Classics series in 1953. That was edited by Dan Davin, a prolific New Zealand writer, then Assistant Secretary to the Delegated of the Oxford University Press, a mouthful of a title, but in fact, in charge of the Clarendon Press and academic publishing.  Ten years on Davin suggested that that it was time for a second collection of New Zealand short stories. A lot had happened to New Zealand writing in the intervening years. Davin suggested that we approach Ian Gordon, the respected professor of English at Victoria University, a scholar with international reputation, who wrote about early Scottish literature as well as about Katherine Mansfield and New Zealand writers in general. Ian Gordon said that he was too busy to take this task on, but there is a young man who had just joined his staff, Vincent O'Sullivan who would do justice to this project. Vincent would visit our show room and editorial cubyhole in the now demolished Empire Building in Willis Street and I suppose we must have chatted about this and that. It was only many years later that Vincent told me that he found me then a forbidding presence. 

     And this leads me to his new novel, All This by Chance. It is a rich, complex books, with vivid narrative and set pieces, but the theme I related to was, near the beginning of the book, that we can't see ourselves as others see us. Stephen, the young pharmacist from Auckland in London on his OE, meets Eva, a young woman, brought up by a kindly Quaker couple in England. Stephen thinks that he left a dull uninteresting place behind, while Eva thinks of Stephen's New Zealand as a vibrant, exciting world. 

      Perhaps people who knew me when I was at school, university, Teachers' College, when I was young, thought of me as a European, at home in a rich European culture, someone who knew a lot about a culture New Zealanders who grew up here only struggled to grasp, while I thought that my New Zealand contemporaries knew a lot I didn't know, could shoot pigs and goats, fix things with No 8 fencing wire, pour concrete, and yes, some of them read widely and knew more about European literature and art than I ever hoped to learn. However, they might have sensed the difference between applying yourself to serious study and accumulating knowledge about culture, and growing up with this culture, breathing it living it, no matter how superficially. The books around my home were by Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Arthur Koestler. I was ignorant of the popular music of the time, but could whistle entire Haydn or Beethoven symphonies. 

     In Vincent O'Sullivan's book, a damaged survivor of the Holocaust, a forgotten aunt of Eva, joins the household and her silent presence impacted on the children and even the grandchildren. Similarly my wife's Judy's aunt. Lisa, damaged by her Holocaust experiences, lived with her family, I knew any number of people who were damaged by the Holocaust. I also knew people made of asbestos like my parents, whom no fire could touch, because having survived the Holocaust, they were impervious to whatever threats others imagined. But my children, like those in the novel, grew up with stories of danger, of betrayal, of starvation, and of people disappearing, and these impacted on their view of the world.

Cause beyond ourselves

My grandmother, Grosz Jozsa, nee Weinberger, died in May 1945, a few weeks after her daughter, my mother, returned from death, from the Lichtenwört concentration camp. She had lived to shepherd her grandchildren, my brother and I, through the the last months of the war, with the accelerated murder of Jews. She sheltered us in the Budapest ghetto, helped us to survive the siege and bombardment of the city, saw to it that her husband, my grandfather and my handicapped aunt, Margitka came through alive and undamaged. Her task was done. She could let go. She died of typhus, she died because her mission in this world was complete.

My grandfather was bereft. Jozsa, known as Pepi, the girl from the inn in Ráckeve whom he married, was the rock of his life. She had enabled him to live a life of great esteem, enjoy respect which was a key to his success. She kept diverse parts of the extended family,the cousins, nieces and nephews and distant relatives, together in her home that exuded an air of orderly, middle class comfort with large heavy furniture, reflecting stability and a measure of prosperity. With Jozsa gone, it was up to her daughters, my mother and her sister Márta to look after him.

Grandfather Gyula, a boy from the country, from the town of Gyönk, was the son of Solomon, a wine wholesaler, remembered for his strength. He had wrestled a wild bull that went on a rampage in the market, an incident noted in one of the books of Báro Eötvös Jozsef, and was the son of Charne, who my mother was named after, daughter of an old Nográd district family renowned for their beautiful daughters. He was educated at the Reformatus Gimnazium, one of the elite schools in Budapest. As a young man he worked for the Tallow Marketing Board, and then struck out for himself using the business experience and the contacts he gained. At one time he was in advertising, producing scribble pads with advertisements printed on them, later, again making use of his contacts in the tallow and oil industry, he acquired the agencies for some of the world's leading manufacturers and producers, among them Mitsubishi, who marketed whale oil, and Uni-Lever, with a wide range of products. He was the go-between between these large international conglomerates and manufactures in Hungary, some on a modest scale, of soaps, cosmetics, and various chemical products. He would travel around Budapest, driven by his regular taxi driver, Mr. Diamand and call on his clients;. He never wanted to own his own car and drive himself. Grosz bácsi, uncle Grosz, was a well known and respected personality in the trade.

After the war he worked on re-establishing his business and clientele. He was in his seventies by then, but this was his life. These were his friends, the people he knew. With the communist takeover, with businesses nationalized, his customers disappeared. Life made him redundant. He found fulfilment in his involvement with the Páva Street Synagogue. He was elected to the Board, he was one of the gabbais, sitting in the front to the left of the Ark. His friends were his fellow Board members, Rochlitz, the retired pharmacist, Kunstaedter, men his age, Weisz Karcsi, a generation younger. They worked to keep the synagogue going. Rabbi Farkas, the founding rabbi of the synagogue, appointed in 1928, was shot into the Danube in 1944, Rabbi Rosenblum, the second minister, who later took over, moved to Israel. Cantor Tennenbaum, the portly hussar who had served in the Austro-Hungarian cavalry was killed in the Holocaust, the shammes, Lézer, the fixer, the jack of all trades, shochet, mohel, baal koreh, debt collector who knew everyone, moved to Canada. It befell to my grandfather, Grosz Gyula, and his cohort of old men to keep the congregation going. They had to negotiate for funds with the Budapest Jewish Organisation, they had to arrange aliyot and make sure that no one's feelings were trampled on, make sure that the services were conducted in an orderly fashion. They arranged functions for the Holidays, arranged events for charity, cultural events, guest speakers. My grandfather was kept busy and found purpose in his life.

We, my mother, who of his daughters was the most like his wife Jozsa, my brother and I, his only grandchildren, abandoned him. He appreciated that we left for possibly a better future, untainted by the memories of a world that had betrayed us. He would write us postcards in minuscule handwriting but complained that his eyes were failing. We would write back to him. People would stop him in the street and ask him how are the children, and he would produce our letters, proud of the good marks we got in school and proud of our loving words. My aunt Marta, the younger daughter in Budapest, cared for him. He died at the age of 87. He was honoured by his community, and remembered in the many messages of condolence and obituaries. He had made the most of his days. He lived in dignity.

The Pava Street Synagogue was redeveloped and turned into a Holocaust Memorial Centre. Its impressive exhibition tracing the story of the Hungarian Holocaust is closed for the present. The congregation meets in one of the small side rooms, it is still active.

It's been a while

I wrote my last of my 276 blogs in June last year, 2017. A lot happened in my life since then, we moved house, moved into a comfortable small villa in a retirement village, Judy, my wife, had a major spinal operation, which at the time I thought was touch and go, but it was successful, though she still has a long way to go before she recovers her enjoyment of life. I gave up blogging, because I thought 'Who cares?' it is a piece of self indulgence, but i read something today that I thought is worth sharing with whoever reads my blogs.
I am reading Atul Gawande's Being Mortal, a profound, thought provoking book, and in it he quotes Josiah Royce's The Philosophy of Loyalty. Royce wanted to why simply existing - why being merely housed, fed and safe and alive -seems empty and meaningless to us.  ... The answer, he believed, is that we all seek a cause beyond ourselves. Royce called this dedication to a cause beyond oneself loyalty. He regarded it as the opposite of individualism. The individualist puts his self-interest first, seeing his own pain, pleasure and existence as his greatest concern. For and individualist, loyalty to causes that have nothing to do with self-interest is strange. ...
In fact human beings need loyalty. It does not necessarily produce happiness, and can even be painful, but we all require devotion to something more than ourselves for our lives to be endurable. Without it we only have our desires to guide us, and they are fleeting, capricious, and insatiable. ...
The only way death is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater.
Atul Gawande, Being Mortal, pp125-127

A talk I gave at the Holocaust Centre of NZ on May 21, 2017

The Holocaust in Hungary and Romania

Holocaust between East and West

Holocaust in Romania and Hungary

After the peace treaties at the end of the First World War there were winners and losers. Hungary was one of the losers, It lost two-third of its territory and a third of its Hungarian speaking people. Romania was one of the winners, gaining large areas at the expense of Hungary and Russia.

The aim of the Hungarian government in the 1930s was to reclaim these lost territories, while the aim of Romanian government was to retain them. It was these aspirations that prompted their alliance with Nazi Germany.

Winners and losers

Peace treaties at the end of W W 1 changed borders and created new states.

Hungary lost 2/3 of its land and 1/3 of its people

Romania was greatly enlarged.

Hungarian foreign policy was driven by its aim to regain lost land, while Romania's aimed to retain territories.

Alliance with Germany was seen as the best way of achieving these aims

Murder of stateless Jews from Hungary

Until 1944 Hungary protected its Hungarian Jewish citizens, but in 1941, Jews who were not Hungarian citizens were exiled to Kamenets Podolsk across the Ukrainian border. 17,000 were murdered there in one of the first massacres

The Germans occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944. By then it was clear to all but the most single minded Nazi that Germany was losing the war. The Soviet army was moving through Belarus towards Germany, British and American troops were working their way north in Italy. The Germans could no longer count on the loyalty of Hungary. One of the signs of its disloyalty was that Hungary refused to address the 'Jewish question'. Not only did Hungary refused to hand over Hungarian Jews to Germany to be murdered, it provided shelter to Jews fleeing from Slovakia, Poland, and other parts of Nazi occupied Europe.

On March 19, 1944 Germany occupied Hungary, and immediately introduced measures for the isolation and deportation of Jews.

By March 1944 the Hungarian Jewish community of about 650,000 was the only large Jewish community left alive in Europe. To address this issue, Adolf Eichmann arrived with the first occupying troops with his specialist experts on transporting and liquidating Jews, and the persecution, isolation and ghettoisation started immediately.

When Hungary was occupied by the Germans (March 19, 1944), a large number of Jews were arrested and sent to the SS-run Kistarcsa camp administered by the Hungarian police. From there they were deported to Auschwitz

Working from East to West, town by town, Hungarian gendarmes under Germans supervision cleared the Hungarian countryside of Jews. Clare Galambos, living in Szombathely, one of the most western cities, close to the Austrian border was on one of the last trains. 437,000 were deported on 145 trains Four trains a day with about 3000 on each, 12000 people arrived in Auschwitz every day. Of the 437,000 about 320,000, children, old people, the lame and the sick, were killed immediately on arrival. The rest, like Clare Galambos, were selected for slave labour.

Budapest however, with 200,000 Jews, 20% of the city's population, presented a special logistic challenge. The Jews of Budapest were to be deported in the middle of July 1944, but on July 7, Horthy, the Regent, the head of the Hungarian government ordered a halt to the deportations.

Between July and October the Hungarian government sought to follow the Romanian example and pull out of its alliance with Germany and change sides. The Germans arrested Horthy, the head of the government, and his son, and installed the extreme nationalist antisemitic government of Szalasi and his Arrow Cross party. This lead to uncontrolled mayhem and the random murder of thousands of Jews.

With the overthrow of the Hungarian government in October by the Arrow Cross antisemitic regime, deportations resumed.

Deportation were resumed on foot. Trains were no longer available. The death camps in Poland had already been destroyed or captured by Soviet troops, so the the Hungarian Jews were deported mainly to Austria. These included my father who ended up in the notorious Mauthausen camp and its sub-camp Günzkirchen, and my mother who was in Lichtenwörth, a women's camp close to the Austrian Hungarian border, a sub-camp of Mauthausen. In November the Jews remaining in Budapest were confined in the newly established ghetto. My brother and I survived there in the care of our grandparents

During the Szalasi's Arrow Cross regime, gangs perpetrated a reign of arbitrary terror against the Jews of Budapest. Hundreds of Jews, both men and women, were violently murdered.

Memorial on the Danube river bank commemorating those who were shot into the river by Arrow Cross murder squads

Jews of Romania

Your chance of survival depended on where you lived. Large proportion of the Jews of Bessarabia and Moldova were killed, but the Jews of the Banat and the Regat [Old Kingdom] had a better chance of survival.

Whereas Jews in Hungary had been aligned with the liberal Hungarian nationalist movement since at least the Revolution of 1848 and were granted full Hungarian citizenship rights in 1868, Jews of Romania were not granted citizenship until after the First World War, and then only reluctantly, mandated as part of the Peace Treaty settlements. Antisemitism was deeply ingrained in Romanian politics, closely linked, as in other parts of Europe, to anti-liberal forces, and acceptance of Jews was a significant divisive issue. The incorporation after the First World War in Romania of territories with large Jewish communities that were formerly part of Russia, added to the perception that Jews were an alien element in Romanian society.

There was widespread opposition to the granting of equal rights to Jews. There were a number of pogroms in the 1920s, demand for the exclusion of Jews from universities and the professions. After the Nazis assumed power in Germany, violent antisemitism became an integral part of the political movements of both the right wing regime of Ion Antonescu and the extreme fascist organisation of the Iron Guard. Starting in October 1941 as part of their conflict with the government of King Carol II, the Iron Guard began a massive antisemitic campaign torturing and beating Jews and looting their shops. Coinciding with the failed coup in which the Iron Guard tried to overthrow the government the attack on Jews culminated in the pogrom in Bucharest in which 125 Jew were killed in the most brutal manner, their corpses hung from meat hooks in the slaughterhouse.

In the northern provinces that were annexed from Russia by Romania, Jews were largely unassimilated Eastern Europeans. In some towns and cities, Dorohoi, Botosani, Jasi and some smaller towns, Jews formed a majority. Many were poor, though there was also an elite, essential for the economy of the province.

Deportation to Transnistria

After Romania occupied the Soviet territories of Bessarabia and Bukovina between 45,000 and 60,00 Jews were killed by their Romanian neighbours and 150,000 were deported to Transnistria, a district east of the Dniester river that came under Romanian occupation. Many were shot, others died of exposure, disease and starvation. Killings took place before the arrival of occupying armies. Members of the German Einsatsgruppen D were shocked by the primitive brutality of the Romanian slaughter.

Deportation of the Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina was completed by the middle of 1942. However in Transylvania, the Banat and the Regat, the Old Kingdom of Rpmania, most Jews remained in place despite German pressure to deport the remaining Jews to Polish camps. Ion Antonescu, the head of the Romanian government, began to have doubts about the final German victory. Why should he give up his Jews when the Hungarian government refused to do so. Deportations ceased, the Jews of the Regat and the Banat survived, and some who had been deported to Transnistria were able to return. Antonescu stopped the murder of Jews when he understood that this was contrary to national interest.

In the end, 50% of the Jews of Romania, 300,000 of the 600,00 survived, compared with 30 % of the Jews of Hungary, 200,000 of the 650,000 who lived there before the Holocaust.

Romanian soldiers rounding up the Bessarabian Jews, summer 1941