Jews are news

Guilty as charged! I wrote a letter to the Editor, which elicited replies and added to the controversy. My letter pointed out that the term 'Occupied territory' as it applies to the former land of Palestine has a different meaning for Arabs, Jews, and the rest of the world. When Arabs, i.e. Jordan occupied East Jerusalem, drove the Jews out, destroyed the synagogues, that was OK, but when, after 1967, the Jews moved back to Jerusalem, that was 'occupation' Although some people approved of my letter, and others had disagreed, no one picked up on the obvious historical truth that was my point. Suddenly the newspaper is full of letters about the Israeli Palestinian conflict. When there is no news, bash Israel, and by implication, the Jews. Today there were two long opinion pieces on the subject, one presenting the Palestinian side, arguing on points of international law, the other presenting the Israeli side, taking a broad historical perspective, going back to the Ottoman Empire, the creation of the Arab kingdoms by the British after the First World War, and the promise of a homeland for the Jews.  Both articles are right in essence, but neither comes to grips with the present reality, that the Jews are there to stay in the land formerly known as Palestine, and the Arab refugees who fled from there have nowhere else to go and have lived on international charity for the last sixty years. The New Zealand government's official position is that it support a two state solution  and sees Israel's, and especially Benjamin Netanyahu's intransigence as the one great obstacle to this ideal solution. Hi presto! Murray McCully has the answer to this intractable problem that had eluded all the other great statesmen for two generations. Well, Mr, McCully, I am entirely on your side, I totally agree with you. A two state solution would be an admirable resolution of the problem of two people sharing the same land, but only if Jews can live in peace among Arabs without fear of being murdered just as Arabs live among Jews in Israel. Unfortunately such a radical solution has not proved to be acceptable to the leaders of the Palestinian Arabs (don't call them Palestinians, because that implies that only the Arabs who fled from Palestinian are Palestinians). Unfortunately understanding the issues confronting the Jews of Israel is beyond many New Zealanders who read the newspapers and listen superficially to the news. Even Tom Scott, a prodigiously talented left leaning cartoonist, playwright and film maker, depicted the Arab Israeli conflict in images reminiscent of the images of the Jew in der Sturmer, a huge, overpowering, Israel bullying poor wee, small Murray McCully.

Learning from history to understand the present

John Le Carre is a writer who always intrigued me. He is a convoluted but wonderful story teller, and in his Cold War, Smiley novels he created an imaginary world which somehow seemed to have an uncanny resemblance to a secret but real world of the Cold War. Were Smiley and his crew like real spies, and how real was his nemesis, Karla? Le Carre's latest book, The Pigeon Tunnel, is a series of essays about people he had met and incorporated in his fiction. As always, John Le Carre tells great yarns. Reading The Pigeon Tunnel led me to read about the man who killed off the Cold War, Gail Sheehy's very readable Mikhail Gorbatchev, The Man Who Changed the World. Gorbachev was the protege of Yuri Andopov, head of the KGB, the only institution in Brezhnev's Soviet Union largely untainted by corruption, until he became the General Secretary of the Communist Party and head of the Soviet Union in 1982. Was Andropov Le Carre's Karla? Andapov fostered Gorbachev's vision of an egalitarian communist society free of corruption. To understand Gorbachev, you have to understand Andropov, but also Khrustchev, who in his 1956 denunciation of Stalin, attempted to steer the Soviet Union away from Stalin's bloody legacy. And to understand Putin you have to understand Gorbachev. Khruschev, Gorbachev and Putin.all tried to free, not successfully, Russia and Russian communism, from the stranglehold of corrupt apparatchiks, servants of the regime who peddled influence and used their power, often petty and pernicious power, to feather their own nests, while impoverishing their society, the people all around them. Both Khruschev and Gorbachev ultimately failed and were defeated by entrenched forces, Khruschev by Brezhnev, Gorbachev by Yeltsin and his supporters. The jury is out on Putin. He managed to survive and project the image of the strong leader, who enjoys popularity because a strong ruler makes for stability. But reading about Gorbachev prompted me to ask questions about other leaders who took strong stands and were maligned for it. What do we know about Assad who was undermined by fundamentalist Islamist rebels enjoying American patronage. He may not be a good guy, may not have the charm of a Gorbachev, but he is an educating, intelligent man. Syria would be a happier place had his autocratic rule not been undermined. This is something that Putin understands, but Western leaders don't.

The meaning of words

Dave Armstrong, musician, playwright and left leaning weekly columnist of the DominionPost is a writer whose prejudices I, an unreconstructed socialist, often share. Yet when this week's article was entitled 'Three cheers for a brave Murray McCully' I wondered what he was on about. I have some idea of the meaning of the word "brave", as in 'Brave Soldier Janos' who, in the story of Hari Janos captured Napoleon single handed and saved the Emperor's daughter. Brave, for me, means facing great danger with fortitude. I am not aware of Murray McCully facing such danger in proposing New Zealand's resolution on Israeli settlements in the last few days of New Zealand's tenure on the UN Security Council. So what was Dave Armstrong on about? John Kerry, the US Secretary of State whispered a few words in McCully's ear during his very brief visit to New Zealand, and McCully, like a good colonial petty chief, jumped to attentions. You want us to solve the world's most pressing problem, kick that uppity Jew, Benjamin Netanyahu in the teeth, or any other part of his anatomy, we will be glad to oblige. And what would be the down side? At the worst world peace would not break out. At best, we might be able to sell a little more meat to Arab countries. Certainly not to the United States, because that would displease the American farmers and would look bad to the electorate. 

So where is the bravery? Should McCully get a medal, or be just pensioned off to a comfortable diplomatic post where he may not have to face such dire danger, but would perhaps not be able to do much harm either.

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.