A Jewish Jew

Mark Oppenheimer, host of the podcast 'Unorthodox', wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times. In this he questions why commentators, politicians, and people in general talk about the 'Jewish' people, 'Jewish' neighbours, 'Jewish' writers, 'Jewish' artists, and not simply about 'Jews'. 'Jew' is a term that is used in many instances as 'something bad', not something to be proud of. This is the price Jews paid for acculturation and assimilation. They think of themselves as Jewish New Zealanders, Jewish Hungarians, Jewish Englishmen, Jewish Americans. It is a steep price. It enables antisemites to pick on Jews, to imply that there is something phoney about them, neither quite one thing, nor quite another. I much prefer to think of myself as a Jew, who happens to live in New Zealand. Being a Jew defines me not only in my own eyes but also in the eyes of my fellow citizens, the Scottish, Irish, English, Maori, Polynesian, Chinese and Indian New Zealanders. It makes me impervious to antisemitism. I am who I am and don't want to join someone else's exclusive club. There is a lot I can take pride in as a Jew. If there are some idiots in the world who take exception to Jews, so be it, I am not going to lose sleep over that. If antisemitism is on the rise in the world it is not a problem for Jews, it is a problem for those who subscribe to it.

Story telling

Many years ago I went to Hamilton for a weekend of Jewish learning. This was before we started Devarim in Wellington, a long time before Limmud in Auckland and Kia Torah in Wellington. It was organized by Norman Simms, an eccentric, challenging scholar ( I hope that he won't mind being described as such) I don't recall the topic of the talks apart from Norman talking about Mendel Beilis, the victim of the last Blood Libel in Kiev in 1913. I don't think that there was much Talmudic or any other rabbinic discussion, but it was a very pleasant weekend of talkfest. One of the guest speakers was Morris Lurie, Australian writer of 27th Annual Hippopotamus Race fame. His talk on writing must have clashed with something more topical or controversial, because I was the only one who turned up for it. Thus Morris and I had a one on one conversation about writing. The one thing that I remember form this conversation is that he said that a story, a work of fiction, must be true. I can't say in what sense it has to be true, because after all, fiction is made up. But Morris Lurie quoted the work of William Trevor, a fine stylist and good story teller, who had just published a new collection of short stories as an example of a story that was patently not true. I suppose that what he meant was that an event, an incident that caused a disruption, deflected from the natural flow of the story was artificial imposed on the story line. 

I think of this because I am struggling to explore a very short story I wrote a while ago. It came to me in the middle of the night almost as I wrote it down. It is about the experience of an old man who can no longer orient himself, who is suffering from a degree of dementia. To unpack this story I need to know more about his circumstances, his relationship with his son, perhaps also with his absent daughter, his life with his late wife, his sense of both loneliness and self-sufficiency. All this must seem true and not contrived. 

Why I bother working on this story I don't know. I gave up writing fiction some time ago. I have a folder of unpublished stories, none of them good enough, though some are better than others. They could be revised, I could look for a publisher or publish it myself on the Internet, but who cares. It is all vanity. Yet here I am, back to writing. It has no purpose. It will not bring me fame. It is like my violin playing. I just do it because I am still alive and for better or worse I can do it.

Wisdom of the people

I have been playing Bartok's Violin Duos with a friend, and this made me want to know more about Bartok. I borrowed David Cooper's detailed biography of Bartok. It is a portrait of an era, not only a very detailed account of Bartok's life and music. It also raises questions about Hungarian and generally European liberal history. Hungarians were a minority in lands that were inhabited by many different ethnic groups, Serbs, Croats, Slovaks, Wallahs,  Germans, Gypsies and Jews. Whatever their ethnic roots, people were defined by the language they spoke. Those who spoke Hungarian were deemed Hungarian. Language defined people's station in society. The aristocracy spoke German, French, even English, the gentry mainly German. The people of the land, the peasantry spoke by and large, Hungarian. Thus Hungarian nationalism was rooted in this class structure.  So Bartok, whose mother was German, developed an interest in Hungarian, and ultimately other ethnic music of the Balkans and North Africa, thus siding with the peoples of the land. This was also a rebellion against urban bourgeois and aristocratic culture, which relished ornamented, decorated, virtuoso gypsy music, the music of banquets at country estates and the music of the city coffee houses. Searching for real Hungarian, and real ethnic music, rejecting the prevailing romantic idiom made a statement about cultural values. 

Listening to Bartok music, some of it still sounds 'barbaric', 'primitive', but some of it is exquisitely beautiful and haunting. I have listened to the First Violin Concerto that he dedicated to Stefi Geyer and the First String Quartet. These are just sheer beautiful music. But embracing nationalism and national music, Bartok was treading on dangerous ground. Bartok's music embraced the music of many different people, without asserting the superiority or inferiority of any. But once nationalism glorifies a mythical past that impies the superiority of one people over another, it becomes poison.

The general who saved me

'How did you survived' the man asked me. He was originally from Odessa. The mother of his daughter-in-law was from Hungary. She was six years old when she was taken to Auschwitz. Somehow she survived and is still fit and well. The man from Odessa knew that few Hungarians survived. How did I survived? Through a series of miracles, I said. What did I know about miracles? I vaguely knew that the Budapest ghetto was mined, that at the end Eichmann planned to blow it up, and send in his Arrow Cross thugs to kill anyone who might have survived.If this didn't happen it was due to the commander of the Wehrmacht forces in Hungary, Generalmajor Gerhard Schidthuber. Raul Wallenberg, the Swedish emissary and possibly CIA spy may, or may not have talked to him and threatened to hold him personally responsible if the 70,000 inhabitants of the ghetto were massacred, and would make sure that he would be hanged after the war,  but it was only Schmidthuber who could stop the slaughter. While Himmler, the architect of the Holocaust vacillated and thought of saving his skin after the war, Hitler and some of his henchmen, and notably Eichmann, were adamant that the Jews of Europe had to be finished off, whatever fate awaited Germany, Schmidthuber far outranked Eichmann and probably thought little of the arrogant SS Lieutenant Colonel SS Uberstrumbannfurher, still going against his instructions straight from Berlin was a major decision. 

Schidthuber took over the command of the 13th Panzer Division in September 1944, by which time Budapest was virtually surrounded by Soviet troops. 

He was a soldier with a distinguished carrier. He served as a junior officer in the First World War, After a stint in civilian life during the 1920s, he rejoined the army in 1933. He was a captain in an infantry regiment, then in 1939 was promoted major, and commanded an infantry battalion. He took part in the Polish campaign in 1939, in 1940 served on the Western front, and later in the Balkan campaign in Yugoslavia. From 1941 he was on the Eastern front, and was promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel. In 1943 he was involved in heavy defensive fighting near Kiev. He was awarded the Knight's Cross of Iron Cross for his contribution. 

In September 1944, after taking command of the 13th Panzer Division in Budapest he was promoted to Generalmajor. [http://www.lexikon-der-wehrmacht.de/Personenregister/S/SchmidhuberG-R.htm] Who would have wanted such a job? The odds were vastly stacked against the German troops, the war was as good as lost. Yet as a soldier, he had to continue to lead his troops and fight. Perhaps being ordered to allow the slaughter of the last remaining Jews left alive was one step too much for him. Allowing the rampant rebel to slaughter civilians was something too much for his soldierly conscience. He stepped in and stopped the killing. On January 21 he was awarded Oak Leaves as the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross for his leadership,  three days after the ghetto was liberated. Three weeks later he was killed in the battle on the Buda side of the city. Perhaps he no longer wanted to live with all the burden on his conscience. Generals are seldom killed in battle, but this was a fitting end for a loyal soldier fighting for an unspeakable regime.

Turbulent times

I knew a lot about politics when I was about fifteen, sixteen. I had faith in Stalin as a benevolent father of the free world. When my social studies teacher questioned the influence of Stalin, and portrayed him as an evil dictator I knew that it was not Stalin but his misguided advisers who were responsible for Stalin's dastardly acts. Not only I, but millions of people, and in particular, teenagers who thought about the troubles in the world thought of Stalin as I did, and when Stalin died in 1953, they mourned his passing and were worried about what would happen to the world.Those were amazing times. The Americans were engaged in wars to topple regimes, undermined the communists of Italy and France, sided with brutal dictators. went to war in Korea in support of the corrupt premier Syngman Rhee, They worked on the development of the Hydrogen Bomb and Klaus Fuchs passed nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. I make this embarrassing confession, because I am reading Khrushchev Remembers, his kind of autobiography with notes by the eminent commentator on Soviet affairs, Edward Crankshaw, It was John Le Carre who aroused my interest in politicians who changed the world. I started with Mikhail Gorbachev. To understand him I had to understand his predecessor, Nikita Khrushchev. Khrushchev's story has an epic dimension, the son of an illiterate minor from Donbass, in the industrial part of Western Ukraine, a simple man with very little education, who had the talent for getting things done. He came under the wing of Kaganovich, one of Stalin's henchmen, Stalin took a liking to him, perhaps he saw in him the ultimate worker who rose to power in the workers' communist state. Not being an old-time party leader, and being a man of limited education, Stalin didn't feel threatened by him. Khrushchev moved among terrible, brutal men in Stalin's circle. His life was in constant danger. But he had a touch of humanity. He could relate to simple soldiers, and working with Zhukov and other Russian generals, had a great impact on the Russian victory at Stalingrad. This simple man in his ill cut suits and coarse peasant manners, changed the world by acknowledging the crimes of Stalin. He also opened my eyes. His narrative, his picture of Stalin's inner circle, men who were household names when I grew up, has a Shakesperean dramatic quality. Perhaps only those who lived through those times can appreciate this. Remembering times past is one of the rewards of old age.

Culture vulture

I chatted with an old friend about university education. Though we go back many years, almost his entire life, he is my son's age, by the time he went to university university was almost unrecognisably different from the university I went to and society was very different too. My friend asked me what I studied at university. I left school believing that there are only three things worth studying, Latin, Greek and Mathematics. Where I picked up this piece of nonsense I don't know, but it was in line with my idea of becoming a cultured person. I was quite unprepared for university, but had enough of school. I thought that I was a grown up. Schools were for kids. The thought that I need to learn something at university that would help me earn a living never crossed my mind. You could leave school and walk into a job any day. Making money didn't concern me either. There were more important things in life than getting rich. I wanted to be a cultured, civilised man, and to attain that I had to understand ancient civilisation, language, and to understand science and rational thinking I had to understand mathematics. The reality was that I didn't have enough grounding in mathematics to cope with it at university level and had to give it up, and although I persisted with Latin, and a smattering of Greek, I didn't have a real flair for either. Ironically, I had just enough Latin to teach it, though at least one of my students far outstripped me in no time. He ended up becoming a Professor of Russian. However it appears that I somehow, far from intending to, projected an image of someone who knew much more than in reality I did. People thought of me as an 'intellectual' whatever that is, someone who has views out of step with popular views. Someone who knew me when we were both young, someone whose learning far exceeded anything I could ever aspire to said that at the time he was terrified of me. I must have had the look of a classical scholar that concealed my ignorance. Yet deficient as I am in scholarship and education, I have huge problems with the celebration of post-truth. I can't accept the idea that truth is negotiable, that my gut feeling is as valid as that of the opinion of scholars, scientists, experts. We don't know where this scepticism, doubts about empirical evidence might lead to, but decisions based on gut feeling, ignoring historical and scientific evidence caused tremendous harm in the past.

The burdens and frustrations of office

The failure of Abdel Fattah El-Sisi

Yet again, my old friend, The New Yorker, provided me with food for thought. An article about El-Sisi, the military ruler of Egyptian, by Peter Hessler, who spent five years reporting  from Egypt raised questions about the challenges of democracy, the obligation of a man with power to step in and take control, and the pernicious effect of dependence on charity. The promise of the revolution that heralded democracy and brought to power Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood resulted in chaos and political paralysis. In stepped the army and the general in charge of intelligence, the self-effacing General El-Sisi, seemingly untainted by corruption. He proved to be ruthless in face of military challenges. He confronted threats by Islamist extremists in Sinai, terrorism on the ground and in the sky. As a soldier he was trained to fight the enemy, whoever that may be. What he was not trained to do was to address economic challenges. Egypt's economy is entirely dependent on largess from the Arab states, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait, and Qatar, which consider Egypt a a bulwark of Suni Islam against the threat of Iran and the Shiites. The United States funds the Egyptian military. But this dependence on hand-outs stunted the development of the economy. People with education and skills cannot find outlet for their creative talents, and unemployment or underemployment as well as a lack of hope and prospects leads to restlessness and ultimately threatens El-Sisi's rule, and political stability. There is a parallel with the threats faced by Mickhail Gorbachev, whose initial promise and success was undermined by his inability to manage the economy. It is failure to address unglamorous micro-details while focusing on the grand overall schemes that result in failure.