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".