Books

Talking to Strangers

Stephen Pollard — Fri, 24 May 2013 09:33:37 +0100

If you're a regular JC reader, you'll have seen - and, I hope, laughed at - the columns of Peter Rosengard.

Peter's autobiography is effectively a book-length version of those columns. To me, that makes it an automatic recommendation. When I first came across Peter, I simply couldn't - still can't - understand why he wasn't writing regularly elsewhere. I've yet to read a piece of his that hasn't had me in stitches.

Peter is the British Larry David, with one big difference. He's not a journalist or a writer. He has a real job - and one at which he is astonishingly successful. Let me explain.

I'd been editing the JC for a few months when I got a call. "Hello, my name is Peter Rosengard. I am a life insurance salesman and I wondered if you would like to have breakfast with me at Claridge's."

My father taught me many things, but one of the most important was "if you don't ask, you don't get". That's how Peter works. He rings up total strangers and is completely upfront. He is after your business but if you're not interested in that, well, there's always breakfast at Claridge's. And, as he says in the book, who says no to that?

I didn't. The sheer chutzpah got me to say yes.

He told me that he used to have a column. I looked it up, and emailed him there and then to ask him to write for the JC.

You see, although Jews have a well deserved reputation for wit and comedy, there aren't that many who can do it on paper and regularly. Peter is one of them.

His life seems to have been one long definition of chutzpah. He is in the Guinness Book of Records for selling the largest life insurance policy ever, a story that has you breathless with admiration for the nous with which he pursued it.

The idea of reading the autobiography of a life insurance salesman isn't the easiest sell ever, but this is really a series of fabulous yarns, retold with wit and panache and which, if you enjoy his columns, you will love.

There's a serious and thoroughly admirable side to Peter, too. In recent years he has pushed his charity, the 9/11 London Project, like a dog with a bone and has brought over a sculpture crafted from steel from the World Trade Centre as a symbol of the charity's bigger project - an educational programme for schools.

My one worry is that in being so positive about his book, he will invite me to Claridge's for breakfast again.

Every time I say yes to scrambled eggs and smoked salmon, I end up with yet more bloody life insurance.

Hollywood and Hitler 1933-1939

Nathan Abrams — Fri, 17 May 2013 09:22:01 +0100

The 1930s are fondly remembered as the beginning of a golden age for Hollywood. The studios were dominated by Jews who operated a highly sophisticated oligopoly - the "dream factory"- and churned out as many as a film a day.

Surprisingly then, little has been written about the specific reaction of Hollywood to Hitler and Nazi Germany. Into this breach, steps Thomas Doherty, a Brandeis University professor. He charts how film-makers and audiences responded to Nazism as a business, ideology and ultimately a threat.

It took until 1939 for the word "Nazi" to appear in a film title: Warner Brothers' Confessions of a Nazi Spy. Why? The movie moguls - Jewish and gentile - largely took a realpolitik stance. Not wishing to lose out on a lucrative market, they took a long view. Variety reported in late 1933: "Thus far no one's been able to sell a Hitler item as entertainment." Lack of commercial incentive and plenty of official disincentive meant Hitler was ignored by the big studios even as he redrew the map of Europe. Anti-Nazi pictures were quashed, unmade or made poorly so they would bomb. Instead, the fight was taken up by - offbeat documentaries, low-budget indies and subtitled imports. And just as Hitler failed to appear on the American big screen, so did Jews, who simply disappeared. Why bother foreground an ethnicity that comprised only three per cent of the potential market and which would surely get the film banned from German import. As Doherty notes, "Commerce and censorship colluded to erase Hollywood's most prominent ethnic group."

Many Jews in the industry felt boycotts of German products would be detrimental to their co-religionists in Europe. Nevertheless, Jewish areas typically boycotted the exhibition of German films. Others deliberately showcased them, appealing to pro-Nazi opinion. The Yorkville cinema in Manhattan, showed Nazi-themed films until anti-Nazi protestors pointed out that the cinema was owned by Jews.

The Nazis tried to cloak their films by removing distinguishing signs and logos. Hitler, eagles, swastikas and even German were removed. But having purged its industry of its talent, German films tanked - Americans generally stayed away as a matter of taste rather than ideology. Yet, there was a good chance that those that did slip through were distributed by Jews, an irony that wasn't missed at the time. In a further irony the trademark product of American Jews remained up on marquees throughout Germany, even as anti-Jewish violence and other Nazi measures escalated.

One company that took a principled stance was Warners, which severed relations with Nazi Germany in 1933, and later produced Confessions of a Nazi Spy.

The book ends where most studies begin, with the outbreak of war. In so doing, it fills a gap, discussing little-known and long-forgotten films in a scholarly yet readable fashion.

Saul Bellow's Heart

Josh Glancy — Sun, 12 May 2013 10:15:00 +0100

It can't have been easy being Saul Bellow's son. He was a towering genius, a womaniser, sharp of tongue and hard of mind, yet with a fragile core that shrank away from the type of personal criticism he was so adept at dispensing. Bellow's heart and mind were consumed by his work, producing novels that helped define post-war US literature. And, as with many influential historical figures, behind the public legacy lies the pain of the family doomed to play an auxiliary role to a great figure.

Greg Bellow clearly had a troubled relationship with his father. "Was I a man or a jerk?" Saul asked his son once in a rare display of self-doubt. A psychotherapist, he puts himself on the analyst's couch in an attempt to find an answer. The conclusion, it seems, is that he may well have been both.

The book's strength lies in its exploration of the complex familial network that surrounded Bellow and the ghetto mentality from which he never truly escaped. Bellow Jr reaches into his father's immigrant upbringing. Despite the chaos, privation and beatings from his volatile father, Abraham, a failed bootlegger from Dvinsk, Saul treasured this time. Much is made of Saul's "inability to penetrate Abraham's mask of family civility". From this neglect, stems Saul's own inability to give and receive love freely, which his son believes to be his "greatest personal flaw". Perhaps the most striking memory of Greg's childhood is the closed door of his father's study.

Despite this barrier, the author makes the most of his unrivalled perspective to identify parallels between his father's life and his art. In each of Bellow's protagonists he finds echoes of his father's self-perception, most notably in Moses Herzog, "a trusting man surrounded by an army of betrayers". Bellow had recently discovered an affair between his second wife and his friend Jack Ludwig. Greg Bellow seems aware that his father would have loathed such a public discussion of his private motivations, and in this sense the book is, at least in part, a belated filial rebellion.

The dominant theme of the book is the distinction between "young Saul", the idealistic, areligious Trotskyite radical who was a loving if difficult father, and "old Saul", a cantankerous, conservative and authoritarian man who became surrounded by admirers and distanced from his own children. His son identifies the 1976 Nobel Prize as the turning point, when "the optimism and hope I loved and admired were buried under anger, bitterness, intolerance and preoccupations with evil".

Bellow did indeed become more conservative in his later years, and returned to the Judaism of his youth. His son's resentment at this, and the rift that it caused with his father, renders him incapable of understanding or explaining it properly.

The book's greatest strength is also its weakness. Deeply personal, at times it becomes an Oedipal vendetta more about Greg Bellow's pain than his father's heart. He acknowledges at one point that "Saul always exerted more influence on me than I would have wished". In fact, the sheer size of his father's character seems to have overwhelmed him, and one is left with the hope that writing this memoir has helped lift the weight of his enormous and painful legacy.

Hats in the Ring

Simon Rocker — Thu, 02 May 2013 15:47:46 +0100

The Chief Rabbi may now represent less than half of British Jews but no communal office attracts greater interest. In the third of his studies of the chief rabbinate, former JC Judaism editor Dr Meir Persoff looks at how six of its incumbents were chosen, from Nathan Adler in 1844 to Lord Sacks.

The United Synagogue may have been criticised for taking two years to anoint Ephraim Mirvis. But after Solomon Hirschell died early in 1842, it took until late 1844 that Adler was selected. (Of course there was no Skype then).

Even then, the Voice of Jacob paper was rooting for the chief rabbi "to be elected by all". Adler defeated three candidates - including the great German commentator Shimshon Raphael Hirsch - in a ballot cast by delegates from shuls across the UK. Democratically, we seem to have moved backwards.

Mirvis was selected by an inner ring of just six men and two women - though that was an advance - with another 15 having a veto, all bound to pledges of confidentiality. By contrast, 115 delegates chose Joseph Hertz over Moses Hyamson in 1913 in a vote that went ahead despite Lord Rothschild's attempts to have only Hertz's on the ballot sheet.

Persoff chronicles the political tensions that ever threatened hopes for the chief rabbi to be a figure of unity. In 1965, the Liberals could offer their "full co-operation" to Yaacov Herzog, the Israeli diplomat chosen to be Chief (he pulled out because of ill-health). But by 1989, the Liberals were very publicly distancing themselves from the office.

Persoff relies on substantial quotation from letters, resolutions of meetings and news reports at the time. This provides valuable source material and helps give a feel for the period, though some of the wordy Victorian prose in early chapters might have been paraphrased. What enlivens the book is his access to the personal papers of some of the protagonists, such as Lord Jakobovits or Ann Harris, wife of the late chief rabbi of South Africa, who was courted as a rival to Sacks.

It also sheds light on relations between Jakobovits and his successor. At one point, Lord Kalms, the leading champion of Sacks's candidacy, accused Jakobovits of failing to recognise the younger man's talents. Jakobovits - said to have preferred Emanuel Feldman of Atlanta - responded: "He [Sacks] knows… the failure to strike up proper bonds between us is certainly not due to any lack of trying on my part." Though at Sacks's installation, Jakobovits could generously acclaim the new chief rabbi's "exceptional endowments" and his entry into office "with a higher public profile than any of your predecessors".

Innocent honesty inside an Aryan exterior

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 11:54:10 +0100

Let Me Tell You A Story
Renata Calverley

In 1942, while her father was away with the Polish army, six-year-old Renata Calverley was sent with her mother and grandmother into the Przemysl Ghetto. From there, in an overcrowded room with a bucket in the middle, the child began a hazardous journey that would start with the traumatic loss of all the familiar comforts of childhood and end with a new life in England four years later.

Obvious challenges arise when writing as an adult from the point of view of your six-year-old-self. Not all events and conversations can be recalled and dialogue needs to be written to suit an adult readership. The result here is that the little girl’s speech tends to sound oddly mature. That said, it is impossible not to be moved by the plight of this child, who lost her mother and grandmother and was then smuggled from the ghetto by her beloved nanny and passed straight into hiding with a volatile couple who were obsessed with the cash payments that came with hiding a Jew.

At one point, Calverley ended up in a grim, state orphanage “similar to the one I had imagined Oliver Twist lived in.” She had been born with blonde hair and blue eyes and, for this reason, was considered for adoption from the orphanage by a German family who might have pushed her towards recruitment into the Hitler Youth.

Despite her Aryan appearance, her little girl’s innocent tongue often threatened to betray her origins, as it nearly did when she told the director of the orphanage that her mother had been “taken away in a lorry to a camp”.

A cousin turned up to remove her just in time and members of Calverley’s extended family gave her temporary shelter. It was not until 1946 that she was reunited with her father in London.

As a tale of a young child being hidden and passed around, rather than an adult actively engaged in fleeing peril, this is a tenderly moving rather than an overtly dramatic tale. It would be difficult not to warm to Calverley, honest enough to portray her young self as often wilful and stubborn.

But, for illuminating one way in which a small number of Jewish children managed to survive the horrors of the Second World War in Europe, hers is a worthy addition to the Holocaust memoir genre.

Poor bare, forked males

Simon Round — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 11:48:23 +0100

If you buy only one quirky, surreal collection of comedy short stories about relationships this year, make it Simon Rich’s The Last Girlfriend on Earth (Serpent’s Tail, £9.99).

This is an endlessly inventive, laugh-out-loud book that makes some acute points about males and relationships in a way that will have most men simultaneously nodding knowingly and shifting uncomfortably in their seats.

Rich is happy to attack the big topics. For example, in Centre of the Universe, he writes about the Creation.

On the first day, God created the heavens and the earth. On the second day, God separated the oceans from the sky. Then on the third day, “God’s girlfriend came over and said He’d been acting distantly lately.

“‘I’m sorry’, God said. ‘Things have been crazy this week at work.’”

There are many such genius moments. One story is about a government agent who has been given the power of invisibility so that he can track down enemies of the state and save the world but who spends the vital 48 hours stalking his ex-girlfriend who is on a date with a new man. Dog Missed Connections is a canine take on the matter. “Saw you by the Dumpster, eating a pile of what seemed to be human vomit. You seemed like someone who doesn’t take himself too seriously.”

In the Adventure of the Spotted Tie, we realise Sherlock Holmes can detect just about anything apart from the fact that his girlfriend is seeing another guy. And there is the poignant tale of Xander, a brilliant scientist who has fallen down on the crucial matter of buying his girlfriend nice birthday presents: “Quantum physics and nuclear hydraulics were trivial compared to the rigours of gift shopping.”

It’s fairly spooky that Rich, though still in his 20s, has such telling and very humorous insights into the shortcomings and sensitivities of the male psyche.

You will easily read the 208 pages of this book in a single evening — and this is a one-night stand you will definitely want to tell your friends about.

‘Jews are deﬁned by words, not religion or ethnicity’

Simon Rocker — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 11:19:41 +0100

Frank Sinatra’s daughter Nancy once released a song called, These Boots are Made for Walking. Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger’s book, Jews and Words, could have been sub-titled, These Books are Made for Talking.

The novelist father and historian daughter’s “Abraham to Seinfeld” tour of Jewish civilisation is a treat. But at the heart rests a single, powerful proposition: Jews are a people not because of religious beliefs (the authors are atheists) or common ethnic descent (historically, many have been converts). Instead, Jews collectively share a “textline”, a tradition of books and discussion from the Bible onwards, which has travelled down the ages, around Shabbat- and dinner-tables, in salons, yeshivot and now cyberspace. Jews reproduce through textual intercourse.

“Perhaps the greatest centre of life was the family home,” says the 52-year-old Haifa University professor, Fania, whose intonation carries a trace of her father’s.

“On the table, there were two things, food and texts. Even a very poor family that could not afford a book had textuality — they would say the blessings, the prayers and, after dinner, chant the songs. The text was always on the table.

“Even now, I allow my teenage boys to bring books to the table. It is more complicated when they bring their iPad but even an iPad is a book in many ways — a tablet.”

Jews and Words was issued as a companion to the Posen Library of Jewish Civilisation, the 10-volume anthology sponsored by philanthropist Felix Posen, on whose academic board Professor Oz-Salzberger sits. When Posen first approached her father to write it, some 10 years ago, he turned it down — “he is not in the habit of writing commissioned books.”

But when the prospect of collaboration with his daughter later arose, he warmed to it. “I wouldn’t have done it earlier” she says. “I needed to carve my own identity as a writer and researcher before I could team up with my dad.”

It is his first book composed in English but she has published and edited several works in the language before.

She was mentored for her Oxford University doctorate — on the German enlightenment — by Isaiah Berlin, and taught at North American and Australian universities before her current post.

A book on Jewish words written in English might seem ironic but contemporary Israelis are a cosmopolitan tribe. “So many members of my generation — academics, scientists, hi-tech people — are travelling the globe, so English has become very natural to us,” she points out, and suggests that “there are two great Jewish languages these days, English and Hebrew.

“We think these two great Jewish languages should converse more freely. This is the reason we wrote the book in English.”

The writing flowed smoothly because “we are so very conversant with each other. We have been going over each other’s lectures and articles for a long time now.”

Their secular outlook is nourished by an “irreverent reverence” for the Jewish past. “People tell us you can’t be secular and pass the torch on to your kids because your kids will not be in the business of being Jewish at all. But when we look at our own clan, we are talking of at least five generations of secularity.

“My father’s grandparents were already secular Jews. That’s also true for my mother’s family. Then you have my own children and my sister’s children, who are no less secular and no less Jewish.”

For “members of the Jewish world” — she prefers the term to “diaspora Jewry” —- Israel is proving to be a beacon. “Israel shows that it doesn’t have to be the synagogue or the family table alone. Any concert hall, theatre stage, or night club can be a hub of Jewish existence and creativity.

“In Tel Aviv, so many new songs are written around the lyrics of the Bible or the medieval poets of Sepharad. There is a whole renaissance around the Jewish bookshelf — it’s so rich, it keeps delivering. This is the secular synagogue.”

Jodi Picoult on the Shoah

Jennifer Lipman — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 14:43:36 +0100

It was perhaps inevitable that the reigning queen of moral-dilemma fiction would one day turn her attention to the Holocaust.

In her career so far — 20 novels and counting — American writer Jodi Picoult has delved into witchcraft, gun crime, suicide pacts and teenage cancer, not to mention the Amish and Native American communities.

Her latest offering, The Storyteller, (Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99) adheres to the by-now familiar structure — the action flits between past and present with each chapter narrated by a different character. The themes — love and loyalty, and the dilemmas these raise — are likewise Picoult staples.

That said, it is a departure from formula in that there is no court case at its centre, or at least not a formal one. Instead, we have Sage, a damaged young woman who lives her life in the shadows and finds solace in little other than baking and a damaging affair with a married man.

Her grandmother — one of the few relatives with whom she is in contact — is a Holocaust survivor; Sage herself has little connection with her Jewish heritage. Into the equation comes an elderly widower, who may or may not be concealing a Nazi past, and a Jewish Nazi-hunter with personal problems of his own. Woven into the contemporary tale is a fable — or is it more? — about a young woman living in a fairy-tale European village as tragedy strikes.

For anyone familiar with Holocaust history, some passages can be trying — for example, where Picoult mentions the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele and proceeds to give a museum-exhibit-like summary of his notorious deeds. Her rigour is admirable but a genuine eye-witness account, of which we have many, is always likely to be more powerful than a fictional one.

Yet she will undoubtedly introduce some readers to much of this history. And, by making the story about the modern implications of the Holocaust and raising the questions associated with tracking former Nazis seven decades on, Picoult does more than merely write a fictional survivor’s testimony. You will be gripped whether or not you want to be.

Can a psychoanalyst see through you?

Rebecca Abrams — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 14:38:11 +0100

Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions
By Stephen Frosh

Have you ever seen a ghost? Or felt that an event in your past needed laying to rest? Or had a strong premonition something was going to happen before it actually did? Or caught sight of your reflection in a shop window and for a moment failed to recognise yourself?

These are the intriguing phenomena that Stephen Frosh explores in this short but fascinating book about the experiences of haunting familiar to many of us, and what those experiences might tell us about ourselves.

In the course of his investigations, Frosh draws on a wide range of Jewish sources, including the Bible, the Talmud, and Jewish folklore and literature. The story of the binding of Isaac, for example, provides intriguing insights into the difficulty of seeing and being fully seen. The play The Dybbuk informs a discussion about the search for the Shechinah, and the possibility of forgiving those who have possessed and dispossessed us.

“Judaism, Jewish identity and psychoanalysis are bound tightly together”, Frosh reminds us, since psychoanalysis is itself haunted by its Jewish origins, and “the ambivalence that comes from having a ‘Jewish father’ to whom one might feel in thrall, and against whom one might have to rebel.”

Jewishness, he argues, is itself a “spectral” presence within psychoanalysis, “another unlaid ghost, bursting out from time to time, sometimes celebrated but at other times abjected.” A strong theme running through the book is Freud’s complex relationship with his own Jewishness.

All humans can find themselves haunted by the past, and also, according to Frosh, by what ghosts intimate to us “about what we are about to become.” In various guises, he argues, ghosts speak to us from the past about the future. For Jewish readers, Frosh’s book has a particular resonance, since the dead, for good and ill, seem to exert an especially strong hold over us, be they the Patriarchs and Matriarchs of the Torah, or our own specific ancestors. But being haunted is a normal state in Frosh’s view: “Those who are not in some way possessed are also not fully human.”

Frosh is Professor of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College and his overriding focus is on how these experiences can be understood and worked within a psychoanalytic context.

Hauntings is aimed at a specialist audience and at times this makes for fairly impenetrable reading for a reader not steeped in the work of Freud, Klein and Lacan. But even for the non-specialist there are rich rewards in this book. It will change the way you think about things that might haunt you.

Brothers and others

Moris Farhi — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 13:41:17 +0100

Exposure
By Sayed Kashua (Trans: Mitch Ginsburg)

Deliberations on our individuality, our place in the world — whether or not our attitudes towards social, political and religious responsibilities offer acceptable meanings to life — have been major themes in literature since Antiquity.

In contrast, progress and knowledge have prompted antithetical discourses, not least the nihilism that life, being a cosmic accident, has neither meaning nor an ultimate, divine purpose.

Latterly, our robotic existence in our techno-materialistic world has, in the main, severed itself from esoteric pursuits. Today, but for a few seers in the wilderness, the question of “identity” has become the war-cry of hysteric religions in fear of losing their futures.

Haaretz columnist Sayed Kashua, the author of Exposure, is a Palestinian who is also an Israeli citizen. He writes in Hebrew and is a recipient of the Prime Minister’s Prize for Literature. But are he and the Palestinian-Israelis he writes about full Israeli citizens?

Can they exist freely as both Palestinian and Israeli individuals in a land where the cultures and selfhoods of the two peoples are torn asunder by indurated politics?

In Kashua’s first novel, Dancing Arabs, the answer was negative. His Palestinian protagonist, despite his brilliance and ability to interchange identities and appearances, failed. In Exposure, the answer is more nebulous.

Its story is quite simple. Well-settled in a prosperous Jerusalem neighbourhood, a successful Palestinian lawyer finds, in a secondhand book he has just purchased, a billet-doux written by his wife. Consumed by jealousy and determined to redeem his honour, he sets out to find the book’s previous owner whose name, Yonatan, is inscribed on the title page.

Parallel to the lawyer’s investigation runs the story of another Palestinian, a social worker, who looks after a paralysed youth named Yonatan. I will disclose no further details in order to safeguard the reader’s enjoyment of the story’s twists and turns.

Suffice it to say that the lawyer does triumph in his quest and finds Yonatan. But we wonder whether this is a Pyrrhic victory.

Exposure is not an intense circumspection on selfhood as is, say, Albert Camus’s The Stranger or Max Frisch’s I’m Not Stiller. But it makes full use of its own troubled times — always conducive to questioning the Self — to subtly depict the erosion of both individual and communal identities not only of Israeli-Palestinians but also of Israelis themselves. Bearing in mind that when we look at our adversaries we see our own selves, the warning is clear: we can celebrate our identities only by allowing others to celebrate theirs. Otherwise, woe unto us!