Posts by Simon Round

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.

Stephen Grosz: telling tales from the consulting room

Simon Round — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 14:19:21 +0000

There is something mildly thrilling about sitting in the consulting room of a famous psychoanalyst and asking him a few searching questions about how he feels about the success of his recent book and his motivations for writing it.

It is also fitting that we talk in the house in Hampstead where nearly all the action took place. The Examined Life is a series of 30 vignettes, taken from encounters that occurred between Stephen Grosz and his patients in the very room where we are sitting. The book was fought over by publishers and was serialised on Radio 4 — an unusual amount of attention for what is essentially a book about a set of clinical case histories.

But as American-born Grosz, explains, the tradition of setting down encounters with patients in readable story form goes back to Freud — and beyond. “The Jewish philosopher Gershon Sholem said that anything that can be talked about in a theoretical way can also be done in a story. I’m a great believer that anything, no matter how complicated and theoretical, that can be done in technical language, can be done better in a very simple story.”

Smiling, he adds: “Some more religious friends of mine do say that the stories read like the rabbi’s comments on a Torah portion. I don’t know how I feel about that.”

But Grosz’s impulses in writing the book were not so dissimilar from a rabbi’s. While a minister searches for the message in the weekly portion, so Grosz attempts to explain the significant moments in his career as an analyst — and crucially to do so in a readable style and without jargon.

“The stories are all short, between 1,000 and 2,000 words. There were a lot of things I wanted to communicate. I wanted to strip away all the theory. I wanted reading it to be a bit like a therapy and for you to be surprised by the endings. Sometimes in my sessions I think to myself: ‘My gosh, I hadn’t thought of that’. I wanted it to have an echo of that and it seems to have worked. Readers have picked up on it.”

An example of the surprise that Grosz speaks about occurs in one of the pieces, in which he recounts a conversation with a Jewish woman who explained how her father had sat shivah when she married a non-Jewish man, and had poisoned his family against her so that there was minimal contact until she had children. Then she discovered to her astonishment that her father himself had been in a long term affair with a non-Jewish woman while condemning her for doing exactly the same thing.

Grosz explains that this is an established psychological trait, known as “splitting”, but that he much preferred the expression the woman had used. “She said: ‘The bigger the front, the bigger the back’. It’s a fabulous expression because it gives a clear picture of something dynamic. It’s a way of putting ideas about ourselves onto others, as if to say that they are the bad ones, not me. We all do it in minor ways.”
Despite many years as an analyst, Grosz still has the same fascination with the subject he had as a teenager when he first encountered Freud.

“I read The Interpretation of Dreams when I was 15 and was blown away by it. I was interested by his idea that we don’t have direct access to knowledge about ourselves — that we have to infer our desires by examining our own behaviour.”

Grosz studied at Berkeley in California and later went to Oxford. As a trainee psychoanalyst, he underwent his own therapy, during which he had a revelation about the process.

“I went into analysis thinking that your analyst knows everything. But I discovered very quickly that the thing about analysis is the analyst doesn’t know anything at all.

“The point is that you have to examine everything together and keep your mind open to all sorts of possibilities.

“And that’s what I tried to do in the stories. I would often arrive at a cliched meaning and then the patient would show me there was a deeper meaning. This would come as much as a surprise to me as it did to the patient.”

Dame Vivien Duffield puts the final touches to her project

Simon Round — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 12:05:53 +0000

Dame Vivien Duffield claims she is tired. The new Jewish community centre for London, to be known as JW3, is approaching completion and Dame Vivien, honoured for her massive philanthropic efforts, says that this may be her last big project.

However, when she discusses JW3 and the influence she hopes it will have on the community, she seems to lack nothing in energy.

Dame Vivien’s Jewish identity is bound up with the work she does. She sees herself as a builder. As such she hopes JW3, on the Finchley Road in Swiss Cottage, will have a transformative effect on the way we interact with each other.

“I’ve always worried about how fragmented the Jewish community is in this country. We all live in small circles and have nothing to do with one another at all. It’s amazing how few cross-communal things there are. Even the mere fact that synagogues are beginning to have their own community centres, I find rather sad. That means they are keeping things very much in their own sector.

“There aren’t that many Jews in this country. There is such a richness a variety of in our community it seems a shame not to bring it all together. It’s a rather idealistc dream, I suppose.”

Dame Vivien, the daughter of businessman Sir Charles Clore, now in her late 60s, has certainly put her money where her mouth is. JW3 is a huge enterprise and Dame Vivien’s Duffield Foundation has put up most of the cash.

Her identity is bound up in the work she does and the belief that charity is a very Jewish concept. “Philanthropy was part of the make-up of a certain generation of Jews, particularly in people like my father, and others like Isaac Wolfson and Marcus Sieff.

“But I’m not so sure about this new lot. They give very reluctantly – there are quite a few who don’t do much but on the other hand there are anawful lot who do and I believe the Jewish community gives more than anybody else.”

Her vision, which was inspired by a visit to the Manhattan JCC in New York, nearly a decade ago, is now nearing completion. JW3 London is due to open in the autumn and Dame Vivien is excited about how everyone will benefit.

“I’m hoping it will be a hub for the community. There will be a restaurant, serving vegetarian food, [under the eye of restaurateur Nicholas Lander] so the idea is that people will go there for coffee during the day, notice what’s for dinner and also that there’s something going on at the theatre and an interesting enamel painting class or a Jewish history class that their friends might be interested in going to.”

And that vision is also an outward-looking one – she wants the local Muslims, Christians and others to engage in debates and use the facilities as a way of fostering good inter-community relations.

However, when it has been constructed, although Dame Vivien plans to attend JW3 regularly, she will not play a part in running it.

She smiles: “I’m a builder. My intention is to bow out gracefully, having made sure the baby is OK and that there’s enough water in the bath.”

Cholent: the Ashkenazi secret key to a long, long life, says Israeli scientist

Simon Round — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:00:00 +0000

Eating cholent has long been seen thought of as the traditional, if not the most dietetic, Shabbat lunch.

However, new research, centring on the Ashkenazi slow-cooked mix of beef, potato, pulses and other ingredients, now points to the exciting possibility that cholent, if eaten in sufficient quantities, could be the key to a longer life.

Israeli scientists have long wrestled with the reasons why a disproportionate number of Ashkenazi Jews live past 100. Previous research has centred on their DNA - but now researchers believe the answer could be their lunch.

Mordecai Bedichah of the University of Ra'anana revealed this week that when beef and pulses are cooked together for an extended period of time, a little known enzyme, known as esterzine, is released.

When released into the body, this enzyme is known to slow down chemical reactions within cells and could be the key to elongating life. While scientists have long known about its theoretical benefits, this is the first time that it has been found to be delivered to the body in useable form. Mr Bedichah said: "Many people have experienced that feeling of tiredness after a large portion of cholent. Previously we have always put it down to the stodginess and high-fat content of the food. However, now we believe this sensation has more to do with the body's ageing process slowing down."

He added that the crucial component was the length of cooking - it has to be more than 12 hours. He also pointed out that the benefits do not seem to apply to the Sephardi version of the dish, hamin. This might have to do with the fact that hamin uses different ingredients - chicken instead of beef, and rice instead of barley and beans.

Mr Bedichah predicted that, given a diet rich in cholent, people might be expected to live to an average of 120 years. But there could be a problem. He said: "For the full effect you would have to eat cholent in large quantities – perhaps six or seven times a week. However, this could well cause an epidemic of obesity. We could end up with a world full of very old but very fat people. This is a snag we have yet to overcome."

TV review: Alex Polizzi - The Fixer

Simon Round — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 11:29:17 +0000

If ever there was a business in need of a fixer, the Alf Onnie curtain shop in east London was it. There was the horrendously jumbled store – so cluttered that only the rats that infested the premises seemed to know their way round. And then there were the three Freedman brothers who ran the shop their grandfather, Alf, had founded in 1920. Kevin, Lawrence and Jeremy disagreed strongly about where things were going wrong — if there was a profit to be made from squabbling they would be in the FTSE 100 by now.

Alex Polizzi, a businesswoman from the Forte dynasty, knew what was to be done. They needed to concentrate on their core curtain business, smarten up and get rid of all the clutter in the shop. “There’s so much schmatter everywhere,” said Polizzi, lapsing into the vernacular.

But the boys, who argued incessantly to a klezmer backing track (just in case you didn’t realise they were Jewish), seemed unable to see that amid their bickering the curtain was coming down on their, er, curtain business.

But Polizzi is an assertive woman and she dragged them off to see branding experts and shop design people while she herself attempted to shake some sense into the brothers. Even Jeremy, the one she thought had been her ally in redesigning the shop, turned out to be obsessed with pelmets, swags and tails, and oblivious to modern trends.

But there was, to Polizzi’s and my surprise, a happy ending. The boys allowed the shop to be refitted, and on Polizzi’s advice, Jeremy went out and obtained some big made-to-measure contracts. And just when it looked like it was all over, the business literally started to make a net profit. The brothers were so amazed they almost stopped arguing.

It’s time to polish up your Polish

Simon Round — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 09:58:04 +0000

So now we know for sure what many of us have suspected for a long time - that there is an awful lot of Polish people in this country.

Polish is now the second most commonly spoken language in the UK, if you disregard Welsh, which so many are inclined to do. According to the 2011 census, there are 546,000 people who speak Polish as their first language. It's fair to assume that most are actually Polish, which means that for the first time since the Jews left the shtetl to settle in the UK, we are once again outnumbered by Poles.

And not just Poles. There are also 85,000 Lithuanians living in this country, five of whom used to live next door to me. My ancestors fled the Vilnius area in an attempt to escape persecution and, 100 years later, I found that the great-grandchildren of those who may have persecuted my great-grandparents were now living next door to me in North London.

The Lithuanian neighbours were superficially friendly (although at no point was I confident enough to tell them of our shared heritage) but I soon began to understand why my ancestors might have felt the need to leave very quickly with whatever they could fit on to the back to their cart.

Their taste in music was absolutely atrocious. One hot summer we were forced to listen to monstrosities including a Russian version of Save Your Kisses For Me. And there were many other appalling songs. Imagine Sir Cliff Richard singing his greatest hits in Lithuanian… well, it was not quite as bad as that but it was pretty hard to take, particularly when they parked their speakers under their gazebo and turned up the volume to a level that most courts would consider antisemitic.

There were also the barbecues. I did not have any particular objection to the char-grilling of cheap burgers and sausages but, while waiting for the food to cook, the neighbours would entertain themselves with long games of badminton. Every now and then a shuttlecock would sail over the fence, quickly followed by one of the neighbours. I experienced an atavistically visceral reaction whenever I glanced out of the kitchen window to see a 16-stone Lithuanian thrashing around in the shrubbery.

Having the Lithuanians next door was also slightly off-putting from another point of view. I had always taken comfort in the fact that, while the Jews had suffered persecution in Eastern Europe, we had prospered in this country while our former tormentors had atrophied under the dead hand of Soviet communism. Yet now, here they were living next door to me - and they had a shiny new BMW while I could only run to a Vauxhall Astra.

However, I have to admit that the migration of Poles and other Eastern Europeans has, on reflection been positive. Superior quality pickled cucumbers are now to be found more or less on every high street, the nation's cisterns are flushing more reliably now than at any time in post-war history and, the clincher is this: when racists complain about the invasion of foreigners from Eastern Europe, they are by and large no longer referring to us.

Radio review: Ajax - the Jewish club

Simon Round — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 11:51:51 +0000

Fans of Dutch football club Ajax call themselves the “super Jews”. They wear scarves adorned with Stars of David and display Israeli flags in the Amsterdam Arena where the team plays .But Ajax is not a Jewish club. Only 500 of the weekly attendance of 50,000 is Jewish.

This was a fascinating and disturbing investigation into why Ajax fans have adopted this spurious Jewish identity.

Before the Second World War, Amsterdam had a Jewish community of 100,000 out of the city’s 700,000 inhabitants. As a result, the city had a Jewish character but Ajax was not considered a particularly Jewish club.
That was until 30 years ago, when the chant of “super Joden” first sprang up on the terraces.

The only explanation anyone could come up with was that as Ajax were generally hated around the Dutch League and Amsterdam was historically a Jewish city, they allied themselves with a similarly hated group – the Jews.

Now Ajax’s rivals really had something to get their teeth into. Antisemitic chants follow Ajax around — “Hamas, Hamas, all Jews to the gas” is one of the more popular songs.

An Ajax fan tried hard to explain the Jewish affiliation. He said: “If everyone feels Jewish, you don’t have to be Jewish to have the feeling you are Jewish.” However, the club’s Jewish former chairman Uri Coronel was ambivalent.

“At first, we were all shocked. But at a certain stage I got used to it. People waved the Israeli flag and I even felt proud. In Israel, they love Ajax, they call it ‘our club’, but that’s ridiculous because there are no Jews in the stadium.”

A Dutch Holocaust survivor told of how he had become disillusioned with the imitation Jewishness of the club he had followed for years and one day walked out of the stadium in tears never to return, leaving the non-Jewish Ajax fans with their Star of David tattoos to sing, “whoever doesn’t stand up isn’t a Jew”.

Next Tuesday, a new series of Alex Polizzi – The Fixer begins on BBC2 at 8pm. In the first episode, businesswoman Polizzi takes on three Jewish brothers whose fabric shop is stuck in a time warp. Not only does she have to persuade them to modernise, she also has to get three Jewish siblings to agree on what needs to be done — exacting for her and very entertaining for the viewer.

TV review: Yes, Prime Minister

Simon Round — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 11:58:21 +0000

Around 26 years after the last episode of Yes, Prime Minister aired, it is back, with the same writing team but a different cast — Henry Goodman replaces the peerless Nigel Hawthorne as Sir Humphrey and David Haig is the bumbling PM Jim Hacker in place of the much underrated Paul Eddington, both the original actors sadly no longer with us.

To revisit Margaret Thatcher’s favourite comedy is, as Sir Humphrey might himself say, a courageous decision. So does the familiar format of verbal jousting between an incompetent but cynical politician and his intellectually superior but equally cynical permanent secretary, work in 2013?

At this point, like an embattled minister standing at the dispatch box, I must declare an interest. I not only loved the first series of Yes, Minister three decades ago, I watched some of the shows being shot at BBC TV Centre at the invitation of my uncle, Jonathan Lynn — Yes, Prime Minister’s co-writer along with Anthony Jay, and the director of the current series.

It is true that the TV climate has changed. Yes, Prime Minister offers a return to a gentler era of comedy that some feel may look dated next to the brutal satire of The Thick of It.

But this is a formula which never dates — the eternal struggle between the man who thinks he is in charge and his more capable and powerful underling. The format has evolved though. This series, adapted from the hit stage show, offers for the first time a storyline that runs across the six episodes, concerning an offer from the oil-rich country of Kumranistan of a £10-million loan which could save the financially crippled Euro zone – but with some eye-watering conditions attached.

Goodman is wonderfully oleaginous as Sir Humphrey, and Haig offers a slightly more histrionic version of Hacker. The writing remains razor sharp. “Power abhors a vacuum” declares Sir Humphrey’s private secretary Bernard Woolley (Chris Larkin).

“Yes, and we are currently led by one,” replies Sir Humphrey.”

Welcome back.

Francesca Segal: the Costa Prize-winnning novelist following in her father's footsteps

Simon Round — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 10:50:46 +0000

The most surprising thing about Francesca Segal was that she was in her 30s before she published a novel. Aged three, her imaginary friend was the secretary who would take dictation for her. When she was six, Segal would hand stories she had written over to her father — Erich Segal, the author of Love Story — to take to his publishers.

Yet despite writing for a living as a journalist, and being desperate to publish a novel, Oxford- and Harvard-educated Segal was not in a hurry to write her first book.

This was partly because she wanted to wait for the right story to come into her head. But also partly because as reviewer of debut fiction on the Observer, she knew the best new novels tended to be written by more mature authors.

When the idea for a book eventually came, however, it was clearly a good one. Her first novel, The Innocents, has won not just the Costa Book Award for new fiction, but also the American National Jewish Book Award for fiction — previous winners of which include A B Yehoshua, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.

The Innocents is a reworking of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, set in the north-west London Jewish community in which Segal was brought up and still lives. Sitting in a Hampstead cafe, within a mile or two of where most of the action takes place, Segal recalls the moment that she came up with the idea.

“I was in New York re-reading Wharton. There’s that opening scene in The Age of Innocence where they are at the Academy of Music. Faust is playing and the most adored soprano of the day is reaching this climactic aria. Yet no one is remotely interested in her — they are just interested in one another, what they are wearing, who is sleeping with whom and what is going on. It just so reminded me of what happened at synagogue during the chagim.”

Thus the opening scene of Segal’s novel is set in synagogue on Kol Nidre. She continues: “When that thought came into my head I just had to do it. I saw that all the central dilemmas and pressures in Wharton’s novel were the same as those in the Jewish community and I had questions of my own which I could also work in. I kept the skeleton of the plot but I didn’t want to write a facsimile. I wanted it to be a live contemporary novel. I put The Age of Innocence away and didn’t read it again until my book was finished.”

She is at pains to point out that, while set in the heart of the Jewish community, this is not really a novel about the community per se — that in Golders Green alone there are dozens of different communities, all interwoven but completely separate from each other.

She also feels that, while the dynamics of the plot demand the book be set within a small, enclosed community, it did not have to be a Jewish one.

“I did not set out to write an anthropological guide to Anglo-Jewry. It is a very small, specific facet of one community which is true to the way that I observed it. What I was so excited about was not that it worked so perfectly in north-west London, but that it could equally have taken place in somewhere about which I’m not best qualified to write, like a Muslim community in south London, a Hindu community in Ealing or a small village in Wales. Also, I don’t feel it’s caricature. The characters are fictional but the social climate was one I’m familiar with.”

The community she describes in the book, largely from the point of view of protagonist Adam, who is torn between his conventional fiancee, Rachel, and her rebellious cousin, Ellie, is a warm but claustrophic one.

“All small communities have that feel about them,” Segal says. “But what is in the novel is Adam’s perception. He is not right about everything. He is not right about Rachel and he is not completely right about the atmosphere. One of the things I value most about this community is that there is space for people to be different and still to be part of things.

"In fact, it was very hard for me to think of something Ellie could do that would be considered sufficiently shocking. There’s not much – we’re pretty liberal. In the end all I could think of was here appearing in a porn film. I think that it’s a very elastic community and that is something to be proud of.”

Yet she can also relate to Adam’s misgivings about the community. “There were points in my late 20s when I was still single, thinking to myself, I know everyone — who am I going to marry? I thought I knew everyone there was to know.”

There is an element of irony in The Innocents being set in a Jewish community, given that Edith Wharton was a notorious antisemite. Segal laughs, but Wharton’s hatred of Jews is something that she has wrestled with.

“I went to this beautiful house that Wharton built in Lennox, Massachusetts. It has been preserved as a museum. While I was there I felt this palpable air of disapproval. I do think she’s probably spinning in her grave but there’s no revenge attack intended.”

Segal points out that, if anything, Wharton was even more antisemitic than has been assumed. Her biographer Hermione Lee wrote that Wharton’s early editors amended her letters and journals in “a chivalrous way”, removing many of her worst excesses.

So does this prejudice take away from Wharton’s literary greatness? Segal ponders: “It’s a hard one to navigate. What I’ve reconciled myself to Wharton, whom I love, is that her era was pre-Holocaust. She was very much a product of her times. That’s not to excuse it. It’s an ongoing debate. For example, I won’t read Kingsley Amis because he was modern and post-Holocaust. Somehow his antisemitism offends me more.”

Segal has been immersed in literature since she was a tiny child. She thinks this has less to do with being the child of a famous writer and much more to do with being raised in a household in which literature was exalted. Books were almost the defining feature of her childhood.

“My father being famous? I had absolutely no idea about that. But his being a writer was important to me because I was a nice Jewish girl who worshipped her daddy. I wanted to do what he did. When he read me bedtime stories it would often be poems for adults but with cadences and language that children would enjoy. My father was a classicist and that, even more than the fact that he wrote novels, informed the atmosphere in our house. Etymology was for him important enough that he would leave the dinner table to find something, read it and explain it.”

Francesca’s world was books. Because her sister is nine years younger than her, she was for a long time an only child. So she would spend most of her time reading. She recalls reading as she walked down the street to school, her mother guiding her in the right direction.

She always assumed that she would grow up to be a novelist but that ambition led to a terrible anxiety. What if she wrote a novel and it was rejected?

“There was this Jewish neurosis. If no one publishes the book then I have to train as something else. All I ever wanted to be was a writer. It is who I am in the secret life in my head. To put myself out there and be told that I was not good enough would be a negation not just of what I wanted to be, but also of who I thought I was.

“Of course there was also the good fantasy. Not about winning awards, which I never contemplated, but about having my novel published — with a jacket — by a real publisher.”

In the event she need not have worried. Segal already had an agent, who sent the manuscript out to publishers. There was an auction for the rights both here and in the United States, where sales have been going very well. And the television rights have been snapped up by the production company which makes Downton Abbey.

Nonetheless, when she was shortlisted for the Costa Book Award, she confesses to being “flabbergasted. Once I was on the shortlist, the prospect of winning was there. But even then I was surprised when I did win because it was such a great list.”

Segal describes the moment when she discovered she had won the award. “I was away in Thailand with my husband. It was to be announced on Front Row on Radio 4. So there we were crouching outside a cafe at 2am trying to get wifi, being eaten alive by mosquitos, and listening to the presenter, Mark Lawson, make the announcement. And I won.

“Suddenly the mosquitoes didn’t seem to matter anymore.”

Death on the A20

Simon Round — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 14:44:21 +0000

At noon on October 31 1946, the body of a 48-year-old woman, Dagmar Petrzywalski, was found by the side of the A20 in Kent. She had been strangled by Sidney Sinclair, a lorry driver from whom she had hitched a lift early that morning on the way to visit her sister.

In "Murder at Wrotham Hill" (Quercus, £18.99), Diana Souhami has reconstructed the murder, examined the lives (as well as the deaths) of Miss Petrzywalski, her killer, the investigating detective, Robert Fabian — the celebrated “Fabian of the Yard”— and the executioner, Albert Pierrepoint, and set them within the context of a country still scarred by the horrors of war.

Dagmar – a nervy spinster who, traumatised by the Blitz, had retired as a telephonist in London — used her meagre pension to buy a hut opposite her mother’s modest home, and subsisted by keeping chickens and growing vegetables.

Her death was completely senseless. Sinclair, aka Harold Hagger, a bigamist, black marketeer and recidivist with a long history of petty crime and violence, had picked her up with the expectation of sex. It seems he had no premeditated desire to kill but, when Dagmar —a virgin — screamed in fear, he strangled her with the man’s vest she had been using as a scarf. To the day of his execution, Sinclair stuck to his story that she had “offered to play about” with him and had been attempting to steal his wallet.

Souhami paints a compelling portrait of a bleak and deprived period in Britain’s history, through the story of two sadly wasted lives. Her only digression is in the chapter about Pierrepoint, the famous executioner.

Here, she catalogues the mass murders at the death camps that led to his biggest commission — the hanging of 226 Nazi war criminals. If there is a parallel to be drawn between a callous killing machine that brutally murdered six million Jews, and the clumsy assault that claimed an innocent life one cold morning in Kent, it is not one Souhami chooses to probe.

The publicity on the book’s jacket asks: “After World War Two, why did one more violent death matter?” It is a question the reader is left to ponder alone.

An epic survivor's tale

Simon Round — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 10:59:53 +0000

This extraordinary film was made by Lisa Bryer, the producer of The Last King of Scotland, about her Aunt Henia.

According to the producers, when it was shown to BBC1 controller Danny Cohen, he cleared the schedules so that the film could be the centrepiece of the Holocaust Memorial Day coverage. Having seen the 40-minute documentary, I can only endorse his decision

The film is very simple in form. It consists of the personal testimony of Henia, with a few comments from her husband and children, and a little of that horribly familiar archive footage.

But her story needs no embellishment. It is remarkable, even by the standards of Holocaust survivors. Born in Poland, she grew up in the town of Radom which was occupied by the Nazis in 1939. Soon after the arrival of the Germans, the Jews were herded into the town’s ghetto. Many died either from extreme deprivation or random shootings and beatings.

Henia survived until the ghetto was liquidated. Her reward was the cattle truck to Majdanek, followed by a spell in Plazow, a trip to Auschwitz and finally the infamous death march to Bergen Belsen.

The details are narrated calmly and eloquently by Henia, who photos show to have been a beautiful, blonde teenager — just 17 when she was deported. As with all survivors, she enjoyed some good fortune along the way.

In Plazow, her barracks was enlisted to become blood donors for German troops. Needless to say more than a pint was extracted — it was more or less a sentence of death. She told a guard she had typhus. The guard felt her unfeverish head, and told her she was excused.

But for all her comparative luck, Henia survived because her will to live was unshakeable. She recalls: “I would say to myself over and over: ‘I’m too young to die, I cannot die’. It was my mantra.”

If everyone were to watch only one Holocaust documentary, they could not do better than this film.

A good read and good friendships - why we love book groups

Simon Round — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 10:24:28 +0000

The demise of the book has long been predicted. Television was forecast to rip us forcefully away from the novel but somehow the written word survived — indeed adaptations of classics such as Pride and Prejudice actually boosted sales.

Then, along came the PC. Who would want to read a novel when there were so many gaming and social networking opportunities? However, the advent of the Kindle has revitalised publishing and taken much of the hassle out of reading on the go.

But there has been another factor in the renaissance of reading — the book group. Over the past 20 years, thousands of people — primarily women — have been forming reading groups to discuss books. They take many forms — some resemble closed orders in their tightness and exclusivity and others invite everyone to join in and participate.

Unsurprisingly, where there are books and discussions to be had, Jews feature prominently. Suzanne Franks, who is a London-based professor of journalism, has participated in her book group in north-west London for many years.

She says: “Over time the members of our group have been through all of life’s challenges. They have had to deal with deaths and divorces and new partners. One member left the group and we just couldn’t agree on how to replace her. When you’ve all been together for so long, the idea of taking on a new person is quite contentious.”

Rules are strict. The meetings are fixed, so if a member has not completed the book chosen for discussion, there is no chance of a postponement. Franks says: “You’ve had your chance. Sometimes people who haven’t finished the book ask us not to spoil things by revealing the ending, but that’s their problem.”

There is also a formula for choosing books. Members all take their turn to recommend their favourites, but they have to come up with a choice of three or four, the merits of which are then debated until a consensus is arrived at.

Franks’s group is different from many in one particular respect. Rather than merely discuss a book in the comfort of someone’s home, they have been known to convene their meetings on the road.

“In the past we regularly went away for long weekends. And we would base the choice of book on the place we were going to. There was a Spanish author for Bilbao and a Portuguese one for Lisbon. The holiday would become the meeting.”

Franks’s group also take to the road in this country. They discussed John Preston’s book The Dig on location at Sutton Hoo, in Suffolk, where the famous excavation of an Anglo-Saxon burial ship took place.

Lawyer Sarah Anticoni enjoys the book group formula so much that she is a member of two of them. One is a group of Jewish women who have been meeting regularly for 12 years. The other is a non-Jewish group. She says the dynamics are very different.

“The Jewish group is always hosted in someone’s house, which means there is a culinary aspect. We have discussion about the book we have read but much of the time we are actually arguing over what we’re going to read next.”

This contrasts with her other, non-Jewish group. “It is quite serious — a bit like therapy. There is a much wider range of literature that I normally wouldn’t touch, including science fiction and historical biographies. In my entire life I would never have gravitated towards that area of the library. I’ve read the same book in both groups and had very different discussions. We read Nathan Englander’s short stories in the non-Jewish group and a lot of the nuance was completely missed. ”

Anticoni acknowledges there is a downside to having two books to read at any given time. “It’s a bit like being in the middle of an A Level course — you are reading set texts all the time. But unlike
A Levels, there is no test at the end and there is a joy in listening to several other people who all have their own take on a book you have all read.

“I spend one evening a month with each of the book groups come what may. I spend a considerable time each month reading the one or two books chosen (as I found this month while indulging in Anna Karenina) to the exclusion of the other tomes accumulating next to my bed.”

One common theme which tends to emerge when talking to book club members are the close ties that build up between them. Jennifer Paul’s Emunah Book Circle will be celebrating its 11th anniversary next month and still has many of its original members. It differs from many groups in being open to all-comers (as long as they are women), but the core group have attended every meeting since Paul set the group up.

She recalls: “The committee wanted to know what they could do to interest the older members who were no long able to contribute to our work. I suggested the book circle. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.”
Paul is the driving force to this day and jokingly describes herself as “a mini dictator”.

She chooses the books — ensuring that the titles are all in paperback and preferably available at local libraries. She has also persuaded local bakers and caterers to provide food for the women. “It’s become a labour of love,” she says. Recently, Andrew Miller, the author of Snowdrop, addressed the group.

For many groups, the social and culinary aspects are paramount — one member described his group as “more like a takeaway pizza club where books are sometimes discussed”. Others take the discussions very seriously. In the United States it is not uncommon for groups to employ a professional moderator.

Although less common in this country, Alex Gordon, who used to teach semiotics at London University’s Goldsmiths College before forming his own branding company, was employed by a book group for several months.

“Everyone paid £10 each for me to guide the sessions. I would prompt questions and inform about techniques for analysing literature — how to read between the lines. I also tried to get them to explore lines of thought which might not occur to them. But the important thing was not to run it like a seminar — I was really just helping the discussion.”

He adds that a moderator can provide an added benefit in allowing everyone’s voice to be heard — useful if there are dominant characters in the group.

He feels there are echoes of Talmudic discussions in the book-group format. “It’s very similar to the way one might introduce a shiur and facilitate a free flow of conversation. I help them turn the text in a Talmudic way, although obviously from a secular perspective.”

Discussions at the book group based at Hale Synagogue in Manchester are not led by a moderator but do not lack in intensity. According to Sonia Lee, the co-founder of the group, which has been running for 12 years, debate has often raged into the small hours. Her group is characteristic of many in being women-only. Lee explains that this feels completely natural to her.

“Once we get talking after the book discussion has finished, we get on to women’s issues. Men wouldn’t be interested It’s not that we’re averse to men, but we like it as it is. The group is very close — all the founder members still attend regularly.”

For this reason, Lee feels that the group must be kept at a manageable number. “We have 10 to 12 people. You don’t want too many otherwise it loses its intimacy.”

They tackle a wide range of books, all of which are recommendations from members. Among the most successful discussions were those about Bernice Rubens’s Brothers, Kazuo Ishiguru’s Never Let Me Go and The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger.

The popularity of the book club is not confined to any one age group. North-west Londoner Louise Dobrin’s group is comprised of women in their 30s, but the they first met 10 years ago when the members, mostly ex-Habonim, were fresh out of college. She says: “We read fiction, non-fiction and biography. There is probably a feminist leaning.”

A recent read was Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, by Jeanette Winterson.
Dobrin says the books often provide the catalyst for debate. “Having different people’s insights read makes you question your own feelings. And it can often offer a route into discussion of much wider issues.”

Karen Ruimy: the high-ﬂyer who gave up ﬁnance for ﬂamenco

Simon Round — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 11:11:25 +0000

This is the time of year when many people take a look at their lives and wonder whether they are going in the right direction.

Karen Ruimy went through the same process back in the 1990s. She was the epitome of the high-flyer riding the economic boom in one of Paris’s most successful finance houses. But then she decided that the life, while hugely lucrative, was no longer for her. So she left, with no idea about what she might do next but determined that, whatever it was, it would be something more fulfilling.

Perhaps some people are just born to be high achievers, because now Ruimy has replaced finance with several new careers. She is a writer, a singer and a dancer, and still has time to do globe-trotting charity work.

Over coffee at her central London mews house, Ruimy, who is in her mid-40s, recalls the moment her life changed forever. “I left my job because I felt this inner calling to understand something about my life. I really felt suddenly that the world I was in did not interest me anymore.”

She had savings to fall back on which gave her time, but she says she never made a conscious decision about a new job. Rather, her career found her. She says that it became natural to start writing. “It was part of the process of understanding myself.”

Her reflection on life and spirituality have been crystallised in two books, The Angel’s Metamorphosis and the recently published Voice of the Angel.

But this is not all — she also decided at the age of 37 to become a professional dancer. As if this was not enough she also began to sing. “I’ve danced all my life. I had to do something about it.”

Ruimy was born in Morocco and emigrated to France with her parents when she was seven years old. The flamenco style of dance, which she has performed at the Folie Bergere in Paris and the Lyric Theatre in London, felt very natural to her. “I feel flamenco very strongly. I see it is as a mix of gypsy, Arabic and Jewish cultures.
Also my grandma was Spanish. It makes sense to me.”

But it was also Ruimy’s Jewish-Moroccan roots which compelled her to seek a high-flying career in the financial world. Her early years in Casablanca had been “idyllic”, she says. “Being Jewish in Morocco at that time was heaven. It was one of the very few countries where you didn’t have any pressure. But Paris was a harsher place — it didn’t welcome foreigners easily and as a Moroccan woman I felt I had to succeed, because if you don’t succeed you have no voice and no respect in Paris.”

She chose finance because it was a seductive world to a young woman in her twenties. “It was a high-speed business and it was attracting a lot of brilliant people. It is both a very intelligent business but at the same time you are completely disconnected from the outside world. You meet high-end people and you’re playing with a lot of money. It was fun — a good game,

Ruimy started at HSBC in mergers and acquisitions. A year later she was head-hunted by the brokerage house Finacor. She excelled and at the age of 28 became a director. Yet even at the height her success she suspected that there was something missing.

“I was the only one who was not trading in stocks for myself. All the traders did their jobs but then traded for themselves to make more money. I really didn’t care. I thought that maybe I wasn’t normal. I began to feel more and more anxious. So I decided to stop and that was that. It was a relief because I felt like a hypocrite. If you don’t feel part of it, you have to leave.”

She still mixes with “high-end” people but they tend to be creative types, these days. Her London dance show was put on in collaboration with Strictly Come Dancing judge Craig Revel Horwood and her new album, Come with Me, a fusion between Moroccan and western musical styles, has been produced with Robert Plant’s guitarist, Justin Adams.

Ruimy has also been working with celebrities such as Renee Zellweger and Mariella Frostrup to promote equality for women in Africa. They have made visits to Liberia and Rwanda. She explains: “It’s called the Great Initiative. There are many charities which are building schools and hospitals so we don’t do that. We build a platform for grass-roots women’s organisations. They do amazing work. In Liberia there is a radio station created by women for women – it gives them a place to go if they have a crisis. We funded that. ”

Home for Ruimy, her husband Ely and their three children has been London for the past six years.
“For the first year I felt very naked here — it’s hard for a newcomer. But suddenly you become part of London. It’s an amazing city. People are so open-minded. I could never go back to Paris,” she says.

Staving off the winter blues

Simon Round — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 11:05:43 +0000

OK, it's the first week of January and I know for a fact that all of you are clinically depressed and will remain so until the clocks go forward. And yes, I know that it is dark out there from about lunch-time onward, the winter weather is, well, wintry and there are no holidays until Pesach.

However, I'd like to present an alternative, counter-intuitive interpretation of January. You see, for me this is pretty much the best time of the whole year. There are lots of reasons to enjoy this month. The stress of the holiday season has gone. If you are observant, you have had to endure watching everyone else enjoying themselves while you watch re-runs of Strictly Kosher and Jewish Mum of the Year on TV. And if you do the Christmas thing there is all the stress of putting a party together combined with the guilt of celebrating a festival you know you shouldn't really be celebrating at all.

Then, a few days after that comes New Year's Eve. Nobody likes New Year's Eve, what with all that forced jollity and the compulsion to drink alcohol until the middle of the night, at which point the clock tells you that yet another year of your life has disappeared in smoke. This is of course followed by New Year's Day, which resembles the most depressing Sunday ever.

But now, a few days later, you have to admit that things are looking up. If, like me, you have arbitrarily decided that spring should actually start on February 15, then we are only six weeks away from a change of season. Already, the days are getting longer. And there is every chance of snow over the next couple of weeks to make commuting a little more interesting. Plus there is all the excitement of the third round of the FA Cup this weekend.

And yes, I am aware that everyone is stopping drinking, but then we're Jewish - we never really started anyway. And as for that winter dieting thing, forget it. It has been scientifically proven (at least I have a vague idea that it has) that mid-winter is the very worst time to cut back on calories because your body craves the extra warmth that stodgy foods bring - so you are almost doomed to failure. Best to wait until the relative warmth of April to shed a few pounds. It's the same with exercise. There cannot be a worse time to start your fitness programme. Gyms are at their most crowded at the beginning of January and if you decide to go for a jog in the park, might I suggest you wait until the second week in May when the flowers are blooming and the temperature may have risen above five degrees Celsius.

So there you have it. All that there is to be done this January is to enjoy the relief of the end of the party season with a warming bowl of chicken soup (don't forget the lockshen) or a nice big piece of cake eaten on the sofa of your centrally heated living room, as you watch spring almost springing from under 10 inches of snow.

Me? I'm just dreading June 22 - it's the most depressing day of the year, you know.

Felix Posen's mission: the first-ever entire record of everything Jewish

Simon Round — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 11:08:35 +0000

Felix Posen is passionate about secular Jewish culture. If it is not a contradiction, he is positively evangelical about it. And he has also been prepared to invest more than just time into his interest.

Posen made plenty of money in the oil, metal, minerals and coal business. And since he retired he has ploughed millions into Jewish education, but his latest project is his grandest and almost certainly his most expensive, although from the outset he tells me that he does not want to go into the money side of it.

However, The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilisation cannot have come cheap. It has so far been 12 years since the project was properly initiated. Eventually, it will comprise 10 volumes, each 1,000 pages plus — an anthology covering every aspect of Jewish civilisation and culture from the year dot until 2005.

The project involves 120 scholars working over a long time span. Posen readily admits that he does not expect the work, the first volume of which was launched last month, to be a best seller. So why put so much of his time and money into it?

For Posen, a lot boils down to recognition. He says: “If you were to look through the Encyclopaedia Judaica, you will find that the word secular does not exist. It’s disgraceful. Even if you don’t like secular Jews, you can’t say they don’t exist. To have nothing about the literature which has been written by secular Jews or for secular Jews is quite unbelievable.”

By the time Posen has finished, nobody will be able to say that. Still active — not to say driven — well into his 80s, he is determined to right the imbalance in Jewish education so that it more accurately reflects the demographics.

After all, he says, we live in a world where the majority of the Jewish population is secular but practically all of the Jewish education is religious.

“After discussions with some of my more learned friends we decided that we were probably not going to get somebody to do an anthology of books which had nothing religious in them so the thing to do was an anthology of everything that’s ever been created – religious and non-religious. Everyone seemed to like that so the idea was born.”

This was a daunting ambition but Posen set about it. “I’m no scholar but I envisaged we would gather the totality of whatever has been written. I wanted a balance between religious and secular, Israelis and Americans, men and women working on it. We arrived at a main board and they decided how to divide up history into periods and also who were the main experts in each period.”

The first volume to be published is the last in the series. It is appropriate that this covers a period — from 1973 to 2005 in which Jewish culture in a variety of forms has flourished. It will certainly be the most secular in character, whereas the early volumes will be almost completely religious. So who decided what went in and what was omitted?

“We leave it entirely to the individual volume editors. It won’t be completely uniform — that is impossible — we have 15 volume editors for 10 volumes and they do the best they can with the knowledge they have.

"There have been problems. For example Menachem Ben Sasson had to leave the project when he was made president of the Hebrew University. One of our volume editors died from cancer. But given the time that has elapsed, things have gone pretty smoothly.”

When Posen says everything Jewish is in there, he means everything. “The Sermon on the Mount is in the book. We had a long debate over whether it should be included but the fact is that a Jew called Yeshua delivered it. No one knew that later on he was going to be called Jesus.”

The library, which Posen expects to come out at a rate of two volumes a year, will eventually all be available digitally. “We have to keep up with modernity. It’s funny that when we started the process they were thinking in terms of CD roms. In that short space of time the technology has changed.”

The scope and vision of the anthology is unquestionable but it is designed to be a work of reference rather than something which will be read from cover to cover.

“Anthologies are not a popular sale. But it gives us a basis for future writing of text books. This will allow people who are interested in the field to have references through the ages.

"What should Jews read if they want to continue to identify with Judaism? This was my main purpose. When I asked the children and grandchildren of my Jewish friends what it meant to be Jewish, those who were not religious had no answer. I thought that was a terrible tragedy.”

Because he acknowledges that the subject is “not sexy” there is another book being published as a companion to the series, and to promote it. Jews and Words is the first book to be written by Israeli novelist Amos Oz with his daughter, historian Fanis Oz-Salzberger. It is also the first book he has written in English.

Posen says: “It was my idea. It’s charming, sharp and easy to read. I wanted to try to find someone who identified with what we’re trying to do. Both Amos and Fania are enormously knowledgeable.” The book is already a number-one best-seller in the national history category at Amazon.

So how does Posen define his own Judaism? “I consider myself a cultural Jew. I prefer that to the word secular. Actually I offered a reward of £50,000 to the person who could come up with a word that doesn’t have the overtones that secular does but no one has claimed it — the word doesn’t exist, which is a pity. Cultural is probably the nearest.”

Posen himself was brought up as Orthodox by his parents, initially in Germany and later in the US, where they settled in the 1930s. He retained his observance through university.

“It was only after graduating that I gave it all up. The religion had no meaning for me and I had no idea that anything else existed. I felt very empty there for a while. I grew a family and a business. And when I retired from business I decided this was an area I wanted to examine. I chanced upon historian Yehuda Bauer, who was head of the secular humanistic movement in Israel and he opened my eyes.”

Posen joined Yarnton Manor — the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. There he met philosopher Isaiah Berlin “He told me, ‘For a man as curious as you are, I’m amazed by your ignorance’. He was right.”

As Posen became more involved in the subject he started his Posen Foundation to promote Jewish cultural education around the world. He thinks the Library of Culture and Civilisation is a crucial component of this work.

“This is a mind changer for the Jewish people. There’s no doubt whatsoever this will be hugely important 20 to 30 years hence. I won’t be around to see it but I am sowing the seeds and others will take it on later.”

TV review: Ottolenghi’s Mediterranean Feast

Simon Round — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 12:04:15 +0000

Yotam Ottolenghi is not the first celebrity chef to make a culinary journey to the Mediterranean. Keith Floyd, Rick Stein, James Martin — you name them, they have all been there.

However, until the cook and food writer came along, Israel did not feature on the TV food map of the Med. Ottolenghi showed that those who ignored the land of his birth were missing a trick. This, after all, is a country made up of influences ranging from native Palestinian cuisine, Jewish food from around the globe and, superimposed on all of that, an innovative restaurant scene.

But for many, Israeli cuisine boils down to one dish — hummus. It predates Israel by several centuries, but this chickpea dip has been elevated into a national obsession. And at the best places, like Abu Hassan in Tel Aviv, there is a scrum every lunchtime. It is worth it, decided Ottolenghi. “This is heaven,” he said.

Meanwhile, across town, the man they call Dr Shakshuka was cooking his eponymous spicy stew of tomatoes and egg. Ottolenghi attempted his own, scattered with extras like pulped aubergine and preserved lemon. “Is this shakshuka?” he asked the doctor, who was looking on with some disdain. “If you want to call it shakshuka, you can,” he replied.

This was a lightning quick exploration of a varied food culture. There was a market-trader making flatbread snacks, an Arab chef cooking seafood in Jaffa, and Ottlolenghi doing what he is famous for, scattering pomegranate seeds over his salad.

It was a great climax to a quite brilliant series. No one speaks more eloquently about Mediterranean food than Ottolenghi. He observed the world’s thinnest pastry in Turkey, ate sheep’s brain in Morocco and cooked for a very severe-looking Jewish mother in Tunisia.

This is an Israeli who is rapidly becoming one of Britain’s national treasures.

Richard Young, the photographer who clicks with celebrities

Simon Round — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 10:31:06 +0000

If you believe Richard Young’s account of his own career, he is one of the luckiest photographers around. He tells of how he was working in a bookshop, dabbling in photography, when he obtained a world exclusive by accident.

True, he did have this one incredible stroke of luck in his career — of which more later — but it takes only a quick look of some of the iconic shots that Young has taken in his near 40-year career in photography to realise that he is a very talented as well as a very modest man.

Now 65, Young describes himself as “the oldest bohemian, hippy photographer in the world”. He has taken photos of the world’s most famous people, from Fidel Castro to Bob Dylan, Nelson Mandela to Madonna. However, back in the early 1970s, he was drifting. His boyhood love of music had persuaded him to try his luck as a sound engineer. He got as far as working in Jimi Hendrix’s studio in New York but eventually lost his job.

”I wasn’t very good and I wasn’t paying attention,” he says. “I was trying to live on pennies while living the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle and spending too much time doing the wrong things.”

Meanwhile, he was developing an interest in cameras, largely due to the influence of his then girlfriend, who was an avant garde photographer. But his career was nearly finished almost before it had started. While working in a London bookshop he was told by his boss to go to Dorset to take some photos of Thomas Hardy country to illustrate a book.

Young recalls with horror: “I took three rolls of black-and-white film. I lied through my teeth about knowing everything about photography and when I got back not one image came out. My boss wasn’t very happy, but being the Zen master he was, he gave me a camera and told me to go out and teach myself how to use it. So for the next few months, I went into stores, asking how things worked, and roamed around London taking pictures.”

All of which meant that Young could take a decent picture when a few months later, he bumped into one of his neighbours in Holland Park, west London.

“I was living in a bedsit and next door to me were these six journalists. I got friendly with one of the, a man called Craig Peters, who was London correspondent of Rolling Stone magazine. Over a bottle of rouge at a local wine bar he told me that I should be a photographer — that I had the right attitude for it.

"The following Saturday he said: ‘Look, I have some friends staying with me. They’ve come over from Rome — the kid has just been released by the mafia and the grandfather has paid a $2 million ransom’.”

That kid was Paul Getty junior — grandson of oil tycoon Jean Paul Getty — who had been kidnapped and who had no one had managed to photograph since his release. Young had stumbled across a world exclusive. He recalls: “I photographed him as we walked through Hyde Park with his girlfriend.”

He sold the photos to the Evening Standard and they were syndicated worldwide. Young was still working in the bookshop, but two to three times a week he would be called by the Standard to do celebrity jobs. One evening he was told to go to the Dorchester where Liz Taylor was throwing a 50th birthday party for Richard Burton. He did not have an invitation but says he managed to “schmooze his way in”.

“I got away with that one on the night and got my second world exclusive in 18 months.” The following day he left his job at the bookshop.

If the Getty photo was luck, then the Taylor and Burton one was down to his “chutzpah”. The ability to make friends of his subjects is one of the factors which he feels has propelled him in his career — that, and the persistence which he learned as a Jewish child growing up in Stamford Hill.

“My dad always taught me that as long as you’re polite to people and show good manners, the world will open up to you, but if there’s a door open, you need to go through it because you never know what’s on the other side.” This was advice he took literally at the Dorchester that evening.

Young thinks his unorthodox approach to his art has helped him to stand out. He says: “There’s this thing I do which is to photograph people from behind. At fashion shows and photocalls there will be loads of photographers at the front so I go around the back and get the subject to turn around and look at me. The background becomes this vast bank of photographers — it gives you a different perspective.

"There’s a lovely picture of Scary Spice on the catwalk at the Roundhouse. It’s taken from behind but we know it’s her because of her hair and the whole attitude of her body. What I was interested in was the sheer excitement and the energy — that’s what I look for in pictures.”

Above all, Young, who remains as busy as ever, maintains that if you are to be a successful photographer you need to leave your ego at home. “I know a lot of celebrities. But they sit on one side of the table and I’m on the other with my cameras. I never encroach upon their lives, unless they invite me to sit with them and have a drink. Ego is the biggest destructive element.

“After all, it’s not all about me. I’m just the photographer, man.”

Ooh la la and allo allo already

Simon Round — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 10:20:40 +0000

For the first time ever, I feel sorry for Joey Barton. Normally, I have no time for footballers who are randomly violent and excruciatingly pretentious but, having heard his recent post-match, French-accented interview, I do empathise with him a little.

Poor Joey was just doing that thing where you put your interlocutor at ease by mirroring their voice patterns. I do it myself. When I'm hanging out with my Liverpool friends, I often refer to things as being "dead good" - I find it helps them to calm down.

To be fair to Joey, his French accent is not bad. I say this as someone whose most significant talent in life is the ability to do accents (that and making scrambled eggs).

It doesn't make me popular. My children hate it (though they quite like the scrambled eggs). When I'm driving them around at the weekend, I find myself lapsing into Ulster or Yorkshire without realising it - until they remind me that I "sound stupid".

I don't agree. Accents definitely have their place. Certain words just sound better when delivered in a particular dialect. For example the word "ratatouille" should always be delivered in a lilting South Wales accent whereas "paté" should be pronounced in Geordie, and "diabolical" in Glaswegian.

Being good at accents not only makes you unpopular but it can also be incredibly frustrating when you realise that certain dialects are beyond you - Norfolk, for example (although, to be fair, there are a fair number of East Anglians who can't do that one) and Nottingham.

Then there is the problem of the "Jewish accent". Years ago, Jews, particularly those whose parents came from eastern Europe, did have a certain Yiddish inflection to their voices. But they didn't sound like Fagin. Nobody did - not even Fagin himself. So it drives me mad to hear actors - often Jewish actors- adopting a faux Jewish tone to their voices the minute they get near a Jewish sitcom.

I particularly hate that thing of inverting sentences. So instead of saying, "I like cake", they say, "Cake… I like"; or rather than say, "I'll do that for you", it's, "For you, I'll do that". Just in case any sitcom actors happen to be reading this column, I can confirm that this kind of thing, nobody does.

Probably the most irritating example is the German war-film syndrome. Films like Where Eagles Dare feature British actors speaking to each other in English but, because they are playing German characters, zey speak like zis, which sounds just as ridiculous as when Joey Barton or Shteve McClaren speak in French/Dutch accents.

But there is joy in being able to do an accent well (as long as no one else is listening). So if you, like me, can't resist trying, and you don't have children, here are some tips. If you want to say "bacon" in a Jamaican accent, first make sure your rabbi isn't listening and then say the words "beer can".

For "the peg is in my tent" in a New Zealand accent, simply change the vowel sounds to "the pig is in my tint". An Israeli accent? Well, just wait until Joey Barton is transferred to Maccabi Tel Aviv.

Enrico Macias: France's megastar comes to the UK

Simon Round — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 10:59:20 +0000

It is not just the Rolling Stones who are celebrating 50 years of musical success this year. French singer Enrico Macias may not be a household name in this country, but he has been a star in France since 1962.
Now his British-based fans will be able to see him in concert, playing songs stretching right back through his career.

Macias was brought up in Algeria where he learned to play classical Algerian, Arabic and Andalusian music. However, his family were forced to flee during the war of independence there. Exiled in Paris, he started to write new songs.

He recalls: “I created songs in order to cope with my frustration at being in exile. Success eventually arrived after two years, but during these two years it was very difficult.”

After playing in cafes and bars, Macias was signed up by a record company and became an overnight sensation following his first TV appearance. He puts down his success to his originality.

“My music is somewhere between Middle Eastern and western music. I might not have been the best but I was unique.”

He draws his fans from all over Europe and countries in the Middle East. After the peace deal was signed between Israel and Egypt he was invited by President Sadat to play a concert at the pyramids for 20,000 people.
Macias sees his music as a unifying force.

“I am very popular with Arabs as well as with Jews. Outside they kill each other but inside they sing my songs and make peace with each other.”

What chutzpah! How Olivia Lee became the queen of prank TV

Simon Round — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 12:03:20 +0000

When you interview Olivia Lee there is bound to be a slight sense of nervousness. This is a woman who has made a TV career out of playing pranks on the unsuspecting, so as I sit down there is a temptation to look for a camera crew secreted behind the potted plant.

In the event, Lee — who first appeared in Channel 4’s Balls of Steel, starred in her own hidden-camera show, Dirty Sexy Funny, on the Comedy Central channel, and is now a regular on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show in the US —is not in pranking mode. In fact, she is nonchalantly nibbling on bar snacks in a break from an exhausting schedule which has taken her from Los Angeles to Australia. “You can write that I devoured the olive,” she suggests helpfully.

In the past, Lee has posed as a woman with obsessive compulsive disorder who invites a masseuse into her house but will not allow herself to be touched; then there is the hard-of-hearing American Jewish grandmother noisily slurping soup in a restaurant to the horror of a waiter, and the heavily pregnant woman whose waters break during an exercise class.

Very few actresses would have the confidence to pull it off. Lee, who grew up in Totteridge, north London, thinks she gets it from her family.

“It’s chutzpah. We all have it, don’t we? I think it’s because I grew up in a family full of very strong personalities. I could swear in front of my parents. They are liberal and were very young when my brother and I were born. So I was always outgoing and lively and pushing the boundaries.”

Despite this openness, Lee’s parents still wanted their daughter to follow a sensible career path, and she did… up to a point. She dutifully went to university to study business and marketing and found a job in an office.

“After a few months I realised it wasn’t for me. Luckily I was made redundant which meant I was able to pursue my dream, because it would have taken a lot of courage to leave the security of a regular paycheck.”

She enrolled at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London with the thought that she might become a serious dramatic actress. But that was not how it worked out. Her first job was on The Basil Brush Show. She was delighted. Her rather serious agent was less so.

“I was really proud because it was my first ever job. I would go into meetings and tell everyone I was doing Basil Brush but my agent kept saying: ‘Would you please stop telling people about that’. In the end she told me that perhaps I should get a different agent, so I did.”

Lee found she was offered plenty more comedy roles. She did a bit of stand-up but decided that character-based comedy was more her thing, and particularly the niche occupation of pranking the general public and the occasional celebrity (Boyband singer Antony Costa has the distinction of being pranked on two separate occasions by Lee).

It is a strand of comedy with an illustrious Jewish tradition. Paul Kaye was the first to confront celebs on opening nights posing as American showbiz reporter Dennis Pennis, and Sacha Baron Cohen developed it into art-form with Ali G, Borat and others. So was Lee aware of the Jewish heritage?

“Oh my God, I never realised,” she replies, adding cheekily: “I knew I was going to get something out of meeting you.”

She does think that there is something in the Jewish psyche that lends itself to being outrageous.
“On the whole we can externalise and get our feelings out there and get passionate about things. My ex-boyfriend was very English and he was always telling me to shush. He didn’t really understand the level of communication I have with my family.”

One place where her humour does seem to go down well is in the United State. Lee’s agent sent a tape of Dirty Sexy Funny to chat-show host Jay Leno and he called back the following day to with the offer of a job. She became a regular for a while, holding mock auditions to investigate just what people would be prepared to do to get themselves on TV. The answer? Practically anything. She also posed as a tour guide taking tourists around LA on a bus.

“We stopped at an STD clinic so I could get my results and I also stopped to throw a brick through a car — I told everyone it belonged to my ex-boyfriend. It was all quite inappropriate.”

Lee is well aware that the prank show format has a shelf-life. Because her face is now well-known, she often uses heavy prosthetics — either that or she acts abroad where she is less famous. But she is also branching out into writing.

She has completed a sitcom, although, because it has not been officially announced yet, she is coy about the details. What she can say is that it is set in north-west London and it is fairly autobiographical but is nothing like either Simon Amstell’s Grandma’s House or Friday Night Dinner.

“The Jewish community has been done a lot but not from a female perspective. It’s a really different story on the girls’ side. For example, my grandma would always say: ‘Sitcom, shmitcom – you’ll meet a man and get married and it won’t matter. What do you want a career for anyway, it’s so exhausting’.”

So will she be acting in the series? “Of course I will. You don’t think I’ve spent a year writing it just to give it to someone else?”

One imagines there must be a huge expenditure of nervous energy in Lee’s job, but she clearly loves the adrenaline and has had very few occasions when those who have been pranked have failed to sign the release forms to enable the clips to be used in her shows.

“I can be very charming when I want something from you,” she says. “Anyway, we’re never mean and most people find it really funny. They are laughing with you and they are happy to be on TV.

"In fact, most of the time the joke is on me because I’m playing several degrees of crazy. People usually don’t guess what’s happening. After all, the last thing they expect is that there’s going to be a whole camera crew hidden in the house.

"But if I think they suspect something I pull back and go in a different direction, or start behaving normally until I have their trust again. You develop an instinct for it after a while.”

She has plenty of confidence in her abilities but Lee has never come to terms with the chronic insecurity of her profession.

“Every day I worry about it. It’s got to the point that my friends, most of whom don’t work in showbiz, have told me ‘I can’t have this conversation with you anymore’. I remember finishing this job in LA and I was jubilant. Yay, I got my life back. The next day it was like, what am I going to do now? But then the day afterwards the phone rings. Something always seem to happen with me.”