As I stared into the space where my Dad had stood, a story came back to me that I had never recalled before. It was clear and vivid, like a forgotten family cine film that I had just found in a box of old photographs.
There was no sound, like watching the film of our holidays in Super 8 on our cine projector, in our lounge, with the lights off, the curtains drawn and the screen up, and yet I could hear the conversations of the people involved and the sounds and smells around them. I watched it roll in real time. I could barely remember it but it was as clear as a bell. As it started I didn’t know how it would end.
I looked about eight or nine and I watched it through those eyes. The colours were great, golden velvet caps and mauve corduroy jackets, so it had to be the late 60s or early 70s. I’m just trying to tell you what happened. I could pretend it didn’t happen and that would be better for me, but it did and I thought you should at least know about it. We’ve come all this way. I don’t know what to make of it either. I’m reporting back as best I can.
Up until I was nine I shared a bedroom with my older brother. He used to get annoyed with me because I would keep him awake. I thought he moved into the smallest room in the house just to get away from me. He wasn’t the only one. Everyone was annoyed with me. I used to fall asleep at school with my head on the desk because I felt so tired. My exercise books were empty. I didn’t seem to learn anything, or know anything. My Dad was astounded at how little I knew. He used to ask, “Don’t you learn anything at school?” and I replied “No”.
I had no idea what my teachers were talking about. Verbs, adjectives, nouns. What’s a “doing” word? Turning numbers upside down and dividing them. Who could understand any of this? And then when I wasn’t even aware of it I used to jiggle my leg and a lot of my teachers found that very annoying. And sometimes I said something and sometimes the class would laugh and sometimes they wouldn’t but whatever the response and for all those reasons, sleeping, jiggling and speaking, I used to find myself standing outside the classroom and told not to move from the spot where the teacher could see me through the glass square in the door.
And sometimes I would move, or I would make faces that I didn’t always know I was making, and sometimes people inside the classroom would start laughing, or sometimes the Deputy Headmistress called Mrs Calev, or even just another teacher walking down the corridor would find me there. Whichever way it happened I used to find myself being escorted, as if under arrest, to see the headmistress of the Clapton Jewish Day School and her name was Mrs Rose Stiftel-Lipman. When I saw her appear on the film I felt shocked and afraid. I hadn’t thought of her for a very long time.
Mrs Lipman looked exactly like Queen Victoria and gave every indication of eternal dominion. It is incredible to think that Jewish people could look like that, but she did. She was also leader of Hackney Council which she ran with Bolshevik finality. All the councillors seemed to be Labour and Jewish.
Chadeysh Yomeinu Kekedem.
Read all the chapters of Maurice Glasman's A Jewish Chronicle Of A Death Foretold
I was on two occasions found in the corridor by her but there are some experiences from my childhood that I still don’t have the courage to recall. She had taught my Mother and my Aunts at Cheder in Egerton Road. I once asked my Dad how old she was and he said, “older than God” and I believed him.
Mrs Rose Stiftel-Lipman. Even her name evokes awe.
And I had many terrible days standing outside her office. I had to stand there all day and if I was sent there after lunch, I had to stand there for the first half of the next day. When she left her office, to inspect the school, or to inspect the construction of an entire council estate in Homerton that she fully expected to be named after her, the secretary would give me a chair and a biscuit.
A few times she made me a cup of tea with sugar. Sometimes I fell asleep in the chair. In later years I realised it gave me my first insight into life in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev.
The gap between rhetoric and reality was so huge that the official papers would give you no idea of what was really going on. We had visits from Golda Meir and the Indian Ambassador and you would have thought we were all bilingual in Ivrit and English and that every day in every way we all strove to make Hackney a shining beacon of hope for all people and peoples and be a “light unto the nations”.
But this film was not about being sent to her office, which I did not mention when I was asked about my day by my Mum. This was about the time my Mother was actually called in to see Mrs Lipman, and she looked anxious. It was like being called into the office of the head of the Stasi or Jabba the Hut. There was a terrible finality about it. “What happened?” is all she said. And the film told the story and I can only describe it to you.
One of my sisters, or someone who was staying with us, I can’t remember, was enrolled to have ballet lessons from one of those Jewish German emigres who lived in Swiss Cottage and thought all British culture was rubbish. She had founded “the most prestigious ballet school in Berlin” before the war and was the pupil of a great ballet teacher called something like Arnold Minsivitz who had revolutionised “breathing” as a balletic concept. I cannot remember her name and she could not, and did not wish to, conceal her disdain for the dismal lack of artistic and physical talent among the Jewish girls who were her only pupils. She actually smoked and wore sunglasses while she was teaching, flicking the ash on the floor and turning away in despair.
I went with my Dad and stayed to watch the lesson. It was a treat. Out the house, with my Dad, no homework. The dispirited Greta Garbo had a hope that my Dad would have some understanding of the scale of her disappointment because he spoke German.
I was standing next to him when she explained to him, “zat ven you dance, you dance” and she straightened her arm elegantly, and it was quite captivating to see, “not mit der hand but mit der fingge” and as she spoke her arm and then her wrist extended upwards and each finger was slowly unfurled and held in perfect static motion. She said it again with her arm upraised to make sure we got the point. “Not mit der hand but mit der fingge” with an even stronger emphasis. Bravo.
Each fingertip was a perfect petal of a flower in first bloom. It was something to see. She was transformed from an old lady into a graceful living statue. Poise. It was amazing to watch her again. We got it. And when I dance, or watch dancers, I always look out for the fingge.
My Dad loved that sentence. He said it all the way back in the car and chuckled to himself and I used to laugh at everything he said and even now, while watching the film I was laughing with him. I said, “not mit der hand but mit der fingge”, in a heavy German declamatory accent while raising my arm in the air and unfurling my fingers and we both laughed. We never wore seatbelts. I had plenty of space to perform standing up. It was amazing how often the phrase came to mind.
My Dad used to say it when I was doing the washing up, or trying to improve my handwriting (big issue) or when he saw me picking my nose. “Not mit der hand but mit der fingge”, he would say and there was a strong emphasis on the hard double g and the short e. Fingge. He used to call our lunch “fish finggez” and that made me laugh every time. And when the Fawlty Towers ‘Don’t Mention the War’ episode came on, me and my Dad laughed our heads off.
All of this was rolling on and it felt great but then the scene and the mood changed and I was in a classroom, at the Clapton Jewish Day School in a converted house in Cazenove Road and it was in early 1970. Brian Islin, Graham Arno and Brian Solomons, who were sitting next to me and behind me, were singing “I was born under a wandering star” by Lee Marvin from the film Paint Your Wagon, so I can date it precisely. “Snow can burn your eyes but only people make you cry”.
It was Year Four so I was coming up to nine. Dr Wohl was in front of the class. Dr Wohl was also a German émigré. She also spoke with a heavy accent. She was now in her sixties and she taught Torah Studies which we now call Limudei Kodesh. Our Ivrit teachers, in contrast, were young Israelis, just out the army who wore miniskirts, thigh-length boots and used to address us as Kvootza Daled. “Yadaim al ha rosh, yadaim al ha ktafaim” and we would do “head, shoulders, knees and toes” in the classroom as that was the closest we would ever get to a PE lesson. Our actual PE teacher, Miss Gilbert, was disabled and taught either from her chair or her wheelchair. She only taught ballroom dancing.
At Clapton Jewish Day School my sisters won sporting awards. At break time, the boys in my class used to play football with a marble or a bottle top in the corridor outside the toilets and the intensity of those games was relentless. Miss Gilbert told us that Fred Astaire could say good morning with his feet.
One day a year we went outside for Sports Day and that seemed to involve our parents talking to each other, smoking and then our Dads doing an egg and spoon race with their trouser legs rolled up. The one ambition I had was to play for Spurs and I could feel it slipping away.
Our Israeli teachers only spoke to us in Ivrit so I never understood a word they said, and I was not alone. The Israeli Ambassador once asked our class how we were, in Ivrit. Ma Nishma? and I called out, shtaim vechetzee, half-past two. I liked the sound of it and it was worth a punt. When he left I was duly delivered to Mrs Lipman’s office and she went the full Captain Mainwaring. You are a stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid boy.
How my Dad laughed when he heard that story and he called me stupid boy for years after that. It was an endless source of merriment to him. Shtaim vechetzee.
In contrast, our Torah teachers were old and spoke with a German accent. Ziss and zatt and zee uzer and so force. I had loads of them over the years. It was like Torah world and Ivrit world were two completely different places inhabited by two completely different types of being.
Dr Wohl wore her thin white hair tied back in a bun, she wore a black cardigan and a long thick black skirt with a cream blouse done up to the neck. A small silver Kemaia fell just below her top button on a slender chain. She also had the palest blue plastic glasses in the Yekke style. She wore the same thing every day. If evil did not rule the world she would have been teaching German Literature, particularly Heine, in a high-end Modern Orthodox Girls Gymnasium in Grunewald Berlin, but because it does, she was teaching the B stream 4th year class Torah in Clapton Jewish Day School.
And the 1970 World Cup was coming in Mexico and we were still the World Champions. We were at a bar-mitzvah on the night of the quarter final against Germany, the Pollins family. How I didn’t want to go to that barmitzvah. I tried to hide in the pantry so my parents would leave without me. And I watched the barmitzvah boy say, as he closed his speech, “By the way, England are two nil up” and the whole room exploded in cheering and clapping. Back home we were really behind them when they were far away. And then going back in the car my Dad turned on the radio and we had lost 3-2.
In my little head it was my first experience of inconsolable grief, of Tisha Bov, of Eicho. It was incomprehensibly bad. It was just terrible. I cried and I cried when we got back home and my Mum thought she would have to call the doctor. I was running a temperature. I watched as she sat by my bed until I fell asleep and brought up a cold flannel and placed it across my forehead but I don’t remember her being there. I just remember crying. In some ways, thinking about it now, I don’t think I ever got over it. It was the first time and it was the start of something.
And I remembered meeting German Jews, Yekkes who wanted to talk to my Dad in German, who thought that the ball hadn’t crossed the line in 66. Russian linesman. And they still supported Germany. Does anyone remember how much the German Jews loved Germany? When I visited Grunewald as the guest of the British Ambassador it looked just like St John’s Wood. No wonder they lived there, and in Belsize Park and Swiss Cottage. Yekke Land.
The Ambassador’s House was once a Jewish home and was seized after the war. It had a serious dining room. The Yekkes used to say to my Dad about England that after Shakespeare there was nothing. Nussink. And they called him unzer Shakespeare. They thought that Shakespeare was German. They thought we were all rubbish. Really rubbish. Superficial and stupid.
I once watched an episode of Animal Magic with Johnny Morris with a group of Yekkes in our lounge. They were completely stupefied by what they saw. They were aghast at the sight of a Hippopotamus opening its enormous mouth and saying, “Excuse me but I need to spend a penny”. Scheisse. They couldn’t watch our television and they couldn’t read our books. Nussink.
And we were in Dr Wohl’s lesson and they had brought up the Sefer Torah from downstairs and it was only then that I remembered where this was going. It felt like I was watching my own slow motion car crash. I wanted to stop it but I couldn’t. The Sefer Torah was laid upon the table in front of Dr Wohl on a talles. She was looking at the class. And she told us, in her German accent, that the Torah was our refuge, our sanctuary and our salvation throughout our history. And I had collected football stickers throughout the whole season and I had seven Derek Dougans, 14 George Armstrongs, 12 Colin Bells, 8 Phil Beales and 5 Mike Englands. I had a wad of stickers in my pocket fatter than four packs of cards and I didn’t have one of Jimmy Greaves or Alan Gilzean. So many packets opened in vain.
Brian Islin, who lived next door where Helen Shapiro used to live in Cedra Court, and who had ballroom dancing cups on his mantelpiece, had spares of both and he wouldn’t swap them for my whole stack of stickers. Joe Arrovo was doing a full drumming practice on his desk while Iris Mansoor, Tamar Saunders and Lesley Decker were involved in a loud conversation. Susan Zeligman and Kim Lowenthal were doing some kind of hand jive thing. Colin Jackson swore on his mother’s life that his uncle lived next door Pat Jennings in Chigwell and he could get free Spurs tickets any time he liked and none of us believed him. Dr Wohl told us that the sanctity of the Sefer Torah was the only thing for which we were allowed to sacrifice our lives. And I’d seen that.
Right across the road, at the opposite corner of Cazenove and Kyverdale Roads, was the Satmar Yeshiva. It was also two big houses knocked together. There was a fire and it burnt down. I could see it from my classroom window. I saw Chasidim run into the burning building and emerge with a Sefer Torah with their clothes and their beards on fire. I have witnessed a Chasid running out a building with his payos flaming behind him with a Torah scroll held to his chest. I saw singed parchment and burnt books. It was something. The smell of burning and the charred shell of a building lingered for a long time. To me it felt like a haunted house but when it was eventually rebuilt, it was in the Brezhnev style and I never looked at it again. All the ghosts had left.
And she told us that when the Nazis came to attack the synagogue in Grunewald on Kristallnacht, the Jewish men tried to defend the dignity of the Torah and her fiancée was killed with the scroll in his hands. And we couldn’t have cared less about that. We didn’t even ask his name.
I was listening but all our minds were on everything that was in front of us except what she was saying and the Sefer Torah with the mauve cover and its silver pointer, the Yad, which means hand. And she took the Yad off and showed it to us. She said that the Sefer Torah was so sacred that we could not touch it with our hands but had to use the silver Yad, which looked like a clenched fist with an index finger pointing out.
I had never looked at it so closely and it caught my attention. I said, “So Miss, when it comes to the Sefer Torah you read it” and then I switched into a heavy German accent, “not mit der hand but mit der fingge”, and I raised my unfurling fingers to the ceiling with an exaggerated flourish. And the whole class laughed, it rocked with laughter, not at what I’d said, but the way I said it. And even though I was watching this with my heart full of shame, when the laughter of the class broke I laughed with it. It was like an earthquake of laughter.
Now, as I watched this, I could see Dr Wohl for what she was; a beautiful refined remnant of high German Orthodox culture who had lost her homeland and the love of her life and yet continued to uphold the values she held most dear to honour their memory.
Torah im Derech Eretz from its origins. A life of grief, duty and obligation.
But for us she might as well have been an alien from another planet. Everything was going fine for her in Berlin before the terrible thing happened. She graduated from University in German Literature as a doctor and she had to end her years being baited and mocked by a little Jewish bastard who thought that a Jimmy Greaves sticker was more important than the Sefer Torah. Was there no end to the indignity of a human life?
And it was too much for Dr Wohl. Her spirit was broken. She sat in her chair with the Yad in her hand while the class disintegrated. Graham Arno shouted “bundle” and all the boys in the class jumped on Brian Dehond who Graham had pushed to the ground. We formed a heap of black shoes, grey trousers and blue armed jumpers. There were cuppels everywhere. BUNDLE.
Beneath the pile of bodies, and some girls jumped on too, Brian Dehond called out, “Get off. I’m winded. I can’t breathe.” These were the words that greeted Mrs Calev as she walked into the classroom. We started debundling and all of us went to our places and stood silently. I think we all felt ashamed.
Only Hannah Coren sat blamelessly throughout, silent and attentive at her desk. Her family were from Baghdad and god only knows what she thought of us. We were all silent except Brian Dehond, who was still complaining when he clambered to his feet but when he saw the wounded deer face of Mrs Calev he too took his place. She looked at each of us, then turned and put her arm round Dr Wohl and led her from the room. We stood still and we still stood when she returned.
She said that we were all guilty and that we would all be punished. That we would have no playtime for a week. Then she said, and I could feel my chest tighten, that there were some who were more guilty than others, she called them ringleaders, and it wasn’t long before I was being taken away to Mrs Lipman who was on the phone to my Mother when I entered her office and a meeting was arranged between them for the next morning at 11. She said not a word to me, neither did she catch my eye.
I had to stand outside her office and even after she was long gone, there was no chair or tea with sugar. And a word appeared in my mind that I had never thought before. As I watched myself on the film I could see myself silently saying the word ‘sh*t’ for the first time. And it was the only word I thought for the whole afternoon. I couldn’t get beyond it. It was like it was making a home for itself in my head. It stayed with me forever and I said it many times. Shit. So many times in so many different kinds of ways. But this was the first time. And I wasn’t looking forward to going home. I would have liked to have stood there all night.
When we walked through the back door into the kitchen my mum was sitting at the table, and there were two lipstick stained cigarette butts in the ashtray and my mother didn’t smoke. She sent my brother and little sister out the room and she had never done that before. I sat in the chair. “What happened?” is the only thing she said. I didn’t want to tell her but I was on the wrong side of a phone call from Mrs Lipman so I told her the story as an eight-year-old would. You know, dunno and then he goes and she went and she goes and then I go, “Not mit der hand but mit der fingge”.
My Mum looked short of breath and stared through me, her black eyes gleaming like shiny cherries. I don’t think this was the sort of thing she had in mind when she had children. The look on her face was one of numb disbelief. She said, “What did you say that for?” and I said, “I dunno. It just popped out.”
My Mum stood up and her eyes flitted around desperately for a face that would show mercy or compassion in her distress but there was no one there and she lifted her hands so they were facing each other, as if she was about to do a two handed karate chop and she said, “Chanum verachum” and brought her arms down. “What am I?” she asked, “the skivvy of the world?” I had mocked a Jewish German refugee who had never hurt a fly. And she said, “That’s unforgiveable”. She had said many things to me but she had never said that before. And I think it was the last time I ever told my Mother the truth about anything that happened to me at school. From then on it was dunno, can’t remember, it happened so quickly, wasn’t there, nothing. Bad things happened but she didn’t hear it from me. Whatever happened I never said a word about it at home.
Nussink.
When my Dad came in from work he got it full blast. She told him that it was all his fault, that if he hadn’t kept on making that stupid joke about “der fingge” none of this would have ever happened. She even went as far as to swear and she called it “der blinking fingge” and in all this grief my Dad glanced at me when she said that and I almost laughed. But it had happened and she had to go and see Mrs Rose Stiftel-Lipman the next day. Blinking fingge.
And that night gave me a first inkling of what it must be like to be on death row and to know for sure that tomorrow was coming. And people ask me why I smoke. Each one feels like the last.
I saw my Mum arriving at the school from the window, and I also saw her leave, what felt like a whole lesson later. She arrived with her head up and she left with her head down. At no point did she look up at the window to see if I was there. It had never been like this between us. If she knew how I felt she would have said that I was “devastated”. And she did know and she still didn’t look up.
When I arrived home she was sitting at the table again. I was bathed and in my pyjamas by six and sent straight to bed. She brushed my hair in a very aggressive manner. I told her it hurt but she kept on doing it. I could hear everyone having supper and then the television. I crept down the stairs at about half-past nine as the hours passed like years and I couldn’t get to sleep. It was a risky move. The storm had not yet broken. But I was thirsty, I wanted a glass of Ribena.
My Dad intercepted me at the foot of the stairs and pointing silently upwards he took me back to bed promising a Ribena “at some point”. He was whispering. When he went back down again I could hear my Mum declaring to him that he wasn’t “firm” enough with me, that she was the one who had to do all the disciplining, that he had to do something about it. Do something. He had to put his foot down. I was in the bedroom above and I could hear every word because she was not whispering. My Mum could barely speak the words that she had heard but it turned out that Mrs Lipman had called her a bad mother.
There are some things that should never be said and, if said, never allowed to stand. And then she said that Mrs Lipman had showed her my exercise books and they were all empty and I never did any homework and I was in the B stream now but I was going into the C stream if this carried on. Mrs Lipman had said that I was establishing a trend and that once it was an established trend it was only going in one direction and my Mum started crying terribly. She was overwhelmed by the force of the established trend and its direction. I didn’t hear my Father’s voice through it all. And then there was silence. Sometimes I lay in bed as a child and I just didn’t feel good and I couldn’t say why. This wasn’t one of those times.
A while later my Mum walked crisply into my bedroom wearing sunglasses and looking like Sophia Loren in that film with Peter Sellers and announced quite formally that “your Father wants a proper talk with you in the dining room.” The Dining Room. This had turned into real time Cluedo. I could see myself lying on the floor killed by my Mother with a Shabbos Candlestick in the Dining Room. There were no other suspects. Colonel Mustard could take the day off. Now she was a bad mother, who knew where it would end?
The dining room was only used on Shabbos and YomTov, or for piano practice, which I never did. And it had a double decker bronze serving trolley which was only used on Pesach. Me and my Dad took it to the Avigdor playground, on the Sunday before the Seder, where they dipped large items in huge boiling vats of water in order to kasher them. We took the trolley because it had been exposed to chametz all year and you could never be too careful. The rubber wheels melted.
The dining room had a big table, a sideboard, a piano and curved cushion window-seats beneath which lay the Pesach plates. On the sideboard stood the Shabbos candlesticks, and each child had one, diminishing in size. Mine was the third. Inside the sideboard was stored our entire civic and religious history. Wedding certificates, birth certificates, passports, my Zaida’s tephilin, machzers with prayers for the Tsar and thousands of unsorted photographs. There was something sacred about that sideboard. It also had two drawers full of cutlery that we never used. My Dad sat at the head of the table and I sat beside him. I bowed my head and he put his hand on mine and we sat like that for a long time.
Then he said that he knew that I didn’t mean anything bad. That it was just a joke. I said, it just popped out. Exactly, he said, and sometimes when it just pops out it goes well and sometimes it goes badly. That I would find that. I felt that he really understood. And you can’t tell how it’s going to turn out. No, I said. He said that I didn’t know this but all this would blow over, it would be as if it never happened, that no one would remember it. And watching it I thought that he was right. Even I had forgotten it. My Mum never mentioned it again but I didn’t believe him then. I thought it would follow me wherever I went. He said that it would happen again though. You will say something and sometimes it would go right and sometimes it would go wrong. He was sure of that. And then he went silent again.
Then he said, I don’t know what will become of you or how you’ll earn a living. And really sweetly he said that I didn’t seem to be good at anything and that I could never concentrate on anything, that I couldn’t sit still, that I couldn’t go to bed and I couldn’t wake up and that I wasn’t like the others. He was only telling the truth and I nodded when I listened.
It made sense. I had no idea what I was going to do either. I could feel my Spurs career falling away and in Palmers Green kids only played on Shabbos. And then he said that he thought I was a good boy and he squeezed my hand and that things were going to go wrong again a lot of times for me and that when they did I needed to remember to be nice to Mum, and if I did that then it wouldn’t all go wrong at the same time.
That’s when it got really bad. He asked if I understood. I thought it was a lot to ask and I didn’t say anything. I was angry with her about not being able to play football on Shabbos. It was the only thing I was good at. “Don’t argue with me”, she said, “argue with God” and I did, and he said I could play as long as I walked there in my football boots so I didn’t carry them and played in the Spurs kit. She still said no and I held her responsible for that one. She could have let me play if she really wanted to. He said that even if she was very angry with me I had to promise to be nice to her and not be angry with her. He seemed to mean it. I nodded this time. And I believe that I kept my promise to him.
My Mum was very angry with me, many many times, and her temper was ferocious. A couple of times I thought her head would explode but I was never angry with her, and I tried to be nice which sometimes made her more angry. I let the Spurs dream go. I felt very sad.
He said that when I said something it would go wrong a lot but that maybe one day I would say something and it would go right but then he said that he didn’t think he’d live long enough to see it.
I couldn’t bear it anymore and I fell upon his chest with my head like a falling tree, reached my arms around him and started crying. It had been a very long couple of days. I hadn’t shed a tear and I hadn’t shared my fear and it all came out in my tears which burnt my eyes. I remember that feeling as I write. “Better out than in”, he said and put his hand across my forehead, then ran his fingers through my hair and quietly kissed me on the top of my head.
My Mum burst in and put her arms around me. She was crying too. I looked up at my Dad but he wasn’t crying. He just looked relieved. He blew his cheeks out and then disentangled from me and Mum as we held on to each other and he sat down at the other end of the table, lit a Rothmans cigarette and blew the smoke out heavily between his lips. I was in my mother’s arms and he was sitting on his own, staring at the table.
That was the final shot. The projector froze and the cine film started melting and so did the scene. The spell was broken. I became aware of myself staring into space with tears falling from my chin as I beheld the smashed Jewish cemetery of Winkowitz where my grandfather was born. The bright sun burnt my eyes and I closed them as if I was walking out of a matinee on a summer day.
It was my Dad, Collie, who I was looking for all along and I had found him anew. He loved my Mum more than I ever knew and in his capacious heart he had found a place for me.
On the worst of days, when my tears were ablaze, and ceaselessly streamed from my soul in a rage, I reached my arms to him and it was he who kissed me on my head and I knew no fear for he was with me. He who.
Lev Haisan put his hand on my shoulder. He looked up to the cemetery at the top of the hill, where his daughter, his mother and his wife are buried, I nodded to them to say farewell, and we both turned and walked away. I was not the only one to have lost the ones who loved us most.
I held my sky blue sack of earth as you would a fragile present, like an antique clock for an ageing aunt.
We walked up the hill and back to the car. I took my cuppel off and put in in my pocket. I put my sunglasses on so no-one could see my eyes. Vlad took our photo. Maxim held my sack of earth like it was as light as a yoyo.
I said goodbye to Lev Haisan and climbed into the car. What can you say? As I pulled the door shut dark clouds formed intensely in mass formation until they became one. And it rained and it rained, it poured and it stormed all the way back to Vinnitsa. Lightning bolts spat like gunshot over the dark enormous fields. I wrote that down in my little black book. I saw lorries skidding sideways on the flooded pot-holed road.
Maxim asked me if I had any hobbies. I thought about it for a while and didn’t think that playing Patience on my computer really counted so I said no. I asked him. He said fishing. But of a special kind. He liked to shoot fish wearing full diving gear with a harpoon.
And I remembered I couldn’t remember anything about the rest of Psalm 77 which came to mind when I was told of Kamianets-Podilsky. I couldn’t recall anything. I took my book of Psalms out of my bag and then I remembered.
When the mighty water saw your light
The darkness on the face of the deep took fright
The clouds poured
The sky roared
Your arrows soared
Your lightning lit the ocean with your fire burning bright
The thunder was the whirlwind of your chariot in flight
You came from the sea and your path was through the deep
Then the water washed away, your footsteps with its spray
The rain kept hammering, like the sound of a herd of white Cossack horses galloping across the Russian Steppe, and even Maxim had to slow right down and became silent as we crawled against the power of the rain as it smashed into our windscreen.
My Zaida was right, I thought. It was time to do some bloody verk. The thought of it made me weary and I drifted off into what felt like a cosmic Shabbos shluf. All I heard was the sound of the rain and thinking I wouldn’t care if I was washed away. I’d said thank you to all those people and I never said thank you to my Dad. It had been a very early start and there was no way that I’d be sleeping tonight.
There is so much more I would like to tell you. I would like to tell you about going to the matzeyvah of Reb Nachman of Bratslav in my Spurs shirt and saying all ten Tehilim, giving Tzedoka, speaking to him as you would to a friend and explaining the importance of the impending Champions League final against Liverpool and asking if he could tilt the balance in our direction if it was close at the end of the game.
I could tell you of how towards the end of the game I beseeched the highest level of celestial compassion to intercede, to give us a sign of redemption, some glory in our exile at the very moment that Liverpool scored their second goal. It was déjà vu all over again, Peter Bonetti. My sins were too great for even Reb Nachman to annul and now I fear the new season and Rosh Hashanah in equal measure. Dr Wohl taught me that on Rosh Hashanah it was written in pencil and could be erased but on Yom Kippur it was written in indelible ink. It was going to be a long ten days.
Above all I would like to tell you about Odessa and its food and Yiddish songs, about Moishe Yaponchik, the one who blew up the Chief of Police after the pogroms in 1905 and who held the city agog with the audacity of his crimes before the revolution. About Sonia Goldenhands.
I could tell you about the catacombs beneath the city where the partisans fought against the Romanian murderers who killed more than 50,000 Jews by hand in three days in October 1941. It’s my blood down there. In 1940 Odessa was the third largest Jewish City in the world after New York and Warsaw. In 1944 a few thousand returned as refugees in what they once called the “star of exile”.
I could tell you of the Mishpoche, from my Mum’s side, that I discovered there who took me all around and of the Buba who told me that when they returned to Odessa after the war there was no-one that they knew, that they were strangers in their own city. And now, she said, after all that and to cap it all, they were Russians in the Ukraine and couldn’t leave the country for fear that they would not be allowed back. Red Army. They knew no Hebrew but still lit candles on Friday night in ornate candlesticks with a big Mogen Dovid in the middle. The daughter said she felt a “good aura” from the candles. There were no Mrs Lipmans in Odessa. And no Dr Wohls.
I found an old silver Becher with Shabbos written on it in an antique shop and I gave it to them and although it was a Thursday night I said Kiddish with the Buba, the mother and the two children round the table and they told me how lucky I was to be born in such a country as England where people could still read Hebrew. I was leaving on Friday.
I could tell you about Vladimir Jabotinsky, Chaim Nachman Bialik and Leon Pinsker, who were all from there. I could do all these things, the matzah and the herring and the acid Yiddish beat that swings from the restaurant speakers, but I sense that I am over-staying my welcome.
I know, in my heart, although I don’t want to face it, that you’ve had enough too. I just want to thank you for keeping me company on all the nights that I’ve been writing this. I certainly wrote it with you in mind. The truth is, I couldn’t have written it without you. Emes. Who else other than you would be interested in this? I will say what my Mum told me to say when we went anywhere. “Thank you very much for having me”.
The truth is, I don’t want to stop writing. I don’t want to lose my beloved Yidden who have also come to keep me company. My Mum and Dad, who have even sat in silence as I got on with the writing, my Dad doing the crossword and my Mum writing letters. When the first chapter was published, my Mum read the JC from beginning to end, as she always did, except for my story. She said that we’d talked about it and she knew it already. And it seemed a bit long. My Dad glanced at me and I laughed. Cup of tea?
My Uncle Shmuel and the Triske Rov on Oyneg Shabbos. Mrs Lipman and Dr Wohl. They came back. How great they were. How great they are and I know that when I stop it will be back to emails and meetings and seminar papers and ziss and zat and zee uzer and so force. That this summer will soon feel like a dream, as if it never happened and I can’t bear to think that I will lose them all again. I will miss them so but as my Zaida said, and I met him for the first time too, it’s time to do some bloody verk. Even my Dad is telling me that, so I have to take it seriously. When those two agree on something I can’t ignore it. It’s like going back to school.
It makes me impatient for Moshiach Kimmen, when we will sit around the dining room table together and Shabbes will never go out. Playing chess and drinking lemon tea in a glass through a dissolving sugar cube held between our teeth. Talking about our parents forever.
All I will say in farewell is that when I thought of a flat overlooking the sea for my old age I could never really get beyond Bournemouth with its palm trees and balconies. Dorset beckoned. But now, Odessa has captured my soul, with its sun, blazing like a blood orange at dusk, warming the crisp wind from the Black Sea.
I think it would be a good place to die and to be buried. I could have Spurs Forever engraved on my tombstone in large letters beneath my photo, maybe looking like a serious writer with a Parker pen in my hand, or maybe my barmitzvah photo, and it would be in black and white and embossed on my more than life-size pink marble matzeyvah in the Third Jewish Cemetery.
In a smaller italic script, written beneath that, in the form of a biblical quote, would be the words, “The thing I love most is being a Yid.” (That is also the single line insertion I would want in the Jewish Chronicle with my name and the years of my life.) It would be my way of showing solidarity with all the Yidden who were massacred there, the ones who were slaughtered and the ones who fought. It would have a lit navy-blue five pointed star shining on the top to show that however broken hearted we may be, the star of exile can never be extinguished; that those who are loved never really die.
And behind my grave, in earth dug by Maxim from my ancestors' cemetery, a tree of life would be planted, a chestnut or acacia tree, in memory of all the dead Jews of Winkowitz, the desecrated and the decimated. My big stone photo would rest in its leafy shade at peace.
I would leave a Last Will and Testament of instructions that would have to be followed to the letter through the Moishe Yaponchik Trust which I would endow. It would pay for a minyan to say Kaddish on my yahrzeit each year, change the bulb in the dark blue star of exile and make sure my grave is kept clean. And each year Maxim would bring more of the fertile soil of Winkowitz so that the tree of life would grow strong. In the case of his death or incapacity, the payment and the duty would pass to his grandson. And each year, on my yahrzeit, someone would read out this story that I have written for you and it would be called ‘A Jewish Chronicle of a Death Foretold’.
It would let the dead Yidden of Odessa know that across the length of the North Circular Road, from Gants Hill to Palmers Green, from Henley’s Corner to Hendon, and all the way to Wembley and Edgware and even as far as Kenton, that there were still Jews alive in Europe after the war who were every bit as mad as they were, and the beat goes on. And with that understood by all, I could rest in peace with Koved and honour. “Lord Moishe Glasman, son of Coleman Glasman, the Levite”, would be set in stone forever in Hebrew, English and Russian.
On the back of the matzeyvah would be a big vivid blue tattoo-like heart and inside it would be one word: MUM. Next to it would be a Union Jack, about the size of a postcard, with the dates 1939-1945 to let them know that the people of my country fought the Nazis too, and for longer. I leave it to my wife to write the words of remembrance. Only she knows. Whatever she wishes to write would be deserved and would say more about me than I ever could.
And should you ever visit Odessa and come to my grave I ask you to please place a little stone beneath my photo and know that I am very sorry for what I did to Doctor Wohl. May her name be blessed. And Reb Nachman would be nearby if I really needed someone to talk to, when the nights grew long and everyone was asleep.
