I was brought up to love Yiddishkeit. I was brought up to love all those who have ever spoken Yiddish and their descendants. All of them. It’s true that I have mixed feelings about Litvaks but I try to put them to one side. The thing I love most is being a Yid, with everything that means. All Yidden. Always.
In just my Mum’s family we still have Communists, Zionists, Chasidim and Misnagdim, we have assimilationists, bundists, capitalists and socialists, monarchists and anarchists. I love them all and I can’t deny that my head is a cacophony of ancestral argument and I can be any one of those things in the course of a single day.
My ability to hold, with great conviction and sincerity, several entirely contradictory opinions at the same time explains my calling as a politician. It comes very naturally to me.
I even went as far as inventing an ideological name for this intensity of paradox: Blue Labour. Very conservative, very radical. There is only a seeming contradiction between Shabbos and the Paris Commune, democracy and the monarchy, the Bund and the Baal Shem-Tov, tradition and modernity, the ancient and the new. They go best together. That is not true of Milchik and Fleishik or Spurs and Arsenal. There are limits.
It’s about getting the right blend of incoherence. My day job is to find a common good between estranged peoples and concepts. My big thing at the moment is to bring the United Synagogue, the Church of England and the Shia Ayatollahs of Najaf together around the idea of “sharing the water”. That water is sacred. A lot of different kinds of people can agree on that and it’s going well but I think it was a lot more fun when there were more of us who liked going on about this sort of thing. When there were more people who are at their most belligerent when they agree with you.
Read Part One: No one had a good word to say about my Zaida
Yidden. I miss the dead ones every day and their children and their grandchildren and all the other ones who weren’t born but could have been my friends. My comrades. There would have been a few who weren’t taken in by globalisation and liked the idea of a democratic tradition and dancing to the music of Irving Fields while drinking fizzy water. I wish they were with me now.
A core imperative in my life is to preserve the memory of the Yiddish dead in all their mayhem of disputed visions. In their energy and their vivacity, in their astonishing ability to get hurt and fall out with each other and carry on regardless. Their gift of broiges is a wonder to me. That’s my thing, Mechayeh Hameysim, that the dead should live, that we keep the memory of their lives alive with love. I’d be lost without them.
But how do you revive the dead? I was having as much luck with that as I was in finding my grandfather’s shtetl on the map. Winkowitz.
One of the things I do, while I patiently await the coming of Moshiach, is annoy the Corporation of the City of London. They care only about money and not about people and they get on my nerves. I wanted to be the Lord of the City of London but it was refused. A man called Garter, who looked exactly like Uncle Monty in Whithnail and I, informed me that my request was “unprecedented and unacceptable”. That is why I am the Lord of Stoke Newington and Stamford Hill, which is ok, but not quite the same. I live in Stoke Newington and my family are from Stamford Hill so it made sense. They go best together.
The whole business took more than six months to sort out. They kept on thinking of new reasons not to give it to me. None of them made sense. I told Garter that I wanted hedge-fund managers and corporate accountants to stand when I walked into a room and show some respect to Parliament. He was so keen to get rid of me that he agreed to a double-barrelled title. They won again.
The Corporation were up to their usual trick of moving real and ancient markets out of the City, like meat and veg, flowers and fruit, to be replaced by more offices, more algorithmic investment, a Costa Coffee and a Pret. The City of London is the most ancient continuously democratic city in the world, from time immemorial in law, and you can’t even buy a carrot in a market in a paper bag. I was incensed. They do whatever they like and no-one can stop them. It’s a long story.
One of the small group of people who shared my outrage was a very pleasant young man called William, who was also a Common Councilman in the City, representing one of the few places where people still live. We had a chat and it turned out he was doing his PhD in Yiddish. As with most people called William, he wasn’t Jewish. He studied German at Oxford and became interested in Yiddish writers and thinkers and he asked if I had heard of YIVO.
YIVO.
Yes, I had heard of YIVO. It has the largest collection of Yiddish language books and things in the world, millions of Yiddish newspapers, photos, posters, interviews, books, films. They have the original secret newspapers of the Bund, the Yiddish-speaking trade union that spread like wild-fire through the Jewish poor of Eastern Europe and was decimated by Stalin. They are a source of inspiration to me in my politics. Mechayeh Hameysim.
The photos in this section are from the YIVO archive and they bring the dead to life. Please look at the one of the Bund self-defence group funeral in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Odessa during the pogroms of 1905. Look at the high cemetery wall and their determined faces. We did fight back. I’d like to spend time with those people. I honour their memory.
YIVO is the guardian of the lives of all the dead Yidden.
It was founded in 1925 in Vilna by a group of Jewish intellectuals for the specific purpose of the ‘scientific’ study of Yiddish life; it is an acronym for the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Instititut. William had done a Yiddish course there and they had charged him with setting up a London office for the first time. Would I like to be a Trustee? Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud were among the founding trustees so I thought I would slum it and get involved.
YIVO’s survival is a tragic miracle in its own right. It exploded into the world and researchers went all over a Yiddish-speaking Europe — that they did not know was about to be decimated — in order to collect and describe. They collected wedding invitations and moyel’s knives, folk stories and accounting logs. They founded offices in Warsaw and Berlin, they wrote papers and took photographs. All the rivers flowed through it, Communists and Zionists and secularists fought over every position. They developed their own form of anthropology to study their own people. Yekkes learnt Yiddish to make their contribution. It was bursting with energy.
YIVO built, in 15 years, the most comprehensive archive of Yiddish life that there has ever been. And then it wasn’t. Lithuania was a total wipe-out. Jewish Vilna, in all its raging glory was laid to waste. It was Tisha Bov. Eicho. Behold the deserted city where once we loved. It rivalled Ukraine in the intensity of its killing. The Berlin office was ransacked, Warsaw was plundered.
The Nazis transferred a good part of the collection to the “Institute for Research on the Jewish Question” in Frankfurt where they dispassionately analysed and filed the artefacts of the culture and people they were annihilating. It was run by Goebbels and included mandatory academic lectures. I wouldn’t claim a German passport for love nor money.
And people gave their lives to protect the archive and smuggle it into the ghetto so it could be hidden and preserved. Sam Kassow wrote an immaculate book about this called Who Will Write Our History? He tells of the digging of a tomb beneath the Warsaw Ghetto so that the archive could be stored there. The code name for the secret operation was Oyneg Shabbos, the Joy of the Sabbath. The historian who led the operation was called Emmanuel Ringelblum and he was executed for it. May his name be counted among the martyrs and never be forgotten.
When I was little l used to be sent to stay with my Auntie Betty and Uncle Shmuel in Stamford Hill because they hadn’t had children yet and my parents needed a rest. They were proper frum. Best of all was Shabbos-YomTov when it lasted for three days, or was it weeks, and everything would merge into a timeless blur of sacred stupor intensified by the chemical reaction between limeade Corona and Chollent.
I didn’t experience that feeling again until I went to University. Sometimes I felt that the dust stopped falling and it was the closest I ever came to understanding the idea of eternity in a moment. My Dad came to pick me up once at 10.30 at night and we thought it was lunchtime. YomTov lasted longer in Stamford Hill.
Sometimes after midnight on Shabbos my Uncle Shmuel would wake me up and take me to a shteeble, either the Trisk or the Skvare. It was dark and moody on Osbaldeston Road with the old orange street lamps giving us giant moving shadows that changed shape on the high kerbs.
My Uncle Shmuel used to go from the size of Ali Baba to a mouse and then into the Hulk and then into a thin jagged black line in ten strides. When we walked into the Beis Midrash I saw men wearing fur hats, long silk kapotas, white stockings and black shiny slip-on slippers silently dancing round the Ark with their hands barely touching and then they raised their arms, eyes and voices to heaven and thanked God for giving them Shabbos.
Some cried with gratitude. It was magic. And I asked my Uncle Shmuel what this was called and he said Oyneg Shabbos. And that is what the Jewish historians who were trapped in the Warsaw Ghetto called their precious books, artefacts and documents of the life of the Yidden that they buried in a secret vault. In Vilna, too, the documents of the YIVO Archive were smuggled in at risk of execution, then buried under the ghetto and rescued after the war. Like the Torah, they put it before their lives.
To those involved, and there were many, the archive was as holy as the Torah and, heretic that I am, I feel that way too. Or rather, that it is part of the Torah, which includes the oral law, that is to be treasured and studied and passed on to the next generation. Vedibarta Bom. Let Babylon have the nuclear bomb, we’ve got Vedibarta Bom, and that will always be, all we have. We lose it all when we lose that.
The archive was life and its destruction was eternal death to the Yidden of Eastern Europe. The archive was proof of their unique existence, it provided a source from which their history, their lives and their work could be written. It was all that stood between them and complete invisibility forever.
As they understood it, without the archive, people could say that they had never existed at all. That they never happened and never were. One of their founders managed to get to New York and they re-established there. They re-assembled what was left of the archive, survivors bequeathed their collections and they are still coming.
After the war, the Soviet Bloc was reluctant to yield what remained of its captured treasure and even now YIVO is digitising more than a million and half documents and more than 1,000 books that have only just become available in Vilna but which were part of their original collection.
YIVO produced their Encyclopaedia of Jews in Eastern Europe which is the most authoritative and comprehensive study ever, in our glory and our decimation, from the beginning to our end. Its truth was the archive. Emes.
As the emails were exchanged it emerged that they were planning, for the first time, a tour of the Jewish Ukraine travelling from Kiev to Odessa, including trips to the graves of the Baal Shem Tov, Levi-Yitzchak of Berdichev and Reb Nachman of Bratslav. They were going to the house where Sholem Aleichem grew up and his flat in Kiev. And then in Odessa; Babel, Jabotinsky, Bialik. Our guide would be Professor Sam Kassow. They asked me if I wanted to join the trip.
What is the point of losing your faith when Hashem is always there to remind you that mazel is a gift and not a reward? That all you can ever do is have faith. We are very small people in a very big world. There are limits to planning and action points for the next meeting. All we can do is trust in
He who gives salvation unto Kings and dominion unto Princes, whose Kingdom is an everlasting Kingdom.
I mentioned my love for the Jewish writer Isaac Babel, whose stories introduced me to Odessa for the first time. It turned out that Jonathan Brent, the Director of YIVO, had written a scholarly paper on him and discovered new information about his arrest on Stalin’s order, his torture, his confession and his murder in 1941.
Moonbeams were flying across the night sky. I asked whether, perhaps, maybe, would it be possible, to visit my Zaida’s shtetl called Winkowitz, although I couldn’t find it on a map? I didn’t want to cause any trouble but it was kind of important to me. Before I could get to the end of Chiribim, Chiribom by the Barry Sisters, a travel agency in Miami had got in touch and they specialised in Jewish tours to Eastern Europe. Their name was, unbelievably, Momentum.
Meanwhile, a YIVO archivist had tracked down Winkowitz. It turns out that it was now only known by its Ukrainian name, Vinkivtsy, and it looked like it was very small. They couldn’t really say if it still existed. Meanwhile Momentum were on the job. It was far away, they said. It wasn’t near anywhere. It may not have roads as such. It most likely didn’t have a cemetery. In many cases the graves were smashed by locals after the war and the stones used to build new houses or repair old ones.
It would not, they feared, be like I imagined. I would need a four-wheel drive Humvee of the kind that Isis seized in their hundreds when they moved into Iraq, or which drug dealers use to drive around Chicago, or which Jewish parents use to drop their children off at nursery in North-West London.
They said I would also need a driver and a translator and said it would cost $200. They advised against.
I was never going to let Momentum thwart my plans. I said book it now. An hour later it was confirmed for May 25. I entered ‘Winkowitz’ in my diary. I was on my way.
He who.
