We needed to eat kosher out. Whenever we eat out, David has fish or vegetable pasta. If we go to my fave restaurant, Le Relais de Venise, and queue up for half an hour for steak frites, then he has to have cheeseboard and chips and just enjoy my enjoyment. The last time we visited a kosher restaurant there was an unfortunate accident involving boiling water and the neck of the Rebbetzen of Kiev… so it had been a while since we returned. On this occasion it was less than crowded as we contemplated a schnitzel or two from the menu. Suddenly there was a man in tsitsis at the table offering us a glass of red on the house. Very nice.
“How are you?” I ask because I have been well brought up. His reply was unexpected.
“I’m alright I’m alright. Considering…”
“Considering?” I queried, expecting a brief organ recital of the kind that begins most of my daily encounters at this point in my life.
“Considering I died yesterday.”
I swallowed too sharply and coughed for a while;
“Sorry – I thought you said you …er..died yest…?”
“I did. That’s what I said. Yesterday afternoon. I suddenly left my body, drifted up to the ceiling, saw myself lying on the ground, thought about it for a while and decided to return to my body.”
Frankly, I was too hungry for an existential debate. The choice was to tell him the joke about the Jewish woman in hospital who woke up in a tunnel of light (*see later) or to carry on as though I hadn’t quite heard what he’d said… instead I said: “OK… er… r..i..ght.. So… I’ll have the lamb chops and he’ll have the escalope.’’ (Pause to reflect that we’ve only been married for a year and already I’m ordering for him.) Then the electricity in the kitchen cut out so nothing could be fried or grilled. We ate what they could manage to cook, shared a dessert and the bill was £138. So, from now on, it’s cheeseboard and chips.
Fortunately, David has friends and family who all cook superbly and… well, David loves to shop and loves to entertain, the more the merrier and I’m a pretty good… guest. We were recently at a Spectator party in Great Queen’s Street with enough booze to sink the QE2 and barely a Twiglet to mop it up. The following week we went to a Jewish publishing launch next door at UnHerd, where there was enough food to feed the Grenadier Guards, the O2 and the Last Night of the Proms.
That there should be a desperate need for a publishing house for Jewish, Israeli and other cancelled writers is chilling. Neil Blair is a brave and committed man and the future looks prescient. We are all, I’m afraid, going to need Odessa Editions as our original angle on life grows less welcome.
The phrase "as a proud Jew” was never more risible than it was coming out of the mouth of Miliband the younger as he pushed the Labour Party back into CorBin-face with a petulant gesture against Israeli imports.
“As a proud Jew,” he didn’t say, “I am cancelling the bananas from the West Bank while hanging on with white knuckles to the intelligence and hi-tech which keeps our country safe from activists and jihadists… oh, and continuing to sell them arms.” In what respects are you proud, Ed? Your shul attendance, your sense of community, your bacon sarnies, (sorry – it’s too soon after Yom Kippur for me to bitch) or your empathy for your tribe? Are you proud of our CST and the work they are forced to do to protect our schools, shuls and burial grounds in this so civilised diaspora? It’s not the extra money we want, Ed, it’s the knowledge that you have our backs.
Howard Jacobson, the great novelist and essayist, finds this is the first year in many that he has not been invited to the Hay Festival. Instead, they welcomed that other proud Jew, Ms Margolyes, who told the audience her mother came from a “criminal immigrant family” and went on to say: “Jews must hold themselves to higher standards.” Why? Is my question, Why must we? Standards such as who’s – hers? Zack Polonski/David Paulden’s? Javier Bardem, who is urging followers to back a petition to remove Pink as a Unicef ambassador over her stance on Israel? Of course, in our progressively leftist business these antizionists seem to neatly flop upwards, procuring themselves ever more quality work? Susan Sarandon is another who, on being arrested while protesting against Netanyanu in New York, looked joyful. Never has there been a smugger detainee.
I often wonder whether Hitler developed his obsessive hatred because every Jewish art dealer in Austria rejected his mediocre paintings. It depresses me to think that only Charlie Chaplin made a truly anti-Nazi film, The Great Dictator, during the war, while all those Jewish heads of studios did nothing but prevaricate or worse, collaborate. It depresses me further that Ireland and South Africa have become so virulently antisemitic. It just proves that one despises in others the very thing one hates in oneself. It makes me angry that Jews have been whitewashed out of a history where they stood solidly beside the anti-apartheid fighters of South Africa, as they did in the Civil rights movements. It should be pay-back time not stab-in-the-back time. As ever, there are no answers, only questions. So, as promised, I will lighten up…
*Hilda is in hospital after an operation and slips into a tunnel of white light where she encounters an angel. The angel says, "Go back, go back… you’re not due here for another 30 years.” She finds herself back in her old body and is thrilled. So much so that, contemplating the longevity ahead, she rings a distinguished plastic surgeon and books herself in for surgery. She has rhinoplasty, blepharoplasty, tummy tuck, neck tuck, every tuck save Friar Tuck and walks from the hospital looking like a Vogue cover. Whereupon she is hit by an ambulance and finds herself back in the tunnel of light with the angel.
“You! you lied to me!" she cries, “you call yourself an angel! You told me I had another 30 years.” The angel wrung his wings in shame; “I’m sorry, I’m sorry… It’s my mistake… I didn’t recognise you.’
PS: If you love stone sculpture, try to make it to the Galerie Betty Charles upstairs at 15 Duke Street, St James’s to see the astounding Dawn Rowland exhibition. As a proud Jew, I urge you to support her.
PPS; In South Hampstead shul on Saturday Rabbi Elli brought the caretaker of the shul, Lorenzo, on to the bimah to speak about his trip to Israel. I can’t think of another shul who would have the largesse to do this and it was inspired.
He beautifully articulated what Israel had revealed to him which was so different from his expectations and his profound joy at lighting a candle for his grandfather in the church of the holy Sepulchre. He finished his
wonderful address with “Am Chai Yisroel.” Grown men wiped away a tear.
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