VOLUME 3 No. 2 FEBRUARY 2003 Two admirable blue stockings Eliot seems unique among her literary contemporaries - both Continental European and English - in espousing the cause of the Jews. Dostoevsky showed antisemitic tendencies, as did Gustav Freytag, and, to a lesser extent, Balzac. Among English novelists the best-selling Charles Dickens had created the stereotypical Fagin figure (although he subsequently tried to make amends with .«« his sympathetic portrayal of Riah, a Emma Lazarus minor character in Our Mutual Friend). George Eliot t-xactly 100 years ago a plaque was affixed The similarly prolific Anthony Trollope scheme only one degree less chimerical ^° the plinth of the Statue of Liberty on made the foreign financier Melmotte a than a plan for a gipsy nationality '^llis Island. The inscription read: monomaniac - though not unique - villain in Africa. in The Way We Live Now. When Henry James was asked to Give me your tired, your poor, Yo,u r huddled masses yearning to breathe free, Eliot had not always been a review the novel, he found the task so "e wretched refuse of your teeming shore, philosemite. Criticising Disraeli's novels onerous that he wrote his critique in the j'^nd these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, Conigsby and Tancred at the start of her form of a debate between three readers. '•ft ray lamp beside the golden door! literary career, she had written: 'The One of his alter egos said she was wearied ijie promise contained in these stirring fellowship of race to which Disraeli by the Jewish burden of the story and felt ^es by Emma Lazarus was, alas, only exultantly refers is an inferior impulse ... tempted to skip chunks. Another dubbed ^^mporary. In 1924 the US Congress Everything specifically Jewish is of a low Daniel Deroruia 'a dreadful prig' and ^"ided unrestricted immigration, abruptly grade.' During the subsequent decades, subjected him to primitive antisemitic ^rminating the greatest Jewish when she immersed herself in jibes: 'I am siu^e he had a nose and I hold •^Pulation movement in history. It had philosophy and theology, travelled on the that the author has shown great ^^ed in 1881 when the Tsarist regime continent, fell under the spell of Heine, pusillanimity in her treatment of it. She ^sponded to the assassination of and suffered ostracism because of her has quite shirked it.' •^exander with a series of pogroms. imconventional lifestyle, her estimate of The fact that Henry James felt impelled Within a year boatloads of fugitive the Jews underwent a radical to inject this crude example of gutter •Russian Jews arrived in the USA. Her transformation. antisemitism into his review shows the ^Counter with them inspired the And not only that. She hoped that forces George Eliot was battling. She ^Phardic Emma Lazarus, who had Daniel Deronda (published in 1874) was fully aware of this, as shown by the rsonally experienced neither poverty would 'widen the English vision'. For her, title of one of the last essays she wrote: ^'" persecution, to write Songs of a the Jews' preservation of their faith 'The Modem Hep! Hep! Hep!' (the "^'te. In the composition of those poems through centuries of dispersal and acronym for Hierusalema est per dita: ^ endeavoured to live up to her teacher persecution was a model for the way the Jerusalem is lost - the cry uttered during sho' Ph Waldo Emerson's precept 'to show EngHsh might reaffirm their national the Crusader pogroms). ^ Celestial element in the despised consciousness. Two centuries ago Wordsworth wrote: ^Sent' (i.e. in humdrum daily life). On But above all, of course, Daniel 'Milton, thou shouldst be living at this '^Pleting the cycle Lazarus dedicated it Deronda was a Zionist novel, and Eliot hour/England has need of thee.' Today, 3 fellow woman writer, who, she wrote, deserves to be called the greatest, if not when the air is filled with the din of new J "lost among the artists of our day the first, gentile Zionist. And, like most 'Hep! Hep!' cries fi-om Peshawar to ards elevating and ennobling the spirit visionaries, she was - often wilfully - Finsbury Park, one would like to rewrite p •'e*ish nationaUty.' This dedicatee was misunderstood. To Leslie Stephen Wordsworth's lines, substituting George ^rge Eliot. (Virginia Woolf s father) Zionism was a Eliot for Milton, and Zion for England. AJR JOURNAL FEBRUARY 2003 Virtual reality Richard Grunberger Though der Heim - the Yiddish-speaking heartland of Eastern Europe - vanished over halfa century ago, it spawned a rich folklore, some of which fed into world culture. Prime examples are the legend of the Golem - the precursor of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - and the notion of demonic possession exemplified in kn^k)!?, Dybbuk. Nicholas Winton, pictured here with Esther Rantzen (left) and Vera Gissing, At a less elevated level, stories was guest of honour at a gathering of 200 Kindertransport members held at the Imperial War Museum last August. The meeting, organised by the AJR, abounded about archetypal fools, was part of the Continental Britons Exhibition programme of events braggarts, drunks, beggars (shnorrers) and gossips (yentes). The fools all The 93-year-old nnan known as 'Britain's 'the Englishman in Wenceslas Square', inhabited the real, existing Polish town of Schindler' has been awarded a trying to persuade him to include their Chelm (Chelmno). German simpletons, knighthood. For nearly 50 years he children on his lists to get them out of in contrast, lived in the fictitious Schilda - concealed his humanitarian mission: the country. Eventually he put 669 hence the term Schildburger. The English his late wife, Greta, discoverefl that he children on eight trains for London- had organised the evacuation of 669 equivalent, Gotham - as in 'Three wise But on the outbreak of war, on 3 youngsters out of Czechoslovakia only September 1939, the ninth train, the men of Gotham went to sea in a sieve' - when she found lists of the children in one carrying the most children, never was an obscure village in Northants. an old leather briefcase in their attic. left the station. Braggarts are personified in the In 1938 Nicholas Winton, who was One of 'Winton's children'. Vera European imagination by somewhat flaky working for the London Stock Gissing, said he 'rescued the greater aristocratic figures like Baron von Exchange, was invited to Prague by a part of the Jewish children of nvj Miinchhausen and Sir John Falstaff. The friend at the British embassy. On arrival, generation in Czechoslovakia. VeryievJ Yiddish counterpart as teller of tall tales he was asked to assist in the refugee oi us met our parents again - they is the plebeian Hershele Ostropoler. The camps. Noticing that nobody seemed perished in concentration camps. Had last named was ordinary, but not average. to be helping the children, he set up an we not been spirited away, we woulo In the Yiddish communal subconscious, office at a dining room table in a city have been murdered alongside them.' Mr Average - the Victorians' 'man on the hotel. Soon, parents were rushing to HS Clapham omnibus', alias Joe Bloggs - is Chaim Yankel. After faces lost in the crowd, places lost Thea's Diary in the distance. When the English want to On 27 January, marking this year's Holocaust evoke the back of beyond they say Memorial Day, Radio 4's Women's Hour is Timbuktu, and the Americans Hicksville. broadcasting the first of ten episodes of Ttiea's Diary (originally Das Tagebuch der Tt>ea Gersten). The Yiddish counterpart to those places Thea Hurst (nee Gersten) was born in Leipzig in is Yehupets (the Austrian equivalent is 1925 and now lives in Yorkshire. She wrote her Kigrizpotschen - possibly a strange diary between 1939 and 1947. It begins shortly compound of Kirghiz and slippers). after Kristallnacht in Leipzig and chronicles loss, exile and coming to terms with a new culture in Mention of Austria brings to mind their England. The programme can be heard at 10.45 national stereotype of cretinous am with daily repeats at 7.45 pm. aristocrats: Graf (Count) Bobby. His BD nearest English equivalent, other than the generic term 'chinless wonder', is Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster. Yiddish AJR Journal folklore has produced nothing remotely Richard Grunberger Editor-in-Chief JACKMAN • similar; lacking a land of their own, the Ronald Channing Executive Editor Howard Spier Editorial and Production SILVERMAN Jews also lacked a landed aristocracy. The AJR Journal, 1 Hampstead Gate, COMMERCIAL PROPERTY' CONSULTANT closest Jewry got to having a hierarchy la Frognal, London NW3 6AL was the priesthood - and no one would Tel: 020 7431 6161 Fax: 020 7431 8454 e-mail: [email protected] 26 Conduit Street, London WIR 9TA poke fun at that living repository of www.ajrorg.uk traditional wisdom. Telephone: 020 7409 0771 Fax: 020 7493 SCl m AJR JOURNAL FEBRUARY 2003 Lost in transit Richard Grunberger NEWTONS Leading Hampstead Solicitors advise on At a recent '43 Club evening a member Berliners crooned Reich' mir die Hand Property, Wills, Family Trusts criticised the choice of Continental mein Leben Komm' auf mein Schloss mit and Charitable Trusts Britons as the title of last year's mich/Ich will dir Kuchen geben Denn French and German spoken exhibition at the Jewish Museum. His Semmeln frisst de nich. The UK called point was that we should define one the Toreador's Song, and the other Home visits arranged ourselves by the language and culture in La ci darem la mono - and how many 22 Fitzjohn's Avenue, which we had our roots, rather than by Brits were Italian speakers? London NWS 5NB that into which we got pitch-forked. As against this, I concluded, Germany Wanning to his theme, the speaker even Tel: 020 7435 5351 had produced nothing to equal Fax: 020 7435 8881 found fault with his contemporaries for Elizabethan poetry, Jacobean drama or having omitted to pass on the German Restoration comedy.