JOURNAL the Association of Jewish Refugees
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VOLUME 20 NO.5 MAY 2020 JOURNAL The Association of Jewish Refugees ADAPTING TO Lasting Legacies THE TIMES We hope you are well and managing How fortunate we are, in hindsight, that the year-long Insiders during these extraordinary times. Outsiders Festival officially ended on 31 March. The Festival Here at the AJR we have adapted our organisation and resources to consisted of more than one hundred and fifty talks, concerts, continue to provide essential frontline services. You can read about this on exhibitions and events, all over the country, paying tribute to pages 4 & 5, while on page 24 we the impact of refugees from Nazi Europe on British culture since have listed some activities that you might consider personally interesting. the 1930s. As is usual for this time of the year, we’ve also included our Annual Report for 2019, making this a ‘bumper’ issue. We hope you enjoy reading it and, as always, would be delighted to receive any feedback. Letter from Israel .......................................... 3 Business not quite as usual ........................4-5 Letters to the Editor ...................................6-7 Family Matters ..........................................8-9 Art Notes.................................................... 10 2019 Annual Report & Accounts ...........11-15 A trip down Memory Lane ....................16-17 The Pasha from Upper Silesia ................18-19 Lives in Focus: Helen Bamber ...............20-21 Reviews .................................................22-23 Why don’t you? ......................................... 24 Please note that the views expressed throughout this publication are not necessarily the views of the AJR. AJR Team Chief Executive Michael Newman Plans are in the pipeline to bring back the brilliant Ballad of the Cosmo Cafe, Finance Director David Kaye performed to great acclaim last November Heads of Department Community & Volunteer Services Carol Hart HR & Administration Karen Markham The AJR was proud to back the Festival, the Bohm-Duchen. As she wrote recently, Educational Grants & Projects Alex Maws brainchild of the art historian and curator, ‘Both my own parents arrived in this Social Work Nicole Valens Monica Bohm-Duchen, who drove the country from central Europe as teenagers AJR Journal project with huge energy and ambition. in the very late 1930s, “just in time”, but Editor Jo Briggs suffered profound personal losses – my Editorial Assistant Lilian Levy It has been a very personal project for Continued on page 2 Contributing Editor David Herman 1 AJR Journal | May 2020 Lasting Legacies (cont.) schooled in the culture of pre-Hitlerian artists, Marxist historians and sociologists, Central Europe (Expressionist art, Bauhaus Yiddish writers, atonal composers. father in particular, who could never speak architecture, Schoenbergian Modernism, of them.’ Her mother is the distinguished Brechtian drama) began to mix their Refugee artists often had very different refugee photographer, Dorothy Bohm. labours with the arguably more genteel experiences and impact for a number of She was born Dorothea Israelit in 1924 in culture that they found in Britain: a world important reasons. Some were too old to Königsberg, East Prussia. From 1932 to of Bloomsbury, Garden Cities, the BBC and adjust to a very different culture. Alfred 1939 she lived with her family in Lithuania the olde-world revivalist architecture of Kerr, for example, was one of the best- and was sent to England in 1939 where Edwin Lutyens or the musical pastoralism known theatre critics in Weimar Germany. she became one of Britain’s leading post- of Vaughan Williams?’ But he never learned fluent English and war photographers. couldn’t build a career here. His son, Sir Secondly, Andrew Snell, has directed a Michael Kerr, QC, by contrast, went to What is perhaps most impressive about series of filmed interviews with both first- Cambridge and became one of Britain’s the Insiders Outsiders Festival is the range and second-generation artists, entitled leading lawyers and Michael’s sister, of events. Venues have included major Fractured Worlds. Snell worked at ITV’s Judith, learned fluent English and went on cultural centres, such as Sotheby’s, Kings The South Bank Show, was editor of to become a famous children’s writer. Place and the British Film Institute. But BBC 1’s Omnibus and was one of the they have also included less well-known leading arts TV documentary-makers of his It mattered where they came from. places all over the country, from Truro generation. German physicists and chemists were Cathedral in Cornwall to the Fermoy already well known in the science labs of Gallery in Norfolk; from the Pier Arts The Festival website (https:// Oxford and Cambridge. Poets and artists Centre in Orkney to Kendal in Cumbria. insidersoutsidersfestival.org) and from Poland had no such networks or Interestingly, only very few were explicitly newsletter will continue for the foreseeable reputations. Their work was too foreign, Jewish. future, offering information about relevant too European, too Jewish. ‘No one is as cultural events. Discussions about the lonely as a Yiddish poet,’ said the Polish Then there is the range of cultural figures Festival’s afterlife are ongoing. It is hoped poet, Itzik Manger. He never settled and represented, from a season of Alexander there will be events marking the 80th eventually moved to Israel. In his poem, Korda films at the BFI to artists like Kurt anniversary of internment and the 70th The British Museum Reading Room, Louis Schwitters and John Heartfield, from anniversary of the Festival of Britain, both MacNeice wrote, Pamela Howard’s Ballad of the Cosmo significant moments for many refugee Café to an exhibition at Sotheby’s last cultural figures. ‘Between the enormous fluted Ionic Summer on émigré art dealers, curated columns by Sue Grayson Ford. There was an event Then there is the title itself. There was There seeps from heavily jowled or hawk- at this year’s Jewish Book Week about never just one kind of cultural refugee. like figures fashion in Weimar Berlin and a concert Refugees were complicated, divided The guttural sorrow of the refugee.’ called Farewell to Vienna, featuring the between Insiders and Outsiders. Insiders work of refugee composers including often came from the great cultural centres In the British Museum Reading Room Hans Gál and Joseph Horovitz; an of central Europe – Berlin, Vienna, Prague. the historian, Norbert Elias, worked on academic conference in Cambridge, City Often young, many learnt English and his masterpiece, The Civilising Process. of Scholars, City of Refuge, about scholars grew up in Britain, assimilating quickly. Now considered one of the great social and scientists who settled in Cambridge Others soon found a home in central historians of the second half of the 20th and a touring exhibition about refugee British institutions, Oxford and Cambridge, century, Elias arrived in Britain in 1935, but artists, currently on show at MOMA, the BBC and Fleet Street, the galleries of he couldn’t find a permanent university Machynlleth, in Powys in Wales. Cork Street and Britain’s most famous post for almost twenty years. He joined concert halls. the sociology department at Leicester Exhibitions, performances and talks when he was 57. No major university are by their very nature transient. But Perhaps the classic example was Isaiah would take him. His work wasn’t widely there are lasting legacies. First, there is Berlin. A Jew from Riga in Latvia, he was known in Britain until he was ‘discovered’ a book, Insiders Outsiders, edited by a professor at Oxford, knighted, a Trustee in the late 1960s. Bohm-Duchen and published by Lund of the National Gallery, President of the Humphries last year. The contributors British Academy, presided over the opera The Insiders Outsiders Festival has been are a Who’s Who of critics and cultural committee of the Royal Opera House and an astonishing achievement, celebrating historians who have studied the impact was offered (but declined) a peerage. He the success of so many important cultural of refugees on British visual culture, from watched the Coronation of the Queen figures, but also reminding us of those Daniel Snowman (author of The Hitler from the Daily Telegraph window in who have been neglected for far too Emigrés and a trustee of the Festival) and Piccadilly, sat with Margot Fonteyn and long. It has brought together exhibitions Sarah MacDougall, a curator at Ben Uri, Cecil Beaton to watch the trooping of the and concerts, but, perhaps above all, it on émigré art teachers, to Anna Nyburg Colour ceremony in 1954. has asked the right questions about these on designers and Michael Berkowitz on extraordinary figures and their impact on photographers. Beautifully illustrated, the But then there were the Outsiders, more Britain. book explores, in the words of Daniel often from eastern Europe, who struggled Snowman, ‘What resulted when people to fit in. These included Expressionist David Herman 2 AJR Journal | May 2020 LETTER FROM Around ISRAEL BY DOROTHEA SHEFER-VANSON the AJR THE SUNSHINE York and her mother, Ruth Hermann, née The AJR’s programme of face-to- Fortgang, now over 90, was in California. face events and activities is currently HOSTEL Mindy wrote that she sometimes visited on hold, pending relaxation of the her mother, and that on her next visit national lockdown. We apologise I grew up she would try to make contact with me therefore for the absence of our knowing that the via Skype so that her mother and I could normal events listings within these Sunshine Hostel have a chat. pages. had been an important part of Mindy told how she had found me on In the meantime AJR staff and my parents’ lives. the internet because her mother had volunteers around the country are ‘Hostel children’ been trying to find a book my father carrying out a phone-around to check were frequent visitors in our family had supposedly written about his life.