AJ R Info r mation Volume LV No.11 November 2000 £3 (to non-members) Don't miss... Israel's stymied hopes p9 Science Season of mists and anniversaries Notebook pl2 Mixed marriages pl3 Reflections on 'inevitable'wars fromTroy to the present Leadership ovember is a mist-shrouded month replete Many a conflict since the siege of Troy has been with anniversaries: the Seventh, the Ninth, exacerbated by a Thersites figure. Kaiser Wilhelm vacuum N the Tenth and the Eleventh. Some of these played that role on the world stage in the run-up to f the intemperate historic red-letter days marked a beginning, and the Great War His successor was Goebbels, most and ill-timed visit others an end - and .some signified both. Thus 7 vociferous advocate of the Final Solution in wartime Ito the Temple November 1917 simultaneously spelt the demise of Germany. If Goebbels acted Thersites at Hitler's Mount in Jerusalem Tsar Nicholas and the inauguration of Tsar Lenin. court, Zhdanov did so at Stalin's, and Jiang Qing at by Ariel Sharon On 9 November 1923 the beerhall Putsch Mao's. Though those ogres have long departed the was c-alculated to transformed Hitler from a Bavarian tub-thumper into scene, the passage of time has brought no shortage boost his popularity a force in national politics. 10 November 1938 tore of Thersites look-alikes. Lord Tebbitt plays the part among Israels the veil from the barbarous face of Germany and in the immigration debate, Ian Paisley in Ulster and rejectionist right, precipitated the country's slide into the abyss. 11 AyatoUah Khameini in Iran. Israel, for its part has the he totally November 1918 concluded four and a half years of thersites twins Ovadiah Josef and Ariel Sharon. niiscalculated mass slaughter and launched a twenty-year interval But the absolute Thersites clone of our time is the degree of between two global wars. Finally, on 10 November Yassir Arafat. Giraudoux's Thersites dies gloating violence with 1989 the Fall of the Berlin wall symbolised the wider because thousands will soon share his fate; the which Palestinian Soviet collapse and lifted the threat of global war terminally ill Arafat provoked the current conflict out opponents of any from mankind, probably forever of a craving for posthumous glory as saviour of Arab peaceful settlement However, at the non-global level conflict has Jerusalem D ^ould grasp this remained a running sore disfiguring Southeast Asia, pretext. Africa and the Middle East. Cynics - and not only Faced with large they - would say it was ever thus since the dawn of scale civil disorder, civilisation. Consigning the prophet Isaiah's vision fomented by Arab of swords beaten into ploughshares to the realm of television and radio fantasy, they invoke Heraclitus' dictum about war stations and clerics, being the father of all things. Without the Trojan 3 civilised society War, they argue. Homer could not have laid the ^^^nnot lower its foundations of worid literature in the Iliad and the ^fences. Chairman Odyssey. The protagonists of these epics appear Arafat failed to over and over again in the works of Chaucer, ^•oy his police Shakesf>eare, Racine, Goethe and Jean Giraudoux. force- of 30,000 As most schoolchildren know Achilles, the Greek to dampen the hero of the Trojan War, could kill a man with one conflagraUon; blow. This is what he did to another Greek, father ihe>' used Thersites, who had mocked him. Giraudoux's La lU' ^ir weapons to guerre de Troie n aura pas lieu (Tiger at the Gate) •"•n the attackers. posits a situation where the Greeks and Trojans are If the prospect of on the verge of reaching an accommodation when * mst setUement is Thersites, whom Achilles had left to expire Datiish Prime Minister Mr Poul Rasmussen, right, unacceptable to miserably, is discovered by some Greeks and with conferring with ProfDr Uffe Oestergaard, left at the ^^at, who wUl his dying breath denounces his Trojan assailant; this opening of the Danish Centre for Holocaust & Genocide Studies (see page 15) ^«^eedhim?D makes war inevitable. AJR INFORMATION NOVEMBER 2000 The Jews' muse Profile nder the impact of the Harry Potter phenomenon some JC readers Gerald Granston four European countries. Gerald and his U have hazarded the guess that the father were among those lucky enough to barmitzvah-aged wizard might be 'one of lthough born in Chemnitz, Gerald be able to land at Southampton in June us'. To me that was obvious from the Granston - then Gerd Griinstein - 1939 when a cousin agreed to act as start, since the whole of English literature A spent most of the first six years of guarantor and put them up on arrival. is a Jewish creation. The identity of the his life in the Baden Wiirttemberg village For three years from 1940, Gerald author of the first epic in Old English is of Hechingen where he was brought up attended boarding school when his lost in the mists of time, but its very title - by his maternal grandparents whose Crystal Palace school was evacuated to Beowulf - points (pace Leonard and family had lived in the village since the Broxbourne in Hertfordshire where he 'Virginia Woolf IFo//" Mankowitz et at) to eighteenth century. His father remained remained until 1943- By this time, his Jewish provenance. with his family textile business in Chem­ father had been released from internment The next major writer, Geoffrey Chaucer, nitz until it was aryanised in 1938. In the and had a new partner and a second made a mikve attendant the protagonist same year, Gerald's mother, who had been child. Gerald returned to live at home of The Wife of the Ritual Bath's Tale". ill for many years, died. Her illness had with his new family in West Hampstead. William Shakespeare composed the trans­ meant that the family did Leaving school at l6, he vestite drama King Leah, and in his not take up the visas for spent two years as an ap' comedy Voll Ponem, Ben Jonson created emigration to Palestine. prentice in the tailoring the original 'cheeky chappie'. John The family business in trade, followed by two Milton's preoccupation with the issue of Hechingen was also happy years of nationa' divorce caused him to write Samson's aryanised although the service in the RAF. For a Agunot; in a lighter vein Milton's friend buyer subsequently paid couple of years he Andrew Marvell addressed a poem to His the balance of the true worked in the theatre, Goy Mistress. market value into a Swiss mainly in stage manage­ The 18"' century was the period of account which assisted ment but "with the odd Sheridan's Shul for Skandal and of the Gerald's maternal grand­ cameo Jewish part." A trip Scots poet Rabbi Burns; its most parents when they left to New York in 1956. quintessentially Jewish creation, Gray's Germany for Switzerland initially to visit his grand­ Allergy to Country Churchyards, can be and then the USA. mother, turned into 3 attributed to the fact that Thomas Gray In May 1939, six-year year in which Gerald dis­ was a cohen. old Gerald and his father Gerald Granston covered the excitemeO^ The high tide of Romanticism brought travelled to Hamburg of how the Americans do us Byron's Hebrew Melodies, the geron- where, with 938 other German Jewish business. He returned to London and, o(^ tophile John Keats' Ode to Nightingale passengers, many released from concen­ the basis of his American experiences, House, and Coleridge's Rhyme of the tration camps on condition that they left revolutionised the family belt-making Modern Mariner (a poem in the Belsize the country, they boarded the luxury liner business, entering into an exclusive con­ Square Ballads sequence). St Louis with visas for Cuba. He recalls tract with Marks & Spencer and moving Under Queen Victoria, the Jews' muse the sheer excitement and sense of adven­ the manufacturing side of the business to continued to flourish. The period saw the ture on the outward voyage, emotions the north-east of England. Thanks to the gestation of Browning's Pipik Passes, of which turned to panic and fear with the advice of a director of M&S, the business Tennyson's In Menorah and Macaulay's implications of the Cuban authorities' re­ diversified into clothing in the early 1970* Lays of Ancient Rome - particularly the fusal to allow the ship to dock and its and went from strength to strength. ^^ dental epic Horatio's Bridgework. passengers to disembark. "It was like be­ 1987, both Gerald and his half-brother Gradually, though, the literati switched ing in a prison." After six days, the were able to retire when the business ^^ from articulating Jewishness through their captain was ordered to sail the ship and bought out by one of M&S' suppliers. tides to expressing it via their names. This its passengers back to Germany. He re­ Since the sale of the business, anO trend started with Samuel Schneider fused and made for Florida where US regarding himself too young to retire- Coleridge, continued with Jerome Klapka coastguards were sent to escort the refu­ Gerald has worked part-time headhunting Jerome and found its apogee in Mohel gee vessel away from the coast. After for the industry he knows so well- H^ Coward. Nomen est omen! negotiations on behalf of the passengers, takes none of the income which, instead, U Richard Grunberger the St. ZoM IS deposited its human cargo in goes to supporting 35 charities. He is regular visitor to the USA where he stu AJR Information Personnel has family.