Cousins Reunited

When I came to live in Israel fifty years ago, and even before that on my occasional visits to the country, my father equipped me with a typewritten list of names and addresses of relatives. I dutifully visited most of them, and so I got to know the numerous cousins of my parents, but mainly those of my mother.

It seems that back in pre-WWII Germany many of the descendants of the eight children born to Elias Hirsch, who was himself born in the small Polish town of Gollub in 1785, and Miriam Jakob-Koski, who was born in Mattebuden in 1786, lived first in western Poland and later in eastern Germany, in and around the region known as Silesia. The various generations of the Hirsch family seem to have succeeded in running small businesses, being able to maintain their families in relative comfort.

The development of the railways enabled the families who were scattered throughout the region to visit one another, and these periodic visits were highlights of the family routine. The faded photographs my mother brought with her when she left Germany show well-dressed and well-behaved children enjoying their annual holiday in the countryside, or even swimming in the river on the outskirts of Sprottau, the town where my mother’s family lived. One of her cousins, who stayed with them every summer, told my sisters and me of the hide-and-seek games they used to play in the house, the fun they had in the surrounding countryside and the kindness of my grandparents (whom I never knew), who would always send her home with a pair of new shoes from their shoe-shop.

My mother’s parents, Max Hirsch and Paula née Jacobson, were second cousins, and theirs was not the only marriage between those two families. Between them Max and Paula had seventeen siblings, and all of them seem to have been on good terms with one another. In the event, most of those families managed to get out of Germany in time, though scattered all over the world, and a fairly large proportion of them ended up in pre-State Israel. Whenever my parents came to Israel, whether on a visit or when they moved here permanently after my father’s retirement, the meetings with those cousins were always a source of enjoyment.

And so, on my visits to the relatives who were just names and addresses on the page my father had given me, I found individuals who in many ways were very similar to my mother. Sometimes we found communication difficult because neither my German nor my Hebrew were fluent, and neither was their English. But they were all welcoming and friendly, and I knew that I could always find a good meal, and ample coffee and cake, in their homes. These were my mother’s cousins, as well as her sister, and it was comforting to be able to ‘touch base’ with them, though the exact nature of how we were related was not always clear to me. Today I have an extensive graphic family tree that I can refer to and see how everyone is connected.

Over the years the older generation has gone the way of all flesh, and now it is my generation that bears the torch of maintaining the family ties. However, because everyone has their own family and various occupations and concerns, we don’t manage to get together very often, and in fact this tends to be only on occasions such as weddings, bar-mitzvas, etc., when it’s not so easy to sit down and chat in comfort.

So when one set of cousins decided to invite the current generation (most of us by now in our seventies) to mark their move into the modest house they had inherited from their parents and had spent two years renovating, bringing it to a standard of comfort and aesthetics that is a joy to behold, some twenty of us were able to get together and share experiences, admire photos of grandchildren, recount tales of activities and interests, and renew our common bond. Without much ado we found ourselves at ease with one another even though we hadn’t met for several years. Some backs were a bit more bowed than they had been and some knees more stiff, but on the whole we seem to be holding up well, enjoying life, finding new spheres of interset in our retirement and reveling in the achievements of our grandchildren. Our chronological age is one thing, and the way we feel and behave is quite another.

Silesia, the part of Germany where our ancestors lived, was annexed by Poland after the war and the entire German population banished. The place names were changed, so that Sprottau is now Szpratawa, for example, and the only language that is spoken is Polish. Yes, you could call it a kind of Transfer, I suppose.

As the evening wore on, I looked around at my second and third cousins and wondered what our grandparents and great-grandparents would have thought of our reunion. I hope they would have been glad to know that the connection and affection between us is still clearly in evidence in this very different time and place, that we still subscribe to their values of hard work, honesty and decency, and that we are proud of our ‘yekke’ heritage.

 

 

Security and Naievete

I happened to be in France this summer at the time of several vicious terrorist attacks there, all of course perpetrated by Muslims. The poor French public is subjected time and again to these horrendous attacks and is left both bothered and bewildered by it all, as well as being angry with its government for not doing enough to ensure  its safety. The trouble with France, the country of liberty, equality and fraternity, is that it has allowed itself to be lulled into a sense of false security by those very values.

Everyone tries to be very tolerant and enjoy the good things of life (and France has plenty of those) and this has enabled cohorts of angry or possibly disturbed young men to be persuaded by leaders and preachers with evil intent to perpetrate acts
of mass or individual murder on an unprecedented scale.

I have heard well-meaning French intellectuals speak out in favour of the assumption of a position of cultural superiority. It seems somewhat naïve on their part to contend that culture, music and greater acceptance of the other will defeat all the hatred and radicalism that is awash in the immigrant communities that inhabit the high-rise suburbs of the big cities, where poverty, crime and murder are everyday occurrences. Other than that, it is no secret that France is host to a large Muslim population, much of it from what were once French colonies and most of whose members are well-integrated into French culture and language. So there shouldn’t be any sense of disgruntlement there, nor should one expect young men (and it always seems to be young men) to be so full of hatred and venom that they are prepared to plough a heavy truck through a throng of innocent people enjoying a day of national rejoicing, or take a knife to the throat of an elderly priest as he conducts a church service.

One can only shake one’s head in dismay and wonder what is going through the minds of those young men. On the other hand, there are a great many things that governments can do to stymie or preempt those dastardly deeds, and unfortunately the necessary actions do not seem to have been taken by the French authorities. After all, as an editorial in Le Figaro pointed out, the attacks that took place in Paris earlier this year and at the end of 2015 (Charlie Hebdo and Hyperkacher in November 2015, the Bataclan theatre earlier this year), with dozens of casualties, should have triggered a far-reaching heightening of security. In this respect, Israel has much to teach other countries. After suffering for many years from terrorist attacks of every possible variety, the last few years have seen a drastic reduction in such attacks, so that even though some individuals still feel impelled to perpetrate attacks, these are usually restricted to small-scale knifings and the occasional attempt to ram vehicles into bus-stops or run down pedestrians

Obviously, every country and society has to tailor its counter-terrorist activity to meet ts own needs, and one cannot expect everyone to put into place the same kind of extensive surveillance and security checks that Israel does, but the fact of the matter is that these methods work. No-one wants to live in an Orwellian dystopia, and Israel is not quite at that stage, but surveillance is part of the modern world and the methods available in this day and age can contribute to preventing terrorist attacks. After all, when all is said and done, it’s still preferable to have a higher degree of security than to put innocent lives at risk. Surveillance makes it possible to identify and track down potential terrorists, and in my opinion the price of less personal privacy is worth paying. There are indications that things are moving in France.

As we left Toulouse airport a unit of ten heavily-armed soldiers patrolled the area. And a friend in the south told me that the small holiday town where he lives on the Riviera was being inundated by armed soldiers and policemen, with sharp-shooters posted on the roofs of buildings. This was happening just prior to the 15th of August, a national holiday when crowds tend to fill the beaches, promenades and open spaces. In the final event, however, in France as in Israel, Germany and anywhere else, it’s all a question of being lucky enough not to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

.(This article appeared in the October issue of the AJR Journal.)

 

Thar she blows!

A nautical image for a totally landlocked novel? But I’ve just launched my new book on the waves of the ether, so there is some justification.

My novel is now up on Amazon (LINK: https://www.amazon.com/Chasing-Dreams-Flies-Tragicomedy-France-ebook/dp/B01LW3D212) in both ebook and printed form, and can even be downloaded for free on 9^th and 10^th October. I’m hoping that readers who go for the free download will be kind enough to write a review on Amazon.

The book is about Sophie and John, a couple from England who decide to retire to France in the early 2000s in order to benefit from the favourable sterling-euro exchange rate and enjoy the good things of life that France has to offer.

Helped by their French estate agent, Jean-Christophe, they eventually find the house of their dreams and embark on the adventure that is supposed to bring them tranquillity and security, far away from their perception of contemporary Britain, with its influx of ‘foreigners’ from the former British Empire and the current European Union. All is not as it seems, however, and dreams have a way of turning into nightmares.

In a nearby village Julie Smithers is also embarking on a new life, having left England and an unhappy romance behind in order to settle down to writing a novel of her own. She is alarmed to find that the refurbished house she has bought appears to have faulty plumbing, and when Steve, an expat British handyman appears, they soon embark on a bumpy romance.

The renovated barn next door to Sophie and John houses an orphanage or foster home with a large number of children who constitute a constant nuisance. The manager of the institution is unfriendly, even hostile, and Sophie and John find themselves being increasingly harassed by actions that may or may not originate from the orphanage. Their own lack of familiarity with the French language and culture constitutes an additional obstacle to their integration into local society, giving rise to situations that are comic at times, and less so at others.

The adventures and misadventures that befall the various characters lead to a surprising denouement, that puts everything that has gone before in a new light.

The events and situations described in the book are based in part on my own experiences and those of friends and acquaintances. My imagination has also played a role, though in the light of recent developments I feel that the book is prophetic.