The Longest Hatred

(image: NYTimes)

The recent tragic events in Pittsburgh took my thoughts to Professor Robert Wistrich’s seminal study of anti-Semitism. Coining the phrase ‘the longest hatred’ to denote the phenomenon, and making it the title of his book, Wistrich describes the longstanding and widespread occurrence of anti-Semitism. In a subsequent tome, ‘A Lethal Obsession,’ he traces in great and exhaustive detail the outbreak of the phenomenon across cultures, countries, nationalities and religions. Starting with the period of early Christianity, when the adherents of the new religion felt compelled to demonstrate their rejection of the ancient faith by denigrating its devotees, the book traces the many expressions of anti-Semitism throughout the ages up to the present day.

The ultimate culmination of anti-Semitism was of course the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, but the phenomenon could be found in every European country throughout the middle ages, at a time when modern nations had not yet been established in their final form. The crusades that sent countless multitudes of men across Europe to fight for the Holy Land did not spare the Jews living in the countries through which they passed, nor those in the Holy Land either. The massacres at that time of Jewish communities along the Rhine have not been forgotten. Nor have the pogroms that devastated the Jewish communities of eastern Europe and Russia in more recent times. As the countries of western Europe waged war on one another, they did not omit to oppress, slaughter and decimate the Jewish communities they encountered.

In ‘The Merchant of Venice’ Shakespeare gives his Jewish character Shylock a human face and voice when he says ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ and goes on to show that a Jew is a human being with feelings like anyone else. At a time when Jews were banned from living in England and portrayed as the offspring of Satan, subhuman and the source of all evil, to express such a sentiment was truly revolutionary. Shakespeare’s play may have been based to some extent on Christopher Marlowe’s play, ‘The Jew of Malta,’ but in that instance the main character displays no mitigating humanity and is as conniving and murderous as befits the prejudiced stereotype of the Jew current at that time.

So to accuse President Trump of being responsible for the murderous attack in the synagogue in Pittsburgh is not strictly fair. Inflammatory rhetoric is just that, inflammatory rhetoric. Whether someone commits an act of violent aggression as a result of that rhetoric or of some internal mental imbalance is immaterial. Unless the machinery of aggression or annihilation is available, or the wider situation enables acts of violence to be performed by the wider society, as was the case with the crusades, the pogroms and the Holocaust, words remain just words. It could be said that the general availability of firearms in America is to blame, and that claim does have some weight. But it cannot be denied that until this week’s attack no similar act has been perpetrated against Jews, other than isolated incidents of beatings and desecration of cemeteries.

My own experience in the Midwest of the USA brought me into contact with the underlying enmity towards Jews (and Israel) and various minorities felt by some Americans, and I have described these individuals and their activities in my recent book, ‘All Quiet on the Midwestern Plains.’ In real life, however, I did not encounter any violence, and the Jewish community was not subjected to acts of aggression.

Like many Jews in England, as a child I experienced some instances of anti-Semitic speech or acts, but nothing of any great severity. Instances of that kind may have been partly behind my decision to come and live in Israel, but many Jews, including several of my Jewish friends, have forged successful careers in England, the USA and elsewhere. They have been able to rise above encounters with anti-Semitism and even act to combat it. But who knows? Perhaps the strict gun controls in England have prevented violent actions from being committed against the Jewish community there.

All that remains is to hope that irrational hatreds can be set aside and an atmosphere of tolerance towards minorities, whoever and wherever they may be, can be fostered. What is needed is for religions and communities to work together to combat the rising tide of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel sentiment that is evident throughout the Western world. After all, the paramount aspiration repeated in so many prayers of so many religions is the desire for peace.

 

ANOTHER CONTROVERSIAL LAW

The furore surrounding the Nation-State Law recently passed by Israel’s Knesset has continued to reverberate throughout Israel and beyond, even reaching the pages of the French daily, ‘Le Figaro,’ the weekend edition of which I read when I was on holiday in France.

Since I cannot bear to be completely disconnected from Israel and events there even when I’m on holiday, I make sure to have an internet connection while I’m away. This may seem somewhat masochistic, but it’s an intrinsic part of my life wherever I am, so that being cut off from this form of communication causes me suffering to which I am not prepared to expose myself.

Thus it was that my news updates and Facebook feed while in France contained numerous messages condemning the law, claiming that it was discriminatory, contrary to the values enshrined in Israel’s Declaration of Independence and even racist – all things that are anathema to any decent person anywhere in the world, and also to most Israelis. Massive demonstrations were held to oppose the law, and there seemed to be widespread condemnation of it, at least among my friends and many of my relations. No-one can accuse me of being a supporter of Binyamin Netanyahu and his party, but the significance of the article in ‘Le Figaro’ made me stop and think that perhaps the messages I’ve been receiving are one-sided, to say the least.

Headed ‘The State of Israel Will Not Be Binational!’ (my translation, his exclamation mark), the article, under the byline of Francois d’Orcival, asserts that the justification for introducing the law is that it serves to guarantee the future of the Jewish state.  Claiming that the law does not contravert the rights of the various minorities living in Israel at present but merely affirms the Jewish character of Israel, the writer underlines the confrontation between national identity and multiculturism that is becoming increasingly prevalent all over the Western world, adding that political opposition is inseparable from demographic evolution.

The sticking point, according to M. d’Orcival, is the difference in the birth rates of Arabs and Jews in Israel. Currently, Jews account for 75 percent of the population and Arabs for 18 percent. But the Palestinian Arabs have said more than once that the weapon with which they will defeat the Jews is their birth-rate, and the difference in those of the two populations seems to bear this out (4.6 percent as opposed to 3.2).

Under the provisions of the law, the official language of Israel is Hebrew and the official religion is Judaism. In England, America, France and most other Western democracies there is an official language and an official religion (the British monarch is even the head of the Anglican church), and no-one accuses them of being undemocratic on that score. If the aim of the law is to ensure the Jewish character of Israel in the future, like M. d’Orcival, I personally see no harm in that.

In the final analysis, there is no getting away from the fact that there are at least thirty Arab or Muslim countries and only one Jewish one. And we all know what happens when Jews do not have a single country that will accept them in their hour of need. Many, though not all, of the Muslim countries will not allow Jews or even anyone who has ever visited Israel to set foot on their soil. Israel has no such policy regarding members of other religions.

Sometimes it takes an objective outsider to reveal the truth of a situation, so I remain grateful to Francois d’Orcival for enabling me to see matters in a different light.

The Eagle has Landed!

It’s a very metaphorical eagle: my latest book, ‘All Quiet on the Midwestern Front; a Tale of Deception, Betrayal and Vindication,’ which has been two years in the making and has now been published on Amazon and is available as an ebook and a paperback. It is my longest book so far, numbering just under 500 pages, and I only hope that readers will enjoy the ride. Like my previous books, this one has a cover based on a water-colour painting of mine that has been admirably produced by my talented son Eitan Shefer. The picture shows a quiet suburban street with an ambiguous – possibly threatening – figure in the foreground.

The book describes the events that befall Avi Samuels, an ambitious Israeli scientist who is spending a year in Seabrook, a sleepy university town in Nebraska, only to find that the head of the department seems to be hostile towards him, while articles and letters from readers in the local newspaper proclaim rabidly anti-Israel, even anti-Semitic, opinions. Despite these and other setbacks, Avi is determined to do good scientific work while he is in Nebraska.

Avi’s wife, Rachel, suffers from boredom and loneliness at first, though the wife of the head of the department tries to provide her with some company. However, Rachel does not feel comfortable with the lady’s overbearing personality, and it is only when she starts going to art classes at the local community college that she starts to find an interest in life. The main focus of her interest is the art teacher, Duane, who seems to be equally attracted to Rachel, and so the inevitable love affair, with all its complicated ramifications, ensues.

Rachel and Avi’s children, teenage twins, one of each gender, encounter difficulties at school, finding the American education system alien and complicated, and the students unfriendly. In addition, they have to contend with language and cultural differences that place them at a disadvantage vis-à-vis the system. Their frustration eventually lands them in trouble and it is only after the school principal intervenes that they are able to come to terms with their new life.

The reader is made privy to the machinations of the Brotherhood, a group of rabidly racist individuals who are plotting to bring death and destruction to minority groups in Seabrook and the rest of America. Whether the head of Avi’s department is involved in this or not is one of the strands that constitute the plot of the book.

Various other characters move in and out of the narrative, with Avi’s colleague and neighbour, Tom Friedman and his wife Nancy, featuring prominently in the events described in the book. Some of the university’s cleaning staff also play a role in helping Avi overcome the various setbacks he encounters as he seeks to make a scientific breakthrough in his chosen field.

The Nebraska climate also plays a part, and determines to a considerable extent what happens to the various individuals.

As the book comes to its conclusion, the various ends are tied up, the scientific breakthrough may or may not have been achieved, and the plot to sow death and destruction throughout America appears to have been foiled. At least for the moment.

I hope that everyone reading this blog will buy a copy, whether for Kindle or to hold in their hand, and if they write a review on Amazon my gratitude will know no bounds.

 

‘Camino Island’ by John Grisham

By chance I happened to see an interview with John Grisham on TV, and found myself riveted by this charming and enormously successful writer. His books are not quite my cup of tea, but I found my attention drawn to his account of his recent novel, in which he tried to stay away from his usual subject of lawyers, crime and legal issues and focus on a story about books, publishing and writing.

Grisham has published over thirty novels, almost all of them bestsellers, so he must know a thing or two about the subject. He wrote the book, he claimed, to cock a snook at the ‘literary mafia’ which describes his books as fit only to be read at the beach. And so he wrote about a scenic spot by the sea. A ‘beach book’ to end all beach books.

As a result, I ordered the book from Amazon, and all I can say is that I was not disappointed. The novel has pace, interesting and varied characters, and a series of situations that keep the reader’s interest. For me, as a writer, it was particularly interesting to read Grisham’s insights into the pitfalls that tend to beset writers who are not careful about such matters as ‘starting a book with a prologue that leaves the reader hanging, then goes on to chapter 1, which, of course, has nothing to do with the prologue,’ and so on. Never mind that Grisham does just that in this book, this is his alter ego poking fun at his own writing style.

But Grisham’s bookseller character has many more insights to impart about writing. Amongst other things, he says: “Another mistake is to introduce twenty characters in the first chapter. Five’s enough and won’t confuse your reader. Next, if you feel the need to go to the thesaurus, look for a word with three syllables or fewer…Please use quotation marks with dialogue, otherwise it’s bewildering…Most writers say too much, so always look for things to cut.. I could go on.” The point he makes about quotation marks is very valid, and I still remember being reprimanded by my English teacher in high school for using single quotes instead of double. That was a long time ago, but it seems that it’s a convention that serves a function and should not be neglected or ignored.

‘Camino Island’ contains much more than a few rules for writing, and the situations that are described are more than enough to keep any reader’s attention riveted till the end of the book. I promise to try to apply Grisham’s rules in my next book, while in the meantime I was able to enjoy the story of ‘Camino Island.’ To give the bare bones of the book, a young writer suffering from writer’s block is recruited by a mysterious company to find information about a character who appears to be a perfectly sane and sensible bookseller but is suspected of dealing in stolen books and manuscripts.

True to form, the denouement took me by surprise even though the idea was lurking in my mind towards the end of the book. Contrary to expectations, the prime suspect manages to get away with the loot, but at least in this book there is less of the violence, murder and mayhem that generally abounds in books of this kind. All in all, a rollicking good read as well as a tutorial for aspiring writers.

Why I Started Writing

 

I’m not quite sure when I started writing. I remember trying to write a story of my own sometime around my tenth birthday and having a great deal of difficulty deciding on my characters’ names. Nothing remains of that attempt, but as I grew up I found myself being appointed as the chronicler of family events, and later I became just another of my family’s inveterate letter-writers. I’ve been told that my letters home from my first trip to Israel when I was sixteen, and later from my post-graduate years there which turned into the rest of my life were valued by my family.

All my life I’ve been a voracious reader, whether of newspapers or books, the latter including fiction and nonfiction, plays, essays, and the encyclopaedias that my parents bought for the home. But books were my rock and my salvation from my earliest childhood until today, and it is rare to find me without reading matter to hand. The advent of that blessed invention the Kindle, now in my iPad and iPhone relieves me of the need to carry a physical book with me at all times as I have a veritable library to hand in my iPhone.

I kept a diary or notebook from time to time, and the record of my experiences during the Six-Day War enabled me to reconstruct my feelings and what I went through at that time. Reading Virginia Woolf’s writings and getting absorbed in the various biographies of her as well as her autobiographical writings helped me to see the process by which she turned her own experiences and life-events into stunning literature.

In principle, three novels that I read at various times in the 1990s, I think, made me realize what I wanted to write about. The first was Vikram Seth’s ‘A Suitable Boy,’ about life and politics in modern India. The second was ‘Wild Swans; Three Daughters of China,’ by Jung Chang, about life and politics in China. The third was ‘House of the Spirits’ by Isabel Allende, about life and politics in Chile, though I couldn’t swear that I read them in that order.

However, it dawned on me that each novel was in fact an account of the experiences of each of those writers and their family as they lived through historic times. And it also dawned on me that my family and I have lived through historic times and experienced events that have had a far-reaching effect and continue to be of lasting significance. That is how I came to write my first novel, ‘The Balancing Game; A Child Between Two Worlds, A Society Approaching War,’ which is a fictionalized account of my childhood in post-war London and my experience of living in Jerusalem during the period leading up to Israel’s Six-Day War. Of course, I also referred to newspapers of the time and other material to make sure I got my facts right, but much of what I wrote was still engraved on my memory.

Then I wrote my second book, ‘Time Out of Joint, the Fate of a Family,’ in which I tried to reconstruct the life and times of my paternal grandparents in Germany in the interwar period and then during the Second World War. My focus was not so much on the events of the Holocaust, though that of course came into it, but rather an attempt to depict the everyday life of the Jewish bourgeoisie in Germany and the way in which this was undermined and eventually destroyed. In order to depict these characters I was fortunate to have extensive files of family correspondence and documents that my late father brought out of Germany with him, as well as what he had told me about his family. The main trigger for writing that book was, however, the plaque in their memory that my father had erected in Jerusalem, where it was brought home to me that although all five family members were born and lived in Hamburg, Germany, each one died in a different country, and in some cases even a different continent.

When you think about it, anyone who has lived through any part of the twentieth century has lived through momentous times, with two world wars, political upheavals galore, climate change and immense technological advances. Some may call it progress, and one must hope that the end-result of all this will be something positive, though political upheavals tend to cause at least as much suffering and privation as progress. Statistics show, however, that a far smaller proportion of the world’s population now lives in poverty than was the case fifty years ago.

After writing and publishing my first two books, I found that there were other subjects about which I felt compelled to write. The first of these (my third novel, also based loosely on personal experience) was about the perils and indignities of old-age and how these affect the various members of a family (‘Levi Koenig; A Contemporary King Lear,’); and the folly of English people who think that retirement in France will be paradise (‘Chasing Dreams and Flies; A Tragicomedy of Life in France’).

And now it’s time for novel number five, ‘All Quiet on the Midwestern Plains; A Tale of Deception, Betrayal, and Vindication,’ about the effects of life in the American Midwest on an Israeli academic and his family, bearing in mind the fact that in 1985, when the events in the novel take place, the headquarters of the American Nazi Party was in the Midwest. My family and I spent a year in Nebraska in similar circumstances, so I do have some personal knowledge of the subject. Here, too, I made use of contemporary newspaper articles as well as my own memory and correspondence, but of course the actual characters and events are fictional. The ebook is already up and available on Amazon, and I hope it won’t be too long before it’s joined by the paperback. Once that’s done, I’ll be deep into getting novel number six, ‘A Ruffled Calm,’ ready to go, so keep your eyes open for future developments.