Elections. Again.

 

Oh botheration. ‘Ere we go again, as the earwig said as it fell off the rim of the jar. The midnight hour struck last night and no fairy godmother appeared to turn the pumpkin into a carriage. So we poor benighted citizens of Israel face another two-and-a-half months of electioneering, jockeying for attention, inane political ads, mind-numbing propaganda, and general brow-beating and misery. As if life isn’t tough enough as it is, what with the excessive summer heat, constant fires set by nasty neighbours across the border (and even some within it), and the general sense of unease caused by growing political tension in the region and global warming.

Israel’s election system, which is based on proportional representation (rather than the ‘first past the post’ system prevalent in the UK and most western democracies), means that no one party has ever yet managed to form a government without having recourse to the need for a coalition. In most cases in the past this has worked relatively well, with compromises and common interests generally forming the basis for a workable government. Matters of principle are all well and good, it would seem, but when the prospect of a ministerial post and its attendant perks and influence are dangled in front of a faction or candidate, the temptation is usually irresistible.

But now the situation has changed. Intransigence is the order of the day. And whereas in any normal country the party that finds itself unable to form a government hands the mandate back to the President so that another party can be given the opportunity, this has not happened here. Why is this? I hear you ask. Oh, it’s nothing serious, really, just a ploy to stop the opposition getting into power at all costs as well as to prevent the current Prime Minister from being faced with the possibility of standing trial for various cases of corruption and abuse of power.

About twenty years ago a similar situation confronted then MK Tzippi Livni, who was head of the party which had gained the most seats at the election. When the composition of the parties elected to the Knesset as a result of the general election prevented her from forming a viable coalition, she nobly and responsibly handed the mandate back to the President, and the then opposition leader(who was Benjamin Netanyahu)was given the task of forming a government.

But nobility of character is not a feature that distinguishes our current Prime Minister. True, he has considerable ability, is an excellent rhetorician in two languages, as well as not being above resorting to demagoguery when matters come down to the wire and the result of the election is at stake. But sensing that his back is against the wall, both personally and politically, he is pulling out all the stops in his attempt to prevent anyone else gaining the upper hand. This time, too, he finds himself unable to reconcile the two outlying factions – the head of the Israel Our Home party, which seeks to impose some form of partial military duty on the ‘scholars’ who spend their days poring over tomes in religious seminaries, on the one hand, and the ultra-orthodox parties, who flatly refuse to perform military service of any kind, on the other.

So it’s us poor suckers, the man and woman in the street, who have to pay the price for all the above. Worst of all is the prospect that very little will change by the time the next election is held, in another few months, so that we may find ourselves on an endless merry-go-round of repeated elections and costly concessions to persuade parties to come on board.

Welcome to Ground Hog Day.

My Ex-Step-Mother-in-Law

 

Actually, the one-woman show that I saw last week has very little to do with the subject of the title, namely, mothers-in-law. I am one such, and even an ex-one in one case, but not a step one, or not yet, at least (and I hope never).

The play was recommended to me by my son and his wife, and so I was sure it would be about the mother-in-law issue and relationship problems. I soon found that I was greatly mistaken. What we were treated to was a highly original portrayal of the history, emotions, reactions and experiences of a member of the generation of our parents and grandparents in Europe before and after WWII. This was done in such a delicate and oblique way that one had to be on one’s toes and wait for the end of the evening before realizing what the subject of the play really was.

The sold-out performance was held in a small space in one of Jerusalem’s neighbourhoods. The solo actress, Naomi Yoeli, moved about the stage, at times representing her own persona and at others the ex-step-mother-in-law as well as other members of that family living in a small town in pre-war Hungary.

The main character’s family of origin is described by means of a letter from her mother, written shortly before Hungary was invaded by the Germans. In the letter, the happy mother announces the forthcoming marriage of her daughter, Agi, to the scion of a very wealthy family (also Jewish). Although she is careful to preserve the proprieties of good behaviour and social mores, the letter contains accounts of the apparent wealth of her daughter’s future family, to her evident satisfaction.

The almost bare stage contained an elegant round table into which drawers were built. From time to time a random member of the audience would be invited to sit at the table, open one of the drawers and extract its contents. In one instance this was a set of miniature wooden items of furniture typical of a bourgeois European home, in another it was a porcelain plate and bowl, and so on. Each set of items served as a trigger for Naomi, who now assumed the persona of Agi, speaking with a light Hungarian accent, to recount some aspect of her life, sometimes in a rambling highly imaginative way, sometimes evoking the time and place of her youth. In one particularly enchanting moment, she waxes lyrical about a particular Hungarian pastry she loved, whereupon trays of that pastry were handed out to the audience. It was delicious.

Thus, not necessarily in consecutive order, we learn about Agi’s childhood and youth, the attempt, together with her husband, Latz, to avoid deportation, the release from the concentration camp and her efforts to find surviving members of her family. There are also accounts of encounters with Russian, French and American soldiers of the Allied Army. No mention is made of the horrors of the camp, which we later learn was Auschwitz. We learn, too, that just prior to the establishment of the State of Israel she and Latz moved there, and that she was not very impressed with the place.

Towards the end of the evening, Agi suddenly becomes more assertive, abandoning the refined, cultured Hungarian lady we have come to know, and in firm tones she repeatedly declares that she refuses to speak about ‘it.’

However, upon hearing a final, apparently innocuous, incident, we learn that Agi and Latz, now a retired professor, were strolling in Haifa with a visiting academic and his wife. The latter asks Agi what it was like in Auschwitz, and upon hearing her noncommittal, evasive reply, which ends the play and could be described as the ‘understatement of the century,’ the stunned, audience breaks into appreciative applause.

The relationship between Agi and Naomi appears to have been a good one, with daily phone calls and regular meetings in a café. We do not learn how Agi attained the ‘ex’ and ‘step’ status that might have been the subject of the play. What has happened, however, is that in the course of the evening we have, almost unwittingly, gained an insight into the psyche of someone who endured Auschwitz and was able to rise above it and live life on her own terms.

‘The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher’ by Hilary Mantel

 

I picked up this book (greatly reduced in price) probably because I was intrigued by the title, and found when I started reading it that it consisted of eleven rather long short stories, set in various parts of the world, but mainly in contemporary England. Some years ago I read Mantel’s two books about Thomas Cromwell and Henry the Eighth, ‘Wolf Hall’ and ‘Bring up the Bodies,’ and I remember thinking at the time that they were not very well-written, though interesting. I was very surprised to learn that both (I think) won the Man-Booker Prize.

I find that in her short stories, too, Hilary Mantel’s style is as ragged, jagged and unclear as it was in her previous books. To cut a long story short (pun intended), I find her style irritating and confusing. What is worse, I find the subject-matter of her stories equally annoying. Some of them don’t seem to have much point or to go anywhere, which is hardly what a short story is supposed to achieve. In some cases they are vignettes of a certain time or place or situation, but in my view that is not enough for the medium of a short story.

One of the stories describes the author’s encounter with an Indian businessman when she is living in Jeddah, where her husband is working for an oil company. The author feels awkward about having to entertain the unwelcome guest for tea, and even attend a dinner party he has organised. But beyond the feeling of unease, and relief when she finally manages to shake him off, there doesn’t seem to be much point to the episode. Another story describes a childhood encounter with a girl from a less privileged socio-economic environment, but beyond that there is little to grab the reader’s interest. Yes, the children’s conversation is convincingly conveyed, as is the atmosphere of noseyness and latent aggression, but that is all. An account of the relationships between the staff of a doctor’s clinic reveals an unexpected lesbian alliance, and that perhaps is one of the better stories.

The story of the title is the last and longest in the book and describes what might perhaps have happened had the plumber whom the narrator had been expecting turned out to be an assassin bent on shooting Margaret Thatcher. The erstwhile prime minister, who is apparently universally hated, had been undergoing minor eye surgery in the suburban house next door which had been converted into a clinic. The encounter between the lady of the house and the assassin, who is a member of the IRA, is described in very low-key, almost casual, terms, with no-one getting particularly excited or upset about anything much. Detachedness is all. Of course, there is the period of waiting, with the conventional cup of tea, which winds up becoming something more alcoholic, but there are no accelerated heartbeats, sweating or swearing, and not even any raised voices. Everything proceeds with the utmost calm and, in a strange turn of events, the lady of the house even conspires with the would-be assassin to show him a secret escape route. Not very convincing, to say the least.

Several of the stories have previously been published in such august journals as ‘The London Review of Books’ and the ‘Guardian,’ which only leaves me wondering what has become of the British literary scene.

An Opera About Auschwitz!?

 

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I was one of the brave souls who attended a performance of the opera, ‘The Passenger,’ by Mieczyslaw Weinberg. I did so mainly because a friend of ours was the revival director of the production by the Israel Opera, and not because I’m a ‘glutton for punishment,’ as I have been accused of being (due to my inordinate consumption of Holocaust literature).

However, I’m not sorry I went. The subject is undoubtedly difficult, if not well-nigh impossible to convey in any meaningful artistic way, yet the performance left me with a heightened sense of awareness of and identification with the experience of life in a concentration camp. The combined impact of Weinberg’s music, the text (based on a novel by a non-Jewish Polish woman who was in Auschwitz herself), and the ingenious set, staging, costumes and scenery was greater than the sum of the individual parts. The soloists—a mix of imported and local talent—acted and sang with feeling and skill. It cannot have been easy for Israelis to evoke the experience of being prisoners in a concentration camp or members of the SS.

The author, Zofia Posmysz, wrote the novel originally as a radio script after having heard, while on a visit to Paris, what she thought was the voice of the German woman who had been her supervisor in Auschwitz. Posmysz was imprisoned there as a young woman for the ‘crime’ of reading and distributing anti-Nazi leaflets. The idea was taken up by the Polish-Jewish composer Weinberg, and the libretto was written by Alexander Medevdev. Weinberg had managed to reach Soviet Russia before the Germans invaded Poland, but his entire family was murdered by them.

The action of the opera is set in two different places and two different points in time: on board an ocean liner in 1958 and in Auschwitz in 1943. The first staged performance took place in Bregenz in 2010, directed by David Pountney, a British and Polish theatre and opera director. The set, which shows both locations, involves large sections of scenery which move together with the singers, constitutes a combination of imaginative reconstruction and engineering ingenuity. The railway tracks at the front of the stage serve as a constant reminder of Auschwitz.

The prisoners who form the focus of the opera are a mix of women from the various countries conquered by the Germans and each one performs in her own language. As we watch them move and sing, wearing the striped concentration-camp garb, their heads shaven, we are exposed to their touching stories and relationships, to their individual humanity and the comfort they find in their friendships.

Some scenes also expose the mental processes of the SS, managing to convey their diabolical combination of brutality and efficiency—as well as stupidity in some cases. The impossible love between two of the prisoners is shown in a way that is touching without being unduly sentimental, and the moment when the tones of Bach’s chaconne are played in defiance of the commandant’s request for a schmaltzy waltz is unbearably moving.

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Artistic licence notwithstanding, it seems odd that the presence of Jews is barely mentioned, and when it is (by the woman from Salonika, who points to her yellow star as ‘the mark of death’), it is misrepresented, as she sings in Yiddish. The Jews of Salonika, who fled Spain in 1492, continued to speak their Judeo-Spanish language, Ladino.

Weinberg’s music is not inaccessible to the untrained ear, and in many instances it sounds as if it could have been written to accompany a film, which is in fact what Weinberg did for a living in Russia. He was a friend of Shostakovich’s, and it is possible to discern some similarities between the music of the two.

Over and beyond the dramatic impact of the opera, the fact that it exists at all, and can—and hopefully will—continue to be performed for generations to come plays an important role in the task of never forgetting what happened or allowing the Holocaust deniers to prevail. ‘The Passenger’ stands as an eternal reminder of the depths to which mankind sank in order to perpetrate unspeakable horrors against other human beings, as well as the heights which the human spirit can attain in overcoming adversity.

There is no happy end to this opera, which concludes with a lone voice ringing out to assert that we must never forget or forgive.

Amen to that.

‘Asylum’ by Moriz Scheyer

Written at the time of the actual events, this powerful book starts by describing the atmosphere in Vienna before the Anschluss by Nazi Germany, followed by the author’s flight, together with his wife and non-Jewish housekeeper, who was also nanny to their children and his wife’s best friend (and who insisted on remaining with them throughout their ordeal).

Moriz Scheyer was a well-known and respected journalist and writer in pre-war Vienna. The editor of the arts section of the Neues Wiener Tagblatt, he was a friend or acquaintance of many prominent writers and musicians of the time, among them Stefan Zweig, Bruno Walter and Arthur Schnitzler.

As was the case with countless Jewish families, their comfortable bourgeois way of life was disrupted by the imposition of Nazi restrictions and race laws. He describes the behaviour of the general population of Vienna with bitter scorn, favourably mentioning just one or two individuals (a waitress in a café he frequented, a compositor for his journal) who showed any fellow-feeling towards him.

In search of security, Scheyer moved first to Switzerland, then to his beloved Paris (their two teenage sons had found sponsors in the UK), and the trio survived there until the Germans overran France too. When the country was divided into two zones, one occupied by the Germans and the other supposedly ‘free’ under Petain, ruling from Vichy, thousands of Parisians set out to leave the city. Scheyer describes the ‘Exodus’ in vivid terms, as well as the indifference displayed by most French people to the suffering of their Jewish compatriots, their desire not to be bothered by any accounts of personal misery, and their focus on continuing to enjoy the good things of life.

The Scheyers also left Paris, but their attempt to find refuge in the French countryside failed, and they returned to the capital, only to find themselves being harassed by visits from gendarmes and confiscation of what little property they had. Scheyer describes the systemic way the Nazis looted, stole and profited from the property of persecuted Jews, and does not spare the French who cooperated in these acts. The trio lived in a state of constant anxiety until they heard the fateful knock on the door heralding the arrest of Moriz.

Together with several hundred other men, Scheyer was taken under guard to the concentration camp of Beaune-la-Rolande in the Loiret region, and assigned a bunk in a hut containing 180 men. Conditions in the camp were atrocious, starvation rations and daily humiliations were the rule, accompanied by the senseless brutality of their guards, both French and German. What little consolation there was came from the sense of comradeship shown by other denizens of the hut. Scheyer describes all this in searing detail, and it is without a doubt accurate. It is harrowing to read.

On the eve of the transportation of the inmates of the camp to Auschwitz, Scheyer was told to report the next day to the camp adjutant’s office with his bundle of possessions. Twenty of the camp’s 1,800 inmates who were over 55 years of age or physically disabled were lined up, closely examined, harangued by the commandant, then marched under escort out of the camp to the town centre, where they were released. Scheyer was able to board the bus from Orleans to Paris, and was greeted with shrieks by his wife and Slava her friend when he turned up on the doorstep of their apartment.

In a chapter entitled ‘Another stay of execution,’ Scheyer describes how, after a brief respite at home, the entire neighbourhood was sealed off and the hunt for Jews began. It was known that those who were caught were sent to the infamous camp at Drancy. Scheyer and the two women managed to evade the net, and tried to get to the Free Zone. The vicissitudes of that attempt at escape are again described in disturbing detail, specifying the amounts paid to passeurs and sundry officials who were supposed to help the trio get to safety in Switzerland, the fraudulent assurances of assistance and several hair-raising close escapes as the danger of exposure came ever closer. This attempt failed too, and they turned back into France, ending up in a small town called Belvès in the Dordogne region. From there they were summoned to Grenoble and kept under guard in an army barracks together with several hundred other Jews. While there, Scheyer suffered a heart attack, and the French doctor who attended him gave him a document stating that because of his medical condition he was unable to travel. The guards told Scheyer to leave the place immediately, and he managed to do so only by being physically supported by his wife and Slava. The next day all the detained Jews – men, women and children—were sent to Auschwitz.

The trio returned to the town of Belvès, where they were obliged to register and were subject to ‘friendly’ visits from local gendarmes. One of Scheyer’s acquaintances, a young man named Jacques Rispal who lived there with his parents, showed sympathy for his plight. His mother, Helène, woke up one night with the inspiration of where Scheyer, his wife and Slava could be hidden. Thus it was that the trio were smuggled into a convent, ‘Asile de Labarde,’ an isolated building on a nearby hilltop where the nuns looked after mentally and physically disabled women.

For the next two years the trio were able to live there in relative safety. Scheyer describes the selflessness and piety of the nuns and the unexpected kindness of the Rispal family in terms that convey the depth of his gratitude and emotional attachment to them. Life in the convent was Spartan but the Scheyers were finally able to breathe more easily, without feeling as if they were hunted animals. The gift of a radio, smuggled to them by the Rispals, enabled them to hear news from the outside world and, perhaps even more significantly, to listen to music again. Scheyer describes the experience as being “like a blessed release of the self…” reminding him of the concerts he had heard in Vienna.

In comparing the situation of Jews at that time to that of the ‘weakminded’ inmates of the asylum he writes: “We, on the other hand…are hunted animals… If Einstein were here, he would be a hunted animal…” and the same would apply to a Bruno Walter, a Franz Werfel, even the great Gustav Mahler if he were still alive. These thoughts lead him to mourn the fate of the millions of Jews, adults and children, who were ‘eliminated as pests’ by the Germans, and among whom there had undoubtedly been countless gifted human beings in any and every sphere of human endeavour [as was indeed the case, DS].

The Scheyers survived the war and settled in Belvès. After Moriz’s death in 1945 the typescript of his memoirs was thrown away by his son, who considered the writing too intense in its condemnation of and hatred for the Germans. By chance, however, some years later their grandson came across the carbon copy, rescued it and translated it. He has annotated the text, as well as adding an introduction, epilogue, biography of the author and index of people mentioned in the text. He has done an admirable job, and we owe him a great debt of gratitude for providing us with this harrowing yet gripping account of events as they occurred in real time. The text uses language which is eloquent without being flowery to convey the soul-destroying experience of living through that horrific period in human history.