Louisville, Kentucky

 

 It’s just a fairly obscure town in the USA where a woman of colour was recently shot and killed, and the subsequent decision by the court not to indict any of the three policemen involved for a serious crime has given rise to demonstrations and riots there and elsewhere. But it has a connection with my family’s past.

In 1928 Herbert van Son, the uncle I never knew, was a young man of nineteen. The family lived in Hamburg and his father was a successful importer of tobacco. He arranged for his son to travel to Louisville and work as an apprentice to a business associate who was a tobacco farmer and trader there. He writes about the hot, damp climate and the warm relations between him and his employer, who helped him get settled and even took him to the Kentucky Derby. It was all interesting but very different to the life he had known in Hamburg,

Herbert, like most of the members of his family, was an inveterate letter-writer. Every week a typed letter describing his experiences and encounters in Louisville’s tobacco farming and processing industry would arrive in the family home in Hamburg. His initial tentative steps in the field eventually led to his being given ever more responsible positions, such as improving the speed and efficiency with which the blending process was managed. He writes home that “All the negroes here regard me as the ‘Big German Boss,’ simply because I don’t talk to them as if they were dogs, and I don’t go around with a gun in my pocket, like the other managers do, indicating their ridiculous arrogance and stupidity…”

After spending a year in Louisville and the surrounding area, Herbert was asked to manage the Chinese branch of the American tobacco company to which he had been apprenticed. After a brief trip back to Hamburg to see his family, he set off overland to Shanghai, taking a series of trains culminating in a week-long journey on the Trans-Siberia express. Before leaving Hamburg he traced his route with his younger brother, Manfred, who eventually became my father.

Herbert’s letters, which were written in German, were carefully collected and filed by his parents, and that file was among the few possessions my late father was able to take out of Germany when he fled the country in December 1938, after Kristallnacht.

There are no letters from Herbert from Shanghai. The family was informed a few days after his arrival of his death there by suicide, and the anguished correspondence between his father and the Jewish community there regarding the gravestone is all that remains.

In 2002 my father commissioned the translation of the letters, which I undertook together with Miriam Ron. The letters, which were published in book form as ‘The Tobacco Road; Hamburg, Kentucky, Shanghai,’ trace the brief trajectory of Herbert van Son’s life.

Several years later, I spent some time in the British Library’s Newspaper Department in Stanmore, London, as my father was sure that there had been a newspaper report of the incident. Lo and behold, in the May 25 edition of the ‘North China Herold,’ the English-language weekly newspaper that appearend in Shanghai at the time, I came across an irem headed ‘Tragedy in a Bathroom; Young Foreigner Found Dead: Suggested Suicide.’ My sharp intake of breath when I found it caused heads to turn, but blessed silence was soon restored.

And so, every mention of Louisville, Kentucky, brings back the memory of the bright young man who came to a tragic end at the other side of the world.

P.S. I have imagined Herbert and the other members of the family in my novel, ‘Time Out of Joint, the Fate of a Family,’ available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Time-Out-Joint-Family-Historical-ebook/dp/B00L96LKUI/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=Time+Out+of+Joint%2C+the+Fate+of+a+Family&qid=1551801977&s=digital-text&sr=1-1-catcorr

 

 

Tracking the Fate of my Grandparents

“We don’t know anything about what happened to our (mutual) grandparents. Our parents never talked about them,” my American cousins told me when I visited them last year.

The two sons of my mother’s brother, the late Dr. Kurt Hirsch, live comfortable lives in Virginia. Jack and Harry and their families maintain their connection with Israel and Judaism, and are loyal American citizens. We have not grown up together, for obvious reasons, but over the years we have kept in touch, whether by letters, email or occasional visits to one another’s country. We are all more or less the same age, which helps to keep the bond between us strong.

I did not have much information about what happened to our grandparents, Max and Paula Hirsch, either. I knew only that in 1940 they had been due to leave their home town of Sprottau, Silesia (then Germany, today Poland), to make their way to Cuba at some point, but had never arrived. The whole thing was a mystery, and had obviously caused immense grief to their children: my mother in England, her brother and sister on either coast of the USA, and another sister in Israel.

I mentioned this to my cousin in Israel (son of my mother’s sister) and he claimed to have very little knowledge of the subject, though he sent me copies of the memorial pages (Gedankblatte) his mother had filled out for her parents for Yad Vashem. For both Max and Paula Hirsch the details of when and where they had died were ‘unbekannt’ (unknown). There is no record of them in any official archive.

“Don’t you remember? We found the Red Cross messages between them and our mother in their flat after Dad died,” my sister reminded me when I told her about this. And then it came back to me.

Over the course of a year my two sisters and I would meet one evening each week to clear out the contents of our father’s flat. One small box tucked away in a cupboard contained some tiny dolls that had evidently come from our mother’s childhood home. The box also contained the few Red Cross messages (sent from Red Cross Message Bureau 80 at 130 Station Road, Hendon N.W.4) she had sent to her parents in 1941 and their replies to her from Germany. The flimsy paper used at the time was disintegrating, and after much heart-searching we decided to deposit those precious mementos for safekeeping in the Yad Vashem archive. We were given photocopies of the pages, and it was with a heavy heart that we left the originals there.

After being reminded of their existence by my sister, I located the photocopies, typed the texts into my computer, and promptly sent the file to my sisters and my cousins.

The first Red Cross letter was sent from Sprottau and is dated 29 July 1941. The number of words is limited to twenty, and mentions hopes of reaching Cuba via Barcelona. The next Red Cross letter from Sprottau is dated 19 November 1941 and notes that the journey to Cuba seems unlikely. This is followed by a Western Union Cable from Norfolk, Virginia, evidently from my uncle, dated 12 November 1941 and stating solely ‘LEFT FOR CUBA.’ How he knew this I don’t know, and nor it seems do my cousins. My uncle had presumably arranged the visa for Cuba, and also sent tickets for the voyage.

The last Red Cross letter from my grandparents was sent from Leignitz, which was then (22 March, 1942) in Germany but is now in Poland. It states that they are well, and that they hope to be reunited with their children.

Of course, that was not to be, and they probably knew that by then. I have no idea why they went to Leignitz, though they may have been ordered by the Gestapo to report there, as it seems that from there they were deported to one of the concentration camps. Or shot. Nobody knows.

While browsing Facebook a few days ago, I came across a question asked by one of the members of a group of descendants of Holocaust survivors asking till when it had been possible for Jews to leave Germany.

One of the replies contained the link to the Jewish Virtual Library, and the order issued by the Gestapo on 23 October 1941 (https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/order-banning-the-emigration-of-jews-from-the-reich) banning Jews from emigrating from the Reich. Among the comments were accounts of people whose relatives had escaped by boarding a train in October 1941 that went from Berlin to Lisbon. The train was sealed and guarded by the Gestapo, and the journey took five or six days. Passengers remained in Lisbon for a few days, before sailing to America or Cuba.

So it seems that for reasons unknown my grandparents could not get to the train that was to be their salvation in time to leave that benighted country. Just another story of pain and grief like countless others, but it’s my own and my family’s private pain and grief.

A Name to Conjure With

The name of England’s Foreign Secretary in 1917, Arthur Balfour, has been given to one of the more prestigious streets in Jerusalem, as is only fitting. After all, the official statement known as the Balfour Declaration, in which the Zionist leadership, as represented by Lord Walter Rothschild, was informed therein that “his Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people…” helped to give a seal of official approval to what had till then been a collection of piece-meal efforts to establish a Jewish presence in the Holy Land.

It did not do the trick, but it helped, and with that encouragement Jewish settlement in the region continued, being bolstered subsequently by the British victory over the Ottoman forces in the region. Despite Arab opposition and many setbacks, the Jewish settlement project persisted, culminating in the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

So it seems rather ironic to hear in the press these days that the name of Balfour is used to represent two contradictory phenomena in the context of modern Israel, depending on one’s point of view.

First, the fact that the fine building at the top of Balfour St. now houses the official residence of Israel’s prime minister and his family has taken on an additional meaning. The behaviour, some would say shenanigans, of the first lady, Sarah Netanyahu, with regard to the staff of the official residence – even leading to court cases being brought against her by former employees – has led to the term ‘Balfour’ being used to represent the actions of the first family. Somehow ‘Balfour’ has become synonymous with ‘misbehaviour’ of various kinds on the part of the various members of the first family (there is also an adult son, Yair, who lives with his parents, has no known occupation and seems to spend his time attacking the media and defending his parents on social media).

A few months ago a handful of people started demonstrating outside the prime minister’s residence on a constant basis. Then it became a regular Saturday night event, eventually snowballing into gatherings of many thousands of dissatisfied citizens. There were calls for Netanyahu to resign in the face of his pending trial on several counts of misuse of his office, demands for compensation from small business-people who had lost their livelihoods, calls from artists, actors and musicians to reinstate public performances, and other groups with complaints of various kinds. Speeches were made, noisemakers were brought into action, the police tried unsuccessfully to break up the demonstrations – sometimes doing so violently – and an attempt at a counter-demonstration failed miserably. And still they demonstrate each week.

The demonstrators simply won’t go away, and since they’re located, you guessed it, outside the official residence, they’re also known as ‘Balfour.’ So, depending which side of the political divide you’re on and which particular section of the spectrum you’re referring to, the epithet ‘Balfour’ is bandied about to mean pretty much anything and everything.

As is often the case, it is important to pay attention to the context of what is being said, by whom and to whom it is addressed. Sometimes, in the fast-moving world of today’s electronic media, it isn’t always possible to work out exactly who is the object of opprobrium of any given report, article or interview, but there’s nothing wrong with making a little effort to try and understand what it is and why.

What is really saddening is that the name of the illustrious statesman Arthur Balfour is being maligned in this way.

P.S. My latest book, ‘Friends, Neighbors, Traitors,’ describes life in Israel in 1983. It’s available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Friends-Neighbors-Traitors-Dorothea-Shefer-Vanson-ebook/dp/B087G5NMGY

‘By the Olive Groves: a Calabrian Childhood’ by Grazia Ietto Gillies

 

In

In these Corona-dominated times, when travel is well-nigh impossible, we can console ourselves to some extent by reading about the places we would like to visit, and this book certainly fills that gap.

I really enjoyed reading this book, which describes the author’s childhood in a remote village in the southern Italian region of Calabria. Grazia Ietto Gillies, who is today an academic economist living in London, writes in an entertaining and insightful way, describing daily life in the village, the relationships within the nuclear and wider family, the way goods and services were provided and, best of all – the food her mother cooked. Thus, each of the twenty-five chapters ends with recipes as well as instructions for preparing the food mentioned in the chapter.

Only the first ten years of the author’s life (1939 to 1949) were spent in Calabria, as subsequently the family moved to Rome, but the memory of those childhood years is evidently still deeply embedded in her memory, and she is able to perfectly convey the feelings, aromas and activities she experienced growing up in that environment.

The life that is described in the book is basic, involving many hours of labour-intensive activity on the part of the housewife. Grazia’s family home had electricity and running water, which was not the case for all the families in the village performed by Grazia’s mother, but it took time until machines which could do many of Grazia’s mother’s daily chores arrived in that mountain-top village. The lack of a refrigerator meant that a daily visit to the market to see what was on offer and decide what to cook was an essential part of her mother’s daily routine.

In those early years, especially during and immediately after the war (WWII), food was not plentiful and people learned to make do with the fruit and vegetables that were readily available. Thus, there were figs and grapes in the summer, as well as chestnuts and olives at other times of the year, while nourishing soups were made from dandelions and other plants growing wild in the area. Women invested a great deal of time in bottling and preserving the fruit and vegetables that were plentiful in their season.

Particularly fascinating is the author’s account of her schooldays. At that time the village did not have a school building, although one was built later. Instead, each class was situated in a rented room in one of the houses. The account of the attempt of one unfortunate substitute teacher to keep the class interested had me in fits of laughter. Having decided to read out part of de Amici’s book Cuore (The Heart), which describes the (mis)adventures of a boy in search of his mother, children and teacher ended up ‘sobbing and wailing uncontrollably.’ The door suddenly opened to reveal the landlady, who threatened to throw them all out of her house if they did not ‘stop this nonsense and noise in my house immediately.’ The author concludes by recounting that she found out the end of the story only many years later, when she bought a copy of the book and read it for herself.

One of the first chapters describes the milkman arriving in the morning outside the family home with his goats and proceeding to milk one of them into the receptacle provided by Grazia’s mother. Other chapters describe the role of the church and the various festivals, the games the children played, the many members of the wider family (whose photographs are included), since both sets of grandparents and most of her parents’ adult siblings were still living in or near the village, and of course the relations between the various inhabitants of the village.

Many of the recipes seem easy to make and require simple but fresh ingredients. Salient among the lessons I am taking away from this book are the importance of good quality olive oil and the idea that it is better to tear up fresh basil leaves into a dish at the last moment instead of incorporating the herb in the cooking process. In some of the recipes the author adds the adaptations she has made for them to the ingredients available to her in London.

You can read about my take on expatriates’ life in France in my novel, ‘Chasing Dreams and Flies; a Tragi-Comedy of Life in France,’ https://www.amazon.com/Chasing-Dreams-Flies-Tragicomedy-France-ebook/dp/B01LW3D212