by Maisie Mosco
He stared through the window unseeingly. The petty anti-Semitism he had experienced as a child in Strangeways had not gone away. It had only been lying dormant.
“You don’t intend doing any work today?” his father inquired. “My assistants neither,” he added caustically.
David glanced at the idle presses at the other end of the room, which ordinarily would not have escaped his attention. He returned to his office and saw the absentee pressers talking with Eli and Issie beside the cutting benches. But he could not bring himself to go into the workroom and break up the group. The two newly-vacated places among the sewing machines had the same sickening significance for them as for himself.
Rita was leaning against a filing cabinet, studying her coral fingernails absently, but he did not prod her into activity, either. Today was no ordinary day.
“They’re not all like Myrna and Joyce,” she said. “And we’ve got to be grateful for that.”
The things Jews had to be grateful for!
“The other Christian machinists didn’t behave any differently from how they always are with me, when I said good morning to them,” Rita went on. She stopped studying her nails and managed to smile. “So I don’t intend to dwell on it.”
But it was difficult not to, David thought. “You always were a sensible girl,” he said.
“That must be why I’ve never got married.”
David glanced at her lush figure, enhanced by a clinging, black dress. She still modelled coats for him and since the war had taken to garbing herself for that role, instead of her secretarial one. How old was she now? Nearing thirty. And no man had found her alluring shape sufficient compensation for her ugly face. But she had never lost the capacity to laugh at the cruel joke Nature had played upon her. Nor David his compassion for her.
“The chaps don’t know what they’re missing,” he smiled.
“Me neither,” she quipped. “And I’ll probably go to my grave without finding out.” She sat down at her desk and picked up a pencil and her shorthand notebook. “Meanwhile, let’s do some work, Mr. Sanderton.”
David had grown accustomed to his new name, but this morning it had a hollow ring. Why had he bothered? Jews were thought of as foreigners whatever they were called! He shifted his mind to his correspondence and was halfway through his dictation when Moishe Lipkin rang up.
“How is it in Manchester?” Moishe inquired when the business part of their talk was over.
“It isn’t raining.”
“We should worry! If I wake up in the morning and the sun’s shining, instead of asking God to arrange for a cloudburst, like I used to, I bless your Shirley for designing garments women’ll wear even when it isn’t wet. I wouldn’t like to go back to the days when we sank or swam according to the weather,” Moishe said. “But I wasn’t referring to the weather. I wondered if you’d seen any anti-Semitic slogans chalked on walls. I’ve seen some in Leeds.”
A leadlike feeling settled in David’s stomach. “I haven’t been round looking.”
Later, he learned in telephone conversations with customers that slogans of this kind had appeared on walls elsewhere.
This was not all he learned. “They’re at it again,” Izzie Klepman, who owned a string of rainwear shops in London, said hotly when he rang to inquire why an order had not been delivered. “You’d think they’d had their lesson, but no!”
“Who are you talking about, Izzie?”
“Who do you think? Mosley and his pal Arnold Leese, of course. Even sticking them behind bars during the war because they had the same kind of ideas as Hitler hasn’t stopped them. The moment they’re let loose the Jews know about it!”
“I thought the British Union of Fascists was disbanded.”
“It was. But a rose by any other name can still do damage if its thorns are poisonous. Leese was the leader of the Imperial Fascist League and they say he’s the biggest Jew-hater of them all. Now, there’s something called the British ex-Serviceman’s Movement –”
“I’ve never heard of it,” David cut in.
“What are you? A greener or an ostrich? They’ve already been tub-thumping on a bomb-site in Hackney. The same old stuff the Blackshirts did before the war.”
“I didn’t know.”
Izzie snorted down the phone. “Because all you ever think of is Zionism. I give my whack to the JNF. too. But it doesn’t shut my eyes to what’s going on nearer home.”
“Are you saying the Fascists are behind what’s happening at the moment?”
“Too true I am.”
David’s disquiet deepened when his errand-boy, whom he had sent to buy cigarettes, returned in an agitated state and told him that a gang of thugs had charged up Cheetham Hill Road chanting, “Out with the Jews”.
The lad stood pale-faced in the office doorway, the yamulke he wore atop his crinkly hair because he came from a devour family askew, as if he had been running. “I didn’t get your Goldflake, Mr. Sanderton. They were breaking the Jewish shop-keepers’ windows and I was scared stiff.”
“It’s all right, Harold. I’ll get them myself.”
“I never expected to see anything like that in England,” the boy muttered. “I can’t believe it.” He gave David a dazed glance then turned away and went into the workroom.
David, too, found it difficult to believe. He pulled himself together and saw that Rita was staring down at her typewriter with a confused expression on her face.
“I’m going to see what’s happening,” he said to her brusquely.
By the time he reached the main road, the mob was receding in the direction of the city centre. He surveyed the broken windows. How could you not believe what you had seen with your own eyes? The traders were sweeping up the glass. Like Sigmund Moritz had had to do in a ghetto in Vienna at the turn of the century.
“For this I lost a grandson in the war!” one of them exclaimed to David.
David put a hand on his trembling shoulder, wordlessly.
“That nothing like this should ever happen again, he thought he was fighting for,” the man added emotionally.
David walked slowly back to the factory. It was happening again because those who were determined it would had been let out of jail and were making sure it did. What Izzie Klepman had said was right. Political forces were behind it. The personal animosity directed at David by the two young machinists was the kind of ill-feeling that would blow over. But there were those who didn’t want it to. Whoever had organized the riot on Cheetham Hill Road – and a mob that size would have had to be organized – was using the gruesome incident in Palestine to fan the flicker of anti-Semitism it had sparked to life in England.
That evening, he heard there had been rioting in other Jewish districts. And that the local branch of the Union of Jewish ex-Servicemen and Women had called an emergency meeting.
“Why aren’t you going to it, Dad?” Ronald demanded over supper. “Uncle Nat is. And if Peter wasn’t sunning himself to Lugano, he’d go.”
Bessie eyed Ronald reproachfully. “Do you want your dad to get hurt in a brawl with the Fascists? It isn’t for him, at his age, to start taking them on. I’m ashamed of you, Ronald.”
“And I’m ashamed of Dad!” Ronald retorted, stalking out of the room.
“Pay no attention to him, David,” Bessie said dismissively. “And don’t take it out on me,” she added when he did not reply. “My head’s aching.”
“When isn’t it?”
“And a lot you care!” She, too, removed herself from his presence, slamming the door shut behind her.
David lit a cigarette and stared at the half-eaten dessert his wife and son had abandoned, beset by a sudden desolation. Was this what he had come to? After a life of striving for others? A careworn, middle-aged man who felt lonely in his own home? He ground out the cigarette, which tasted more acrid than it should. But why should his sense of taste be spared the bitterness presently permeating everything else? Did anyone ever get back from life what they put in
to it? he wondered. In business, maybe. Hard work brought its reward. But in personal relationships – the less said the better! He didn’t want to think about it. Only how could he not, when the son he idolized had said he was ashamed of him.
This generation of youngsters spoke their minds to their parents as David’s had never done. He had not exactly been ashamed of his own father, but in some ways had been unable to respect him. It had been hard for a go-ahead lad like David to accept Abraham’s total lack of ambition. But he had kept his opinions to himself. A father was a father and you made allowances because you loved him.
He heard Ronald leave the house and roar off in his car, without saying goodbye. To the father who had provided the car; and everything else he thought of as his. Yet Ronald was always comparing him with Nat, from whom David had received the same treatment. Which amounted to a kick in the arse, though he had supported Nat, too. And hadn’t he got the same from Miriam? Despite all he had done for Sammy, from which she had benefited. Thanks he didn’t want from any of them, but he didn’t deserve what was meted out to him. Why was it that those for whom you did most were the ones who turned against you?
Bessie popped her head around the door. “If you want to go to the ex-Servicemen’s meeting, don’t let me stop you,” she said in a surly voice. “So you’ll get landed by a thug, I should worry!” she added before she withdrew again.
As usual, she had escalated the situation in her mind and could see the Jewish men and lads scuffling in the streets with Fascist bruisers. The meeting had been called to discuss strategy. But would what Bessie foresaw eventually happen? As it had in London in the thirties? The possibility made David shudder. He’d been sitting here feeling sorry for himself, but his personal problems were insignificant by comparison.
The thought of Jews who had worn British uniforms battling with bricks and fists against Gentiles who had been nominally their comrades in arms during the war was nothing short of horrific. And that it should be necessary was even more so. War was a great unifier, but afterwards, it seemed, people resumed the attitudes that were theirs previously.
David recalled the soldiers with whom he had stood side by side in the trenches in Flanders. They had come from all walks of life and some had been rough types; but he couldn’t imagine any of them terrorizing a neighbourhood as the Fascists had done today. It took a special kind to lend themselves to mob violence. The kind in whom Man’s basest instincts were never far below the surface. But if it came to it, the Jewish ex-Service-men would give them no quarter; they had not fought against the Nazis to stand by and watch the worm eat away the apple again.
Bessie returned to the room and sat down on the sofa. “I only said what I did because I love you,” she said, playing with her pearls. “I love you too much.”
That this was the root cause of all that ailed her, David had decided long ago. Her moodiness and jealousy were side effects of it.
“Are you going to that meeting or aren’t you?” she asked.
“No, Bessie.” David smiled ruefully. “As you said to Ronald, I’m past the age when I’d be any use if it came to fisticuffs. Let’s hope it won’t. But there’ll be no shortage of able-bodied volunteers.”
This was confirmed by Nathan at the Sabbath gathering. David noticed that his brother seemed edgy, but who wasn’t with what was going on? There had not been a recurrence of the rioting; but the lads would be ready for it if there was, Nathan told the family. Observers had been posted and everyone was on call.
“Who would have thought, after beating the Nazis, we’d be sitting down talking like this?” Sarah sighed.
“Anti-Semitism is a bestial instinct,” David declared.
“Nonsense!” Hannah said in her brisk way. “Nobody’s born hating Jews, it’s something that’s planted in them. It’s a carefully engineered tactic, David, that makes use of people’s need for a scapegoat.”
“And why is the scapegoat always us?” he retorted.
“Because those doing the engineering know we’re a sitting duck. Jews became the whipping-boy because they’ve never been prepared to renounce their beliefs. What were the pogroms but attempts to make people like your parents accept Christianity? Modern anti-Semitism isn’t motivated by religion, as it was then. It’s a political weapon pure and simple these days. That’s why it’s always at its worst when the economic climate is bad; why it thrived in the thirties when the unemployed needed an outlet for their anger, someone to blame and hit back at.”
“The while it’s the forties and not too many people are unemployed,” Abraham reminded Hannah.
“But there’s the Palestine situation, isn’t there?” she replied. “And the Fascists have hung their hat on that. Opportunism is their middle name.”
The family fell into a contemplative silence whilst Sarah poured the tea.
“The room is half empty today,” she remarked, glancing around at the vacant chairs.
“It’s the holiday season,” David said.
“So far as I know, Ronald isn’t on holiday,” she answered rebukingly. How dare he not attend his grandmother’s tea party? her tone had implied.
Nathan defended his nephew. “Ronald called to see me this morning, Mother, and mentioned he was doing ward duty today. For one of his Christian pals who was invited to a wedding.”
David’s lips tightened. Ronald had reached the final stage of his medical training and was working on the wards at the Infirmary. This was supposed to be his weekend off, but David had had to learn from Nathan that his son was doing a duty-stint!
Nathan saw David throw him a sour glance and wondered what he had done to deserve it. But more than sour glances would come his way when he dropped the bombshell about Marianne. Which must wait until Esther and Ben arrived from the shop. It was August Bank Holiday Saturday, one of their busiest days of the year, and he hoped they wouldn’t come later than usual because of this.
Hannah put down her cup and saucer. “We’d better be off,” she said, prodding the twins, who were seated by the window reading. She rumpled their hair, one head with each hand. “Nobody would think these two boys were going on holiday! Other kids get excited about it, but not them.”
“How can anyone get excited about Blackpool sands?” Henry asked. “I’m long past the stage when I enjoyed digging holes and making castles.”
“I don’t think you ever did,” Hannah laughed. “You were never normal.”
“He still isn’t,” Frank declared. “As Leona would have said if she’d been here.”
“And that’s another thing,” Sarah said, eyeing Nathan. But he remained silent and she said no more.
The Moritzes made their usual noisy departure. Sigmund had maintained a pensive silence throughout the afternoon, but now began protesting that he did not need a holiday.
“He’s been saying that ever since we made the arrangements, but we’re paying no attention to him,” Helga smiled.
This would be their first vacation since the war and was to be spent in the same rented flat they had occupied during bank holiday week for several years before then. They could not set off until evening, the bookshop where Carl was employed now opened on Saturday afternoon, but would have been unable to do so in any event. Nothing short of a life or death emergency would have induced Sigmund to ride on the Sabbath.
“Enjoy it,” Sarah smiled when she saw them to the door. Abroad, in a posh hotel, like some of her grandchildren now went to with their families, it wasn’t, and for them never would be; the twins had the same disinterest in the good things of life as all the other Moritzes. Which seemed a pity, when they were both brainy and could probably end up rich if they wanted to. But, as she’d had cause to ask herself too often in recent years, what were riches if you weren’t content in other ways?
“So why did your wife take it into her head to visit her sister in London this weekend, Nat?” she asked apropos of her final thought when she returned to the parlour. “All of a sudden and taking Leona with her?” Sh
e transferred her attention to David. “And Bessie’s in bed with another headache?”
“It’s a pity Sammy’s in America, or you could give to him the third degree, too,” Abraham said tetchily.
Sarah ignored the interruption and awaited her sons’ replies. That things were going from bad to worse between Nat and his wife, even a blind man could see. And Bessie had pleaded a headache too often lately.
David was not sure if the headaches were real or simulated. He sometimes thought they were just Bessie’s newest way of manifesting her anxieties and irritations. “It’s probably her age,” he said to his mother. “You know. The change of life.”
And when I went through it, my husband didn’t even know it was happening to me, Sarah thought. In her day, women had not made what was natural into an excuse for this, that and the other.
“This isn’t the first time Rebecca’s gone to visit her sister at a minute’s notice,” was the only answer Nathan was prepared to give regarding his wife.
And it won’t be the last, Sarah sighed to herself. What sort of home life did these two sons of hers have? She eyed Nathan’s hair, which wasn’t entitled to so much silver at his age. And the deep furrow, that came from frowning, above the bridge of David’s nose.
“So,” she said, hiding her distress behind a smile. “For once, there’s nobody here but us Sandbergs.”
“One of us isn’t a Sandberg anymore,” Abraham said with an acid glance at David.
“Don’t start on that again, Father,” Nathan interceded.
“All of a sudden you’re on his side?”
Nathan noted David’s surprised expression. “I don’t believe in what you call sides, Father. Any more.”
“It must be because you’ve joined the Reform Shul,” Abraham retorted with sarcasm.
“It isn’t, as a matter of fact. It’s because I don’t think what a person does is anyone else’s business.”
David gave him a look that harked back to the past. “It depends what about. And how it’s going to affect other people.”