by Roger Cohen
When June ran out of the Rothmans King Size cigarettes whose lipstick-tinted filters were always in the ashtrays, she came down the corridor to get one from Manja. She was scrupulous about returning these “borrowed” cigarettes. June seemed to Manja to live in some fear of my father (known to the au pair as “the doctor”), as well as at a distance from her children that she could not altogether understand.
In June 1965, a couple of months before my tenth birthday, Manja went to a Danish midsummer evening celebration party outside London and met Jǿrn Loberg, who had just arrived from Denmark. They fell in love. When Manja told me she and Jǿrn were engaged, my fury knew no bounds. Manja tells me I “climbed the walls” in a frenzy at her decision. I would never speak to Jǿrn.
Manja was soon pregnant by Jǿrn, and their engagement was announced in haste. My mother, concerned about Manja’s dignity, insisted that she should get a ring at once. Appearances mattered. Convention existed for a purpose. She directed her to a small antiques store at the bottom of the hill. “That’s better,” my mother said. “You could not possibly go back pregnant without a ring.” In November 1965 Manja returned to Denmark.
Bereft, I stumbled from one infatuation to another but assembled my outward world with a fierce concentration. In the classroom, on stage, on the sports fields, I excelled. What else defines the success of an English boy? I conjugated my Latin verbs, declined my Greek nouns, converted the half-chances in the squelching, waterlogged goal mouths, cleared balls off the muddy line, captained the cricket team, read voraciously, and cultivated an aura. I wrote a poem about the patterns the clouds make. Beneath the shifting sky, I invented ball games that held me captivated.
Of course, I could not altogether escape the physical punishment then de rigueur in an English public school (my headmaster beating me with a cricket bat at age eight, for telling a lie, as I recall) or the abuse of twisted educators (my French teacher telling me, as I bailed out of his school trip to France, that he hoped my plane crashed because he was certain I would then go to hell). This was just part of growing up in pre-touchy-feely Britain, that long-lost country where nobody had special dietary needs, or knew what gluten-free meant, or was afraid to use the accent they were born with.
London unfurled for me along its misty canals, in the sulfurous tunnels of the Northern Line, on the single-decker Green Line bus (quicker but more infrequent than its double-decker Red cousins). From Hampstead tube stop, I walked down to my house past the church of St. John-at-Hampstead and its cemetery. From the Green Line bus stop, I walked up past St. Andrew’s church. It was often damp and gusty. I kicked the wet leaves. I varied the route home from school, not wanting to settle on one. It never took less than forty-five minutes, more often closer to an hour. I began making this journey when I was eight or nine; I was alone a lot.
My mother was often in bed. I came home one late afternoon to find her sobbing, inconsolable. Our dog, a cocker spaniel called Smokey, had died. Smokey had adored her but held back from my father, a mirror image of the baboons’ affection. June’s grief troubled me even in my own house because there was something disproportionate about it.
She was a shadow of the woman who had had me, yet she was there for me in extremis. Leading the cricket team as captain to a game in Highgate at age thirteen, I protected our equipment against skinheads who assailed us on an underground platform. As we turned to board the train, one of them smashed me from behind on the right side of my face. I crawled into the tube, the bones around my eye broken and my cheekbone crumpled.
At Camden Town I left the rest of the team to take the other branch of the Northern Line to Hampstead. I waved down a car. June was in her bedroom, alone. It was the middle of the day. She dressed the wound and comforted me. We went first to a local hospital, then, as the gravity of the injury became clear, to Guy’s, where my father became professor of chemical pathology in 1965. There were concerns about my eye. The surgery was long and delicate.
My father was away in Scotland. He returned the next day. Much later, in a scribbled annotation of harbored resentments, I found a reference from my mother to Sydney’s absence. Such feelings got locked in a storehouse. It took me a long time to measure the weight of the silence or pinpoint its roots in Virginia Water.
Much later, in a letter to my first wife, Katherine, in 1981, I wrote about the childhood feeling I could never quite articulate: “The fear of death was with me once. Objects resisted all harmony, clamped to their corner of space. Faces fled into their private tunnels. A dull hum pressed on my temples in mornings that were too long. I wanted out from the cold. Only the cold awaited me. Alone on this street I can still feel what the fear was like but the fear has gone. The stars are beautiful, each one in its place, and as the world turns, we find in the end where we will rest. There was a scent of sweet peas on our bodies in the sun. You said, I could die right now and be happy.”
CHAPTER 8
Jews in a Whisper
The compromise in Britain seemed to be: you kept quiet about it, and you could rise just about as far as anyone else. The “it” was being Jewish. Of course there was anti-Semitism—was it not everywhere? But this was not annihilationist anti-Semitism, after all, the continental kind that had pushed many Jews toward British shores in flight from Russian pogroms and Hitler’s Reich.
No, the British were genteel, even affable, in their prejudice: a comment here about pushiness; an aside there about money; a drunken, embarrassed confession from some ruddy squire about a half-Jewish grandparent; a grumble about flashiness (“All that gold jewelry!”); a casual reference to a woman looking Jewish with her “great conk of a nose”; an allusion to “Jewish behavior,” whatever that might be; a murmur about stinginess (“Don’t be so Jewish!”); a harrumph about how “these people are very clever”; a suggestion that a Jew could be “British” but certainly not “English”; variations on the old self-contradicting themes of Jews as arch-capitalists and arch-communists and, whichever they were, a little uncouth.
All this could be irritating, but it was not threatening, flotsam on the tide of an ingrained bigotry that was harmless enough. Compared to the real thing, this was mere condescension, a trifle when set beside Britain’s unusual tolerance. The posture was not actively hostile, and it was quite likely tinged with envy. Britain’s quarter of a million Jews did all right. Many did very well. There were few, if any, societies in Europe where you were better off as a Jew. You turned your back on full-throated Judaism, changed your name perhaps (not de rigueur), and opted never to make a fuss. You swept all that nasty silliness under the carpet. Almost all the time there was nothing to make a fuss about. Britain was ample, open to all comers. The motto was: Keep quiet and carry on. You could even become prime minister.
Yet the prejudice was there in the background, enough—if you were being honest—io feel not quite comfortable, to feel excluded from the heart of whatever it was that was going on. Philip Roth, in his novel Deception, has his American protagonist say to his British lover: “In England, whenever I’m in a public place, a restaurant, a party, the theater, and someone happens to mention the word ‘Jew,’ I notice that the voice always drops just a little.” She challenges him on this observation, prompting the American to say, yes, that’s how “you all say ‘Jew.’ Jews included.”
My parents were quiet to the point of silence about the Jewishness I stumbled on at school through the taunts I faced. Many factors contributed to this effacement of identity: the immigrant’s push for assimilation, the subliminal shame of the diaspora Jewish survivor, a scientist’s rational rejection of Jewish religiosity, and the habits of fellow Jews in England who opted to keep their heads down. I recall my father shaking with rage at the murder of Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympics and announcing he would watch no more of it. But we never talked about what it meant to be Jews. Tradition and custom and ceremony were absent. No days were different from any other days. There was none of what the Israeli novelist Amos Oz and his daught
er Fania Oz-Salzberger have called “the intergenerational quizzing that ensures the passing of the torch.” Our apostasy was complete. There was no wrestling with God. We were chopped liver. We did not have a Christmas tree. Nor did we have anything else. Our deity was academic and professional achievement. My father’s rise in a country he had reached only in his midtwenties was meteoric.
My mother’s core role, in line with her times, was to support him and raise us. She had collapsed but tried to rally. Her closest friends in London were almost all Jewish—Noreen Weber, Mary Warshaw, Eve Pollecoff. They were smart, witty women, born a generation too early to realize their potential. June felt comfortable with them.
But English life was complicated, infinitely more so than among the Jews of Houghton in South Africa. If she thought differently about how we should be brought up—if she felt, for example, that we should know about her grandfather’s brother, the rabbi who served as chaplain to Britain’s Jewish soldiers during World War I—she did not speak up. Sydney knew best. “Syd and I think”: so began many sentences, to the occasional annoyance of her friends, who felt the marital tension suppressed by my mother in the name of loyalty and love. She kept her own views (at least those not in a state of conjugal fusion) to herself.
In Howard Jacobson’s novel The Finkler Question, an aging London Jew and widower makes an awkward confession: “I have discovered in myself a profound necessity to think ill of my fellow Jews.” He is sick to death of “the Jew business,” which has only become more complex with Israel’s growing power and bellicosity, a subject of increasingly unpleasant London dinner-party conversation. He says that he would not be “so quick to see the Jew in the Jew if the Jew in the Jew were not so quick to show himself. Must he talk about his wealth? Must he smoke his cigar? Must he be photographed stepping into his Rolls?”
His companion, a Jewish woman and old flame, is incensed: “We are not the only people to smoke cigars.” No, he concedes, “but we are the very people who should not.” To which she retorts, “You have the Yellow Star mentality, Libor.”
The response is sharp: “I have lived in England a long time.”
My mother’s difficulties as an immigrant trying to adapt were of many different kinds. She had been deracinated. In mildewed England there were no more Shabbat gatherings, no more beef on rye, none of that sunny ease where friends from the neighborhood popped in. One of her problems, although she never framed it that way, lay in how to be that whispered word—a JEW, as she had been registered in the ledger of that British mental hospital—in the land of Lewis Namier’s “trembling Israelites,” a nation whose message to Jews often seemed to be: Lose yourself to join us entirely, and even then fall just a little short.
Westminster School, founded in the sixteenth century, stands on the premises of the Abbey in central London, a stone’s throw from Parliament and a short walk from Piccadilly. Geography is history. Certainly it goes some way to explain Westminster’s unusual combination among British public schools of tradition and worldliness. An establishment so close to Soho could scarcely aspire to the hearty discipline of a remote country boarding school, least of all in the permissive late 1960s and early 1970s, when I was there.
What Westminster offered was academic excellence. It was scholarly and civilized and tolerant. In the days before inspectors and academic league tables and all the deadening modern mechanisms of control and accountability—accompanied by parental hysteria over children’s performances in the global educational marketplace—it was also a place of extraordinary liberalism. Teachers whose eccentricities were indulged allowed boys (and by the time I left, a few girls) great leeway to pursue whatever inspired their passion. Exam curricula were no more than a contemptible passing consideration, it being assumed they could be covered in short order before delving deeper into Ovid or Kerouac. I recall my English teacher, John Field, writing three words in chalk on the blackboard: “Property is theft.” He then uttered one: “Discuss.” When we had dealt with that little matter, it was on to Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, a novel dense as a tropical forest. Westminster taught how, not what, to think.
Freedom nurtures individuality while indulgence may undermine it: the balance is never easy. I arrived at Westminster in January 1969. A year later a young headmaster of great energy and strong convictions, John Rae, took up the reins and, as he relates in his memoir Delusions of Grandeur, grappled at once with how to prevent the descent of invigorating tolerance into destructive permissiveness. Rae had an unusual combination of qualities. He valued Westminster’s sophistication and excellence while bridling at the elitist snobbery he had first encountered in the army—state schoolboys never became officers—and feeling unease at what he called England’s “clearly delineated social strata.” He prized merit and hated prejudice. He wanted as far as possible to treat students as adults—all the evidence of adolescence notwithstanding—and so preserve Westminster’s distinctive urbanity. At the same time, he abhorred the toll drugs in the school were taking on a quality that defines an adult: the capacity for sustained exercise of the will. Even his strong stand against marijuana was not enough to prevent some members of the school’s board of governors from regarding him as an incorrigible radical: Rae the Red. One of his last acts before departing in 1986 was to name a black girl as captain of school.
I first set eyes on Rae, a handsome man of upright bearing and chiseled features, in his long red cassock striding into the Abbey for the daily service. He had his own stall in the Abbey, inscribed with his Latin title: “Archidedasculus.” The cassock, as Rae explains in his memoir, was “the outward sign of his membership of the collegiate body of the Abbey and the school.” Henry VIII had expelled the monks at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries in England in 1540 and established the Abbey and school as a joint foundation: the dean was chairman of the school governors, the headmaster a member of the Abbey collegiate body. These were Westminster’s interlocking institutions.
The past was palpable in the flickering flame of gaslights, in the uneven paving stones of the cloisters (today they would merit a danger warning to visitors), in the nocturnal silence of Dean’s Yard (broken only by the chiming of Big Ben), and in the magnificent Abbey itself, where the fifteen-minute morning services were brief enough to be bearable but just long enough to establish some dim connection between learning about William the Conqueror and imagining his coronation there in 1066.
A child of repetitive Jewish displacement, I had somehow arrived, in the space of two generations, at a Christian epicenter of continuity. This irony was lost on me. I was unaware that my paternal grandparents and much of my mother’s family came from the shtetls of northern Lithuania; or that my upbringing, while bestowing the gifts of a superb liberal education, had also been devoted to the expunging of this past, as well as to the suppression of the not-unrelated history of my mother’s mental breakdown shortly after she reached England. On arrival in the school, I had just turned thirteen without having the bar mitzvah that was the rite of passage of generations of my forebears in the Cohen line. Sydney’s convictions and June’s brittle perfectionism informed my makeover.
Pot was everywhere, and stronger stuff not hard to find. We mocked the notion that one might lead to the other before discovering its truth. Rae writes of the late 1960s, “The use of cannabis was so widespread at Westminster that the drug was sold openly in Little Dean’s Yard and across the tables in College Hall.” There was cannabis growing in window boxes. It was everywhere. What, after all, was the point of listening to Dylan or the Grateful Dead or Jefferson Airplane or Van Morrison without a joint?
An anonymous boy interviewed in The Sunday Telegraph said he had “worked out that half of the senior boys in the upper school take or have tried cannabis. There is nothing wrong with smoking pot, but if you think there is, then a situation exists at Westminster which you would consider serious.” Rae spoke out; there was even a police raid. A few boys were expelled. Orders went out for hair to be cut so th
at it was off the shoulder, a stipulation that meant we held our heads up high when confronted by a teacher while adopting a hunch at other times to be cool. The notion that Westminster would somehow roll back the tide of swinging London was far-fetched. We laughed—and went off to the 1970 Isle of Wight rock festival to watch Jimi Hendrix, the Who, the Doors, Chicago, and Joan Baez. It rained a lot, and we were in heaven. For a fifteen-year-old, there was no arguing with the liberation in that music.
Of course, turning on and tuning in did take a toll. We noted that our all-conquering under-fourteen football team had somehow, by the time we reached senior level, become incapable of winning a single match. We had oozed languid class. Now we were simply languid. Our plummeting form drove our coach, Stew Murray, a dour and diminutive son of Yorkshire, to paroxysms of red-faced exasperation.
His was a losing battle against sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. In our last team picture, I, as captain, should have sat in the middle of the five players on the bench in the foreground, but this seems to have been too much for our distracted minds to calculate because I was off by one. We were rebels. We still had the footballing talent, but we no longer had the will. We had acquired the amused detachment that was a Westminster trait. Our pink team shirts summed up our effete turn.
I came to love the school. In English and history I was inspired by brilliant teachers—John Field and Jim Cogan. I formed lifelong friendships. Westminster was still a school attended by the children of London’s cultured professional middle classes; it was not yet coveted by the hedge-fund honchos and assorted masters of the universe who make up the global elite now bivouacked in the houses of central London with their multistory basements.
Still, adaptation took some time. I had to assert myself and emerge from a cloud. In my first term, the suppressed Jewish past came back. I kept hearing the old “Yid” insult from the boys in my dormitory. If there was a disagreement, I was a “fucking Yid.” There was more. I had earned a scholarship but not the one I would have had if Jews had not been barred from College, the house where Westminster’s forty Queen’s Scholars resided. As Rae wrote of the school he found on arrival there in 1970: “Another deterrent to prospective parents was Westminster’s reputation for anti-Semitism, a reputation that was not undeserved.”