The Girl from Human Street

by Roger Cohen

  Jonathan Katz is sent to a London junior school with what he calls “a clear Christian profile” but no restrictions on children from other religious or ethnic backgrounds. Here he encounters “a moderate British style of racist attitudes”—including taunts about rich Jews, at which he bridles: “My dad is a Jew.”

  He has been prepared. His Leipzig-born father has told him to expect to hear comments about Jews but brings him up to distinguish between conventional British anti-Semitism and people who want to kill you. The British version, to his father, is not much more than a form of insensitivity. It is only the other, lethal kind that matters. Katz takes his father’s teaching to heart.

  The question, of course, is whether the mild does not contain within it the seeds of menace. Britain’s discreet anti-Semitism seemed a good bargain to Jews in the postwar years. But the real distinction is between bigotry, even mild, and tolerance.

  BK takes from the Holocaust not the need to assert Jewish identity but the paramount need for understanding between people of different beliefs. A scientist-immigrant nurtured by British liberalism and academic freedoms, like my father, he lives his Jewishness in a minor key. He sends Katz to University College School, a liberal day school in Hampstead, and tells the headmaster that the capacity of distinct traditions to respect each other is critical.

  His parents, perceiving the Church of England as a benign and tolerant institution, decide to have Katz confirmed as an Anglican. On the night before his confirmation by the Bishop of Willesden, Katz has an identity crisis. He says to his father: “I think I might have got it wrong and I’m really a Jew and I’m not sure I believe in what I am about to take on.”

  In response his father, in the German accent he never overcame, tells the story of a Jewish boy who says to his rabbi just before his bar mitzvah that he is afraid he does not believe in God. The rabbi smiles and says, “Do you think He cares?”

  Katz goes to church regularly until he starts at Oxford. There he finds that “the metaphysics of it no longer convinced me at all.” What he is left with is a residual affection for Anglican worship, music, aesthetics, and theology.

  Just before Katz took up his job in College, he was visited in Oxford by the parents of a Jewish boy, James Fulton. Their son had had his bar mitzvah; they were worried about his Abbey duties. Katz responded that he did not have the experience to allay their concerns but imagined that the services and prayers in the splendid Abbey setting could be viewed as a beautiful metaphor for something worth deep consideration by anyone. You did not need to believe in hell, he noted, to read Dante with appreciation. Fulton went on to become captain of College. He presented Katz with a book on Israel as a leaving present.

  By 1987 there was already a large Jewish presence in College—perhaps as many as 30 percent of the students in Katz’s recollection. Rae’s fight had been won. Katz recalls teaching Yiddish songs to Jewish boys and girls, telling jokes, insisting they sometimes go home Friday night, and attending Passover seders with them. He once made the mistake of scheduling a charity event on Yom Kippur, got berated by a Jewish parent (“You of all people!”), and had to rearrange it. Asked if the school should add Jewish High Holidays to the almanac along with Easter, Ascension, and so on, he responded that, yes, that would probably be a useful reminder for most of Westminster’s Jewish parents. He put up a mezuzah on the front of the college master’s house in Dean’s Yard. It is still there. Katz thinks the works department views it as some sort of intercom.

  Katz remained as master of College for more than two decades, departing in 2010 to return to Oxford as a lecturer in classics at St. Anne’s College. Of late he has been studying Hebrew. “You get more Jewish as you grow older,” he says. The idea of conversion is quite attractive to him, but he is not sure yet. People say they feel him to be a Jew, whatever that means. “But I still feel a bit of an outsider or a fraud when I go to synagogue,” he says.

  In 2013 Katz gave a Latin sermon at the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Oxford. He quoted a verse from Hebrews: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.” He said, “Paul knows that sometimes angels do come in the guise of humans to test the hospitality of those they visit; they do so in both the pagan and the Jewish tradition.” And he noted, “There is a common thread of an idea that strangers come from God, are indeed perhaps a gift from God, and yet we know that entertaining them may bring risks as well as rewards. And here again, moral behavior, to be worth the name, presumably has to involve at least some risk of inconvenience.”

  The Katz family, like mine, came as strangers to Britain. They have been treated well, low-level anti-Semitism notwithstanding. “One takes this shit,” Katz says, “because there is so much shittier shit around. And it’s what has produced, in reaction, a lot of Jewish culture. It’s the manure.”

  My sister, Jenny, grows up believing she has been adopted. She does not need to ask; she knows. She stands at the bottom of the beautiful yard in Hampstead and says to herself: Imagine if this really was my house and these really were my parents. My mother had given birth to her only to disappear into mental hospitals. A stranger is now in the house.

  She recoils from my mother’s touch. She lies in bed and thinks: If Dad dies, I will die. June cannot explain what has happened. She cannot tell her daughter how she suffered on being forced to abandon her, how her pulse rate shot up when the doctor at the Holloway Sanatorium asked about her baby in 1958. If she had talked of her postpartum depression, things might have been different.

  Sydney is my sister’s lifeline. She adores him. My father has the capacity to elicit fear as well as love. His warmth is irresistible. His severity is frightening. She knocks on his study door with trepidation. If her school report is bad, he swivels in his desk chair and asks if she really wants to grow up to mind the cash register at Woolworths. Then he swivels back to his lab notes and Mahler.

  Sadness hangs like a pall. When I go off to board at Westminster, Jenny finds she cannot bear to be at home alone with my parents. At thirteen she goes to St. Catherine’s, a boarding school in Surrey about a dozen miles from the Holloway Sanatorium where my mother had been confined. Jenny is in chapel every evening for services, twice a day on Sunday. All her friends are being confirmed into the Anglican Church as they turn thirteen. She is the only Jew in the school. Listening to the hymns, loving the services, aware of the void inside her, she feels faith stirring. The school reverend is a cadaverous man, bald, hollow-cheeked, small and slight, with hooded eyes. His name is Irving. He listens intently to Jenny in a back room of the chapel as she explains her desire to convert and be accepted into the church. Gently, he encourages her.

  Irving drafts a letter to my parents: Your daughter has discovered Christianity. She has found faith. She wants to know the consolation of God. My mother is upset. She feels it is wrong; she is worried what our grandparents would think, particularly my Žagarė-born paternal grandmother, who is now living in London. My father says to Jenny: “Wait a year. If after that you still want to do this, we will not stand in your way.” The advice proves sound. Within a year the urge has subsided, nudged aside by the discovery of the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty album.

  “It was about belonging, simple as that,” Jenny says. “I felt this desperate need to belong.”

  Without belonging there is loss, a seed of depression. Once, when down in London on a break, Jenny goes to dinner at a friend’s house. The father is a high court judge and an alcoholic. Halfway through the meal, well oiled on whiskey and wine, he asks where Jenny lives. Her reply—Hampstead—sets him off: “Oh, I see, along with all the other rich, flashy Jews. Think you’re the chosen people, don’t you? Chosen people who can do what they damn well please. Fingers in every pie, making a killing, that’s the Jews. Tell me, Jenny, do you think you are a chosen person? Do tell us.…”

  Nobody at the table stirs, not his wife, nor any of the children. Jenny, blotchy w
ith embarrassment, runs upstairs.

  Back at St. Catherine’s, Jenny sometimes calls home in tears. It is hard to adapt to the school. My mother can only respond with tears of her own. Yet she wants to help. When Jenny has to study George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, June reads it, too. Then Jenny thinks: She cares about me enough to read the book.

  June has lost the ability to sustain the giving of love. She veers from the shrill to the shrinking. My mother could be impossible; when she was not impossible, she was heartbreaking.

  The truth does not emerge until Jenny is sixteen. She is back home by now. I am in the midst of my year off between Westminster and Oxford—not yet called a gap year—and after working as a driver for a carpet salesman have departed for Italy and then Afghanistan. June has been very down, often bed-bound. My sister returns from school with a friend. It is a hot summer’s day. She picks up a bottle of Coca-Cola and is trying to unscrew the cap when the bottle slips and smashes on a marble shelf. Shards of glass mixed in sticky Coke spray everywhere. June screams in an uncontrollable way—the telltale disproportionate reaction again. Her father, Laurie, visiting from South Africa, storms in: “I warn you, Jenny. If you carry on treating your mother like this, she will end up back in hospital.”

  Back in hospital? What does Laurie mean? When has June been in hospital before?

  My father comes home from work that evening and, confronted by Jenny’s questions, reveals what has gone unsaid in my family for sixteen years: When you were very young, your mother was in hospital for a long time suffering from depression. She is fragile. There have been signs of the affliction returning.

  Only then, as the curtain lifts at last on our story, does everything start to fall into place.

  CHAPTER 9

  Madness in the Brain

  I will begin with my mother’s suicide note to my father of July 25, 1978, found in the Hampstead house on the hill she loved; the house she had, in an access of manic activity, agreed to sell the previous March to buy a Georgian terraced jewel on Lord North Street in central London, only to cancel the sale when she plunged back into a depression in June.

  Darling Dearest and Most Precious, Never ever think you weren’t very good and kind and wonderful. It’s as though I’ve turned to stone. I can’t relate, I can’t communicate and I can no longer bear the pain and gloom I cause to those I love most.…

  In January of that year, before the manic March phase, she had been depressed and delusional during a visit to South Africa. She revealed to the British consul in Johannesburg that my father, Sydney, had been appointed Commander of the British Empire and that the honor would be conferred by the queen at Buckingham Palace on March 7, 1978. At the time, this information was not public. June began to fear arrest for her indiscretion, an anxiety compounded by the fact she had told a South African friend of her mental turmoil and convinced herself this information would reach the lord chancellor. He, in turn, would dismiss her from the position of justice of the peace for the South Westminster Division, to which she had been appointed on May 24, 1976—a year in which she had suffered from a combination of symptoms: weight loss, dizzy spells, hot flushes, blurred vision, paroxysmal tachycardia, and polydipsia, combined with alternating hyperactivity and inertia, or manic depression.

  The author in Paris, working as a freelance journalist, at the time of his mother’s visit in 1978

  All this she had kept to herself. She had to pursue her work as a magistrate and maintain the outward appearance of familial stability. What if she were found to be bipolar? What if the dark secret of her mood swings was uncovered? She had returned to London from South Africa on January 23, 1978. The sound of the doorbell at the Hampstead house terrified her. It could only be the police coming to scoop her up for divulging official secrets in South Africa. She would end up incommunicado in some lightless cell. She had a dream of birds of prey circling, like bloated flies, over a small child.

  Six days after her return, the American gentleman who lived in the apartment upstairs was killed in a freak accident. A car swerved out of control onto the sidewalk as he posted a letter at the bottom of the hill. This was ominous. She had been fond of him. He had collected antique music boxes. And that aquarium of his: the stern-eyed fish, the silvery fish in schools, the ridiculous armored rectangular fish with spikes and no tail. A few days later, in early February, a doctor suggested electroconvulsive therapy for my mother. No! Two decades on from her Holloway Sanatorium confinement, she would not return to that hell.

  Laurie, far right, up north in Egypt during World War II

  By early March her condition had improved. (There was often a fleeting moment between the depressive and manic phases where she seemed, as my father sometimes put it, “just right.”) At the palace for Sydney’s CBE, she beamed in her dusky salmon-pink knitted outfit and pretty mink hat. She looked a picture of pert pride beside my top-hatted father. A week later, on March 14, papers for the purchase of the house on Lord North Street were signed. On March 29, the sale of our house, her English anchor, was agreed. In May, buoyant, June traveled to Paris with her parents to see me. I had been living in the French capital since graduation from Oxford the previous year, teaching English and writing for a start-up magazine called Paris Métro, an ersatz Village Voice then enjoying a succès de mode among Parisian Anglophones. The year abroad was an escape. Being an outsider, I found, suited me. I was most comfortable in the role of observer.

  On the Boulevard St. Michel, June was bubbly, her sharp girlish eyes almost popping out from behind her glasses, bright as a rabbit’s at night. My grandfather Laurie wanted tripe. She laughed and averted her eyes as he wolfed it down, mopping the juices off his moustache with gusto. Tripes à la mode de Caen. She had a soft spot for his mischief—any mischief in fact. During the war, when he was “up north” in Egypt, Laurie had become legendary for his turtle-meat kreplach. He loved them, but they were generally considered the ne plus ultra of emetics.

  I offered June a ride on my motor scooter. She declined. She always hated the wind in her hair, a cause of arguments over open windows during family car rides.

  Within weeks, back in London, familiar signs of a mood shift appeared: eyes turning inward and puffy, smooth skin beginning to sag. My father noted in a journal, “Acute onset depression. Houses cancelled.” Voiding the real estate deals was neither easy nor cheap, and for June it came with guilt at the time and money wasted. One thing about mania, with its rashness and rages, is that it provides plenty of legitimate reasons for remorse during the ensuing depressive phase. She started on a new drug, Tofranil, an antidepressant, on July 5, 1978. It did not help.

  Her anxiety had been growing since 1975. That year my father injured his finger mowing the grass in the beautiful Hampstead garden he had created. The cut from the rotor blades caused a severe infection. After recurrent rigors, he was admitted to Guy’s and then St. Mary’s Hospitals. He remained intermittently ill for eighteen months. June, then aged forty-six, started on low-dose estrogen in 1975, which she took for about six months. Depressed, she was admitted to University College Hospital in late 1976, weighing one hundred pounds. She was prescribed amitriptyline. In September 1977 she entered Archway Hospital with an attack of tachycardia. It reverted after sixteen hours. The next month she was in a severe depression.

  All this turbulence coincided with the approach of menopause. Jenny and I had left home, Jenny also moving to Paris, falling in love, and staying on. The family maintained its code of silence. Rigors and racing hearts were not recounted. My home had become forbidding. Paris was a release. My first sojourn there, teaching English in a lycée, culminated with the boiling summer of 1976. City fountains dried up. People sat dazed on park benches staring into the haze. Not a bottle of water could be found. The only subject of conversation was la canicule, or heat wave. It went on and on. All barriers evaporated. Strangers opened to each other. The city was as romantic as a war zone. Pensioners died in little airless maids’ rooms under the zinc roofs.
Nobody knew. Brittle leaves on plane trees dangled motionless. Old people huddled in the patches of shade on the Place des Vosges watching list-less children in the little deserts of their sandboxes. I sat at my window and took notes.

  I pray dearest Roger and dearest Jenny will bring you comfort and joy—they are both very special. I feel I’ll never completely throw off this mood and hopelessness and depression. I know I have everything to thank God for and be thankful for, which only makes my ordeal worse and worse.…

  In June’s purse were her Rothmans filter-tipped cigarettes that would be stained with her lipstick; her lighter; scraps of paper picked up here and there with notes scrawled on them; Ysatis perfume by Givenchy; ads for trips she thought of taking or trinkets she thought of acquiring; car keys and house keys; her makeup compact; a special offer for a hotel in Acapulco (she loved Mexico); articles about the law and the role of magistrates; a diary filled with her flowing handwriting; and lines of Coleridge from Christabel (“And life is thorny; and youth is vain; / And to be wroth with one we love, / Doth work like madness in the brain”).

  Madness in the brain, everything raveled and no way to untangle the web. Better a horse that rears than a horse that bucks. The madness was a bucking horse. It made a mockery of control. You were always under the harrow. I wanted so much to clear away the clutter in my mother’s mind. I dreamed of calm and ease between us and her return to life.

  The suicide note was beside her bed, folded in an envelope:

  You are made to do great things, make immensely useful discoveries to aid all mankind and I’m leaving you to continue unimpeded by my burden. I so much hoped to help you and to help you and to love and adore you …