by Roger Cohen
I am lucky to have in Amanda Urban an extraordinary agent whose creative support for my work now extends over more than two decades. Sonny Mehta has always encouraged me to write books. At Knopf, I also wish to thank Meghan Houser and Ellen Feldman for their superb professionalism. My particular gratitude goes to my editor, Jonathan Segal, who helped me conceive this idea, prodded me in moments of difficulty, brought his discerning eye to every phrase, and made whatever I did better. It goes without saying that responsibility for any errors is mine alone.
Rebecca Ring made an immense contribution to this book through her insight and intuition. She saw me through.
This is the story of a family over several generations. Without my family’s support I could not have reached understanding. I wish to thank my sister, Jenny Walden, who shared more intensely than anyone several of the experiences related here. Francesca Gardiner was a very sensitive reader. Barbara Brown took notes that made a difference. Frida Baranek always urged me to forge pain into expression. The last act of my uncle Bert Cohen, an immense figure in my life, was to read the manuscript with his customary illuminating meticulousness. My father, Sydney Cohen, challenged me to understand.
My children, Jessica, Daniel, Blaise, and Adele, know too much by now of the demands book writing makes on their father. They were a constant inspiration. With this knowledge, on this foundation, may they and their children love, prosper, and be happy.
Notes
CHAPTER 1 Circle of Disquiet
1 “If there is any substitute”: Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), p. 150.
2 About eight thousand Jews were still there: In my discussions of the Šiauliai or Shavel Jews in this and subsequent chapters, I relied upon the work of Ellen Cassedy, who details their plight in We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), p. 253. See also The Šiauliai Ghetto: Lists of Prisoners (Vilnius: Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, 2002), pp. 202–54, and Christoph Dieckmann and Saulius Sužiedėlis, The Persecution and Mass Murder of Lithuanian Jews (Vilnius: Margi raštai, 2006). See also Nancy Schoenburg and Stuart Schoenburg, Lithuanian Jewish Communities (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1996), pp. 271–77 and 389–93.
3 A massacre of at least 2,250 Jews: On the Žagarė massacre, see Rose Zwi, Last Walk in Naryshkin Park (Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 1997), an invaluable source for the story of the town and the massacre of its Jews in 1941. See also the chapter on the Žagarė ghetto in The Šiauliai Ghetto, pp. 254–58.
4 “sense of personal contamination”: Saul Bellow, “A Jewish Writer in America—II,” New York Review of Books, November 10, 2011.
5 “No one loves victims”: Joseph Roth, The Wandering Jews (London: Granta Books, 2001), p. 124.
6 “You really had brought”: Kafka quoted in Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), p. 79.
7 “Previous generations knew much less”: Meyerhoff quoted ibid.
CHAPTER 2 Bones in the Forest
1 Seldom did he talk about the catastrophe: Interviews with Mendelson’s sons Mejeris and Vidmantas, Vilnius, November 2011.
2 “Asiatic Bolshevik slavery”: Quoted in Rose Zwi, Last Walk in Naryshkin Park (Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 1997), p. 130.
3 “long-standing Jewish yoke”: Ibid., p. 233.
4 “I should like to call you”: Anna Akhmatova: Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets (New York: Alfred A. Knopf/Everyman’s Library, 2006), p. 193.
5 The Naryshkins: Zwi, Last Walk in Naryshkin Park, p. 245.
6 That year Cossacks swept: Ibid., p. 14.
7 “When my mother evoked”: Mya Tannenbaum, Fuga dalla Polonia (Novara: Interlinia Edizioni, 2010), p. 104.
8 When Soviet forces: The Šiauliai Ghetto: Lists of Prisoners (Vilnius: Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, 2002), p. 257.
9 “I can confirm”: Jäger quoted in Christoph Dieckmann and Saulius Sužiėdelis, The Persecution and Mass Murder of Lithuanian Jews (Vilnius: Margi raštai, 2006), p. 229.
10 “The murder of the Jews”: Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (London: Vintage, 2011), p. 345.
11 “rootless cosmopolitans”: Ibid., p. 348.
12 He worked for a time: Details on the lives of soldiers in the Sixteenth Lithuanian Division of the Red Army are documented in Road to Victory: Jewish Soldiers in the 16th Lithuanian Division, ed. Dorothy Leivers (Bergenfield, NJ: Avotaynu, 2009).
13 On the morning of October 2, 1941: The Šiauliai Ghetto: Lists of Prisoners, p. 256.
14 “As these Jews were being led away”: Dieckmann and Sužiedėlis, Persecution and Mass Murder, p. 226.
15 “The murderers laid her down”: Peretzman quoted in Zwi, Last Walk in Naryshkin Park, p. 106.
CHAPTER 3 Gin and Two
1 “You coolies are not allowed”: Bruce K. Murray, Wits: The Open Years (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1997), p. 56.
2 With conspicuous exceptions: That Jews disproportionately opposed apartheid is discussed in Gideon Shimoni, Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2003).
3 “foreign”: Jewish Migration to South Africa: Passenger Lists from the UK 1890–1905, consulted at the South African Jewish Museum, Cape Town.
4 escorted to the Shelter: Aubrey N. Newman, Nicholas J. Evans, J. Graham Smith, and Saul W. Issroff, The Poor Jews’ Temporary Shelter and Migration to South Africa, 1885–1914 (Cape Town: Jewish Publications South Africa, 2006).
5 A few Jews: The history of some of South Africa’s most successful businessmen is vividly chronicled in Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The Randlords: The Men Who Made South Africa (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993). See also Milton Shain, The Roots of Antisemitism in South Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 2001).
6 “Jewburg”: Richard Mendelsohn and Milton Shain, The Jews in South Africa: An Illustrated History (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2008), p. 42.
7 “To the ordinary member of the public”: Ibid., p. 45.
8 “sixty-eight Cohens”: Ibid., p. 42.
9 “the Jews who had come to South Africa”: Milton Shain, Jewry and Cape Society (Johannesburg: Historical Publication Society, 1983), p. 12.
10 “My rational mind is nonetheless unable”: W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (New York: New Directions, 1999), p. 187.
11 large enough to host a minyan: Ralph Cohen, “Krugersdorp Jewish Community Celebrating Diamond Jubilee on Sunday,” Zionist Record, April 9, 1954.
12 In 1902 the town’s first synagogue: Arthur Tannenbaum, “The Early Days of Krugersdorp’s Jewish Community,” Jewish Affairs, October 1962, pp. 8–11.
13 “This abbreviated form of the Prayer Book”: Michael Adler, Prayer Book for Jewish Soldiers and Sailors (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1914).
14 “History will ask”: Rev. Michael Adler, War Diaries, January 1915–November 1918, University of Southampton Archives, Samuel Krauss Collection; and Michael Adler, ed., The British Jewry Book of Honour (London: Caxton, 1922).
CHAPTER 4 In the Barrel
1 Sylvia Plath had the same treatment: Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (London: William Heinemann, 1966), p. 138.
2 I tracked down George Gordimer: This chapter is based largely on a series of interviews I conducted with Gordimer and his wife, Dorothy, in 2012 and 2013.
3 “Germans brought fox and wild boar skins”: The Šiauliai Ghetto: Lists of Prisoners (Vilnius: Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, 2002), p. 210.
4 “the gray zone”: Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 58.
5 “When they ask me for a thousand Jews”: Jacob Gens quoted in Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews (New York: HarperPerennial, 1988).
6 “The day that our representatives”: Miriam Offer, “Medicine in the Shavli Ghetto in Light of the Diary of Dr. Aaron Pik,” YIVO Ins
titute for Jewish Research, International Conference, November 3–5, 1996, p. 4.
7 “The only place”: Ibid., p. 3.
8 “Injections of potent poisonous drugs”: Ibid., p. 5.
9 “Both ghetto gates were besieged”: Ellen Cassedy, We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), pp. 248–49; emphasis added.
10 “The SS wants me to kill children”: Israel Gutman, Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (New York: Mariner, 1998), p. 136.
11 “Though the responsibility for the crime”: Quoted in Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (London: Vintage, 2011), p. 292.
12 “Under conditions of terror”: Hannah Arendt, “A Reporter at Large: V—Eichmann in Jerusalem,” New Yorker, March 16, 1963, p. 58.
13 “The question was to be or not to be”: Cassedy, We Are Here, pp. 216–17.
14 “The morning after my brother was transported”: Declaration given to me by George Gordimer.
15 “In the summer of 1998”: A copy of this account for MIT was given to me by George Gordimer.
CHAPTER 5 Château Michel
1 An inventory of Isaac’s furniture: Found in the National Archives and Record Services in Pretoria, which houses documents of the South African government, institutions, and individuals.
2 Len Miller wrote to me: The history here of the OK Bazaars was informed by conversations and e-mail exchanges with Len Miller, before his death in 2013, and by pages from his father’s unpublished memoir.
3 “I normally tell people”: Quoted in City Press, June 1, 2012.
4 Operation Matateh: Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008).
5 “orchestrated to transmit”: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), p. 44.
6 “The political misfortune”: Freud quoted ibid., p. 111.
7 Barnato was born Barnett Isaacs: This account of his life is drawn chiefly from Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The Randlords: The Men Who Made South Africa (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993).
8 by then more than five million had been gassed: Cited in Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (London: Vintage, 2011), p. 343.
9 “Jewish resistance in Warsaw”: Ibid., p. 292.
CHAPTER 6 Picnic in a Cemetery
1 “sufficient defense to any charge”: This is from the Immorality Act of 1957, before it was amended and renamed the Sexual Offences Act.
2 “There was a sense of déjà-vu”: This section is based on André Ungar, interview by author.
3 “Any person who willfully enters”: From the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act, 1953.
4 “I have been reproached”: Quoted in Gideon Shimoni, Community and Conscience: The Jews in Apartheid South Africa (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2003), pp. 13–14.
5 “The non-intervention of the Board”: Arthur Suzman quoted in Jewish Affairs, June 1974, pp. 28–29.
6 “There is no occasion”: Quoted in Shimoni, Community and Conscience, p. 39.
7 South Africa’s brave chief rabbi: Shimoni, Community and Conscience, provided important details about Rabinowitz. 128 “There are some Jews in the community”: Ibid., p. 42.
8 “No form of oppression”: Ronald Segal quoted in Richard Mendelsohn and Milton Shain, The Jews in South Africa: An Illustrated History (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2008), p. 138.
9 “As a result of their upbringing”: Cited ibid., p. 139.
10 “a picnic in a beautiful cemetery”: Nadine Gordimer, The Lying Days (London: Bloomsbury, 2002), p. 366.
11 “commitment to justice”: Quoted in Shimoni, Community and Conscience, p. 138.
12 Tensions rose: Information on the Sharpeville massacre and aftermath ibid., pp. 64–66.
CHAPTER 7 Patient Number 9413
1 “We are in a mental hospital”: This section is based on Joy Whitfield, interview by author, August 5, 2012, and a tour of what was the Holloway Sanatorium.
2 “Young children are”: Anthony Storr, Human Aggression (London: Allen Lane, 1968), p. 80.
CHAPTER 8 Jews in a Whisper
1 “In England, whenever I’m in a public place”: Philip Roth, Novels and Other Narratives 1986–1991 (New York: Library of America, 2008), p. 506.
2 “the intergenerational quizzing”: Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger, Jews and Words (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 35.
3 “I have discovered in myself”: Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2010), pp. 213–15.
4 A year later a young headmaster: Information on John Rae’s tenure is drawn largely from his autobiography, Delusions of Grandeur: A Headmaster’s Life, 1966–1986 (New York: HarperCollins, 1994). Further information on John Rae was drawn from his posthumously published book, The Old Boys’ Network: John Rae’s Diaries, 1970–1986 (London: Short Books Ltd., 2009).
5 “worked out that half”: Quoted in Rae, Delusions of Grandeur, p. 76.
6 “Another deterrent”: Ibid., p. 87.
7 “No boy who is not a British subject”: Interview and e-mail exchange with Elizabeth Wells.
8 “The demography of London”: John Field, interview by author, November 2009.
9 “I thought her an unattractive parent”: Quoted in Rae, Delusions of Grandeur, pp. 87–88.
10 “we needed all the bright boys”: Ibid., pp. 88–89.
11 “The European Jew was always a visitor”: Karl Shapiro, Creative Glut: Selected Essays of Karl Shapiro (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004), p. 303.
12 “We wanted to shake off the fears”: Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Biography (New York: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), p. 137.
13 “a self-sufficient people”: Ben-Gurion quoted in Karen Armstrong, Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today’s World (New York: Anchor, 2001), p. 85.
14 Fifteen years after I left Westminster: This section is based on a series of interviews I conducted with Jonathan Katz in 2013 and 2014.
15 “Wherever they burn books”: A widely accepted translation of the original German. Heinrich Heine, Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).
CHAPTER 9 Madness in the Brain
1 “Everything has gone from me”: A suicide note by Virginia Woolf, quoted in Herbert Marder, The Measure of Life: Virginia Woolf’s Last Years (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 342.
2 “What is important for a painter”: Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories of a City (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), p. 378.
3 “As an experience”: Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume IV, 1929–1931 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978), p. 180.
4 “The adjective endogenous”: Anthony Storr, Human Aggression (London: Allen Lane, 1968), p. 74.
5 “At this point in my existence”: Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), pp. 88–89.
CHAPTER 10 The Lark Sings and Falls
1 Rena, I will call her: The account, in this and the next chapter, of my cousin’s life and suicide is based on multiple interviews conducted over many months with all her closest family members in Israel, as well as with friends, family, and acquaintances in South Africa and the United States. Because of the painful nature of her story, and its difficult legacy, her family requested that names be changed; I have respected that wish here. I have taken liberties in rendering my cousin’s thoughts and doubts. While nobody can be certain of what precisely was in her head at what moment, as her moods careened and her life moved toward its tragic end, the story told here reflects the observations and descriptions of those who knew her best, as well as the often anguished reflections contained in her own journals.
2 “discharge from a deeper wound”: Gustave Flaubert quoted in Adam Thirlwell, The Delighted States (London: Picador, 2010), p. 21.
3 “The great advantage of being a
chosen people”: Vikram Seth, Two Lives (New York: Penguin, 2008), p. 343.
4 “an international warrant”: Benny Morris, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 65.
5 “If there is one nation”: Joseph Roth, The Wandering Jews (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), p. 52.
6 “We pay close attention”: Yitzhak Epstein’s “The Hidden Question,” quoted in Alan Dowty, “ ‘A Question That Outweighs All Others’: Yitzhak Epstein and Zionist Recognition of the Arab Issue,” Israel Studies 6, no. 1 (Spring 2001), p. 40.
7 “It is important to build”: Vladimir Jabotinsky quoted in Karen Armstrong, Holy War: The Crusades and Their Impact on Today’s World (New York: Random House, 2001), p. 103.
CHAPTER 11 Death in the Holy Land
1 “Writing is the only way”: W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (New York: New Directions, 1999), p. 255.
2 tzir sterili: Jonathan Freedland, “An Exclusive Corner of Hebron,” New York Review of Books, February 23, 2012.
3 “the corruption characteristic”: Yeshayahu Liebowitz quoted in Gershom Gorenberg, The Unmaking of Israel (New York: HarperPerennial, 2012), p. 66.
4 “If Israel really believed”: Ibid., p. 77.
5 “Eretz Yisrael is ours”: Yitzhak Shamir quoted in Ian Lustick, Unsettled States, Disputed Lands (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 358.