Judith

by Lawrence Durrell

  The Nazi attempt to destroy European Jewry, the Holocaust, created the huge wave of immigrants, both during the 1930s and the world war and its aftermath, which made the crisis so acute. This was, of course, totally unexpected. ‘It was never conceived by the British Government that Palestine would of necessity become the country of refuge for hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of desperate Jewish refugees, of all ages and conditions, with no place else to go.’76 But, as David Ben-Gurion wryly observed,

  Had partition been carried out [before the Second World War], the history of our people would have been different and six million Jews in Europe would not have been killed — most of them would be in Israel.77

  The conditions in which these refugees travelled were indicative of both their determination to escape from persecution and their passionate desire to reach the new homeland. Tom Segev quotes the observations of one British officer watching the disembarkation of such a shipload:

  They stepped ashore after long weeks of horrible crowding on the decks of barely serviceable vessels; the conditions were worse than on old-time slave ships.... Amazingly, he saw no misery among the passengers, only exultation. A strange light shone in their eyes. When the immigrants made out the cliffs of Mount Carmel and the blue mountains of Galilee, they would break out in song ...ancient Hebrew melodies.78

  Durrell captures it well, when Judith assists at a disembarkation where she meets Grete Schiller:

  Now Judith had the chance for the first time of witnessing the different reactions of these arrivals. Some had thrown themselves on the ground, others were laughing and crying, others kissing the wet sand. Most of the refugees were wearing on their backs all the clothes they possessed. (p. 72)

  Durrell himself had witnessed scenes similar to what he describes in chapter 9 of Judith, ‘Operation “Welcome” ’, in which ships dodged the British blockade of the Palestine coastline in order to set ashore their illegal human cargo. In 1946 he and his second wife, Eve, had travelled on a Greek naval vessel as part of a rescue of refugees from a sunken ship:

  Eight of the refugees had died when the ship had run aground and sunk, but some eight hundred had reached land and were spilled about under the moonlight in a natural amphitheatre. The sight had a weird, ghostly unreality. Larry and Eve spent the next morning ashore, monitoring radio transmissions and talking to the refugees.79

  One of the problems for assimilation of Jews into the state of Israel was the fact that they came from so many different backgrounds and cultures. Although Herzl had argued that the Jews were a cohesive entity for which the homeland would be provided (‘We are a people — one people’),80 it had equally been argued that ‘There is no Jewish race now as a homogenous whole’, and that a Jewish homeland in Palestine would be composed of ‘a polyglot, many-colored, heterogeneous collection of people of different civilizations and different ordinances and different traditions’.81

  The state, Israel, would be a home not to a homogeneous people but to disparate peoples from sixty or seventy countries (the number varies in Judith), many of whom had no common language. As Amos Oz has written,

  The Jews from ninety-six different countries of origin ... shared a common literary, liturgical and cultural tradition [but] ... One need spend only a couple of minutes on any street here to discover that there is no such thing as a Jewish race. Jews are not an ethnic group and the only unifying force is in their heads.82

  Durrell, alert to the pathos and the macabre humour of the situation, addresses this in Judith, when he has Rebecca Peterson say of a neighbouring settlement:

  Tell them from me that they are just a bunch of Glasgow Jews thriving on the sharp practice they picked up from the Scots. Tell them, moreover, that we honest lowland Jews from Poland, Latvia, Russia and Brooklyn hold them in massive contempt. (p. 44)

  And the places from which they have come provide the names of their settlements: Brisbane, Brooklyn, Odessa, Calcutta, Warsaw, Glasgow.... Durrell may also have borrowed something of the same sense of heterogeneity from A Chair for the Prophet (1959) by his third wife, Claude Vincendon:

  How in Heaven’s name could they expect a national alchemy to fuse and homogenize in an already overflowing melting-pot — Germans and Russians, Spaniards and Englishmen, and the hordes of street-arabs?83

  In the late 1930s George Antonius pointed out a crucial defect in Arab self-promotion:

  The Arabs have little of the skill, polyglottic ubiquity or financial resources which make Jewish propaganda so effective. The result is that, for a score of years or so, the world has been looking at Palestine mainly through Zionist spectacles and has unconsciously acquired the habit of reasoning on Zionist premises.84

  American support for Israel has, until recently, been unwavering and largely uncritical,85 and this has created a climate of public opinion in which the world has seen the Israelis as the ‘victims’ of history and the Arabs as the aggressors. Antonius went on to say that

  The fact must be faced that the violence of the Arabs is the inevitable corollary of the moral violence done to them, and that it is not likely to cease, whatever the brutality of the repression, unless the moral violence itself were to cease.86

  Since it was impossible to persuade Arabs and Jews to sit at the same table for discussions, co-operation was out of the question, as was the long-term goal of a binational state. The manifest sympathy for the Jewish problem, precipitated by the revelation of the Holocaust, served to occlude the position of the Palestinian Arabs. The 1948 attempt by Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq to stifle the infant state of Israel, followed by those of 1967 and 1973, reinforced the world’s view that Israel was a vulnerable state which deserved support. It was only with the recalcitrant move by hardliners in the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1978 that public opinion began to accept that there was a Palestinian side to the problem which had been neglected, perhaps because it had not been articulated as effectively as the Israeli side. As Amos Oz has said,

  the wars we led in 1948, 1967 and 1973 were a matter of life and death. Had we lost those wars, Israel would not exist today. By contrast, the Lebanon War was optional ... [it] was not a matter of life and death.87

  The intensity of mutual fear and repulsion is expressed graphically in two declarations: in 1928 Chaim Shalom Halevi said of the Arabs: ‘They hate us and they are right, because we hate them too, hate them with a deadly hatred’;88 while in 1944 the Nazi-oriented Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, urged: ‘Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history and religion’.89 Such expressions make explicit what is only slightly diminished by diplomatic manoeuvres such as the Camp David Accords engineered by President Jimmy Carter in 1978 between Egypt’s President Sadat and Israel’s Prime Minister Begin. Anyone who witnessed, during the Six Day War, King Hussein of Jordan saying of the Jews, ‘They will be our enemies until the end of time’ will appreciate not only the depth of Arab feeling but also the inevitable fact that reciprocal Jewish feeling would be expressed with equal force by Israeli statesmen such as Benjamin Netanyahu.

  As General (later Field Marshal) Montgomery said in 1939, ‘the Jew murders the Arab and the Arab murders the Jew. This is what is going on in Palestine now. And it will go on for the next 50 years in all probability’.90 He was wrong only in his fifty-year forecast. Again, there are geopolitics at stake, as Robert Fisk has pointed out:

  The 1948 war threw up extraordinary portents of other, later, Middle East wars — of events that we regard as causes of present danger but which have clearly been a feature of conflict in the region for longer than we like to imagine.91

  •

  One need not make any exaggerated claims for Judith as a work of great literature: its origins as a film project indicate that it belongs with a collection of Durrell’s writings (‘a lot of things I want to write which don’t come into the same class as...) at a level slightly lower than his major works. But
its continuing relevance to the painful situation in the Middle East today makes it a compelling example of Durrell’s ability to write a story which also conveys an enduring sense of hope and tragedy.

  1 Justine was shortlisted for the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in 1957, and its sequel, Balthazar, won the prize in 1959.

  2 Cf. Gordon Bowker, Through the Dark Labyrinth: A Biography of Lawrence Durrell (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996), pp. 306, 313.

  3 Quoted in Ian MacNiven, Lawrence Durrell: A Biography (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), p. 533.

  4 Quoted in ibid., p. 540.

  5 Quoted in ibid., p. 532.

  6 Ibid., p. 533; and MacNiven, e-mail to the editor, 10 October 2011.

  7 L. Durrell, ‘1st Cleopatra treatment’, c. 1960, in Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Collection 42/13/5.

  8 Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Collection 42/17.

  9 The Aberdeen Press and Journal reported on 20 August 1964 that ‘The countries of the Arab League will ban all films starring Sophia Loren unless she withdraws from a picture being made in Israel about a Jewish refugee’.

  10 Woman’s Own, 26 February–2 April 1966.

  11 Letter from Juliet O’Hea, Durrell’s agent at Curtis Brown, to Durrell, 26 June 1972.

  12 Ian MacNiven (ed.), The Durrell–Miller Letters 1935–1980 (London: Faber & Faber, 1988), p. 81.

  13 Ibid., pp. 84, 86.

  14 Ibid., p. 186.

  15 Miller also advised Durrell not to waste time on the ‘Antrobus’ stories (quoted in MacNiven, Lawrence Durrell, p. 571). Durrell had written to Miller: ‘I didn’t send you Esprit de Corps; thought you mightn’t find it funny. I had to pay for the baby’s shoes somehow and wrote it in a very short time’ (Durrell–Miller Letters, p. 306).

  16 G. S. Fraser, Lawrence Durrell: A Study (London: Faber & Faber, 1968), p. 40.

  17 Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Collection 42/19/8; cf. Lawrence Durrell, Nunquam (London: Faber & Faber, 1970), p. 52.

  18 Lawrence Durrell, ‘The Minor Mythologies’, Deus Loci, NS7 (1999–2000), pp. 11–20.

  19 Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State (London: Penguin, 2010), p. 1.

  20 A. M. Hyamson, Palestine under the Mandate 1920–1948 (London: Methuen, 1950), p. v.

  21 Quoted in A. J. Sherman, Mandate Days: British Lives in Palestine 1918–1948 (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 13.

  22 George Antonius, The Arab Awakening (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1939), p. 248.

  23 Ibid., p. 404.

  24 Jonathan Schneer, The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab–Israeli Conflict (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), p. 369.

  25 Dawoud El-Alami in Dan Cohn-Sherbok and Dawoud El-Alami, The Palestine–Israeli Conflict (Oxford: Oneworld, 2001), p. 144.

  26 David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (London: André Deutsch, 1989), p. 520.

  27 Quoted in Hyamson, Palestine under the Mandate, p. 36.

  28 Quoted in Sherman, Mandate Days, p. 237.

  29 Hyamson, Palestine under the Mandate, p. 116.

  30 Sherman, Mandate Days, p. 29.

  31 Schneer, Balfour Declaration, p. 376.

  32 Quoted in Sherman, Mandate Days, p. 87.

  33 Sherman, Mandate Days, pp. 151–152.

  34 Quoted in Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (London: Harper Perennial, 2006), p. 451.

  35 Sherman, Mandate Days, p. 61.

  36 Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate, tr. Haim Watzman (London: Little, Brown, 2000), p. 192.

  37 Antonius, Arab Awakening, pp. 403, 411.

  38 Segev, One Palestine, Complete, p. 193.

  39 Herzl, Jewish State, pp. 4, 78.

  40 Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet (London: Faber & Faber, 1962), p. 533.

  41 Segev, One Palestine, Complete, p. 6.

  42 Quoted in ibid., p. 116.

  43 Najib Azuri, quoted in ibid., p. 105.

  44 Fisk, Great War, p. 448.

  45 Quoted in Hyamson, Palestine under the Mandate, p. 8.

  46 Eliot’s character Mordecai argues: ‘The effect of our separateness will not be completed and have its highest transformation unless our race takes on again the character of a nationality.... There is a store of wisdom among us to found a new Jewish polity’ – George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (Ware, UK: Wordsworth, 1996), pp. 442–443. Eliot was also prescient in predicting, ‘We may live to see a great outburst of force in the Arabs’ (ibid., p. 434).

  47 Quoted in Schneer, Balfour Declaration, p. 125.

  48 Cf. ibid., p. 112.

  49 Cf. Hyamson, Palestine under the Mandate, p. 25.

  50 Cf. Segev, One Palestine, Complete, p. 40.

  51 Herzl, Jewish State, pp. 1, 30.

  52 Quoted in Fromkin, Peace to End All Peace, pp. 520–521.

  53 Herzl, Jewish State, p. 30.

  54 Quoted in Antonius, Arab Awakening, p. 264.

  55 Cf. Segev, One Palestine, Complete, p. 4.

  56 Quoted in Sherman, Mandate Days, p. 171.

  57 Quoted in Fromkin, Peace to End All Peace, pp. 270–271.

  58 Sherman, Mandate Days, p. 15.

  59 Quoted in Segev, One Palestine, Complete, p. 199.

  60 See Glossary.

  61 Cf. Hyamson, Palestine under the Mandate, p. 139.

  62 Segev, One Palestine, Complete, p. 9.

  63 Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet, p. 473.

  64 Fromkin, Peace to End All Peace, pp. 504–505.

  65 Leon Uris, Exodus (New York: Bantam, 1959), pp. 19–20.

  66 Ibid., p. 95.

  67 Ibid., p. 174.

  68 Amos Oz, Israel, Palestine and Peace: Essays (London: Vintage, 1994), pp. xii, 69.

  69 Aggression between Palestinian Arabs and Jewish settlers had existed as early as 1891: Cohn-Sherbok and El-Alami, Palestine–Israeli Conflict, p. 134.

  70 Quoted in Fromkin, Peace to End All Peace, p. 523.

  71 Quoted in Sherman, Mandate Days, p. 26.

  72 Segev, One Palestine, Complete, pp. 249, 257.

  73 Ibid., p. 379.

  74 Haim Canaani (ed.), Shamir during the War of Independence (Kibbutz Shamir, n.d.).

  75 Kibbutz Shamir has grown significantly in recent years, from a population of 600 in 2006 to 800 in 2009, of whom a quarter are children. Today it is one of the most advanced kibbutzim, engaged in the manufacture of optical equipment as well as in agricultural production.

  76 Sherman, Mandate Days, p. 90.

  77 Quoted in Segev, One Palestine, Complete, p. 414.

  78 Ibid., p. 230. See also Sherman, Mandate Days, p. 130.

  79 MacNiven, Lawrence Durrell, p. 333.

  80 Herzl, Jewish State, p. 8.

  81 The Liberal politician Edwin Montagu, in 1915, quoted in Schneer, Balfour Declaration, p. 146.

  82 Oz, Israel, Palestine and Peace, p. 53.

  83 Claude, A Chair for the Prophet (London: Faber & Faber, 1959), p. 9.

  84 Antonius, Arab Awakening, p. 387.

  85 Cf. Fisk, Great War, p. 463.

  86 Antonius, Arab Awakening, p. 409.

  87 Oz, Israel, Palestine and Peace, pp. 46–47.

  88 Quoted in Segev, One Palestine, Complete, p. 307.

  89 Quoted in Fisk, Great War, p. 444.

  90 Quoted in Segev, One Palestine, Complete, p. 442.

  91 Fisk, Great War, p. 460.

  Acknowledgements

  The Editor wishes to thank the following for their assistance in the preparation of this publication:

  Dr. James Bantin, Curator, Special Collections, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale;

  Anthea Morton Saner, formerly Lawrence Durrell’s agent at Curtis Brown;

  Anna Davis, currently agent for the Lawrence Durrell Estate at Curtis Brown;

  Brewster Chamberlin, author of A Chronology of the Life and Times of Lawrence Durrell;

&nbs
p; Ian MacNiven, author of Lawrence Durrell: A Biography and editor of The Durrell–Miller Letters 1935–1980;

  Dr. Yaacov Lozowick, Director of the Israeli State Archives;

  Dr. Hagai Tsoref, Israeli State Archives;

  Yehudit Massad and Joan Halfi, archivists, Kibbutz Shamir, Israel;

  Jenny Romero, Special Collections Department Co-ordinator, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles;

  Patrick Sammon, a colleague in the Durrell School of Corfu, who gave considerable assistance and advice during proofreading;

  and in particular my colleague Dr. Anthony Hirst, Academic Director of the Durrell School of Corfu, for professional support, also for assistance in compiling the Glossary, and for preparing the text for printing.

  Glossary

  Abbreviations

  ADC Aide-de-camp: usually an assistant or adviser to a senior officer.

  ATS Auxiliary Territorial Service: the title of the women volunteers’ branch of the British army, 1938–1949.

  BEA British European Airways: precursor (with British Overseas Airways Corporation) of British Airways.

  C-in-C Commander-in-Chief.

  D.P. Displaced Persons.

  G.S.O.2 General Staff Officer, 2nd Grade.

  H.E. His Excellency: title usually applied to an Ambassador.

  H.M.G. His Majesty’s Government: at the time in which Judith is set, the British monarch was George VI (reigned 1936–1952).