A Personal/Open Letter to Naz Shah

Dear Ms Shah,

You don't know me and I only read about you in the Guardian article that stated your opinions regarding Israel and Israelis, and the subsequent turn of events. Still since you showed such interest in the future of my country and its people I would like to tell you a little about my past, it is a typical Jewish story

The last time my father saw his parents and his brother was in 1934, when he was 21 year old. He had worked for a Jewish firm in Berlin, and as the Nazis were putting a pressure of everything Jewish, the firm was transferred to Tel Aviv, my father moved there as well. This is how my father was the only one from his family to be saved from the Nazis.

My mother came to Tel Aviv, at the age of 17 with her family, they were Zionists and were granted certificates to immigrate to Israel because my grandfather had a job waiting, and his children were all under 18.

At that time, the 1930s, my country was under a  British Mandate (it got the mandate to rule that area in the early 1920s and it lasted till 1948) Immigration was banned, but some certificates were granted, my parents were the lucky ones. 

Please keep reading in the Times Of Israel

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/a-personalopen-letter-to-naz-shah/

“I Don't Want To Spoil The Party": Some Unpleasant Facts about Barbara Pym's Biography

 JUN.02.2013

I have been debating whether her 100th birthday is an appropriate opportunity to discuss some unpleasant facts in Barbara Pym’s biography.  But since Barbara Pym herself loved to expose different types of unpleasantness I decided that I might as well do it now. 

 I shall start with a personal story.

In 2004 when I wrote my PhD dissertation on Barbara Pym’s 1950s novels I stayed in Oxford Britain for 3 weeks to work on her manuscripts.  For days I sat at  “Modern Papers”  a special material room at the Bodleian Library. One day I came across an early version of, what later became, her first novel  Some Tame Gazelle. It tells the story of two sisters Barbara and Hilary and they are portrayed as two middle-aged spinsters. In the scene below they are knitting  for the poor Nazis who, having  lost the war, are in exile in Africa:

 Miscellaneous papers, 1973, n.d. Shelfmark: MS. Pym 99 Extent: i + 173 leaves

 “‘Oh dear’, sighed Barbara, putting down the vest she was knitting for the Nazi exiles in Africa”. . . Of course it had been rather extravagant of her to use such an expensive wool to knit a Charity garment , but she excused herself by remarking that after all the Nazis were rather “special people” Friedbert had been a Nazi. “Dear Friedbert”, she murmured, rolling her eyes.She was wondering whether to wear her little swastika brooch or not.  Dear Friedbert had been so pleased at this sign of her presumable sympathy with the National Socialist Party. ‘Die Deutche ugend liebt ihr Vaterland’. . . how did the rest of it go, something about following the Fuhrer, anyway she had it written on the speech of Hitler’s that Friedbert had sent her once, such a long time ago. Liebfraumilch always reminded Barbara of the Rhineland which she had visited in the spring when she was twenty. The Nazis were young and arrogant then and she had hardly known which she liked best Hans of Friedbert.  “The sad state of the poor Nazis in Africa is a subject very dear to my heart’ ‘Yes’ said Mr. Harvey ‘ we must do all we can for them. Of course I suppose everyone realized that the Nazi regime could not last for- ever. Hitler was a powerful personality, but after he went there was really no one to lead them’. Barbara had always thought that Friedbert would make a good Fuhrer, and much handsomer than Hitler.   

Nothing had prepared me for the shock and the nausea which I felt upon reading this passage. In the mid-1930s Pym, among others in her Oxford social milieu, was apparently infatuated with the outward symbols of Nazism. At this period in her life she can almost be considered a Nazi sympathizer. This part of Pym’s biography has not been fully explored or satisfactorily accounted for.  According to her biographer Anne Wyatt Brown, she never fully explained that episode in her personal history. Yet Brown mentions that Pym was an impressionable 20 year old and apparently in love with a German student at the time (1992: 33).

 Although I read in her biography that Pym has been to Germany 5 times from 1934 to 1938, it did not register. But this flippant (almost silly) passage of fiction with its seemingly innocuous information was too sinister  for me.  At one point during that summer I even considered dropping the project altogether. I tried to calm down by reminding myself that Pym was very young at the time, I read books which could help me understand the zeitgeist in 1938. But one book of newspapers clippings from 1938 convinced me that one had to be quite blind not to see what was growing in Germany at the time. Still many chose not to see, even Jews like my grandparents refused to believe and stayed in Berlin.

 So I decided not to judge the young Barbara Pym too harshly and completed the dissertation.

 In the six post-war novels, Germany and the Holocaust are not mentioned even once. Pym may have been uneasy about her past attitudes, but instead of dealing with the existence of evil she has created an alternative church-centered world, where civility rules and where evil is replaced with human faults which are humorously criticized and ultimately forgiven. No doubt, this is a much more pleasant world.

Jewish and Arab Women Refuse To Be Enemies

The announcement on Facebook read: “Jews and Arabs refuse to be enemies,” and next to it a call for a demonstration in the Arab Israeli town of Tira. I knew right away that I wanted to go.

This morning we gathered,  about 1000 participants, Jews and Arabs, many carried signs in Hebrew and in Arabic. My favorite was one held by a young woman which said in Hebrew: "Jewish .and Arab women refuse to be enemies." I could sense the good-will and the positive energy all around.

The speakers were Jews and Arabs and I appreciated the fact that everyone’s suffering was acknowledged: that of the Palestinians civilians in Gaza whose life is in danger because of the Israeli air raid and that of the Israelis civilians, especially in the south, who suffer the Hamas rockets attacks..

In preparation for today’s demonstration I  reread  a small British pamphlet written in 1952 by that period Feminists, in the Conference on The Feminine Point of View.

On the topic of “World Peace” the women  claimed:

“It has been  generally believed through the ages that women are more averse to war than men (a view expressed in the Greek play Lysisstrata  over two thousand years ago). Certainly war disrupts the home life which is the woman’s main interest and concern. In so far as women are in general less aggressive than men, more averse to physical violence, and more concerned for the suffering of the individual, there are grounds for hoping that their greater influence would make for world peace in the long run. The monstrous absurdity of modern weapons of obliteration is likely to make an increasing number of women reject war altogether on ground of commonsense as well as mercy.; whereas many men seem to be fascinated by exhibitions of vast power”

In 1952 the conference expressed the hope that  women will  “become better educated politically and more confident in their own point of view, they may be expected to be critical of war propaganda and the claims of national prestige. The tendency of women to be more emotionally disturbed by the idea of war and its horrors may bring about clearer thinking on the whole question of that “inevitable necessity” of war which so many men seem to accept with the kind of mesmerized acquiescence.“

In the demonstration today one of the speakers, an Arab woman, talked directly to the women in the audience and said very similar words. She said what all women know (and often say), that not a single woman from Gaza or from Israel is involved in the attacks, but that it is always the women who pay the price for men’s war.

The conference of the Feminine Point of View was seven years after the end of the Second World War. There were hopes for a better future, and fear of the consequences of  the cold war.

Today more than sixty years later,  women are "better educated politically," but so far we have not been able to make a real difference, or to promote peace in this area. Publicly not much has changed, most of the politicians are still  men, and  they have no interest in finding a solution to the Israeli Palestinian conflict.

Not too long ago, Israeli mothers were influential in getting the Israeli army out of south Lebanon. The men have failed us, let women have their say.