Hitch-22

In what was once German Prussia, in the district of Posen and very near the border of Poland, there was a town called Kempen which had, for much of its existence, a Jewish majority. (It is now called Kempno and is about an hour’s drive from the Polish city of Wroclaw, formerly Breslau.) A certain Mr. Nathaniel Blumenthal, born in Kempen in 1844, decided to leave or was possibly taken by his parents, but at all events arrived in the English Midlands and, though he married “out,” became the father of thirteen Orthodox children. It appears that he had disembarked at Liverpool (the joke among English Jews is that some of the duller emigrants did that, imagining that they had already reached New York) and settled in Leicester by 1871. On later census forms he gives his occupation as “tailor.” In 1893, one of old Nate’s daughters married a certain Lionel Levin, of Liverpool (the Levins also hailing originally from the Posen/Poznan area), and the British bureaucracy’s marriage certificates certify them as having been wed “according to the rites of the German and Polish Jews.” My mother’s mother, whose birth name was Dorothy Levin, was born three years later, in 1896.

It doesn’t seem to have taken them long to decide on assimilation, in that by the time of the First World War the Blumenthal family name had become “Dale” and the Levins were called “Lynn.” This might have had something to do with the general revulsion against German names at that epoch, when even the British Royal Family scrapped its Saxe-Coburg-Gotha titles and became the House of Windsor, conveniently metamorphosing other names like “Battenberg” into “Mountbatten.” But nominal assimilation didn’t quite extend to the religious kind. Dodo could recall drawing the curtains on Friday night and bringing out the menorah, and also fasting on Yom Kippur (“even if only for my figure, dear”), but she also remembered being discreet about this because in Oxford, where my great- grandparents had by then moved, there was a bit of low-level prejudice.

My father had died very soon after Peter brought me the Jewish news, and I had flown over to England for the funeral (which Dodo was too frail to attend) and then gone at once to see her. What I wanted to understand was this: How had I been so incurious, and so easily deceived? She seemed determined to act the part of a soap- opera Jewish granny (“I could always see it in you and your brother: you both had the Jewish brains…”), and she certainly and rather abruptly looked Jewish to me, which she hadn’t while I was growing up. Or perhaps better to say, when I was a boy I wasn’t in any sense Jew-conscious: Dodo had dark ringletted hair and a complexion to match, and when I registered this at all, it was with the stray thought that she looked like a gypsy. But when you are young you take your relatives for granted, and even if you do ask childishly awkward questions you tend to accept the answer. “Hickman” wasn’t an especially exotic name—my mother used to laugh that she couldn’t wait to get rid of it and then wound up marrying a Hitchens—and when Peter and I asked what had happened to Dodo’s husband, we were hushed with the information that he had “died in the war.” Since all family stories of all kinds were always about “the war” we accepted this without question, as being overwhelmingly probable. It was years later when Peter discovered that Dodo had been married to a drunken and adulterous wife- beater, Lionel Hickman by name, who had continued our mischling tradition by converting to Judaism in order to marry her, given her an all-around vile time, and then been run over by a tram during the blackout that accompanied the Nazi blitzkrieg. Killed in the war, to be sure.

As I sat with the old lady in her little suburban parlor in the south London suburbs, I kept asking myself if I had any memories that might amount to premonitions of, or other awarenesses of, this heritage. Once one starts looking for such things, I know, the chance of “discovering” them has a tendency to increase. There on the mantelpiece was a photograph of Yvonne, looking young and blonde and venturesome and obviously quite well equipped to “pass” as a Gentile. “She didn’t much want to be a Jew,” said Dodo, “and I didn’t think your father’s family would have liked the idea, either. So we just decided to keep it to ourselves.” This was becoming dispiriting. My father had been a reactionary and a pessimist—the Private Eye caricatures of Denis Thatcher had always reminded me of his insistently Eeyore-ish tone, sometimes taken up by my brother—but not at all a bigot. If anything about Yvonne’s ethnic background might have given him check or pause, it would have been the discovery that her ancestors had identified themselves as German. The Commander’s view, echoing that of the Morgenthau Plan, was that post-1945 Germany would have been better if totally depopulated… But this he would not have thought of as a prejudice.

I was suddenly visited by a long-ago memory of my father’s father, breaking into a harangue when it became generally known in family circles that his elder grandson had declared for the Labour Party and for socialism. This must therefore have been about 1964 or perhaps, given the glacial pace at which news was delivered on his side of the family, as late as 1965 or ’66. He favored me, I remember, in his rather grinding and harsh Portsmouth tones, with a sort of bestiary of sinister surnames, all tending to show the unsoundness of Labour’s then-parliamentary Left. I can remember it now: “Look at them: Sidney Silverman, John Mendelson, Tom Driberg, Ian Mikardo” (this last a Portsmouth lad into whom, along with the fat-headed future Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan, my schoolmaster grandpa had attempted to wallop the rudiments of an education). At the time I hadn’t any idea what he meant to convey by all this, unless it was to identify unpatriotically German names—my later pal Tom Driberg had suffered cognomen-persecution all his life without being in the least Jewish —but I was later able to guess by a sort of reverse-engineering.[74] The old man was very forbidding in manner at the best of times: I can’t imagine what it would have been like for my mother, let alone her mother, to be introduced to the patriarch in 1945, when her marriage to the Commander was first mooted. One of the Commander’s very few surviving letters makes my point for me: it’s to his brother Ray and is dated 28 March 1945, from HMS Jamaica, which means that the warship must have been lying at anchor in the nearby Portsmouth harbor:

Dear Ray,

Many thanks for your letter of felicitation. Yes I quite agree that it does need a sense of proportion to enter the homestead and emerge unscathed and I thought it as well to put Yvonne through this acid test before enquiring whether she was further interested…

I don’t think it would or could have taken Yvonne very long to decide against embarking upon some easy chat with her prospective father-in-law, about the long line of milliners, tailors, kosher butchers, and (to be fair) dentists from which I now know she had sprung. Looking back, I can’t see my grandpa ever having had much use for any of the above professions. What he liked, or what I remember him liking, was lavishly illustrated histories of Protestant missionaries in Africa. On this topic, she could have been of little comfort or joy to him.

Sitting now with Dodo and recalling all this, I had to ask myself what Jewishness had meant to me, if anything, when I was a boy. I was completely sure that it meant nothing at all until I was thirteen, except as a sort of subtext to the Christian Bible stories with which I had been regaled at prep school. In some odd fashion the Nazarene Jesus had been a sort of rabbi, and horribly executed under the mocking title of “King of the Jews,” but it had also been the Jews who most thirsted for his torture and death. Very, very occasionally some boy would make a mean or meaning or even demeaning remark about this, but in my early life there were no actual Jewish targets at which to direct such stuff. Moreover, the Nuremberg trials were a recent memory and, though most of our TV and movie fare still made it seem as if the Second World War had been a personal matter between Hitler and the better sort of English or British person, there were moments of documentary footage which showed the barely conceivable human detritus of the Final Solution, being bulldozed into mass graves. My mother in my hearing, when I was very small, had once used the expression “anti-Semitism” and I remember feeling with a sort of qualm that without having it fully explained, I somehow knew what it meant.

In Cambridge later on, there were Jewish boys at the school, and I suppose I noticed that they tended to have curlier hair and fleshier noses, rather as I had been led to expect. They also had names which were different —Perutz, the son of the Nobel Prize winner; Kissin, the clever boy who recommended that everyone read the New Statesman; Wertheimer, who wore a big lapel-button saying that “Hanging Is Murder.” They were among the few supporters of my failed Labour campaign of 1964 and I suppose that, subliminally, they confirmed my grandfather’s view that there was something almost axiomatically subversive about Jewishness. In history classes I read about the Dreyfus case and in English class wrote a defense of Shylock against his Venetian tormentors. There was mild, occasional anti-Jewish vulgarity to be heard among some of the more dense boys—always a version of the same cliche about the Jews being over-sharp in business—but one almost never saw or heard it directed at an actual Jew.

In the summer of 1967, between my leaving my boarding school and going to Oxford, and while I was undergoing my long-distance postal mentorship with Peter Sedgwick, the various Arab “republics” and feudal