Lost Jews: The Struggle for Identity Today PDF
Preview Lost Jews: The Struggle for Identity Today
LOST JEWS Lost Jews The Struggle for Identity Today Emma Klein ~ Palgrave Macmillan ,.. ISBN 978-0-333-61947-6 ISBN 978-1-349-24319-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-24319-8 LOST JEWS Copyright © 1996 by Emma Klein Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1996978-0-333-61946-9 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address: St. Martin's Press, Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1996 ISBN 978-0-312-12890-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for To the memory of my father Samuel Solomon who made me the Jew I am and to his grandson Gabriel Contents Acknowledgements ix Prologue xi Forewords xii 1 Where Have all the Jews Gone? 1 The Decline in Numbers 1 A Personal Perspective 5 Do Statistics Tell the Whole Story? 11 The Layout of the Book 16 2 Immigration to Assimilation 17 The Sephardim 17 Early Ashkenazi Settlers 21 Fleeing the Pogroms 26 3 Intimations of Decline 29 Semi-submerged 29 Refugees from Nazism 32 Descendants of the Grandees 39 4 Who Says I'm Lost? 46 Grandmother in the Closet 46 Not Lost but Excluded 55 5 The Struggle Towards 62 Entry Points 65 Taking it Further 74 Swings and Roundabouts 80 Resonances of the Past 86 The Chaff or the Wheat? 91 6 Finding a Way 92 A Way Back 92 Coming Out 101 About as Far as They Can Go 105 A Multi-faceted Heritage 108 Vll VIII Contents 7 Mixed Blessings 110 Rebirth in Prague 110 The Promised Land 113 Mixed Blessings 126 Not the End 129 8 The Promise Spurned 130 The Promise Spumed 130 Dissent or Something Else? 133 The Alternatives 140 Christian or Jew? 146 Still Jewish? 151 9 What is Left? 153 Imprints of Jewishness 155 What is Left? 164 Markers 170 Nothing Left? 173 Remnants of Jewishness 175 10 To Be or Not to Be 176 The Marginals 176 Community or Ghetto? 194 11 The Establishment Voice 201 The Orthodox World 201 A Middle Way 207 The Progressive Scene 211 What's Wrong and Can We Put it Right? 216 12 A Way Forward 224 Where and How? 225 New Blood: Thy People shall be My People 230 Lost Jews: Where Do They Stand? 233 Why be Jewish? 235 Notes 240 Glossary 244 Index 248 Acknowledgements I thank everyone I interviewed, whose contributions make up the sub stance of this book, and also many others who were willing to speak to me but had to be excluded for reasons of time and space. I am grateful to Marlena Shmool of the Board of Deputies Community Research Unit for helping me with statistics about Anglo-Jewry and to Dr Mark Tolts of the Hebrew University for his invaluable help in compiling demographic sta tistics of Jewish communities around the world. This book might never have been conceived had not Andrew Harvey, one-time editor of the former Saturday Review of The Times. commissioned an article which focused my attention on some of the principal themes. Special thanks are due to Gloria Tessler who helped transform a journalistic nightmare into a realisable dream of authorship, and to Robert Wistrich who perceived the novelty of my field of interest and suggested I approach Macmillan. I have been fortunate to have Gniinne Twomey as my editor and am most grateful for her e.ncourage ment and enthusiasm. I would also like to thank her predecessor, Clare Andrews. I appreciate the help and encouragement Martine and Peter Halban have given me from the earliest stages. Others who gave valuable guidance before the book really took off were Giles Semper, Richard Gollner, Neil Hornick and Hilary Rubinstein. I am indebted to Amir Nadel for his com puter expertise. I thank Brigid Jackson for emerging at the eleventh hour to fill a domestic vacuum and enable me to finish the book. Among the many people I barely know who were the source of inter esting contacts, I thank genealogists Michael Honey and Nancy Burton and historian Kenneth CoIlins. Cioser to home, I am grateful on that score to Judy, John and Flower Cooper, Monique Neumark, Diana Heller, Yvonne Cooke, Sally Margulies, Judy Cooper-WeiJ and my son Ariel. Louise Hidalgo and Simon Rocker also deserve thanks for helping me track down an important international personality. The concept of struggle, so central to the book, lowe to discussions with Mickey Yudkin and the chapter title 'The Promise Spurned' to my son Amos. To Gordon Pocock, who all along has been unstinting with his encour agement, support and advice, lowe a special debt of gratitude. And IX x Acknowledgements without the constant love, support and dedication of my husband, Chaim, this book would never have been written. If people I interviewed requested that their names should not be used, pseudonyms were substituted and have been marked with an asterisk at the first mention. Prologue Auschwitz 1992: a high ranking medical officer in the RAF contemplates the mass graveyard around him, the culmination of a series of pilgrimages to Nazi death-camps. Suddenly his anger is tinged with a certain elation: 'Hitler,' he declares, 'I'm a Jew and I'm here.' But his proud defiance conceals a sad irony. His wife is Christian and his children are not counted as Jews. Air-Commodore Antony Wober is the heir to two venerable traditions. His mother's ancestors were Sephardi Jews from Spain and ancient Babylon. His father's family came to Glasgow at the tum of the century from Minsk. Though his Jewish identity had rarely been given expression in his married life, his journey through the lost world of east European Jewry was an experience in which he and his wife were united. Yet this reaffirmation of his roots is but a hiatus in another process. By breaking the chain through the simple choice of marriage partner, Wober seems fated to be the patriarch of a new dynasty of lost Jews. I was profoundly moved by Air-Commodore Wober's story, moved by his emotion and by the fact that his own deeply felt Jewishness would be lost to the Jewish people. It was after that encounter that I decided to root out the people behind the statistics, to find out for myself who were the lost Jews. Emma Klein XI
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