The Legacy

by Melanie Phillips

  He remembered blowing on his hands as they sat in the stands in the freezing cold, and his father pulling out the flask of tea and pouring him a steaming cup. He could still taste the plastic on his tongue, and the hot sweet tea. He remembered huddling with his father over the pools coupon, with Jack allowing him to list the guessed-at results. “It’s all luck,” Jack would chuckle, “no skill in this at all.” It was a ritual, a treasured moment of companionship between them. And every week, when the pools results came up on the TV, Jack would sit agog checking off his numbers; and every week he would whistle softly how close he had come to winning.

  Russell thought, I haven’t thought about this in, what, thirty years. It was a memory he had simply closed off after the great rupture. How sad it made him now.

  He had also hardly thought about his grandparents, his father’s parents, those Polish peasants about whom he had never wanted to know. He had certainly never known his grandfather, who had died well before Russell was born. What a born loser he surely was, Russell thought; he hadn’t even had the wit to sell anything but had hired himself out instead as a knife-grinder. A knife-grinder! The kind of creature upon whom his mother had shut the door firmly when he had come knocking for work.

  He remembered his grandmother as a permanently sour, complaining individual who couldn’t even speak English properly right up to the day she died. He had written them off as near-imbeciles, a baleful blot on his own father’s life—so poorly had they valued education that Jack had left school at 13—and a source of deep shame for his own.

  And yet here in this simple inscription he saw two people of flesh and blood who had felt, and loved, and hoped, and even had the wit to use exclamation marks—and to whom his father had been precious. He had never asked his father about them, and Jack had never spoken of them; now they would be forever a blank page, like this flyleaf, with only this inscription to give them any personality at all in his mind.

  He picked up the prayer book, a siddur that was used for daily synagogue services. It was scruffy, and the cover hung precariously by a few threads. Inside he read, in his father’s handwriting: “To dearest Russell on your bar mitzvah; very proud! With fondest love, Mum and Dad, March 1963.”

  With a shock he realized it was his own siddur, the one he had taken to the synagogue every week when he had gone with his father. He had had no idea it was still in existence; he hadn’t had any need of it for more than four decades. But his father had not only kept it close by him, he had chosen to give it back to him now, despite all that had happened.

  Not just that, but he had very deliberately passed it on with his chumash with its own almost identical inscription. From the grave, therefore, his father was giving him the gift of continuity—the unbroken connection not just to his family but also to that ancient ancestry Russell had so forcefully renounced, which had caused his father to renounce him.

  It was an act of love. His father had not wiped him out of his life after all. Russell brushed away tears.

  “Bit late for that now, isn’t it,” said Beverley.

  She was spoiling for a fight, to have it out with him at last, Russell thought dully. But having nudged open the door of his memory that had been shut tight for so long, he did not want Beverley to destroy the tremulous images he had discovered lurking there and that he wanted to take out, dust off and look at again and again. He had to head her off.

  “Your boys seem fine lads,” he said. It came out too heartily, but still.

  He saw a struggle briefly pass over her face between her need to unburden herself of all the anger pent up inside and the irresistible instinct to boast. The latter won.

  “Oh they’re all doing terribly well. Scholarships and prizes all the way. Stu and Alan both got double firsts at Cambridge, Stu’s already a partner at McKinseys and Alan’s at 5 Stone Buildings…”

  “Five Stone…?”

  “Top set at the Chancery Bar, didn’t you know, well not your world, I suppose. Simon’s running his own web service provider company while still at Trinity—he was head boy at Westminster, by the way—and Anthony’s just about to do his interview for Corpus Christi. And so what of Rosa?”

  “Rosa is…well, she’s still trying to find herself.”

  “I suppose you sent her to some dreadful comp? Poor little mite.”

  Westminster! Since when did they have such pretensions?

  “Elliott still stuck in that same little firm in Wembley?”

  She glared. “He’s involved in a great deal of charity work these days. Jewish Care. Cancer Relief. And he’s been told he’s in line for a CBE for his interfaith work.”

  “Impressive! I had no idea he was interested in such things.”

  As soon as the words were out of his mouth he realized his mistake.

  “Hardly any wonder, is it? We never heard from you from one year to the next. How could you do that? Don’t you have any feelings for your family?”

  “It wasn’t my fault. You know what happened.”

  “You could have made a gesture.”

  “I should have made a gesture? He wouldn’t acknowledge my wife. He wouldn’t see his own granddaughter. He wouldn’t even pronounce my name.”

  “He was grieving. He had lost his son.”

  “He didn’t lose me. He wanted nothing more to do with me.”

  “Oh, and I suppose you didn’t put two fingers up to him and everything that was so important to him. And anyway, you divorced Alice.”

  “She divorced me, actually.”

  “Same difference. Fact is, you split. Nothing then to stop you coming to see us. But you didn’t. You wanted nothing to do with us. Too grand for us, that was the problem wasn’t it? All your smart friends. You always were a snob, ever since you went to that grammar school.”

  God! he thought. Still banging on about that after all these years.

  “Well, at least I didn’t send my child to Westminster.”

  “Some of us care about our children more than our politics! Some of us care about our families and want them to make the best of themselves. We actually love them. Do you even know what that means? You had a good education at that grammar school; it got you to Oxford and just look at you now. But you wouldn’t give the same advantage to your own daughter, would you, just dumped on it all from a great height, turned against it just like you did against being Jewish. You knew what that meant to Dad, didn’t you. How could you have been so selfish?”

  Selfish! Russell marveled at his sister’s twisted values. He had devoted his entire life, had he not, to principles: to fighting privilege and the class system that kept working people powerless and stopped their kids from going to university and getting decent jobs and treated them instead like shit.

  He and Alice believed in equality and he was bloody proud of that. Selfish? These principles had cost them. They’d both had to join St. Saviour’s, hadn’t they, and even go along to Sunday services in order to get Rosa into the church school where loads of academics and politicos and media people sent their kids because the standards were higher than the other schools in the area. Alice had had to put aside her principles as an atheist just to do what was best for Rosa.

  Sure, the comprehensive left something to be desired. Rosa was bullied, the teachers were inarticulate and the kids seemed to spend every lesson just ticking boxes. But they’d got her a tutor, hadn’t they, and congratulated themselves on the fact that Rosa was going to school alongside kids wearing gym shoes because their single mothers couldn’t afford proper ones. Because they had a conscience.

  “Dad was a socialist all his life. That was his religion. The Jewish thing was always very superficial.”

  “Superficial? It was everything to him. How can you just dismiss it all? It’s part of you as well, whether you like or not. Why do you try to pretend you are something you are not? Why do you hate this part of yourself?
If you hate that part, then you hated them too.”

  But the fact was that his parents had not spoken with one voice on this. His mother had regarded his father’s attachment to religious rituals as a sign of a weak and uneducated character.

  Indeed, Sylvia had been quite hostile to religion. Her parents, who had emigrated from Berlin to Britain in search of work during the 1920s, had been entirely secular. Like other German Jews before the Holocaust, they did not see themselves as any different from other Germans. They were German. That was their national identity. The Germans were cultured, educated, with great universities, venerated literary figures, a keen appreciation of art and music. They were the acme of European enlightenment. So there was no place in the assimilated German Jewish world for the primitive rituals of religion. Religion made them different. It was accordingly disregarded, despised and largely dumped.

  Like her parents, Sylvia looked down upon those Jews who came from the backward, uneducated villages of Poland as bumpkins, whose religiosity was merely further proof of their low intelligence. It was her misfortune, she thought, to have married the son of just such individuals. She made chicken soup and lit candles on a Friday night on sufferance, merely to pacify Jack. And she was impatient with Jack’s socialism, which she thought was the surefire mark of a loser.

  “Mum was never religious; none of that meant anything to her at all.”

  “She was just a snob, that’s all. She thought religious people were backward and narrow. What mattered to her was being educated and getting a good position in life.”

  Unlike you, of course, thought Russell.

  “Anyway, religion isn’t the point. Sure, she knew nothing about it. But it was being Jewish that mattered to her. It mattered that her granddaughter wasn’t Jewish. It mattered that her own heritage would now come to a shuddering halt with you. It wasn’t ever about religion. It was all about being part of a people, a history. She knew something priceless was being lost.”

  Jew, Jewish, every other word. What was wrong with these people? Did they really never think about anything else? Was there really nothing else in their world, their experience, but this constant scratching at the existential wound? Get over it! he wanted to scream.

  “You mean she was a racist.”

  “That’s just disgusting. Mum didn’t have a racist bone in her body.”

  “Oh really? Well she looked down on Dad as being some kind of untermensch.”

  “Untermensch? What, now she’s a Nazi all of a sudden?”

  “Why are you sticking up for her? You said yourself that she was horrible to you.”

  “Because you are worse! They did their best, for heaven’s sake. They poured as much into you as they possibly could. How can you spit on their memory like this? I’m not a bit surprised Alice left you.”

  So now Alice was being used against him. Even she might have enjoyed the irony of that one, he thought.

  “You still have no idea what you did here, do you? So wrapped up in yourself and your little world and your own importance. You think the world revolves around you. It never dawns on you, does it, that what you do has consequences for anyone else.

  “Well this is what you did to them. When you went off and married Alice, Dad changed. He kind of just shut down inside himself. He had always been so chatty; now there were these long, long silences. He would sit just staring into space. Mum just didn’t know what to do with him.

  “Then he started to get confused. One minute he’d be perfectly lucid and then the next his mind would start wandering. He would turn up at breakfast without his trousers on. He forgot how to play kalooki. And his personality changed—he became irritable, for no apparent reason.

  “Turned out he was having lots of mini-strokes. Vascular dementia, it’s called. It was all too much for Mum; she was run ragged. No wonder her own mind gave way. After that Dad went steadily downhill. But here’s the thing, Russell. One of the factors that’s said to cause vascular dementia is the pain caused by bereavement.”

  “He wasn’t bereaved. He still had Mum.”

  “He had lost you. You were dead to him. And you were his special boy. She never loved him. He knew that. That’s why you were so important to him. And then he lost you.”

  Dead to him. Wiped out. Erased. No longer existing, no longer a person, no longer even a speck in the universe. Obliterated.

  “And some of us had to pick up the pieces.”

  Beverley the martyr. Jesus, what a cow.

  Her accusation was completely over the top, he told himself, bred merely of bitterness and venom and designed to cause as much hurt as possible.

  “You’re talking total rot. For fuck’s sake, Beverley…”

  “I’m sorry, I just won’t listen to that kind of language…”

  “…God dammit Beverley, all I did, all I did was dare to live my own life in the way that I wanted to live it—oh, I’m so fucking sorry—and you’re telling me that because I behaved like a normal adult, unlike certain people I could mention, this killed Dad and sent our mother out of her mind?”

  This was what he had wanted to get away from. How this brought it all back to him—the introversion, the narrowness, the obsessiveness; and on top of all that the paranoia, the belief that they were all at risk of imminent extinction, always fighting to prevent the next genocide, always terrified of their own shadow.

  He was sick of it. It stifled him, it sucked all the air out of his life. He had had to get out just in order to survive. He had loved his father—he knew that now—but he simply had to escape from that suffocation. He resisted that kind of living death with every fiber of his being. He wanted to live, he wanted to be free of this undercurrent of terror, this constant apologetic cringing. He didn’t want to be different anymore. He simply wanted to be just like everybody else. And Alice, golden Alice, with her blonde bob and her freckles and her effortless air of superiority and her entrancingly talented and cosmopolitan friends, had been his passport to normality.

  And yet he couldn’t stop returning to it, like scratching a scab.

  He rang the number on the letter. It rang for a long time. He was about to hang up when someone finally answered. A woman’s voice, impatient. When he asked to speak to Bob Falkner, he gave his name as Jack Wolfowitz’s son.

  There was a muffled sound as the woman placed her hand over the receiver, and then a pause. Eventually an old man’s quavery voice came on the line. Again, Russell introduced himself as Jack Wolfowitz’s son. There was a long pause.

  “Jacky? Wolfowitz? Jacky Wolfowitz? Did you say Jacky?”

  It took a while for the old man to grasp that yes, this was indeed Jacky’s son who was on the other end of the line. He kept repeating the name over and over again, in wonderment, as if it were Jack himself who had rung him.

  Russell began to wish he hadn’t started this.

  “You knew my father during the war,” he said somewhat desperately. “Tell me where you were, what you were doing.”

  After some more difficulty and a number of false starts and repetitions, Russell learned to his astonishment that Bob and Jack had both been in the D-Day landings and then their regiment had fought its way inland from the beachhead. There, on a road through Normandy, they had run smack into a formation of German tanks. The carnage was frightful as they were cut down by artillery barrages.

  “I was hit,” said Bob, “in the shoulder and the leg. ‘Hold on, hold on,’ Jacky shouted to me, ‘I’m going to get you back.’ I screamed at him to leave me but he kept going, crawling on his belly into the guns, and dragged me out of there. So you see, I owe him my rather long life.”

  He chuckled down the phone, and then there was a bout of wheezing.

  “But he saw some terrible sights—well, we all did, but Jacky was very badly affected by seeing a mate of his blown to bits in front of his eyes and all kinds of other horrors. Tha
t’s why he got ill.”

  “Ill?”

  “His nervous breakdown. Had to be invalided out of the army. Was in the hospital for a long time, wasn’t he, more than a year I think. And afterwards, well he just wasn’t the same at all, poor chap. Nervous as a kitten. Very sad, after what he’d been like in the war. Fought like a lion, he did. A real hero. Anyway, I heard he’d eventually got married and had a family, so I wrote to him. But I never heard from him again.”

  After he put down the phone, Russell sat very still for a long time. He thought desperately hard about his father. How could this be true? There had never been the slightest hint of any war experience. Nor had there ever been any mention of a nervous breakdown.

  He had just assumed that his father’s excessive fears and fantasies were part of his character. He had, it seemed, misjudged him totally. He could have had a father to be proud of. Why had this been kept from him? Did his mother know? Had she ever shown any concern for Jack’s well-being?

  He tried to claw through the mists of his memory. All he remembered was his mother’s distant contempt. A contempt he had shared. He went cold at the thought. Had his father been silently suffering all those years? Did the wounds in his mind remain raw, or had they healed? Jack had been a badly damaged hero; both Russell and his mother had treated him as an imbecile.

  Russell wept.

  10

  ELIACHIM’S STORY WAS engrossing him. Russell’s knowledge of how Jews had lived in medieval England was non-existent. This just hadn’t figured in anything he had ever been taught. No one had ever mentioned it. Now he thought about it, he realized that it was as if the Jewish past in England was an unopened book. No one had said anything because no one had wanted to know.

  What, indeed, had they all talked about all those years? The price of kosher meat. Football, cricket. Slights and insults. Anything of substance, ever? It was all such a blur in his mind. What did he have to hang on to? He felt like a piece of driftwood in the open sea.