by Simon May
No matter how vertiginously the German-Jewish émigrés climbed the ladders of British society, or how successfully they adopted British manners and mannerisms, none that I knew ever felt they had succeeded – or wanted to succeed – in becoming British in their innermost sensibility. Unable and unwilling to have one foot in each world, they remained, until their deaths, German Jews transplanted into an alien land.
At the same time, they were fervent British patriots, however bemused by British ways: ferociously loyal to a country to which they felt they didn’t culturally belong. The German émigrés, in awe of Anglo-Saxon tolerance and the rule of law, were perhaps the most overtly patriotic of all the central-European refugees. They would rigorously refer to ‘we’ and ‘us’ when speaking of their adopted country and were so much more diligent than the natives about fixing ‘GB’ bumper stickers to their cars that, it was said, a car with those letters almost certainly identified its owner as German-Born.
This patriotism had a source more resilient than any official integration initiative or citizenship ceremony: gratitude. For all the hardships of arrival, when they had been designated ‘enemy aliens’ and refused permission to work, and for all their sense of not belonging and even of not wanting to belong, this gratitude for the sanctuary and opportunities they had been given remained impregnable. I remember my mother’s exclamation when she was automatically awarded a state pension on turning sixty. ‘You mean,’ she protested, ‘that they saved my life, and now they want to pay me as well!’
Our first stop on those magical Sunday-afternoon tours of refugee north London was the home of Adela Kotowska, a pianist who had been a child prodigy in Lwów, then in Poland, and her husband Efraim Sznajderman, known as Felix Vandyl, a native of Warsaw.
Adela’s teas were uninhibited cholesterol fests: the table at the centre of the all-green kitchen – the walls were painted bright pea green, the shelves of the cupboards were lined with shiny green paper, the table cloth was green, and her apron was green – was laden with toasted smoked-salmon sandwiches, cholla with chopped liver, cheese blintzes, two and often more large cakes, and a canister for spraying whipped cream onto anything one wished. In the adjacent living room, various musicians would be chatting.
Norbert Brainin, a violinist who posed severe competition for the most fattening parts of Adela’s teas and who, she claimed, had been deflowered by my mother under her piano as German bombs dropped on London, was a regular. So, too, was Władysław Szpilman, a Polish pianist who had been a close friend of Felix since their youth and whose memoir of surviving the Warsaw Ghetto, thanks to an SS officer who spared his life because he enjoyed his piano playing, was later made into a film, The Pianist. Unlike Brainin, Szpilman did little damage to the food, was private and reticent, and never, as far as I can remember, played for us. He would sit in a big armchair smoking his pipe, offering occasional comments in his mischievously sad voice, and protecting himself with a bone-dry sense of humour and staccato sentences that gave little away. He would abruptly get up and retire to his bedroom – he generally stayed with Felix and Adela on concert tours of the UK with his Warsaw Quintet – and not emerge again. It wasn’t that he was reluctant to talk of his wartime experiences. On the contrary, he would talk freely about all that, if you asked him about it. As I remember, his map of Warsaw was organized around his most horrific memories. ‘The best bread shop in the city – it’s still around the corner from the local SS headquarters’; or, ‘The new junior school – right on the spot where they shot thirty Jews before my eyes.’
Though the Nazis had murdered all eight of her siblings, Adela loved Germany. After the war, she even thought of returning. Her formative years had been in Berlin, from 1928 to 1936, studying composition with Paul Hindemith at the Hochschule für Musik and earning a living accompanying the students of Carl Flesch. In Flesch’s classes, first in Berlin and then in exile, she had played with many of the great violinists of the twentieth century, among them Ida Haendel, a fellow child prodigy from Poland, and Josef Hassid, whom she regarded as the supreme talent of them all, but who she said had played his last concert at twenty-one and died in a British asylum for the insane after being lobotomized at twenty-six.
‘I am more German than Polish, perhaps because we were for so long part of Austria-Hungary,’ Adela would say of her home town, Lwów. ‘We, at least my family, were never just Polish. We were à la Polonaise.’
It seemed that, for her, Poland was associated with a rejection that she had never experienced in Germany. It was harrowing to hear her stories of the anti-Semitic rampages she had witnessed as a child – the night sky illuminated by the blazing Jewish village that thugs had pillaged and set alight; the bestial hatred that overcame ordinary, decent people, who were kind to their neighbours and polite to shop assistants, but wanted to murder when they heard the word ‘Jew’. And in the next breath: ‘You know, Lwów was called Klein Wien – Little Vienna. It smelled and felt like Vienna. I was forced to come to England by Flesch. If he hadn’t emigrated, I would have stayed in Berlin.’
Stayed?
It wasn’t so bad in the first two or three years of the Nazi regime, Adela insisted. Jews couldn’t work in the state-owned academies, but they could do private work – cabarets, accompanying silent films, playing in clubs and revue bars. She maintained that she’d never heard an anti-Semitic remark in those places. Goebbels even used to come to one of the clubs. Once or twice he tried to flirt with her. He was an ungainly, ugly man, she said. Disgusting. ‘But Hitler – he had charisma.’ One day, she arrived at a local station somewhere near Berlin, and there was this huge commotion; and it was because Hitler’s train was going to stop there on its way through. She was in the women’s toilet when she heard that. The attendant in the toilet wanted to talk to her, though she seemed to sense that Adela wasn’t German. She couldn’t control her euphoria. ‘He is our hero, he is a great and good man, and he will save Germany,’ Adela reported her as saying. While the attendant was still swooning, the train pulled into the station. ‘We both rushed up the stone steps to the platform,’ Adela said. ‘The toilet attendant held my hand for support; she was a little older and besides she was breathless at the arrival of the Führer. The atmosphere up there on the platform was unbelievable. It was a mixture of carnival and reverence – as if the Messiah had been announced. And then he peeked out of the railway carriage. Just for a moment. He peeked out of the window. His eyes twinkled severely. He waved. A moment later, he withdrew into the darkness of the train. And then he was gone.
‘The toilet attendant was still holding onto my hand, almost gripping it. As the train withdrew out of sight, she turned to me, still in her reverie, and said: “He is so tall in reality! I never knew he was so tall. Like a knight!” And I said to her, laughing, “How could you see how tall he is? You could only see his head leaning out of the window! Actually, he’s quite short!” She stared at me blankly. I don’t think she even heard what I was saying.’
After we had eaten our fill of Adela’s tea, there would be music. It took some effort; the vast quantities of sugar had made everybody restless and a little confused, but one after another the guests would play. Usually Adela could be persuaded to toss off a few nocturnes, waltzes, or polonaises by Chopin. She did this reluctantly, but once dragged from the kitchen, where she was constantly resupplying the tea table, to the piano, still in her green apron, she would become absorbed into this world of which she was a master exponent – until she abruptly had enough. ‘That is all you will get for today,’ she would announce as she shut the piano lid with theatrical finality. Or: ‘This is no good at all. I never practise. Now, one of you, come on, take out your instrument and play!’
Everyone looked lazily around them, hoping that somebody else would volunteer.
At this point, Brainin might dash off a movement of the Beethoven violin concerto, with Adela, back at the piano, playing the orchestral part, or jokingly imitate one of the great virtuosi and their mannerisms: J
ascha Heifetz with his poker face, his teacher Max Rostal with his twitching nose and glaring eyes, Carl Flesch with his Buddha-like stateliness. Or Felix, who had been a professional violinist before he started dealing in old musical instruments, would ponder out loud what he was going to perform and which of the magnificent violins that he kept suspended from coat hooks in a wardrobe was best suited to the music in question; and he would move us all with the powerful Hassidic passion of his playing.
‘OK, Karl, now it’s your turn!’ And Adela would summon Karl Wongtschowski, a retired orthodontist born in Berlin. Karl was a passionate amateur violinist whose life spanned three centuries: he was born in 1898 and he died in 2001. Though his orthodontic practice had flourished and he had successfully embarked on a new career as a psychotherapist in his late seventies, his first and greatest love was music. Two or three times a week, whatever the weather, he would go by bus to a concert – until the age of 101, when his girlfriend and musical companion, Lotte Herzfelder, died. He studied musical scores – of which he had an enormous collection that I was privileged to inherit – with ferocious diligence, often in the rain at bus stops; one did not go to hear something performed, he insisted, without acquainting oneself with the score beforehand. Back in the privacy of his apartment on Willesden Lane after the concert, he would play the first violin part of a string quartet or the solo of a concerto that he had just heard, to the accompaniment of a recording minus the leading part.
These electronic companions were, however, employed faute de mieux. He was nostalgic for the war years when he had played with refugee musicians such as Brainin. Often, he had played first violin, relegating these luminaries to second fiddle. This chutzpah worked for one reason only: money. Denied a work permit by the British government, they were grateful for income that was cash in hand and wouldn’t get them arrested; whereas Karl was allowed to practise his profession without restraint. The immigration authorities had deemed dentistry a necessity, but music a luxury.
In later years, he resigned himself to playing for the only captive audience he could find: his patients. Marooned almost horizontally on his dentist’s chair, they were unable to protest when he announced, in the middle of a complex procedure, that he had recently been making progress with Bach’s Chaconne and could prove it to them. He would unpack his violin, tune it up, check that his bow hair was tight enough, and play to his charges, with closed eyes, furrowed brow, and an occasional beatific smile at a modulation that he considered he had perfectly executed.
Karl would stop precisely at the point in the score to which he had practised, put his violin tenderly back into its case, and exclaim:
‘You know, I have to say it myself, I’ve never played that better.’
He would then explain why.
36.
Hiding the crucifix
Every day of the school year, from my first day at six to my last at seventeen, I crossed an international border. In the morning, I departed the 1920s Germany of our home in 1960s and 70s London for the life of a country teeming with sensibilities that never ceased to feel insuperably foreign – not only because they were, but also because I felt duty-bound to regard them so.
And, each evening, I returned, never forgetting that I was a native of one and a visitor to the other – that to feel any other way would be murderously to betray my ancestors and myself.
Once home from school, there would be a strict routine. Tea and cakes were awaiting me at precisely 4 p.m. They were cleared away thirty minutes later, whether I was finished or not, after which there was piano practice for two hours before dinner, which took place at precisely 7 p.m., and was always of the utmost simplicity: bread and cheese, or else chicken rissoles or fish fingers and potato croquettes, heated up from frozen, followed by a dessert such as reconstituted crème caramel prepared by dousing a yellowish powder with boiling water. Or Mother would open a tin of ravioli, which were factory-cooked to a state of limp near-disintegration and slid, in a single cylindrical mass, into the saucepan with a gentle plop that I never ceased to find reassuring and comical.
After that diversion from more serious matters, we would usually repair to the living room to play recordings of great musicians, sometimes listening to the same composition in two or three different interpretations, after which it was obligatory to compare and contrast their respective merits. Finally, there was homework for a couple of hours before lights out.
Television was prohibited. This was at my insistence, my mother claimed, because I thought it ‘a complete waste of time’ – a conviction to which she stuck adamantly even when we visited her friends and I at once vanished into their television rooms for the duration of the evening.
Almost nobody who wasn’t from ‘our world’ ever entered this sanctuary. Even professional services came straight out of Mitteleuropa. Our family doctor, Ernst Lucas, who had played chess with my father every Saturday, was from Cologne – and had the air of a saviour because the family of his wife, Lilly Reifenberg, had afforded my father protection and employment in one of their many businesses after he was evicted from his job at the Dresdner Bank in 1934.
The pediatrician, Kenneth Samson, from somewhere else in Germany, was a genial figure privy to the family’s foibles and furies, sometimes visiting as a friend, when he was relaxed and informal, at other times calling on us in a professional capacity, when he assumed a grave demeanour and his voice descended from a baritone to a bass.
Our dentist, Walter Nuki, and his wife Gina, both from Vienna, often visited to play string quartets.
Carl Flesch Jr., son of the violinist, who first met my mother when she was a teenager in Berlin and who continued to be known as ‘the young Carl Flesch’ into his nineties, was the family’s insurance broker.
Jupp Dernbach, a fine artist who designed our music room, was from Meyen, near Cologne.
A Dr Hell looked after our pictures. Enormously erudite, he was a restorer at the Royal Collection in Buckingham Palace as well as at the National and Tate galleries. Born in the ancient German-speaking community of Romania, he had studied and worked in Berlin before fleeing to London with his wife.
The few non-émigrés who managed to enter our fortress of the displaced were either colleagues of my mother, or else students from the Royal College of Music, where she was a professor, dropping in for a supplementary lesson.
Other intruders were schoolfriends of mine, though I didn’t dare to invite anyone whom my mother would consider ‘alien’. Not that asking my Jewish schoolfriends home was without its complications. For one thing, they would be startled to see crucifixes hanging over our beds. There were occasions when the difficulty of explaining our Catholicism was too excruciating for me to summon the necessary nonchalance when they caught sight of this idolatry, and I might guiltily hide my crucifix in a cupboard or under my mattress until my friend had left.
So many of my mother’s fellow refugees were nominally Christian, or at least knew how common it was for German Jews to convert, that for a long time I assumed that all Jews were familiar with and even relaxed about conversion. I imagined, or hoped, that fellow Jews would take this bold step of my mother and grandfather in their stride – and perhaps even admire it for its open-mindedness, or, failing that, as a sign of canny self-preservation.
I couldn’t have been more misguided. The astonishment verging on hostility of those my mother referred to as ‘English-speaking Jews’ – Jews whose ancestors had arrived in Britain or America three of four generations previously and who no longer harboured a lost European homeland – when they discovered this treachery, was overt, uncomprehending, and profoundly humiliating, throwing me into a crisis of self-presentation that often spiralled into terror.
It wasn’t so much a crisis of identity, for as I entered my teens I thought I was sure in which direction my identity lay: I was a German Jew whose family history had caused me to be born and raised in England and in the Catholic faith; the core of my world was defined by the warmth and musicali
ty of the guests at Adela Kotowska’s Sunday teas; and its elaboration in contemporary terms would be vouchsafed by science, philosophy, and submersion in ‘Europe’. But how was I to explain this to those Jews who saw our fudged identity as a vile combination of cowardice and betrayal? In fact, the latter numbered not a few German Jews, despite the myth promulgated by my mother that they were infinitely understanding on this question.
One of these German Jews was the father of Samuel, whom I had met at my junior school. Friendship with the whole family blossomed after an end-of-year concert where I had played the piano in a Mozart duo with the school’s violin teacher, who lost her place in the score so badly that I began to convulse with laughter, and soon no longer knew where we had reached in the music either. Cacophony ensued before we managed to recover. After this shambles had ended, a man at the back of the audience boomed, with magnificent inappropriateness, ‘Funtustic! Vunderfool!’ The German accent was unmistakeable. And at once, with that tribal recognition which is second nature to the immigrant, I swivelled towards the voice that so clearly issued from the heart of our universe. It belonged to my friend’s father – another refugee from Berlin.
It wasn’t long before we, as a family, were invited for a Friday-night dinner at Samuel’s home, an evening that would turn into a nightmare.
Who were we? And how were we to explain who we were? As soon as we arrived, I realized that we were on the spot. Next to each place at the dinner table, except two – those reserved for my mother and for Samuel’s – were kippas. And Jewish prayer books. We were going to have to have a ‘proper’ Friday evening, with singing, prayers, kiddush, the works. Since I had almost never been to one, I had no idea what to do. In fact, this was not long after I’d enrolled as an altar server at the local Catholic church.
