by Ian Buruma
The question of religion would crop up many times in their correspondence. But the most dramatic instance of her doubts and his liberal composure is an exchange in October 1920, a few months after her visit to Kassel. It deserves to be quoted at some length, as it tells us a lot not only about Bernard and Win but also about many people who shared a similar background, not only in England, of course.
Win had seen a religious play in London called The Unknown, which had unsettled her, since it brought up “the problem of the discord which springs up between those who have faith and those who do not, however much they may love each other.”
“Dearest,” she writes, “it is a tough problem, and as neither of us have faith or any real religion in our hearts, it is very very hard to bring up our children and give them the best.”
They had evidently talked about this before, and her first inclination had been that she should take the children to synagogue every week and raise them as Jews. But, she says, that really “wouldn’t do—it would be hypocritical; how could I instil into them a belief that is wholly lacking in me? All orthodox religion is meaningless to me and leaves me cold, while public worship is even more repugnant to me.” Still, she would be willing to “overcome all this and go to Synagogue every week for their sakes—if it would help, but it won’t. They will ask me questions which I shall be unable to answer, because I cannot feel the answer, and so they will quickly find that I am cold and unconvincing and they will gain nothing.”
Still, despite her misgivings, she is not an atheist. God, she believes, “is a natural instinct born into every human being, because he is a necessary supplement to human weakness.” And so she predicts that their future children “will go to school and learn Christianity from those who have faith, and become Christians, and that will be the first breach between them and us.”
She envies people who have faith: “If only either of us, or both of us could believe!” But she sees no point in picking up scraps of a religion, or taking their future offspring to synagogue “once or twice a year and make them fast ‘just to remind them they are Jews,’ and thereby deliberately do them out of gaining a faith, even though it is not our own.”
Here was a dilemma that many educated secular Jews must have struggled with. Franz Rosenzweig’s answer was to actively embrace Judaism, not as a religious doctrine or an organized faith, but as a form of acceptance, not accorded by others, but of oneself. In his words, “Nothing more is assumed than the simple resolve to say once: ‘Nothing Jewish is alien to me.’”
This was a step that neither Win, nor Bernard, nor perhaps most people of their class and time were able or willing to take. It would be absurd to blame them, even if, as with all choices in life, this too came with a price, perhaps more keenly felt by Win than by Bernard, whose own response was a little closer to Rosenzweig’s.
In his answer to Win’s letter, dated October 18, 1920, he tells her not to worry so much. First of all, her anxiety is premature. Besides, no one knows all the answers to religious questions; people just believe, that is all. Having to attend chapel once in a while at school didn’t convert him, so it shouldn’t necessarily affect their future children. The best thing parents can do for their children is to show them by example how to lead a good and charitable life. He too was against “pointless ceremonies.” He made up his own prayers in synagogue and came away “feeling better.” Keeping the Day of Atonement “is only a matter of policy on my part in which ‘I tell the world,’ as the Yank would say, that I am by birth a Jew, a Jew still and proud of it too.”
Perhaps it was his greater self-confidence in this matter that made it simpler for Bernard to feel at ease in a wider world, a confidence that, paradoxically, might have been helped by a childhood lived in a religious culture he had abandoned. At least he knew what it was that he was leaving behind, which made him less self-conscious, not just in matters of faith. He would tell Win about the grandeur of the Swiss countryside, the fascination of the Middle East, or the wonders of France. He longed to share these enthusiasms with her. They would make her less insular, he hoped.
Her response, in a letter sent on September 8, 1920, to the Regina Palace Hotel, was entirely in character: “Switzerland must be wonderful and I can imagine the grandeur, even though I have never seen it, but although I know I should love that too, somehow the nice cosy English countryside appeals to me more . . . I am afraid I am a home bird and I am just pervaded with the spirit of England. Nothing in the wide world will ever surpass it for me.”
This was not just a pretense. Win was pervaded with the spirit of England as much as anyone could be. But her particular background continued to be a source of anxiety. No matter how much she reveled in the Englishness of her surroundings, she could never shake a slight sense of unease, a fear of rejection, a self-consciousness not shared by her Gentile friends, or at least not for the same reasons.
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Win’s first letter from St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, written on October 16, 1921, to “My most precious and passionately adored Bun,” is a deeply unhappy one. She had never felt so homesick. She is “utterly forlorn and unhappy.” Leaving home for Oxford was “like being wrenched out of Paradise and plunged into Purgatory . . . dumped all alone in this queer, confusing place.” She lies awake at night, his wristwatch the only visible thing in the darkness—“I could have hugged it because it was yours.”
Many students feel that way in the first few weeks or months. In her case, there was also that nagging anxiety, which appears to have been completely superfluous. The principal of the college, a Miss Winifred Moberly, who had the unusual experience of administering hospitals in Russia during the war, “asked me if I was Jewish, and then said I need not attend Chapel unless I liked to . . . and asked if I was particular about food. Awfully decent of her, don’t you think?” Win decides to attend morning chapel anyway, since the others are compelled to do so, and she doesn’t want to stand out. She ends her letter telling Bernard once more how miserable she feels: “Ever your worshipping wife to be, Win.”
Attached in the same envelope is a short note, written at 7 p.m. on the same day. She is feeling much better now, after she has been invited to a tea party, and “the hockey captain is anxious for me to join and will coach me specially at odd hours in a neighbouring field. I must get a hockey stick sent down & a gym tunic made post haste.”
For all the talk about “the English spirit,” the coziness of the English countryside, and the hockey sticks, soon to be joined by reports of rowing and punting, high teas, and cocoa parties, it is easy to forget that Win had spent much of her sheltered existence in a narrow Hampstead milieu of mostly German Jews. Her social life with the Schwabs, the Seligmans, and the Fernbergs would be replaced quite swiftly by friendships with people who had very different names. But the self-consciousness would remain.
Less than a fortnight after her first letter, Win tells Bernard about a new friend she has made in the college. “I have just gone through the terrifying ordeal of entertaining my friend, complete with her mother and a second year, to cocoa in my room . . . I have just heard tonight that my friend’s father was a parson before he moved on to higher climes—I wonder if she will get a bad shock when she hears one day that I’m a Jewess.”
Punting in Cambridge
Shortly after that, on November 12, she wants Bernard to reassure his mother that she won’t become a Christian at Oxford. Indeed, she has been invited to attend various “Jewish meetings” at New College and Merton—“Rather amusing, don’t you think? I wonder if I should be the only female; I am certainly the only Jewess here, but nobody suspects me of it yet.”
There is in fact no evidence in any of her letters that she ever encountered anti-Semitism at Oxford. Perhaps she was too proud to say so, if it did occur. But I don’t think so. Bernard’s story was slightly different, though not at Cambridge, where he was his gregarious self, playing rugger for his coll
ege’s first XV, racing his father’s Bentley on public roads, playing golf, and making new friends with such names as “Jumbo” Monteith. (Bernard’s own nickname, going back to his school days, was also Jumbo, due to his physical clumsiness; it was an odd sensation, as a child, to hear the delighted exclamation “Jumbo!” when my grandfather had been recognized in the street by some elderly gentleman.) Bernard’s trouble began when he had to apply for a job at one of the London hospitals.
Certain hospitals were known to be inhospitable to Jews. This antipathy was seldom expressed directly, but couched in terms of the patients’ interests; they might not like to be treated by someone who seemed a little foreign. Bernard didn’t even try for a place in some of those hospitals. But he had a difficult time getting into the less prejudiced institutions too, racing around to get letters of recommendation, ingratiating himself with board members of this place and that. The Jewish question, in his accounts to Win, is always approached obliquely. To complain about it directly was beneath his dignity. Where it showed was in his remarkable, perhaps even excessive, loyalty to those institutions where he was accepted, such as the Royal Army Medical Corps, University College Hospital, where he did his medical training, and indeed, although it can hardly be called an institution, England.
In 1923 and 1924 he tried very hard to get a job at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children in London. Success would depend on several things, he wrote in a letter to Win on February 28, 1923. One of them was “My name.” Still, he wrote, “I feel in fine battling spirit and was pleased to find so many willing friends at Hospital.”
When he was still without a job on April 3, 1924, he wrote, “Oh Hell, it’s a rotten world and what an uncountable amount of time has been wasted tramping those accursed Harley and Wimpole Streets.* Even my staunch maxims of ‘that’ll be alright’ & ‘it’s all for the best’ seem to me with my present jaundiced eye somewhat threadbare and one even begins to wonder if it really will be alright in the end.” But he concludes the letter by saying he will “put on a stout front . . . They say a Jew will worm his way in through a keyhole & so by Gad this one is going to get into Gt. Ormond Street some time or die in the attempt.”
Finally, in 1927, he did get a position at Great Ormond Street, though not yet a permanent one, after what Win described in a letter to her parents as “a fearfully close contest. And only a series of lucky events helped Bun to win it in the end, in spite of an anti-Semitic intrigue amongst a large section of the staff.”
“The name”—that is as close as he gets to naming anti-Semitism. Much later, in 1938, after failing to get a position at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London, he writes, “45 [the family code meaning Jewish]—the old, old story.” But that was it. Sly social snubs, which must have occurred more than once, were regarded as nuisances too vulgar to pay any attention to. I don’t believe that Bernard was ever bothered by the high anxiety that plagued Win. But it is too easy to forget, when reading their letters, that prejudice against Jews, however mild or strictly social, was still the norm in the world that Bernard and Win tried so hard to make their own.
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Meanwhile, the years go by, those long years of yearning and pining. Without Bernard passing his medical exams at Cambridge and landing a hospital job, they still couldn’t get married. On December 4, 1923, Win writes, “The patience of the extra waiting would not matter, the only sad thing is that youth is so fast slipping away.” Bernard visits Oxford and Win Cambridge, but they can rarely be alone. A “river party” in Oxford is canceled (Win to Bernard, May 9, 1922), because Miss Moberly, the principal, “insisted on a chaperone and asked of whom exactly the party consisted. I thereupon had to explain your identity, thinking that must instantly solve the problem, as all engaged people here go about from morning till night with their affiancéds, but she loathes people being engaged . . . and still insisted on a chaperone.” A walking tour in the country is planned for the spring of 1923, after they had already been formally engaged for a year, but that too has to be in the company of others, since, as Win writes, “unfortunately a walking tour for us two alone couldn’t be done before we are married.”
While waiting for that day, “ill with longing,” she sends him letters overflowing with tender sentiments, kissing his lips “daily on your lovely photo, but they are so cold and hard and unresponsive through the glass—not like the real Bun’s lips” (January 25, 1922). There are “blissful” dances in Oxford in May, leaving “as the only relic of our beautiful weekend, your evening clothes, your pumps (and I kissed them all again and again before sending them back to you).” She practices Brahms and Beethoven on her violin (August 14, 1923) and wishes he were there “so that my fiddle could tell you far more eloquently than I can personally all that is in my heart for you.”
And he dreams, on March 3, 1924, of kissing every part of her “until you are glowing all over with one mass of kisses. Even then that will only be a tiniest part of the unbounded passionate love that I have cooped up for you and that is crying to get out.”
And she, on November 21, 1923, has a dream “that you murdered me in the most blood-curdling manner, and I awoke very late with the Chapel gong . . . to find I was still alive.”
It must have been almost unbearable. So they let their fantasies roam over what bliss their married lives would eventually be. His imaginings tended to dwell on long evenings by the fireplace, long walks in the country, and endless nights together. Hers often had a more social component. Win (April 20, 1921): “won’t it be topping when we go and visit some of our children at school & college . . . I shall literally burst with pride when I go to Uppingham to watch my husband play for the Old Boys against our son.”
They will have their honeymoon on the Norfolk Broads, in a sailing boat called The Nigger, which will be “easy to manage” (Bernard, April 14, 1923). They will walk across the Yorkshire Moors. He will take her to Egypt and see the pyramids. They will have their first night somewhere in the English countryside. Or perhaps the first blissful night will be in Paris, Switzerland, no, Italy . . .
On February 29, 1924, Bernard formally proposes: “Win will you make me the happiest being on earth and marry me soon.” He passes his medical exams in May. A comfortable Victorian house in Hampstead is secured. And the marriage date is set at last for 2:30 p.m., January 1, 1925.
Win spends her last holidays with her family on the Continent in the autumn of 1923, and again in late 1924. The world is at peace and, for those who could afford it, full of gaiety. A faint whiff of the Roaring Twenties comes through Win’s letters. Since the rich were often English, they felt privileged, enjoying the beauty of foreign countries while remaining supremely confident in the innate superiority of their own.
The first trip is to the French Riviera. This was the era of grand hotels, where the guests would dance in the evenings to live orchestras. There was an edge of dangerous excitement about the Continent, especially to a prim young Englishwoman longing for marriage. Win has occasion to observe about French and Italian men “that they all (old and young) stare and leer rudely and unfeignedly, they have cheeky eyes and they all spit copiously and casually without any apparent preparation.”
In September 1924, Win, her mother, her sister Meg, and Walter are staying at the Grand Hotel Bellevue, a huge nineteenth-century pile on the shores of Lago Maggiore. Their “acquaintances” at the hotel include an English bishop who “has taken a tremendous fancy to Walter,” as well as some “Austrian and Parisian Jews.” People on the whole are “very sticky” though, so “we have not danced with anyone except Walter.”
On the beach: Win (FAR RIGHT) and Bernard (THIRD FROM RIGHT)
The entertainments at the Grand Hotel Bellevue include a conjurer who manages to hypnotize his accomplice, “a pretty girl of 18.” He sent her to sleep and “made her do the most incredible things.” Her eyeballs turned upward, concentrating on the brain. “It seems to me a most dangerous thing fo
r a man to be able to have a young girl like that completely in his power . . . He looked an awful beast and they were both quite exhausted afterwards.”
One night in Venice is spent at the Excelsior Palace on the Lido, which is “impossible.” All you get for the vast expense is “overdone grandeur and American millionaires . . . Everyone here, male and female, lives all day long in gorgeous brocaded pyjamas, with painted legs and arms, and jewelled anklets, and they play tennis like that.”
In search of more “homely comforts,” the Regensburg/Raeburn family swiftly decamps to a cheaper establishment, “an awful hole” actually, writes Win, because nothing else is available in Venice, “but I suppose endurable for a week. I can’t say I enjoy 2d class living—this is my first experience of it & there is something sordid and shabby about it which rather repels me.”
She cannot wait to get back to Bernard and England. Bernard promised her this would be the last lap before they can leave Oxford and Cambridge behind them: “You’ll be mine and I’ll be yours & we shall then be able to tear up all our note paper . . . our correspondence will then forever be one of the hand, one of the eye & one of the lips.”
He wrote this on October 16, 1921. But the sentiments were unchanged on the last day of their engagement in 1924.
Four
SAFE HAVEN
According to family legend, Bernard spent the long-awaited honeymoon night writing thank-you letters to the wedding guests. The story, frequently retold, came from Win, as a joke at his expense. But I think she meant to praise him too as a paragon of good manners that we would do well to emulate. Bernard and Win took thank-you letters very seriously. People who failed them in this respect were not easily forgiven.
