PerfectlyWellRead

Joachim Gaunse was a Bohemian Jewish metallurgist whose innovative copper smelting technique was significant in England's victory over the 1588 Spanish Armada.

Gaunse (perhaps originally Gans) was also the first Bohemian (Czech) or Jew to visit the New World  and becamethe putative model for 'Joabin' in Sir Francis Bacon's philosemitic novel, New Atlantis.  

How could Shakespeare, surely eager to imitate the success of Christopher Marlowe's hatefest, The Jew of Malta, resist adding his own nuanced gloss on a subject that was so seriously important to the Elizabethans, that to be non-Christian - or not one of the right denomination - was to blaspheme; to be an enemy of both the State and of God and so face possible torture and public execution.   

I reflect on this against the backdrop of a recent UK feminist production of The Merchant led by a Jewish actress who loathes the play, alongside ever-escalating global Jew hate and the cavernous rift in Israeli society caused by the fight for 'compassionate' democracy versus unyielding legalistic judicial reform. 

Hey ho!

Our greatest modern writers need not make this up!

Just as the rigid Jewish nationalists trashed - no, devastated - an Arab village and were later seen dancing on the ruins with IDF personnel,  I began reading Thomas Brackshaw's painstaking examination of how the concept of 'love' is treated in 11 of Shakespeare's best known plays.

For him, Shylock's Jewish heart is 'closed' while that of  Christian Portia is opened most generously wide.

Back in the early 1970s, US-based Dr Brackshaw was probably working on his PhD thesis just as British scholar, A L Rowse first published his theory marking Emilia Bassano (Lanier) as 'the dark lady' of Shakespeare's sonnets.

My layperson's instinctive guess is that Shakespeare knew Gaunse as well as being Lanier's lover and that conversations with them both helped to seed the two pivotal, mirror-image speeches in the play (3.1.49–61 and 4.1.184-202) that make it soar sublimely higher than Marlowe's vicious grotesqueries.

So I ask Dr Brackshaw to consider Shakespeare's problematic black comedy from a Jewish as well as Christian perspective; to understand that 'mercy' is integral to Jewish tradition and that the Hebrew biblical concept of 'an eye for an eye' is an amalgam of several differrent passages that are not about vengeance but compensation. 

By way of illustration, I suggest this is just one reason why the activities of the current Israeli government so deeply frighten vast swathes of its ordinary citizens. The argument is not really about the judiciary but that most of us worry about living in a puritanical, anachronistic theocracy of the type that has eternally used, abused and massacred us.

For example, some weeks ago a Knesset bill imposing the death penalty on terrorists who kill Israelis, was approved by a 55-9 majority in its preliminary reading.

Those casting their votes chose to forget the huge moral struggle the State of Israel underwent in its debate about whether to execute the Nazi, Adolf Eichmann.

When he was hanged in 1962, he became the only person ever to be executed in Israel on conviction by a civilian court. Secular law aside, this reflected the Talmudic view that a Sanhedrin (rabbinical supreme court) which effects an execution once in seven years – or even 70 years – should be branded a ‘destructive tribunal’.

I suggest that at the two points where the poetry in The Merchant is at its most rhapsodic, this wonderful drama about antisemitism itself becomes hateful as it propagates the tedious canards about pitiless Jewish revenge against saintly Christian mercy.

Although I must therefore disagree with Dr Brackshaw's stance, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this particular chapter of In the Theater of Love: An Analysis of Shakespeare's Major Plays and much appreciate that he endeavours to make Shakeseare's work 'accessible' to lay enthusiasts like me.

In the Theater of Love: An Analysis of Shakespeare's Major Plays is available from Amazon on Kindle and in paperback.

I live in the modern State of Israel, a country founded and populated by a rainbow spectrum of immigrants.

Many Jews, religious or not, view 'making aliyah' or being honoured in synagogue with an 'aliyah' as experiences of personal spiritual and emotional elevation.

So it is intriguing to discover that a prize-winning American immigration lawyer has chosen 'Aaliyah' as the name of her protagonist in  a child's picture book aiming also to help adults better understand the impact immigration enforcement may have on children.

The author is Kansas City, Missouri-based Rekha Sharma-Crawford who says: "I picked the name deliberately ... (because) when I began to write the book, I wanted a name that was global yet powerful. The name is found in a wide variety of cultures and one which has powerful and spiritual meaning across cultures. I did this because I wanted Aaliyah to be relatable no matter the family’s country of origin".

Herself the child of Hindu Indian immigrants, Sharma-Crawford believes that despite its early-years format,  her ground-breaking book is suitable for children aged five-12 and that "there are parts of the book that can be used to educate parents on the need to communicate with their kids.

"Immigrant families that are facing removal often hide these matters from their children and when we need to be able to call the children as witnesses for court, they don’t even know where to start to explain the issue to their children. So, I wrote the book as a resource that has a variety of ways to use it. In writing the story, I first spoke to therapists on how we can incorporate gentle messages into the book that would then have a wider use and purpose".

She adds: "I never thought I would become an immigration attorney. I became passionate about the area after I saw the injustices and trauma we are causing children and communities. In this way, this book is the first of its kind to take this topic on, head-on".

I suggested that the book's engaging and clever format aside, the storyline and characters need to be much stronger.  But Sharma-Crawford insists that after much internal debate, she kept her characters' back-stories vague "because I wanted Aaliyah not to get shoe-horned into a specific set of facts ...  I wanted to focus on the child and that it really was about communication and isolation that the child feels because the parent at home fail to include them ... "

Sharma-Crawford's real-life caseload currently includes about 50% from Mexico and the 'Northern Triangle'. 

But, she says, in the US now "there are so many immigrants who are displaced, including from Ukraine and Afghanistan. The US immigration laws are harsh and draconian. They do little to address the global issues that lead to migration in the first instance, and even less to the trauma caused once people arrive here.

"Child separation .. and other immigration policies are often used to further political agendas, no matter who is in power. So while there are a fair amount of Mexicans in the US,  there is also no shortage of folks from Haiti, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Cameroon and south east Asians".

**Aaliyah The Brave: Empowering Children Coping with Immigration Enforcement by Rekha Sharma-Crawford,  is available from several online booksellers in paperback and hardcover.

Musician Leonard Cohen died in his sleep after a fall. This sort of personal information fascinates fans so it's no surprise that list website Ranker.com devotes an entire section to celebrities who died after falls. Those cited range from Cohen's fellow Canadian, wrestler Owen Hart to British Labour Party politicians and Northern Ireland secretaries, Dr Mo Mowlam and Merlyn Rees. There is even an entry for the ironically and pseudonymously named musician, John Balance.

The publishing industry is fairly gloating over the explosion of new material produced during the continuing pandemic.

For first-time children’s author, Sara Sadik and her illustrator, Karine Jaber, both UAE-residents, it has been a chance to nurture a friendship that began when they met at their respective children’s nursery and then to develop ** The Extraordinary Pause, swapping ideas via Zoom chat about text and illustrations and even accepting stern admonition from their kids - the representatives of their target audience.

I gleaned this much from an interview Sadik gave to US blogger Brianna Peterson in which she revealed how, as a human rights lawyer she turned to writing as therapy while coping with her new born daughter’s congenital hip dysplasia which confined her to a Pavlik harness for eight months.

Another reason why Sadik must find it easy to ‘blur the lines’ between cultures and ethnic backgrounds is that although a Muslim, she was educated at a Catholic school and despite being a Lebanese-Palestinian she is married to a Syrian.

*****

Full disclosure: I accepted my review copy of The Extraordinary Pause from BooksGoSocial with reservations as it is better known as a review platform for independent writers rather than traditionally published authors.

After reading through the gratis pdf e-edition, I read the professional review at Kirkus which commends it as a “short picture book (that) speaks directly to young readers about the many life changes that happened as a result of Covid-19 in ways they will comprehend. Discussion questions at the book’s close encourage reflection …”

Last, I asked my step-daughter, Victoria and her boys, aged seven and three for their opinion.

A Sydney, Australia citizen, Victoria’s first question was about the intended market’s age range.

“Good question!”, I retorted. A mixed message is being delivered with Kirkus recommending ages four-six while different Amazon pages suggest age groups 3-10 years and baby-11 years.

Victoria added: “When we read the book to the boys my first thoughts were I didn't like how they were portraying Corona as a big scary bully … I do like the ending of the book though, reminding us it's nice to stop and appreciate all the small things and to be grateful for the extra time we have together. It was a nice way of trying to find the positives in such a negative time in our lives. Jacob (aged seven) liked the book and it got us talking about how he has been feeling during the last year and all the different emotions he's been feeling. Oscar (aged three) doesn't have a clue about the Corona virus or the pandemic, so the book was completely lost on him and went over his head and he was actually bored when I was reading it!”

*****

As the UAE now enjoys such good relations with Israel, and Sadik’s book is due for release in Spanish, Arabic, French and German, I hope a Hebrew edition will not be far behind.

** The Extraordinary Pause, published by Eifrig, is available from Amazon:

Hardcover - $16.99; Paperback - $12.99; Kindle - $2.99

I started reading this **book  with great enthusiasm.

I’ve long enjoyed a vegetarian Mediterranean diet and fully support Christopher Hernandez’s view that it helps those who follow it to maintain a healthy weight and to reduce potential physical and cerebral ill-health.

I also agree that much of the huge increase in obesity throughout western society is due to pervasive ‘snacking’ and ‘grazing’ rather than for regular traditional home-cooked group meals.

But modern life is complex; usually hectic and sometimes solitary. So many readers will find much of his well-intentioned but misplaced advice startling and impractical.

Take time off work to food shop and then prepare it?

Make complicated hot egg dishes like shakshuka and frittata for breakfast with one eye on the clock and the other on the front door ready for the school run? And what about the washing up ..?

I don’t think so!

I am also disappointed – but unsurprised – that Hernandez makes no reference to Israeli food along with that of its near neighbours. After all, its western coast abuts the Mediterranean and the ancient diet’s basic ingredients of wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives and dates are mentioned in the biblical book of Deuteronomy.

“The Book of Deuteronomy mentions the seven species that the Land of Israel is blessed with: wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives and dates. The term “seven species” is not mentioned in the Bible; this is a post-biblical expression: “Bikkurim are brought only from seven kinds [species], but none [may be brought] from dates grown on hills, or from valleys-fruits, or from olives that are not of the choice kind”

“(Mishnah, Tractate Bikkurim, Chapter 1, Mishnah 3).

“Six of the seven species grow wild in Israel: wheat, barley, grapes, figs, olives and dates; the origin of the pomegranate is not known. The seven species ripen throughout the year: first to ripen is wheat, in the spring, and the last are olives and dates, in the early autumn. The order in which they appear in the biblical verse is also the order in which they ripen. The seven species constituted the basis of the economy in antiquity and great importance was ascribed to their fruit: they could be eaten fresh, stored and preserved for long periods, dried (figs, dates and grapes) and crushed (olives), and they could also be processed for products such as oil and wine”.

It looks like Hernandez prefers political correctness to historical truth as the wonderful diet we both enjoy is not a mere millennium old – but stretches into pre-history and has developed over a period of somewhere between three-five thousand years.

To end, I beg more in despair than expectation, that independent authors start to treat reviewers with more respect.

I do hope, for example, that this book’s published Kindle edition has been properly proofread as the pdf copy I was sent is littered with silly errors, especially in the recipe sections  where accuracy is crucial.

** Mediterranean Diet Essentials: A Beginner’s Guide to Losing Weight and Eating Healthy with Easy-to-Follow Mediterranean Diet Recipes is available from Amazon on Kindle @ $6.99.

A fellow reviewer of this collection notes the author’s fine poetic voice.

She is also wickedly funny!

The semi-fictional universe of **Gods, Nukes and a Whole Lot of Nonsense teems with male fraudsters: deceitful mystics; unholy, rapacious beggars; oversexed street food vendors; conniving civil servants - and even an apparent real-life divinity who disappears most disappointingly during a plane journey somewhere into the ether.

The cited characters above are non-Jews. But perhaps Shirani Rajapakse invited me to read this, her latest batch of stories, not only because she includes a jolly, cacophonous band of visiting Israeli musicians but also because Jewish Indians in Israel would recognise their western counterparts at every hallowed and so lucrative tourist spot they may name.

Rajapakse and I are acquainted only online. So I am unsure whether she is a stern political feminist, an unrepentant misandrist - or just a natural cynic.

Never mind!

Here she draws a devastating portrait of an India – where like Israel – pools of an unpleasant, ancient patriarchy swirl menacingly just beneath the tides of daily life.

**Gods, Nukes and a Whole Lot of Nonsense is available from Amazon on Kindle ($8.99) and Paperback ($15.99).

Rachel Kling’s ** story is that of a ‘poacher-turned-gamekeeper’:

After an abusive childhood culminating in severe catatonic psychosis during her early twenties, she first found refuge and healing in the Japanese martial art, Aikido and then trained as a psychotherapist.

Aikido, a complex combination of self-defence, philosophy and religion, is considered controversial in the world of Mixed Martial Arts as its critics claim it is ineffective and can cause small joint injuries. This, indeed, happened to the author who accomplished some of her training in a cast!

Her memoir is short, running to fewer than 100 pages. I suggest it would be better served either as an even shorter Aikido manual with a full glossary of the relevant Japanese terms or alternatively, as a full-length memoir in which she fleshes out the characters and backgrounds of her Jewish Communist parents, other family members and acquaintances.

** My Walk on the Aikido Path is available from Amazon in Kindle or paperback format.

There is nothing professional writers enjoy more than some serious literary research.

Today, for example, I have followed an intense social media thread about the use of apostrophes with plural possessive nouns and now I have the pleasure of hosting a piece that includes the word ‘up-lit’ – a genre of which I was previously unaware.

All thanks for this new knowledge is due to my friend and fellow Anglo-Israeli MIRIAM DRORI, who was born and brought up in London and now lives in Jerusalem with her husband and one of her adult children.

Miriam has written romance, historical fiction, non-fiction, ‘up-lit’ and crime, not all of which are currently available. She says that she writes to entertain readers. If they also learn from her writing, that’s an added advantage.

Below is a first-person account of Miriam Drori’s writerly journey and how and why she’s produced her latest book. **

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Why Write? Why Crime?

Back in 2002, when I was almost fifty, I added my name to a list of ‘old girls’ of my school. I didn’t expect anything to come out of that, but it led to a few new friendships and a series of daily emails with another former pupil, in which I wrote, among other things, about problems I’d had since our school days, and she told me about ’social anxiety’.

I joined an online forum for people with social anxiety and the posts I read there created in me a passion to raise awareness of this common but little-known problem. Writing was clearly the way for me to do this. I was a technical writer at the time. I knew I could express myself in writing, better than I ever could in conversation.

My first project was a guide to social anxiety, explaining what it is and the different ways in which it manifests itself in different people. I included numerous quotes from people I met online, who agreed to let me use their words as long as they weren’t identified. This book was eventually published as Social Anxiety Revealed.

Why did I move on to writing fiction? I suppose I thought that would be a better way of attracting those who thought the topic had nothing to do with them. In reality it affects everyone, because we’ve all met people who have been restricted by social anxiety. Everyone should know how to react to them and with them. I didn’t limit myself to writing only about social anxiety, but I didn’t lose sight of my passion.

Little did I know what I was letting myself in for. The more I read about creative writing, the more I realised how much I didn’t know. And yet, I found myself enjoying the process. I used lunchtimes and travelling times to do the exercises from my latest how-to-write book, and I discovered things about myself. The most important thing I discovered was my imagination. I thought I didn’t have one, but I think everyone does. If yours is hidden, you should find it, because when you do, you’ll discover yourself.

After writing romance, historical fiction, ‘up-lit’ and more, why have I now turned to crime? It came from a “what if” question that wouldn’t go away. When I first tried to write a novel, I conjured up a main character with social anxiety and a plot that wasn’t very exciting. Fortunately, I wisely discarded that novel, but it taught me a lot about writing, and gave me a character who remained with me. Two “what if” questions niggled at me:

· What if he was accused of committing a murder?

· What if he was sent to Japan to represent the company where he worked?

The second question won, and turned into my novel: Cultivating a Fuji. But the first question kept crying out, “Me, too!” until I was forced to listen. I couldn’t use the same character in a crime novel, so I changed him. I put him in Jerusalem, instead of Bournemouth, UK. I changed his name, to Asaf, and his profession, and brought in new characters to interact with him … or to try to interact. One of those characters is just as much, if not more, of a main character as Asaf is. Nathalie is a new immigrant from France. She’s intelligent and feisty, and refuses to listen to the advice thrown at her from all directions.

** This crime novel, Style and the Solitary, will be published by Darkstroke Books on 26 April 2021

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Miriam Drori may be found online at https://miriamdrori.com/ and on social media.

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Fans of Israeli detective novelist, Sivan Kish call her ‘the Israeli Agatha Christie’.

But it may be an even greater compliment to dub her ‘the Israeli Josephine Bell’ as the latter was not only a British ‘queen of crime’ and a co-founder of the Crime Writers' Association but also because Kish, like Bell, is a doctor.

However, unlike Bell, Kish reveals that despite ten years in Italy during which she graduated with a medical degree from the University of Rome, she has never practised as a doctor.

Instead, she explains: “I decided to return home to Israel where my life took another direction from that I had originally planned as I got married and had a baby.

“You could say that I am the doctor who ‘never put her hands on a patient’ because I ended up doing other things, one of them being homeopathic medicine, which I studied for four more years here in Israel.

“Today when I look back on my life, I realise it was all meant to be like this; to bring me to my real destination in life – not to practise medicine, but to be a writer”.

Now living in Ramat Gan, Tel Aviv, Kish is the youngest child of mixed Polish and Libyan parentage.

She says: “I have a brother who lives in New York, USA and a sister in Giv’atayim, Israel. I am the youngest in the family by many years, so I kind of grew up alone with my imagination and creating stories to keep me company.

“Since I had almost no friends until I was aged eleven, I used to sit alone in the school garden at break time and again, made up stories. The heroes were my imaginary friends and companions and when I returned home from school I wrote everything down”.

Kish adds: “As a child, I read all the time - everything that was in the local library - and there came a point when there were no books left in the children’s section for me.

“My favorite poet was and still is Rachel. Even now I read a lot and gain inspiration from writers including Charles Dickens, Agatha Christie, Robert Ladlum and Dan Brown”.

But despite her great empathy with English language writers, Kish reflects: “I write in my books about Italy, and the stories all take place there, in a police station in Rome. So I believe that if I hadn’t gone there to study medicine, I wouldn’t have become an author and wouldn’t write these books”.

She adds: ”Writing now is like going back to Italy in my imagination. I always knew that I wanted to write a detective novel and since everyone told me I had a talent for writing poems, I thought I must also be able to write novels.

“So I wrote one page and when everyone in my family thought I had copied it from somewhere, I understood its worth and since then I haven’t stopped writing. When I work, I often feel that it’s not me writing but that the stories’ characters write themselves. They live in my head and I can see them and hear them very clearly in my imagination. They are like my second family”.

Does Kish, as an Israeli whose son has completed IDF service, ever tackle Jewish or Israel-related themes?

She says: “In my second book I include characters from the Jewish community in Rome while in my third the heroes visit Israel to resolve an important archaeological murder mystery in Jerusalem that is based on a real-life discovery”.

And future plans? Does Dr Sivan Kish see a change of professional direction? Would she consider writing in a different genre; use her medical knowhow or publish in English?

She says: “I have a hard time seeing myself writing anything different from a detective novel. But you never know and can never say ‘never’ in life. A couple of months ago, for example, I started to write my fourth book – about a murder in high society …”

Meanwhile, there are outline plans for her first book, ‘Despicable Fields’ to appear in English translation in the United States – but not in the immediate future.

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Book purchase and delivery details are available on Sivan Kish’s website: https://www.sivankish.com/

To scan the first pages of The People on the Beach is to be drawn into a Holocaust story with all the hallmarks of a compelling thriller.

But because much of what Rosie Whitehouse writes has been documented elsewhere, her book’s immense power lies not only in her effort to find remaining survivors but in the highly personal and conversational tone in which her material is penned.

Whitehouse, an award-winning ‘road trip historian’, here employs her investigative skills to trace, meet and interview the ageing remnant of more than 1,200 refugees, who in June 1946 had entered Mandate Palestine as illegal immigrants after a voyage from Italy on the Josiah Wedgwood, a converted Canadian corvette disguised as a banana boat.

Such is her attention to detail, the author’s travels take her to Vado Ligure, the secluded north Italian port from where the Wedgwood sailed and where she chats to an elderly fisherman working on his nets and extracts vital details of the incident from his fading memory.

She uses a similar technique when meeting survivors in Israel; painting vividly entertaining portraits of their homes, their characters and their warm hospitality.

Then there are painful accounts of visiting Poland and the Ukraine; meeting some of their barely existent Jewish communities and walking through the Sosenki pine forest (the scene of the second ‘Babi Yar’) with its recently vandalised memorial.

Next comes the half-forgotten and cosmetically disguised former death camp at Sobibor; also the house, Whitehouse believes, that is wrongly marked as having belonged to Israeli laureate, Amos Oz’s maternal family in Rovno and then on to Auschwitz and its grey mass of often wholly uncomprehending tourists.

Whitehouse, in private life the wife and mother of foreign correspondents, Tim Judah and Ben Judah, discussed her book earlier this week with another journalist, Mancunian Gita Conn during a Zoom-streamed event hosted by the Menorah Cheshire Reform Synagogue’s ARK group.

The event attracted about 70 people.

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“Like Clay in the Hands of the Potter”

It is perhaps pertinent to conclude here by examining the man for whom the refugees’ ship was named and who is still memorialised via street names in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa and also at Gan Yoshiya, a moshav in central Israel with almost one thousand members.

📷

Colonel (later, Baron) Josiah Wedgwood, the great-great-grandson of the celebrated Staffordshire potter, was a highly complex individual and an outstandingly gallant old-school English gentleman who agreed to take the blame and so faced undue public opprobrium in an adultery case after his first wife left and later divorced him.

Although recalled generally as both a Liberal and Labour politician, the international Jewish community will forever regard Lord Wedgwood as a fearless, devoted Christian Zionist following his initial contact with the Zion Mule Corps while serving during World War I.

It was about a year later, he said, that he began to learn about Zionism as ‘a creed’.

Col Wedgwood first visited Palestine in October 1926 and subsequently challenged the British Mandatory government's policies there, accusing the administration of hindering the country's social and economic development.

In 1942, during the height of World War II and so the Holocaust, he wrote the preface to a booklet, Stop Them Now, the first English language public report about the non-stop destruction of the Jews in Nazi Europe.

In it he wrote:

"The Huns and the Mongols, Tamerlane with his mountains of skulls, all these demons of long ago were patterns of chivalry compared with the pureblooded devils into which Hitler has converted Germans”.

Baron Wedgwood died in 1943 and three years later the HMCS Beauharnois was renamed as an Aliyah Bet (illegal immigration) ship in his honour. Later still, it became part of the Israel Navy, named INS Wedgwood (K-18).

The stories in Tamel Wino’s debut collection** start in an sinister emotional twilight and peak at what Tennessee Williams’s fans may see as a “lurid nocturnal brilliance”.

All bar one of the pieces in Ékleipsis is written in the first person; most include a scene in a building’s basement and each is reminiscent of an old-fashioned ‘true crime’ melodrama. You couldn’t make them up? Hang on! The new Canadian kid on block just has!

It is always refreshing to discover a new natural-born writer and while Wino makes some mistakes, the stories are a damned good, extremely frightening read. But not at bedtime!

** Ékleipsis is available from Amazon in Paperback ($7.99) or on Kindle (FoC).

Barely three months after the end of World War 2, hundreds of bewildered Jewish children were flown from what had been the hell of Nazi Europe to the Lake District, an idyllic rural spot in north-west England.

The story of the ‘Windermere Children’ is now well documented but what makes one girl’s experience stand out is that she attempted to keep it secret from her own children in order to protect them.

Indeed, says Vivienne Margolis, it was only after a chance sighting of her mother, Viennese-born Judis Singer’s passport during a family holiday that the truth began to emerge.

Margolis, an Israeli citizen from Manchester working in a senior role at a biotechnology company and herself the mother of five, says she had previously believed that both her parents were native UK citizens.

But after she noticed that Judis’s passport named Vienna as her place of birth, her father felt forced to reveal her mother’s time as ‘Displaced Person Number 228’.

She had been among about 300 Jewish children who, on 14 August 1945, boarded one of a squadron of 10 converted RAF Stirling bombers that flew from Prague in former Czechoslovakia.

The passengers were split into groups of 30 per plane, with 15 sitting on each side on the floor. About eight hours later, they landed near the Lake District at RAF Crosby-on-Eden.

The children were the first intake of the now famous pioneering rehabilitation scheme, in which boys and girls from liberated Nazi labour and concentration camps were given a chance to begin life anew after the horrors of the Holocaust.

After landing, the children were driven to the Calgarth Estate at Troutbeck Bridge, a mile from Windermere.

What was their physical and mental state? How did the adults employed to care for them begin to repair the damage done to individuals, who were often the only survivors of large families? How did they communicate when they spoke no English?

These were among the enormous challenges faced by both sides at Windermere and which were recorded in a recently rediscovered daily journal penned by Austrian-born art therapist, Marie Paneth and which has now been published as ** Rock the Cradle.

Meanwhile, Judis Singer was among those from the ‘Windermere’ group to settle in Manchester where she and her future husband, Louis Ingleby helped to establish Bury Hebrew Congregation, and he was elected its first vice president.

Vivienne Margolis has begun to share her mother’s story with Israeli audiences and this past week she addressed a Zoom-streamed Karmiel English Speakers’ Club session marking international Holocaust Memorial Day.

** Rock the Cradle is available in the UK from Waterstones and Amazon.co.uk or overseas via 2nd Generation Publishing.

If you have £2.5M to spare you may fancy buying Bridges Court, once the country home of former British spymaster, Sir Stewart Menzies.

Or perhaps you prefer reading about the criminal exploits of a more junior MI6 agent with a ‘licence to kill’ or even the glowing obituaries to spy turned premier espionage writer, John le Carré, who died just as Israel nominated its next Mossad chief and even as traitorous former US naval intelligence agent Jonathan Pollard prepared for a hero’s welcome on Israeli soil.

All this was happening while I read  To Catch a Spy and Traitor **, the latest novel by popular UK indie author, Toby Oliver, a former civil servant with a degree in politics and a slew of similar stories under his belt.

As a Cold War thriller, this tale shows a painstaking attention to the details of period firearms, motor vehicles and light aircraft. There is also a vivid description of a 1960s-style ‘safe room’ so Oliver may be interested to know that sleeker, modern versions have been a requisite of new built Israeli homes following the 1991 Gulf War.

That aside, I recommend Oliver decides whether he intended to produce an Ian Fleming-style glitz’n’glamour thriller or a serious, political drama. This story – which needs stern editing and proof-reading – falls between the twin genres -  often reads like a black comedy and ends with less of a bang than a whimper.

** To Catch a Spy and Traitor is available on Amazon on Kindle and in paperback.

Anthony Wright is a medical curiosity.

After struggling to be diagnosed correctly with rare, hereditary and incurable Neurofibromatosis type 2, (N.F.2) - benign brain tumours affecting the nerves for balance and hearing leading to the inner ear - Wright ventured on an odyssey in pursuit of a return to health that almost killed him and could have destroyed his marriage.

Towards the end of his memoir, * To Argue with Oblivion, he writes:

“A series of events had changed the nature of my world from an incurable condition, a disfigured face, limited support with permanent mental and psychological issues. I now had a recovery pathway; all I needed to do was put all the pieces together and implement them”.

I suggest that he has achieved this, not only via the many misadventures, strokes of luck and flashes of intuitive genius that he records but because, as a senior medic observed, he is one of nature’s mavericks.

When his strange and terrible illness began, UK-based Wright was a travelling sales manager for a Taiwanese home furnishings company. Since his extraordinary recovery he has metamorphosed into a self-styled ‘international author, speaker and trainer’.

I cannot argue with his authorial self-description but must advise him that praise ’from a former Booker prize judge’ notwithstanding, his work requires stern professional editing to iron out many repetitions, inconsistencies and much meandering if it is to achieve the warm, wide reception it deserves. It also needs a fresh, engaging title and a marketable cover design as neither presently do him justice.

* To Argue with Oblivion - A True Story of Catastrophe and Recovery is presently available for free download for review from Bookfunnel or NetGalley and from Amazon via Kindle Unlimited.

I have found a 30th anniversary edition of Alex Haley’s Roots.

A publisher’s opening statement by Vanguard Press pulls no punches; does not shirk from reminding readers that Haley’s African-American family saga mapping the road from slavery to freedom was both partly plagiarised and roundly criticised for confusing fact and fiction.

 ”But none of the controversy affects the basic issue. Roots”, says Vanguard, “fostered a remarkable dialogue about not just the past, but the then present day 1970s and how America had fared since the days portrayed in Roots …The 30th anniversary edition (is) to remind the generation that originally read it that there are issues that still need to be discussed and debated, and to introduce to a new and younger generation, a book that will help them understand, perhaps for the first time, the reality of what took place during the time of Roots”.

 But 14 years farther on still, there is no dialogue, only the latest fashion for silencing those whose honest views cause acute social discomfort - and with it the eternal rising flame of Jew hate.

 And this would alarm Haley, who died in 1992 barely two months before the Los Angeles anti-police riots and who, in September 1977 visited Israel where he received an honorary degree from the Hebrew University “in recognition of the special significance his book has for the Jewish people”.

 In his acceptance speech, Haley drew parallels between the plight of Jews in history and that of Black Africans who were sold into slavery. “Both have proven that by courage and perseverance they can surmount whatever difficulties they encounter,” he said.

So now I ask why so few people today, including Black historians, examine diasporan Africans’ own forebears’ enthusiastic complicity in their initial kidnap, torture and enslavement? Why does no-one say slavery was and remains traditional in the area and that the ancient monarchs of what are now The Gambia, Benin, West Africa and Ghana, abducted and sold their subjects to Western traders?

None of what happened later would have been possible without these rulers’ early collusion.

Slavery continues without cease throughout the modern world, in the UK and Europe and back to the Far East and Africa and is said to earn international criminal networks barely less than drugs smuggling.

No wonder then, that it remains institutionalised even in countries like Mali and Mauritania where it was abolished but not criminalised during the 1960s and 1980s respectively.

Also dubious is the sudden intervention of the historians cited above, who have complained about the ‘false slavery information’ provided in the handbook for individuals taking the UK citizenship test.

I have not heard of their criticising the defacement, despoliation and removal of historical monuments, be they in Britain, Europe or North America. Why – how - for Heaven’s sake - could they remain silent in the face of the active obliteration of the artistic expression of recorded world memory?

Surely it could not be for the petulant and infantile reason that they dislike the personalities those monuments represent? To erase monuments – even to those of people now loathsome in modern eyes – is to annihilate the past and is the work of terrorists.

The past is littered with benevolent despots like Edward Colston, presently much vilified as an evil slave trader. However, his infinite endowments to the city of Bristol would now be unquantifiable while his skill, energy and imagination make his achievements beyond price. This is ever the troubling conflict at the heart of genius; how extraordinary accomplishment may be attained without abusing others.

But the world prefers instead to laud someone like British Black Lives Matter activist Jen Reid, who in the future will be remembered best as having caused a funding crisis for Bristol Council and current Black mayor Marvin Rees as the thousands of pounds it has cost to remove her temporary, unauthorised statue had been earmarked initially for adult social care and children's services.

If Black lives are now more valuable than those of the rest of us, where does it place the white members of mixed race families? I am acquainted with several such families and so also know that the potential repercussions are too awful to contemplate.

Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed of his children being judged by their characters, not their skin colour and his eldest son, Martin Luther King III remarked of him during a recent New York Times interview:

“He would know that we are much better than the behavior we are exhibiting …. Because he showed us what we could become within his life. I think, though, he would be very pleased that in his era, you had demonstrations that were largely Black but often whites joined, and in this era, it seems like there are many cities where there are very few Blacks and the overwhelming majority of those demonstrations are white. You’ve got these massive demonstrations all over the world, and whites are leading many of them, saying that ‘Black Lives Matter’… he often said that riots are the language of the unheard. He empathised with those who rioted, although he never condoned violence”.

King and his recently deceased civil rights colleague, Congressman John Lewis were both stalwart friends of the Jewish community and I suggest Lewis will have been concerned and pained by the huge spike in global antisemitism that occurred during his final months.

But Black figures like him are becoming increasingly rare in a society which seems to be dominated by virulent Jew-haters in organisations including BLM, Antifa and individuals like Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan who incites the celebrities who admire him.

As his case is that currently being spotlighted, I end here by reminding Wiley, the UK Grime rapper, that far from enslaving Black people, not only were many Jews at the forefront of the 1960s US Civil Rights Movement but that two prominent English Jews, Sir Moses Montefiore and Nathan Mayer Rothschild were directly responsible for easing the abolition of slavery in England during the 1830s.

This was achieved by making a massive loan to the government for compensation to slave owners. Further, it is said that the loan was not repaid in full until “2015 as part of government restructuring of its debt”.

It is blindingly obvious that too many members of the international Black community are so accustomed to feeling oppressed that they almost enjoy and exploit their perceived victimhood.

It is time for those living in the West to be less introverted and to champion the cause of the millions of genuine slaves I mention above.