#PerfectlyWellRead Natalie Wood

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Shakespeare's Bohemian Rhapsodist

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.

© Natalie Wood 25 March 2023

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Stunned, Stuck, Sliced: Is Animal Welfare Mere Kindness Dressed to Kill?

Aleph Farms, an Israeli food-technology company, claims to have cultured slaughter-free meat in space.

Great news for animal welfare campaigners, who say meat eating should be criminalised, but aggravating for those who argue that so long as animals bred for slaughter are reared, then killed with kindness, they are all talking tosh. Inevitably caught in the crosshairs of this irreconcilable and increasingly acrimonious international conflict over human health and animal welfare are Muslims and Jews, significant religious minorities, whose broadly similar yet markedly different ancient methods of ritual slaughter both suffer from ever-escalating external attack.

Scores of authoritative papers appear regularly on opposing sides of the debate. But what seems clear is that while the (religious) minority communities try to present a united front on the contentious issue, they are internally divided while facing hostile outsiders whose genuine humanitarian concerns barely conceal an inherent antipathy to both. I turn first by example to how the UK anti-Jewish riots of 1947 began in a north-west abattoir and then  to an analysis of New Zealand’s 2010 ban on Jewish kosher slaughter by anthropologist Hal Levine of the Victoria University of Wellington. In it, he compares what happened in NZ to the ill-treatment afforded the Canadian Inuit who, after being barred from practising their traditional trade of whaling and sealing, were then subjected to an examination of their very culture. So, argues Levine, the shechita ban similarly destabilised New Zealand’s small, unassuming Jewish community; forcing members to consider their position as equal NZ citizens “free to practise their religion in a country with an international reputation for tolerance. The issue developed in a context involving animal welfare interests, meat exporting, and local Muslim halal (‘correct or proper’) slaughter, itself the subject of similar proscriptions in Europe”.  The concept of any animal slaughter is abhorrent to a growing international vegetarian-vegan population but for those still eating meat, the main argument against shechita and dhabihah is that both methods customarily forbid animals to be pre-stunned before slaughter although some more lenient Muslim authorities do allow several stunning methods. Will the UK’s imminent departure from the European Union affect Jewish and Muslim practice? The feature linked here states: “While making it clear their concern does not relate to the expression of religious belief but the welfare of animals, Britain’s biggest animal welfare charity, The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and many leading veterinary organisations are lining up to support a total ban on non-stunned meat”. Although less urgent, it may also mean a difference to any such products’ organic status as earlier this year, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled that non pre-stunned meat could not bear the EU organic label. Meanwhile, there now remain very few countries worldwide where religiously observant Muslim and Jewish citizens are not adversely affected by tough welfare regulations as the many papers and websites available suggest that outside Muslim countries and Israel, halal and shechita are performed by way of sullen concession at abattoirs used for general slaughter. There exists an enduring, uneasy peace among everyone involved in the trade and it is unsurprising when petty resentments swell into open hostility. While secular abattoir managements may view minority community requests as an impediment to swift, smooth production, religious leaders argue that religious laws may be ancient but they are not outdated. Indeed, barely two months ago, Rabbi Jacob Siegel of the JLens Investor Network recommended that the increasing public pressure to ban non-stun slaughter may be solved by “engaging as responsible investors” in relevant food production corporations. But would money speak louder than fine words?

The answer is ‘no’; not when we read opinions like those of Christian Methodist scholar Cyril S Rodd, whose Glimpses of a Strange Land takes an apparently hostile view of the Hebrew Bible, arguing, inter alia, that it is “mined for texts which support current ecological concern. This is, however, a very late development, and it has been pointed out that far from being in the van of caring for the natural world, the reality is that the Christian Church has at last almost caught up with the secular world”.

Rev Rodd’s view is quoted critically by Jonathan Burke of Monash University, Melbourne, Australia in a paper, Does God Care for Oxen? Animal Welfare Ethics in the Bible. During his study, Burke charges Rodd with presenting “… revisionist readings of passages which have typically been understood as illustrating ethical concern for animals. Finding support in the Bible for a more enlightened ethics of animal welfare has demanded a highly selective approach. The history of the attitude towards animals within the Church should alert us to the fact that the teaching of the Bible is highly ambiguous”.-

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My own view is in my headline. As a Jew, fundamental shechita practice must have my full support. However, as a lacto-ovo vegetarian of more than 30 years’ experience and a journalist once privy to the petty scandals, intrigues and power mongering that still beset the tiny world of shechita in the UK - and beyond – I am reminded that the Hebrew Bible suggests we are supposed to be vegetarian – even vegan – and that meat consumption is said to be an indulgence granted to frail humankind  by Heaven.

© Natalie Wood (25 October 2019)

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From Patient to Therapist Via the Aikido Path

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.

© Natalie Wood (08 May 2021)

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Tinker, Tailor–Unlikely Traitor!

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.

© Natalie Wood (02 January 2021)

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Black Leaders Should Return to ‘Roots’

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.

© Natalie Wood (08 August 2020)

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How Things Were in Knockanore

A recent chance reference to the double Oscar-winning movie, The Quiet Man, has led me to view the movie but first, read the short story from which it sprung. It appears that the film's magnetic draw has always included the village of  Cong, County Mayo,  whose enchanting, deep rural southern Irish locale persuaded even director, John Ford's technical crew to return there on holiday after production, so their families could absorb the magic for themselves. But I digress!   Here I am discussing the original story and its author, Maurice Walsh, who became such an important figure in mid-20th century Irish letters that Éamon de Valera-then President of Ireland - attended his funeral mass when he died in 1964. The son of a farmer from whom he inherited a love of books, legends, folktales and the theory of 'place', Walsh began working life as a civil servant, turning to write full-time in the early 1930s as his fame and popularity grew. Maurice Walsh was also a romantic nationalist and part of a group that included figures like Nobel laureate, W B Yeats, who followed the ideas of 18th century German  Enlightenment philosopher, Gottfried von Herder. The Quiet Man was first published in the US weekly, The Saturday Evening Post in February 1933, later becoming part of his collection, Green Rushes. From the opening words onward, Walsh fairly sets in aspic an image of a southern Irish rural life that was fading even as he wrote. The reader gains an instant image of a wide landscaped, slow-paced idyll measured by the rhythm of the seasons and the strictures of the Church calendar. Superficially, Walsh's story is another 'David and Goliath'  in which an average-sized but skilled boxer shows he is the physical and moral superior of the towering, menacing neighbourhood bully. On another level, it reveals an entrenched patriarchal society in which women are still used and abused as men's property and where they wield any authority via canny, sly manipulation. Third, we are shown with consummate grace how the early resentments of an arranged marriage - here, more one of convenience -  may be turned first to appreciation and at last to genuine affection. Walsh's story and Ford's movie are prime examples of the challenges faced by the creators of one piece of art from another. Is it  plagiarism by another name? But is it artistic theft - even betrayal when the original artist has sold the 'rights' to a new owner? I do not care one jot for the movie. I suggest that it has indeed traduced the original story and is saved only by its cinematography and a couple of individual scenes. As Walsh avoided Hollywood after a second of his works failed as a movie, I wonder if he felt he had sold his writerly soul to the devil of clapperboard tinsel town. A sin he would never commit again. I conclude here with links to both a Youtube screening of the movie and a pdf  copy of the story as it first appeared in print.

© Natalie Wood (20 May 2020)

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Corona and the Myth that’s Called ‘Goodwill’

Most people are so determined to keep cheerful during these terrible times that many have invoked the mythical spirit of public goodwill displayed by British citizens during World War 2.

Give me a break!

As French Algerian novelist, Albert Camus suggests in ‘The Plague’, an escalating crisis like the Coronavirus pandemic produces the best and worst in us all.

Personally, I find notorious villains far more engaging than milk-and-water saints and such a man was Jewish Londoner Harry Dobkin, a delinquent who murdered, then dismembered his estranged wife and buried her remains on a bomb site in a vain attempt to make her look like a war casualty. According to both Murderpedia and Steemit, when the charred, mummified remains of the former Miss Rachel Dubinski were almost coincidentally unearthed at the height of the London ‘Blitz’ in July 1942 they had been lying below the ruins of the Vauxhall Baptist Chapel for between 12 - 15 months.

I will leave you to read the full details at the links provided above as here I prefer to examine the clever, if now old-fashioned forensic techniques employed to identify the corpse and trace the murderer.

It was a superb piece of team sleuthing, led first by pathologist Dr Keith Simpson who discovered the deceased had died by strangulation; then the police, whose records showed she had been reported missing by her sister, Polly who in turn led them to Rachel’s dentist, Barnett Hopkin.

Finally, writes the author of the account on Murderpedia, “Miss Mary Newman, the head of the Photography Department at Guy's, superimposed a photograph of the skull on to a photograph of Rachel Dobkin, a technique first used six years earlier in the Buck Ruxton case. The fit was uncanny. The bones found in the crypt were the mortal remains of Mrs Rachel Dobkin”.

Most improbably, the Dobkins’ awful story became the stuff of a fictionalised short crime film, ‘The Drayton Case’, whose stars included John Le Mesurier, now best remembered for his role in the BBC TV situation comedy ‘Dad's Army’ and which in a roundabout way brings me back to base.

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Blood Libels, Then and Now

The feeling that succeeding generations fiercely sanctify and protect their forebears’ memory has been reinforced this week by social media chat about the early 20th century Beilis Affair.

The real story and character of Menachem Mendel Beilis and the ordeal he suffered at the hands of the Czarist Russian authorities on false accusations of ritual murder were used as the basis for the multi prizewinning novel ‘The Fixer’ by Bernard Malamud which in turn became a film. This was directed by John Frankenheimer and the screenplay was written by Dalton Trumbo, among the ‘Hollywood Ten’ imprisoned and then blacklisted for putative Communist sympathies.

I am sure that this was no coincidence as Beilis’s story will have resonated hugely with Trumbo for many reasons. Some years ago, the screenwriter’s life story was enshrined on film. It needs figures like his son, Christopher, also a film maker to explain to others like the descendants of Mendel Beilis why and how a factual documentary is quite different from a fictive piece of art. Certainly they won’t listen to me!

------------- The debate takes me to the monstrous artistic scandal of the week, the unveiling of the so-called ‘nouveau baroque’ painting, ‘The Martyrdom of Saint Simonino of Trento, for Jewish Ritual Murder’.

Whatever Italian artist, Giovanni Gasparro and his legion fans may say, the real power of the work is neither in its fine draughtsmanship and exquisite colouration, nor its astute pre-Easter and pre-Passover timing: It lies firmly in the evident glee with which he has depicted the anti-Jewish stereotypical characters in the false, hate-filled story.

The Italian episode was vastly worse than the Beilis Affair, involving Jews being forced to make false confessions to murder and then being burnt at the stake.

Gasparro, according to his online biography, enjoys the official patronage of UNESCO, the Italian state and many churches. Further, he boasts a huge social media following: At the last count, more than 2,000 people had reacted to the controversial work on his Facebook page, while it produced 6.2K comments and 1.4K shares.

I do hope that someone persuades Gasparro that if he wishes to honour his faith in paint, there are a million other ways to do so.

The current pandemic has also produced ‘mini’ libels: While a ‘New York Times’ op-ed compared the Corona quarantine to an IDF military curfew on Palestinians in 2002 without mentioning suicide bombings, the Palestinian Authority initially equated Israel with the virus and only after a long silence, did it admit to cooperating with Israel during the emergency. By then, of course, more damage had been done.

Corona as the Theatre of the Absurd

Try as I may, I cannot find any well-known recent commentators who have referred to Camus’s novel, ‘The Plague’. This is especially surprising in Israel where the great master of absurdist philosophy and art is said to be universally revered.

Professor David Ohana remarks in his work, ‘Israel and Its Mediterranean Identity’ that Camus experienced the Vichy regime’s treatment of its Jews “close at hand through the family of his wife Francine, his schoolmates, neighbors, and fellow intellectuals … Most of Camus’s friends at that period in Algeria were Jews”.

André Cohen, his family doctor became “a victim of the fascist plague that was spreading in Algeria: only two percent of the Jewish doctors were permitted to work in their profession, and there was a similar quota in governmental positions. When the decrees were imposed in Oran, Dr Cohen had to stop working as a doctor”.

Ohana muses “… was Dr Cohen, the enlightened Jewish doctor, Camus’s model for Dr Rieux, the fighting doctor in ‘La Peste (The Plague)’, the outlines of which he began to commit to writing at that time? …

“Camus, who was influenced by ‘Moby Dick’, needed a symbol that would embody the subject he wished to describe in his allegorical novel. The plague of typhus that was raging in the town of Tlemcen gave him his inspiration. In 1941, at the time of the plague, he wrote in the newspaper ’Paris- Soir’, for which he worked, a short story that sketched out the main outlines of the plot of ‘The Plague’, which were fully developed about six years later”.

The past three-four months have  indeed seen our global and virtual village turn into a huge stage depicting a strange, absurdist universe that no-one can yet fully interpret or explain. It now remains to be seen if any leading Jewish writers, be they in Israel or the Diaspora, will return Camus’s compliment and write something worthy of his enduring legacy – and the plague that’s irrevocably changed modern times.

© Natalie Wood (01 April 2020)  

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Loveless and Lonesome Among the Fiddlers on the Roof!

It is hard enough for any grandchild to edit and publish a brutally frank memoir by a cherished forebear.

But it must have been especially difficult for Hebrew University historian Dr Michael Beizer, who believes the writings of his grandmother Doba-Mera (Miriam) Medvedeva are unusual, not only for their valuable historic content but as an accurate record “of a Lithuanian-Belorussian Jewish shtetl at the turn of the twentieth century – “written by a poor, uneducated woman”.

Equally impressive, he says. “is the power of her writing. Seen through the eyes of this unfortunate girl, shtetl (small town) life loses the romantic aura ascribed to it by people who had good lives there, as well as by postwar scholars carried away by nostalgia. It is striking how a simple woman with no conception of feminism understood herself as a strong personality with things to say, whose experience could prove useful to her descendants. Her native intelligence and awareness are impressive”.

Beizer and his co-editor and translator, Alice Nakhimovsky have published Daughter of the Shtetl, The Memoirs of Doba-Mera Medvedeva, in a series, Jews of Russia & Eastern Europe and Their Legacy produced by The Academic Studies Press and sponsored by Boston College, USA.

In his introductory essay, Beizer explains that Doba-Mera’s father, Izrail´-Vel´ka, was an Enlightenment-influenced melamed (traditional children’s religious teacher), descended from famed 16th-17th century Talmudist Rabbi Yoel Sirkis.

But what could and should have been a relatively happy, fulfilling girlhood in a tiny town with a majority Jewish populace ‘on the edge of the earth’ turned sour when first her mother, Rokhl´-Leia Ben´iaminovna (née Medvedeva) died when she was aged only 11 and then her father, when she was aged 16.

Her father had meanwhile remarried and she was made to feel an ‘outcast’, forced into a Cinderella existence where she encountered “extreme need, illness, greed and wretchedness; very rarely, human kindness and sympathy”.

‘“I had no childhood, only years during which I was a child,”’ Doba-Mera later recalled.

Beizer makes us question how much his grandmother was a victim of circumstance and to what extent she was imprisoned by her own personality.

While like all natural writers, an innate compulsion may have sparked Doba-Mera’s scribblings, it was surely unalloyed fear that caused her to destroy the first draft.

“In 1939, at the age of forty-seven, Grandmother decided that she had seen enough of life to begin a memoir. When she finished, she destroyed her account of the interwar Soviet period, which is a great pity but hardly surprising, if one considers the terrifying nature of those years for all of Leningrad …

“In addition, why remind the children that Papa had been a lishenets (deprived of the right to vote in the Soviet Union) and had been ‘purged’ from the Party?

“‘That’s what all honorable people did then,” explained his son, “because if the writer was arrested, then everybody mentioned in the memoir would end up in the cross-hairs of the security police”’.

After the war, as a sign of gratitude for the safe home-coming of her sons and sons-in-law, Doba-Mera returned to traditional Judaism, observing Sabbath, Passover and the dietary laws.

In 1958 during the Khrushchev Thaw, she also resumed her diary, describing her golden wedding anniversary and her complicated relationships with her children and husband. Despite countless travails and disputes, the couple’s marriage survived an extraordinary 62 years!

Perhaps understandably, Beizer leaves for another book what lay beyond an ‘impenetrable green fence’ in the woods near his grandparents’ retirement home at Levashovo, outside Leningrad (St Petersburg): It surrounded a former execution and burial site for twenty-eight thousand ‘enemies of the people’.

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* Dr Michael Beizer, born in St Petersburg in 1950, served from 1982 - 1987 as coordinator of the city’s ‘home refuseniks’' seminar on Jewish history and culture. He emigrated to Israel in 1987.

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**Daughter of the Shtetl: The Memoirs of Doba-Mera Medvedeva is available from The Academic Studies Press in paperback and hardback formats from $ 21.95.

© Natalie Wood (29 July 2019)

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Mary Berry, Queen of ... Seder!

I bet even Britain's 'Mary, Queen of Cakes' will be surprised to learn she's become the star attraction of Jewish social media threads during the current 2019 Passover week. This time, though, it's not because of a no-fail cake recipe, but because of a non-dairy vegetable lasagne that is suitable year-round for a kosher diet and that I altered to make it appropriate for the traditional 'seder' dinner by substituting pasta strips with matza sheets. I softened these slightly without soaking them by passing them through running cold tap water before placing them on the dish. Any readers here interested in having a go, either with pasta or matza. wil find the original recipe in the vegetarian section of this whopping cookey encyclopedia - always a pleasure to use. Mary Berry’s Complete Cookbook is available from Amazon on Kindle and in hardback.

© Natalie Wood (22 April 2019)

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Push Yourself to Stop a Fall!

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.

So to help private citizens, particularly those of us who are growing older and so a little frail, physical fitness trainer, Baz Thompson has produced a manual to help us avoid such traumas. Thompson's Amazon biography claims he has helped 'hundreds of people' to achieve their fitness goals, be they professional athletes, business leaders or ordinary members of the public. Certainly, his book, Balance Exercises for Seniors** is superior to others I have read in the same genre, offering very good advice to older people as to how they may  keep upright and supple despite advancing years.  There is a full range of seated exercises for the disabled or those simply less ambulant and a section devoted to 'vestibular' exercises for those with hearing and sight impairment. I also recommend the accompanying line drawings that well illustrate the author's intent. Links to  free downloads for a recipe book and work book are also provided.  Thompson has produced a second book, Stretching Exercises for Seniors. I suggest that any reprints include a glossary of the anatomical terms employed to save readers having to use a dictionary.  ** Balance Exercises for Seniors: Easy to Perform Fall Prevention Workouts to Improve Stability and Posture (Strength Training for Seniors) is available on Kindle ($0.99) or in print format ($24.97, hardcover;  $9.97, paperback).   NATALIE WOOD 13 JANUARY 2022

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On the Commonality of Covid

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.

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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

© Natalie Wood (11 September 2021)

[msniw]

Israel’s Mediterranean Diet Wiped off the Map!

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.

© Natalie Wood (11 July 2021)

[msniw]

Murder, Mayhem – but No Medicine!

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/

© Natalie Wood (19 February 2021)

[msniw]

Not Bedtime Reading!

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).

© Natalie Wood (30 January 2021)

[msniw]

When the Cradle Still Rocked

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.

© Natalie Wood (29 January 2021)

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The Desert Vixen – and Her Fox!

As the arguments about the prosecution of British Armed Forces’ veterans for alleged war crimes in Northern Ireland and the Middle East continue, a new work examining the disposition of the military mind becomes of crucial importance.

But Erin Solaro’s book about Germany’s World War 11 hero Field Marshal Erwin Rommel is neither another biography nor a forensic discussion of his extraordinary personality.

It is rather, a strange, occasionally lyrical novella in which he is made to reflect on the worst excesses of waging war and meeting death in words reminiscent of – even quoting from – celebrated war verse.

Solaro’s Rommel ponders thus five days after the Battle of Bir Hakeim and two weeks before the surrender of Tobruk:

“I have never forgotten, simply locked it away. Even in the moment I knew I need not have shot him, because what is more useless than a lieutenant colonel running around the hinterlands of France without his troops?

“I shot him down simply because he had begun to rant and, amped as I was on adrenaline and amphetamines, after three demands to surrender, the first more than courteous, I had enough.

“Because I knew suicidal defiance when I saw it, so why not deliver?

“It was one of those ugly, regrettable incidents inevitable in any war.

“It was the first time, the only time in my life I had indulged in the intoxication of wanton destruction for its own sake rather than in the bloodlust of close combat. So I let stand the lie that I had ordered someone else to do it.

“In a way I had. For the first and only time in my life, I stood down the part of me that even drunk with rage, knew right from wrong – and kept that faith….

“Armies need private soldiers and young officers who snort and stamp and curvet like warhorses at the scent of blood and generals who, because they understand them, can restrain them.

“I had failed in that. I resolved never to fail again”.

Such words, others may agree, are as fine a defence witness statement at a war crimes’ trial that anyone may offer.

But further passages prove Solaro’s tale to be yet more complex:There is the painfully wrought description of Rommel’s distraught widow, Lucia Maria Mollin, whose thickly veiled face and dignified bearing surely march us straight to that of Jackie Kennedy at her husband’s state funeral 19 years later. We get the hint. The parallels are clear.Both women survived their respective spouses by many years – and despite huge differences in status and wealth – each found herself somehow entombed in her late partner’s legacy.

Next comes Solaro’s reproduction of a photograph from Rommel: The Trail of the Fox by infamous Holocaust denier, David Irving that she uses to illustrate an affectionate – almost domestic - idyll with a vixen.But to tell more now would be to pen a spoiler.

Instead I will own to a warm personal friendship and regard with and for the US-born author who, although not Jewish, has spent about a decade living and working in Israel. She settled here with her late husband, historian and journalist. Philip Gold who died two days after his 70th birthday in October last year.

Erin Solaro’s earlier work has been rewarded with unstinting praise from top US military personnel and individuals including Phyllis Chesler, the feminist psychologist and Israel advocate, who like her, spent time in Afghanistan – but for wildly different reasons!

Now You Know: The Last Day of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel is presently available for free Kindle Unlimited download on Amazon.

© Natalie Wood (29 November 2019)