Radical Nat on the right. On a postcard from 'yours rebelliously Henry B Offell' |
She had, however, emerged from the aftermath of the war a woman saddened well beyond her eighteen years. She’d been engaged to a young man who managed to survive the entire war, only to come home and succumbing to the terrible flu epidemic that followed. So, when Nat approached her, Yetta was still recovering from a devastating loss.
Did that make her more or less open to his advances? Perhaps a little of both. They were engaged relatively soon, but the road to marriage was a stormy one. She told me that on one evening they had such a row in a street on the way home that she tore off her engagement ring and threw it on the pavement at his feet, before storming off.
He, instead of following her at once, got down on his hands and knees and searched for the ring. It was a good ring and he wanted her to accept it. He could settle the argument later.
They were married in 1921. On 8 September, just one week before Yetta turned 21. A week later and she wouldn’t have needed her parents’ consent, but she insisted on getting it, though they were more than a little reluctant: Nat was from a far poorer background than hers, daughter as she was of a skilled craftsman, a shoemaker specialising in orthopaedic shoes for injured or otherwise deformed feet.
Yetta and Nat at their wedding in 1921 |
A Jewish boss of mine once said that to make a man a Conservative, you had to give him something to conserve. Rebellious Nat may once have been, but as the years rolled by, he found himself in ever greater sympathy with the British Establishment. Besides, when it came to the Second World War, he felt that the nature of an enemy led by Hitler meant that a Jew had to abandon pacifism and do what he could to overthrow that violently anti-Semitic regime.
He was too old for combat, but he could volunteer for the Air Raid Protection service, which he enthusiastically did. He knew what Air Raids meant, if only as a result of attempting to travel in to his office in the City of London one day, only to be turned back four stops before his on the Underground. The city had taken a pasting the night before and most of the buildings had been burned out, his company’s included. There was no way through to it.
So, at the end of the Second World War, unlike the First, Nat was far closer in sympathy to the mainstream of British society. And the process continued, notably after the formation of the state of Israel in 1948. My grandparents were never practising Jews (a more religious uncle refused to visit them because they’d allowed bacon into their house), but their sympathies were with the Jews of Israel nonetheless. The result was a continued drift away from the radical Left to which they had both belonged at one time.
A good grandfather with his grandsons in the fifties Just a bit more staid... |
I haven’t the hard data to support my view, but it feels to me that this has been a trend in the Jewish community. Radical in the 1920s, strongly pro-Labour in the fifties and sixties, its centre of gravity is with the Tories today – perhaps their more liberal wing, but Tory nonetheless.
I’m not sure where they would stand on the scandal over anti-Semitism in the Labour Party today. I imagine it would only have been the last straw for them. Among those of us who remain linked with the Jewish community, however tenuously, only a minority stay loyal to Labour.
For my part, I wish we could recapture the time when Jews like my grandparents could be counted on to support the Left. But I regret still more that many Jews no longer feel comfortable in the Labour Party. I’d like to see the first problem solved, but I believe something will have died in Labour’s soul if it can’t solve the second.
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