120 today

She’d have been 120 years old today, my grandmother.

I’ve lived too long in Catholic countries – Italy, France and now Spain – to forget my grandmother’s birthday. The 15^th of August, the feast of the Assumption of Mary. Today, I forgot that the shops would be closed, until I’d walked down to the supermarket to find it shut. But I didn’t forget that it was my grandmother's birthday.

Which is ironic. Remembering my grandmother’s birthday thanks to a Christian festival, though she was someone who never practised but was always profoundly moulded by being Jewish.

This was my maternal grandmother, Yetta. If you read this blog regularly, you may remember her in ‘The Girl on the Dockside’, waiting for the ship that would take her to distant Britain, as she clutched her mother’s hand with one of hers, while in the other she held her little brother’s potty. The brother was in her mother’s other arm.

Her family had escaped the city they called Vilna, today Vilnius, then part of the Russian Empire. Russia was a land of pogroms, anything but kind to Jews. Yetta had little love for the Tsars.

In Britain, she followed the same political trajectory as many other Jews. She started on the far left, glorying in the revolution that had brought down the Tsar and opened a perspective towards a more glorious future for Russia, as the Soviet Union, just a year before the First World War ended.

She joined the Communist Party of Great Britain.

It was while she was chairing a public meeting of the party that she was spotted by Nat, a man ten years her senior, only recently released from Dartmoor prison, to which he’d been condemned as a conscientious objector. He was never a Communist, but like Yetta he was part of that general wave of radical thinking that had swept British Jewry and, indeed, Jews in many other countries.

Yetta had previously been engaged to a young man who had served in the war and somehow survived, only to die in the flu pandemic that followed it (I suspect Yetta would have reacted to today’s Coronavirus pandemic with gloomy familiarity). It took her a while to come back from that, but eventually, after a stormy courtship, Yetta and Nat got married.

They lived through the upheavals of the twenties. They saw the first Labour governments, and they saw the long period of Conservative power that followed the Great Crash of 1929. And they watched with horror the rise to power of anti-Semitic totalitarians in Germany in the thirties.

My favourite image of Yetta
Sketch by a friend in 1930, when she was 30

They were still of the Left. Even my mother had to attend Young Communist League classes on Marxist philosophy in the late thirties, until she could stand the boredom no longer. My mother joined the Labour Party, by then a much more appropriate home for Yetta and Nat too.

Then came the Second World War and the Holocaust. Yetta knew of ninety relatives who had stayed behind in Vilna. After the war, she could find no trace of any of them, even with the help of the Red Cross. That they’d been killed was fairly certain, but we never knew where, when or how.

Then in 1948, the state of Israel was founded. The event was supported by the Labour Party, then in power in Britain. Indeed, Israel itself was ruled for many of its early years by its sister Party, Labor.

Why did Israel matter to British Jews, who had no intention of moving there? Because it was a living symbol of the refusal of Jews ever to be passive victims again. Now they would have a nation of their own, capable of defending itself, and that would be a safe haven for any Jew who could get there, when facing renewed persecution in their country of origin.

Throughout my childhood, on my many visits to my grandparents’ house, I was struck by the collecting tin for Israel on the mantelpiece. It mattered to them deeply. It said, “what happened to our relatives in Vilna must never happen again”.

The kind of collecting box my grandparents always had

But Yetta’s political evolution was continuing. There came a time when the centre-left, Liberal newspaper that she read (and I still do), the Guardian, became too critical of Israel for her liking. She, and Nat with her, switched instead to the Conservative Daily Telegraph.

As I became more politically aware, I had long and usually fruitless debates with them. How could Israel justify building itself a country in a place that already had inhabitants? How could it bring itself to drive so many of them off their land? How could Jews subject Palestinians to the very same indignities and deprivations that they had previously suffered themselves?

I realise now that my arguments could not possibly sway them. Whatever Israel did wrong, to Jews it was the only rock to which they could cling. And their experience of the Holocaust had been the most brutal object lesson in how badly they needed that rock.

There were 12 million Jews in Europe before the Nazis set about destroying them. Afterwards there were just 6 million. A massive genocide had been at least 50% successful.

Many in Labour point out that they must be allowed to criticise the state of Israel without being accused of anti-Semitism. They’re right. But what they often do isn’t criticism, proposing ways to improve. It drifts into demonisation, which views Israel as not merely mistaken, but frankly evil. A demon state can’t be reformed, it has to be destroyed.

To many Jews, that would feel like the loss of their one bulwark against renewed persecution. Besides, it would certainly lead to a new Holocaust amongst the Jews living there now. 

It’s hard to see that as anything but anti-Semitic.

That, I think, is why Yetta, like many Jews, moved over decades in her life from the radical Left to the centre-Right. Because escaping from the Russian Empire hadn’t been enough. It had taken building their own State to make the Jews feel safe. Or at least safer.

Anyone denying them that right represented nothing less than a threat to their existence. And they – she – would have nothing to do with them. Something Labour critics of Israel need to remember today.

It’s funny the things my grandmother’s birthday brings to mind.