Of grandmothers, a warrior, and a revered Argentinian. As well as the Holocaust

Of all my departed relatives, the one who’s been most frequently coming to my mind recently, has been my grandmother. My maternal grandmother. The one who once stood on a freezing dockside in the Russian empire, on her way to refuge in England, when she was three.

It helps that we’ve had the sketch portrait of her framed and it’s now up on our sitting room wall among our other pictures. It shows her when she was thirty and I had it for years, loose, inside the pages of a book she gave me.Whenever I saw it, I was struck by it, because of the way it caught her personality so well.

Portrait of my grandmother, properly displayed at last

That may seem an odd thing to say, because when I think of her, I think of her smiling. She didn’t smile all the time – that would have made her look dotty, and the picture shows her in a more serious, though not sombre mood, which I knew well too. I think she just always had a smile ready, and would turn it on, full of unfeigned affection, whenever it was appropriate.

Another reminder of her came when I was listening to an audiobook the other day. As an immigrant to Spain, I feel I have to work on my Spanish, and work on it I do. It progresses, if far more slowly than I might have hoped, and so far has left me speaking the language far less well than I’d wish. One of the things I try to do, especially when I’m out walking the dogs, is to listen to books in Spanish, and right now I’m working my way through the complete short stories of that great Argentinian author, Jorge Luis Borges. 

If you picked up a nuance behind the word ‘working’, you were absolutely right. I’m fully prepared to believe that Borges is outstanding, especially as there are moments when I find my breath taken away by a sudden burst of insight, but a lot of the time – well, in my lack of sophistication, I have to confess I find him hard going.

Still, let’s focus on the positive. One of the (many) moments when I’ve been struck by this collection was listening to The Story of the Warrior and the Captive. Borges bases this story on a brief account by a medieval churchman, who talks of the barbarian warrior Droctulft.

He, it seems, was a Lombard. Now most of us, these days, think of Lombards, if we think of them at all, as the inhabitants of Lombardy. That’s the region around Milan in northern Italy. But the name of the region comes from an invading tribe of Germanic warriors, since that’s what the Lombards were, before they settled down, started growing rice, became powerful bankers and learned to dominate the world of design and fashion.

Of course, people of my generation, if they hear the word Lombard, might well think of its use in 80s slang – L.O.M.B.A.R.D. meant Lot Of Money But A Right Dick. 

Now, one of the things Borges liked to do was write stories as though they were academic studies. He’d even do things like talk about an event, and then add a phrase along the lines of “however, many authorities doubt the veracity of this account” or “the evidence for this is thin”. And then you discover that the whole things was made up from start to finish anyway, people, events, the lot.

Which, I suppose, does make the evidence for it fairly thin.

Now, I started off pretty suspicious, especially because of his reference to a medieval church scholar, since that’s the just the kind of character he likes to invent (and write material for). Rather a lot of these stories have that kind of character in them, or a Jewish scholar, or a Gaucho. Those seem to be among his favourites to people his writing.

With Droctulft, though, he really is talking about a historical figure. He was one of the Lombard warriors laying siege to the city of Ravenna, then a possession not of the Western Roman Empire – Rome had fallen to the Goths – but to the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as the Byzantine Empire. 

The way Borges tells the story, Droctulft had never seen a city before. He’d come directly from the woods and hills of Germany to besiege this one.  So when he saw it, he was overwhelmed by the experience, blown over in admiration of all that beauty and sophistication, and immediately convinced that this was something that had to be defended, not destroyed. So he switched sides and fought with the inhabitants, ultimately dying in the defence of Ravenna, which honoured his sacrifice with a monument.

That’s the first part of the story. The second part, the one about the captive, is presented as told to him by Borges’s English grandmother. I haven’t checked, but I assume she existed too. She married an Argentinian and lived with him for many years in a desert region, far away from cities and from anyone else from England. 

Or so she thought.

One day, she was introduced to a woman living as a Native American, married to a tribal chief, mother of his children. It turns out that she’d been captured as a child and had lived with her captors ever since. Borges’s grandmother offers to rescue her and her children, but she says ‘no’ and tells her she’s happy to stay where she is.

The writer presents both cases – and perhaps even his grandmother’s – as illustrations of the way someone can be entirely assimilated into a culture that was initially alien to them. At the end of the process, they identify with their new rather than their old people, and feel they have roots among those they live with (the captive) or are even prepared to make great sacrifices, even the ultimate sacrifice, on their behalf (the warrior).

The reference to a grandmother was obviously a first trigger to think of mine. But then I also thought about how she had been entirely assimilated by the English culture her parents took her to. She was quintessentially English. You might say, “well, she came at three”, and you’d be right. But her mother too was completely absorbed by her new country, even though she never really mastered the language completely – like me with Spanish – and spoke it with a strong accent – ditto.

The point is, though, that they came and they stayed. And that reminded me of something else. A photo, in rather a poor photocopy, but one annotated in my mother’s handwriting. It showed my grandmother’s grandmother, her aunt, and I assume two cousins. In Vilna, today’s Vilnius, where they stayed when my grandmother’s immediate family left.

They were all murdered in the Holocaust.

Relatives from Vilna
As my mother notes, they all
died in the Holocaust

It struck me that these were ideas worth thinking about. Immigration is a hot topic again today, as it apparently ever is. To those who condemn immigrants as scroungers or a threat, I would say, “hold on a moment to think of what they’re escaping and find a little sympathy for them, if you’re capable of any.

“And perhaps you could think of the warrior and the captive in the Borges story, or my grandmother in England. They can assimilate. And their commitment to the country they chose may be astonishingly strong.

“Perhaps even stronger than yours?”