An Untouched House by Willem Frederick Hermans (translated by David Colmer) published by Pushkin at £7.99.

Holland, Review, Translation, , ,

My grandfather was an old soldier during the second world war. Too old to have been called up normally, he was called up because he had been in the Territorial Army and had experience of weapons. He became a regimental sergeant-major “in the field”. Somewhere I have a photo of him with a group of other RSMs, friends of his. He was the only one to survive the war.
In charge of a supply column moving up Italy his group found themselves behind enemy lines after Italy surrendered and Germany invaded, sweeping down through Italy leaving his column stranded. Through the offices of some Glasgow Italian soldiers they were able to make contact with local partisans, hand over the supplies to them and fought alongside them for some months. Family legend is that was the one period of the war he would never talk about. What did they do that he could not talk about? Partisan warfare is not exactly nice, you can’t take prisoners.

An Untouched House | Willem Frederik Hermans | 9781782274445
From time to time I’ve read novels or experiences of partisan life and have just read An Untouched House by Willem Frederick Hermans (translated by David Colmer), newly published by Pushkin at £7.99. Hermans was a Dutch writer, read by many in Holland, but whose work was so disliked that he went into voluntary exile. He did not make life easy for himself, as the afterword by Cees Nooteboom, explains. When Hermans died his archives comprise “thirty meters of coagulated anger”.
Partly this was because he published about the war before plucky little Holland had come to terms with aspects of their war that were not the stuff of legend. Later he was a critic of Dutch rule in Indonesia.
This book, first published in 1951, is a novella about a short period in the life of an unnamed Dutch partisan who somehow ended up fighting in an unnamed area of Eastern Europe. After a successful battle against occupying German forces he wanders off and finds the untouched house of the title, a rather beautiful house in an area deserted by its occupants. There’s soup on the stove, evidence of recent flight, but no sign of life.
The partisan explores the house, strips off his filthy battle gear, bathes and sleeps in clean sheets.
Then German soldiers turn up, knocking at the door, planning to requisition the house. He – the partisan – passes himself off as the owner and allows them in, simply grumbling a bit to ensure they look after the place, as any owner would. It sounds a bit like a farce typing this, but shortly afterwards the real owners turn up when the Germans are out on patrol. The partisan has no option but to kill them to avoid being found out. In due course his former partisan comrades arrive, the Germans have been beaten off for good, the German captain had already surrendered to the partisan of the story, now back in uniform and the mystery of the one locked room in the house has been solved.
The partisans proceed to find the wine cellar, get raging drunk and… well, they are not exactly nice to the house, their captive and an elderly deaf and confused man who had turned up to look after his collection of rare fish in that locked room. The fish don’t do well out of this either.
Sorry for the spoiler.
And this book is one of the reasons Hermans was read but not popular in Holland. Every occupied force and every army of occupation likes to think of itself at least in retrospect as the good guys, the most moral. Hermans, in An Untouched House, suggests otherwise.

Ross Bradshaw

An Untouched House is available for £7.99 post free from bookshop@fiveleaves.co.uk

Love’s Work by Gillian Rose (NYRB, £7.99)

Biography, Jewish Interest, Review,

 

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This book was re-issued by New York Review of Books in 2011, with an introduction by Michael Wood, and a dedicated poem for the late Gillian Rose by Geoffrey Hill, who is himself now dead. By the time this, the current edition, appeared Gillian Rose was sixteen years deceased, her book first appearing in the year of her death and written in the foreknowledge of her imminent demise.
 Picking the original edition up from the shelves at home, bought in 1995, never read then forgotten, I found it moving to read as if reading in the present tense having also forgotten the detail of her life (and death) so the chapters about her fatal illness came almost as a surprise to me.
 It’s not an easy book to read – I don’t just mean those details, laid out with candour, but Rose was a philosopher and she had a habit of including technical, exclusive language and the odd phrase of mostly untranslated Latin. But it is worth carrying on.
Her book is autobiographical, but not a full autobiography. Chapters include memoirs of her friends and lovers, the very elderly Edna; her priest-lover; her bisexual lover Jim who died in the New York AIDS epidemic; the promiscuous mother-of-five Yvette, who also died of cancer. So many of her friends died. Her family life was broken too, though her teenage self found more familial love with her step-father than her estranged natural father. But it is the chapter on her illness, her realisation she would not survive a year with the details played out, the spread of the cancer, the disagreements between the consultants, the way her colostomy bag deals with body products. Did her death feel more tragic as she was fit and healthy as the cancer was growing inside her, cycling and swimming, feeling alive?
Rose was a Jewish intellectual and at one stage was called upon, with others, to advise the Polish government on what to do with Auschwitz. Save for the branch of her family that came to England some fifty of her relatives had perished in the Holocaust, yet the person who made her weep was a survivor of the Polish nobility resident only in a fraction of his old house who had scraped a living working as a translator under the Communist regime.
The book is searingly honest.
Ross Bradshaw

Contemporary Trotskyism: parties, sects and social movements in Britain by John Kelly (Routledge, £29.99)

Labour History, Review,
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In 1971 I became quite friendly with some people from the International Marxist Group n Glasgow, then a significant Trotskyist group. I did find it a bit strange – people had pretend “cadre” names, though everyone knew who each other was and it is hard to imagine for a second that the state didn’t have the odd implant within the group anyway.
I didn’t get that involved, but I did go to a conference where I found the various factions of the group hated each other more than they hated capitalism. Not for me.
That was my flirtation with Trotskyism. In the intervening years I have worked closely with some Trotskyists on anti-fascist work, seen the arse-end of their sectarianism, seen organisations built by them and organisations destroyed by them, stood appalled at some of their behaviour and made good friends with some individual Trotskyists who I know would have my back if the going got tough. But never thought of joining them.
John Kelly’s Contemporary Trotskyism: parties, sects and social movements in Britain is about as good a guide to that scene as you can get (with the exception of John Sullivan’s essential but dated skit A Soon as this Pub Closes, freely available online).
Kelly reveals there are (or were in 2017) 22 UK-wide Trotskyist parties or groups in Britain, whose membership ranges from a claimed 5,936 members of the Socialist Workers Party to the mighty two of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency in Britain. At least they do have two as that would be a very large banner for one to carry. Nine of the organisations have fewer than fifteen members, even the Spartacist League whose ten is a fairly small achievement for a group operating here since 1975. Having read the odd paper of the Sparts, the amazing thing is that ten have joined them. My sources in some of the groups indicate that Kelly’s membership figures are fairly accurate, but quite unbelievable about the SWP. During the period around 2012 when about a thousand active members left in the wake of a sexual abuse scandal (involving the SWP’s general secretary, Martin Smith, strangely missing from this book’s index) it became obvious that most of their “members” had never paid dues, never attended branches and many were students, say, who’d signed up at a meeting but were never seen again. One person I came across “joined” several times at a national demonstration, for a laugh. Attendance at any political demonstration nationally or in my home town of  Nottingham will tell you that the SWP is at a very low ebb.
The SWP is famously sectarian, forever setting up front organisations under their control. They were, for example, the only left group that would not join Notts Anti-Fascist Alliance. It was a little too democratic for them. In 1994 Mushroom Bookshop, where I worked, was attacked and wrecked by fifty or so Nazis, many of whom were arrested and about dozen of whom were eventually jailed. Immediately after the attack the local Anti-Nazi League ie the SWP called a press conference about the attack and a demonstration a week later. We were invited to attend their press conference and to speak at their rally about the attack on us! We declined – not least as we were busy putting the shop back together – and working with a much wider grouping to organise the biggest anti-fascist demonstration Nottingham had seen since the 1930s.
More on numbers – the fourth largest Trotskyist group listed is Socialist Appeal with 300 members. This is the group that stayed in the Labour Party when Militant (now the Socialist Party) left, the minority following the former Millie leader Ted Grant in staying. That’s fewer than one person in two parliamentary constituencies. Here in Nottingham the exotically-named Alliance for Workers Liberty has a significant presence, yet nationally only 140 members. These two are the biggest groups in the Labour Party but despite that Tom Watson, yes, that Tom Watson, in his long campaign against his party leader, claimed in 2016 that the Labour Party was at risk of a Trotskyist take over. Indeed, the impact of Corbyn has almost certainly to diminish the number of potential recruits to the main Trotskyist groups, as they are outside the Labour Party. The Socialist Party is a fraction of its size when, as Militant, it had two or three MPs in its ranks, control of Liverpool council and more full time workers than the Labour Party itself. Millie’s much vaunted record of control in Liverpool, by the way, is contested – it is worth finding an old copy of The Racial Policies of Militant in Liverpool published by the Runnymede Trust and the Liverpool Black Caucus during Militant’s high water mark in 1986.
Contemporary Trotskyism starts by explaining what Trotskyism is, bringing back happy memories of debating permanent revolution, the united front, united fronts of a special kind, transitional demands, the revolutionary vanguard party, democratic centralism, rank and fileism and, ultimately, the dictatorship of the proletariat. But primarily this book is about their organisational presence as parties, as internationals (you are nobody unless you have a sister group or two overseas), and within social movements.
And it is in the latter that most people will come across them, often not so much in the vanguard as trying desperately to catch up. This happened in my lifetime with the miners’ strike, the anti-poll tax campaign, CND and the anti-fascist movement. But they were ahead of the game with the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, Stop the War and others. In the latter the SWP provided the organisational framework for the Stoppers, until two of its leaders, John Rees and Lindsey German, were turfed out, forming Counterfire. The power couple had been blamed for the SWP’s lash up with George Galloway in his Respect Coalition.
John Kelly’s book has many charts such as growth, income and membership of Trotskyist groups but he could have done to have added a chart of longevity of individual leaders. Most of the Trotsskyist groups have the same leaders for life. Tony Cliff (born Yigael Gluckstein in Palestine) founded the SWP (as the Socialist Review Group) in around 1950 and he was still leader fifty years later when he died. Ted Grant (born Isaac Blank in South Africa) formed the group that became Militant in 1937 and was still at the helm in 1992 when he was defenestrated, setting up the Socialist Appeal group which he run until his death in 2006. Gerry Healy was an early colleague of Grant’s before setting up the fiefdom that became the Workers’ Revolutionary Party in 1950 which he led for 35 years before his sexual abuse and bullying led to the implosion of the group, after which he still led a fragment of true believers. Sean Matgamma, like Healy, an Irishman, has led the group that became AWL since 1966 and still leads it, when he is not writing his famously bad poetry. Peter Taaffe was in Militant’s leadership when Ted Grant was expelled and has already racked up twenty years as the leader of the Socialist Party. Alan Thornett…. well, you get the message.
Much of this can be laid at the door of they way these parties seem to operate – outgoing central committees suggest their slate for the incoming committees, and are based round a group of full-timers. Membership commitment (the SWP aside) is high and dues are sometimes 10% of your wage.
Kelly’s book is well-written, given it is a book for trainspotters of a special kind, though strangely its cover features a banner from a tiny Maoist group which must have annoyed some people, not least those members of the Maoist group. Anyone seriously into Trotskyist trainspotting, however, should sign up to receive the bulletins of Splits and Fusions which also has an online archive of current, long-dead and half-forgotten Trotskyist papers and organisations, including the semi-mythical Internal Bulletins. It’s encouraging that the website is self-mocking in its title as, well, that’s what Trotskyist do – split and fuse.
Turning back the International Marxist Group and Nottingham… Our own Ken Coates’ International Group, which became the IMG in 1967 is barely mentioned, nor is (Pat Jordan’s) International Bookshop in Nottingham. Indeed the Trotskyist bookshops are mentioned on one page only and only as a source of funds for the party. Anyone wanting to explore this further should go to http://www.leftontheshelfbooks.co.uk/images/doc/Radical-Bookshops-Listing.pdf which has the best listing of past radical bookshops, communist, Trotskyist and libertarian. But what is worth mentioning is that whereas I rarely come across anyone who used to be in the awful WRP, which at one time had perhaps 6,000 members, in Nottingham at least all the former members of the IMG I know here are still involved in politics, have been and are major and beneficial contributors to trade unions, local and labour history, the women’s movement, refugee support groups and environmental campaigns. Perhaps I should have paid more attention at that conference in 1971.
One final point, given that this website is about left culture, though the Trotskyist movement has produced some excellent writers of non-fiction – Paul Foot and David Widgery stand out – they have produced little left culture of their own. Aside from Rock Against Racism, which was Trotskyist influenced, I’m struggling to think of any long term or even short term arts project coming from that milieu save for a very short-lived coffee-bar and venue run in London by Counterfire modelled, perhaps, on the Partisan coffee house of the late fifties and early sixties. But there is hope, I am told (by a very cultured member) within the Socialist Party. At a recent conference this subject attracted a very large attendance and the SP has spawned an art magazine, Bad Art. I can’t help but think old Ted Grant would think that a bourgeois deviation from the real class struggle.
Ross Bradshaw

At the Existentialist Cafe: freedom, being and apricot cocktails by Sarah Bakewell (Vintage, £9.99)

Biography, Philosophy, Review, , , ,

About forty-five years ago I bought some Sartre and Camus books (from Bissett’s academic bookshop in Aberdeen – long gone of course), then Jean Genet. It was quite cool to carry a Penguin in your pocket.

 Did I know these were existential books? Probably not. I did, after all, read Camus’ Plague without realising it was a metaphor for the German occupation of France. I learned that later, but never got round to finding out what existentialism was. Here was my chance…
Well, existentialism could be summed up by “existence precedes essence”, which even Bakewell says “gains in brevity [but] loses in comprehensibility”. Right. So let’s go back to phenomenology, out of which the e-word came. The brief description of this by Husserl is “to the things themselves”, which it took Husserl 87 volumes to explain. I’m not planning to live long enough to read them. All this lot are long-winded. Sartre, the key person in this book, was asked to write an introduction to a book of essays by Genet. He sent 700 pages, which might have been a tad long, so his publisher turned it into Sartre’s well-known Saint Genet book.
Bakewell’s title, however, is a bit misleading. I expected to be thrown into the world of cafes, of Juliette Gréco , of black polo-neck sweaters (I bought one specially) – we were, but also thrown into the much darker world of Heidegger. In fact the third chapter, twenty-four pages, was all about him and we weaved back and forth to him later, not least his involvement with the National Socialists. Though he had an affair with Hannah Arendt and pre-war friendships with other Jews, he never recanted on his support for the Nazis. His followers only needing an apology before they would accept him back into the fold. And he did have followers, acolytes. One early fan remarked about a lecture that Heidegger had “given us a glimpse into the foundation of the world… manifest in an almost aching brilliance.” But why did he not recant? Perhaps he just being true to himself. These Nazis, eh?
 Image result for at the existentialist cafe
As an exercise in group biography At the Existentialist Cafe is brilliant. In comes Colin Wilson, in comes James Baldwin, and also from Black America, in comes Richard Wright. And Sonia Orwell has a walk on part. The book is full of humour, for example when Heidegger gives a lecture to some shipping magnates in Bremen there is a huge ovation at the end. Brakewell interjects that perhaps it was simply because he had finished.#
Sartre and the others fell out with each other all the time. At one stage Sartre did a diagram to work out who was speaking to whom, which presumably also included who had been sleeping with whom. He and De Beauvoir were together, unfaithfully on both sides, for fifty-one years, but non-sexually after the first eight or so years. De Beauvoir revelled in her freedom and in sex. Sartre found it all a bit gloopy.
Sartre and De Beavoir also, in a sense, fell out with themselves, changing their own minds among others, particularly post-war when they became neo-Stalinists, somewhat at odds with their ideas of freedom. They fell out with Camus over their support for executions of French collaborators.
So what remains? Sartre is not so much read these days. Many of us have nostalgia for those Paris cafes in the period when we were actually still in short trousers. Visiting them now is not the same but De Beauvoir is still read – at least her 1949 book  Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex) is, not least by young people. Why? At our bookshop book group a young woman said it was because things have not changed, or not changed enough. People agreed. Though it was Sartre who encouraged, indeed pushed her to continue, it is perhaps De Beauvoir’s work that will be the lasting impact of that exciting philosophical movement created in a France still bleeding from the second world war and which was convulsed by the resistance to Colonialism in Algeria and France.
Ross Bradshaw
At the Existentialist Cafe is available, post free, from Five Leaves Bookshop 0115 8373097

Ursula Le Guin, a tribute by Andy Hedgecock

Fiction, Review, , ,

THE DEATH of Ursula K Le Guin on January 22 prompted elegiac tributes from critics, fellow authors and an assortment of activists — feminists, anarchists, socialists and environmental campaigners.

The diversity of Le Guin’s appeal is extraordinary, but so too is the paradox at the heart of her reputation.

She was a writer celebrated for highlighting the iniquities, horrors and dangers of the way we live now and for exploring alternative forms of social and political organisation.

When the US National Book Foundation honoured her contribution to literature in 2014, her award acceptance speech celebrated the positive potential of creative writing. “Hard times are coming when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being,” she said.

But Le Guin had firm views about the separateness of the creative process. In an interview a decade earlier, she declared: “[People] can read Kant and Schopenhauer if they want speculation. I am an artist, I write stories not treatises. I am not fully in control of, and do not seek control of, my stories.”

The loosely connected books of Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle have done most to establish her reputation as a writer of thoughtful and provocative science fiction and fantasy. The Left Hand of Darkness, 1969, one of the earliest novels to be recognised as feminist science fiction, centres on a diplomatic mission to bring the Gethen planet system to join a coalition of humanoid worlds.

The envoy Genly Ai struggles to understand Gethenian culture, not least because its people are ambisexual. Some feminist commentators disliked the casting of ambisexual characters in traditional male roles and others were disappointed by the assumption of heterosexual norms.

But the book offers a sharp critique of masculinity and explores the theory that gender divisions cause sexual aggression and foster a hunger for war. Le Guin’s assertion that she “eliminated gender to find out what was left” is at odds with the idea that she relinquished control of her narratives because it implies she worked in a self-consciously political way.

Another Hainish book, The Dispossessed of 1974, offers a searing critique of capitalism and proposes a form of anarchist-communism as a potential alternative.

The story is set on two worlds, Urras and Anarres. Urras is rich in resources but its wealth is concentrated into the hands of the few. It is dominated by competing states, one based on patriarchal capitalism, the other on authoritarian parties that claim to rule in the name of the proletariat.

Anarres, on the other hand, is a harsher and economically poorer world with a social structure based on Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin’s book Mutual Aid.

Le Guin, who expressed her enthusiasm for Kropotkin in her non-fiction writing, was too subtle a writer to present a one-sided argument in The Dispossessed. The governmental systems of Urras are not portrayed as one-dimensionally malevolent while the limitations of life on Anarres are presented warts and all.

The key character, Shevek, is a physicist whose career is limited because his beliefs are out of step with his society’s prevailing orthodoxies. His work is further affected by an obligation to perform manual labour when Anarres faces a natural disaster.

None of the political options Le Guin sets out is perfect, hence the book’s subtitle An Ambiguous Utopia, but it is clear that she sees egalitarian and stateless societies, based on mutual aid and collective responsibility, as preferable to capitalist systems based on systems of command and control.

Le Guin’s writing is crammed with speculation about utopianism, sex, sexual politics, anthropology, religion and the misuse of power. Interesting obsessions for a writer who suggested readers should not look to her writing for speculation.

The Word for World is Forest (1976) is an allegorical take on the US involvement in Vietnam and its critique of colonialism, militarism and environmental destruction is more relevant than ever in the context of Donald Trump’s presidency.

In The Telling (2000), Le Guin rejected a purely materialist analysis of human relations in favour of striking a balance between traditional spiritual wisdom and the benefits of technological development.

The Earthsea cycle, a classic of children’s literature, has much to say on the responsible use of power and, as far as I can remember, 1972′s The Wizard of Earthsea was the first book I read with a non-white lead character.

In her later years, perhaps inspired by creeping fascism in US politics and her fears for the environment, Le Guin reaffirmed the social responsibility of artists. “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings,” she declared.

“Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art and, very often in our art, the art of words.

Andy Hedgecock

This article first appeared in the Morning Star

The Veggies Scoffer (Veggies, £1.50)

Veganism,
I picked this up from the shop hoping for some quick and easy vegan recipes since it is Veganuary (a word I can only say though gritted teeth it is so annoying). But somehow I managed to not notice that it is essentially a recipe book for mass caterers. I’m really not going to be making 700 veggie burgers, though that page is no doubt useful for those who need to do so.
Largely the recipes are for twenty, with the intro helpfully saying for four, divide by five and slightly reduce the cooking time. Oh, yes.
Because the pamphlet *is* for mass catering, festivals and the like, none of the recipes are exactly Ottolenghi, but that’s a good thing as you don’t have to go to Google to find what an ingredient is (which is only on sale in Hoxton anyway). And everything is cheap.
So… sweet potato curry, veggie stew with dumplings, moussaka…
If you are catering for a big group then this is really useful, or you can divide by five or have a big freezer then this is a good pamphlet. And for £1.50 you can’t go wrong.
The Veggies Scoffer is published by Veggies catering campaign, in Nottingham.
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The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell (Profile, £14.99)

Reading and books about books, Review, , ,

Two days off from the cutting edge of contemporary literature that is Five Leaves Bookshop (a description not universally shared, by the way) and I’m reading The Diary of a Bookseller. To anyone tempted to say “get a life”, I can only say “this is the life”…

The Diary, recently published to acclaim, covers a year starting 5th February 2014. I might have missed the reason the book covers that strange calendar year, but if feels stranger that the book has only been recently published. Given that the author lives in Wigtown, the cornerstone of the year was the ballot on Scottish independence. It seems a long time ago now.

Wigtown is a “book town” with several bookshops and a large festival. The Bookshop is at the heart of this with the shop also providing a gathering space for visiting authors and a “festival bed” that can be booked in advance. The cover tells us that Bythell is a misanthrope and bibliophile. The former is not completely true, but if any of the Five Leaves’ workers talked so publicly and critically about our customers they’d be out on their ear. I should have seen the traffic light red warning on the cover: “warm, witty and laugh-out loud funny” said the Daily Mail. It was certainly not warm or witty to to write of the last day of one of his workers who, as she was leaving, was given a hug. “She hates physical contact, so it was particularly gratifying to see how uncomfortable it made her”.

Ir’s not all Black Books by any means, though it perhaps sells well in the wake of that programme. Some of the author’s comments did ring true, however. I can’t find the exact quote but if someone does come in and shout something like “Books! I could spend a fortune and all day in here!” it is a guarantee that they will spend nothing and be gone in ten minutes.

Having spent more years than is healthy working in the new books trade, I realise how little I knew about the second-hand world. Where do they get the books from, for example? Death and downsizing mostly, often involving the author in long drives to pore over collections that might or might not hold gems. Many such collections seem to be covered with cat hair. Bythell augments his sales by a subscription-based Random Book Club and bits and pieces picked up at auction. But throughout the book there are gibes followed by rants against Amazon for driving down the price of second-hand books, even charging 41p commission on the, then, £2.80 standard postage charged via to consumers on purchases via their Marketplace.

Other than occasional coups, sold privately, standard income is over the counter or via Amazon or ABE (owned by Amazon…). Day by day the totals are noted. Only on one day, during the book festival, do sales top £1000. Mostly they are in the low hundreds and, during the dog days of winter, tens. The nadir being the last day of the diary. Five online orders but only four paying customers in the shop, till total £18.50.

There is some genuine humour in this book, especially in the relationship between the owner and the incompetent and contrary part-time worker Nicky, whose specialism was bringing in squashed and unidentifiable food found by dumpster diving. But I did not laugh out loud.

As the number of second-hand bookshops declines, so has the literature about them increased. But I tell you what, borrow this book from the library and wander in to Jermy and Westerman on Mansfield Road and spend your £14.99 there. That will help keep our city’s main second-hand bookshop alive. And if you buy second-hand online, check Alibris first as they are not owned by that big river.

Ross Bradshaw

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Revolutionary Yiddishland – a history of Jewish radicalism by Alain Brossat and Sylvie Klingberg (Verso, £16.99)

Jewish Interest, Labour History, Yiddish, , , , , ,

Revolutionary-yiddishland-1050stThere’s nowhere called Yiddishland, except it is everywhere, it’s a state of mind. You don’t have to be fluent in Yiddish, you don’t have to be Jewish (though both of these make life easier). And you don’t all have to be in the same state of mind as the other inhabitants, other than to value the diaspora and have an interest in the shared history of a disparate community of Yiddish speakers. 

Not every part of Yiddishland in the past was a happy place, Hersh Mendel, quoted in this book, remarked that he “cannot remember one single joyful hour” at heder (religious education classes). He became a revolutionary.This was the period, one of the periods, when Jews lived in abject poverty. Yaakov Greenstein recalls “a neighbour’s farm where there were eight children at home. The father went from village to village with a colleague, collecting scrap metal. They had a cart but no horse to pull it; one of them took the front, the other pushed, and they went along the roads, in this way, among the goyim, from dawn to night.” For some, the answer lay in socialism which could lead to family problems such as disapproval from religious parents annoyed because the Bund (the main Jewish socialist organisation) published its daily newspaper on Shabbos, on the Sabbath.

The revolutionary Yiddishland that people like Mendel and Greenstein joined was that of the Bund, of Poale Zion (the socialist Zionist group) and even the Communist Party where they had their own battles to survive and hold on to their Jewish culture. This is the milieu that the authors cover, the world not of industrialists or prominent figures but “the tailors, shoemakers, furriers, carpenters, tinsmiths and other Yiddish craftsmen…” internationalists who were “exploited in the wretched workshops of Warsaw, Bialystok and Vilnius.”
Revolutionary Yiddishland was first published in France in 1983 when there was a critical mass of people still alive from that period to interview. The new English-language edition keeps their memory alive, as the best parts of the book are the interviews, quotes and reminiscences of those who were the history younger people can only experience secondhand. We read of people like Pierre Sherf, wounded while taking part in the Spanish Civil War, a volunteer in the French army against the Nazis and then active in the underground Resistance with other Romanian immigrants in France. People like Hanna Levy-Haas from Sarajevo, another member of the Resistance, this time to the Italian occupation of Montenegro. As an elder, living in Israel, she became active in the women’s movement and against the war in Lebanon.
Those who were Communists had the greatest problems over the Molotov/Ribbentrop pact. Unease would be an understatement and in France the Yiddish left paper Naie presse could barely hold the Party line. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Adam Rayski said “And so, for us to become ourselves again – that is Jews, Frenchmen, anti-fascists – we needed Hitler’s aggression.” But it was not over yet with activists like Artur London arrested as part of the anti-Semitic Slansky round-up in Czechoslovakia. The fact that he survived being in Mauthausen concentration camp helping to prove his culpability. This was the revolution betrayed.
Brossat and Klingberg return to the early debates within the Jewish socialist world, including the warning of the Bund leader Henryk Erlich against the likely Bolshevik dictatorship. Erlich was later murdered by Stalin’s men. Organisations split over their attitude to the Russian Revolution leading to now long-forgotten groups like the Faraynikte and the Kombund, the latter being the group of Bundists who went over to the Communists after the Revolution, as did many members of Poale Zion. Odd to think the British descendant organisation of Poale Zion in this country is the right-wing Jewish Labour Movement.
Within Russia policy on Jews changed constantly. Yiddish schools flourished, while Yevsektsia (the Jewish section of the Communist Party) sought Jewish agricultural colonisation in the Crimea, more popular than the Birobidzhan Yiddish “homeland” and more successful economically. That Birobidzhan was designated a republic in 1936 did not stop the Jewish leadership there being decimated in the Great Purges of 37 and 38. Editors, bureaucrats, committed Communists were wiped out. Anybody with a Bundist or Poale Zion history was at particular risk. Colonisation projects were closed, newspapers were suppressed and Yiddish was replaced in most schools by Russian. Brossart and Klingberg write “by the end of the 1930s the entire ‘national’ and ‘democratic’ gains of the Jewish population had been reduced to nothing.”
Committed Jewish communists would continue to be arrested, post-war, with the closure of the of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in Russia. The final spasms being the anti-Semitic Gomulka purges in Poland in 68 and 69, when the “anti-party element” David Szarfharc, expelled from the CP, said that “five minutes of a certain speech by Gomulka had done more for that [the desire to emigrate to Israel] than decades of Zionist propaganda.”
Ironically Israel became the  home for many of these revolutionaries, including Sylvie Klingberg’s own father Marcus Klingberg who, despite everything, spied for the Soviet Union. He was finally arrested in 1983 and sentenced to twenty years in prison. Sylvie Klingberg became an activist in the Israeli socialist group Matzpen which was an anti-Soviet breakaway from the Israeli Communist Party. They must have had some interesting family discussions.
Ross Bradshaw
This review first appeared in Jewish Socialist, issue 70 (www.jewishsocialist.org.uk)

Forgetfulness: making the modern culture of amnesia by Francis O’Gorman (Bloomsbury, £13.99)

Politics, Review, ,

Media of Forgetfulness

This book is about communal amnesia. Its author, Francis O’Gorman, believes advanced capitalism has triggered processes that detach us from the benefits of our history such as wisdom, pleasure, identity and security and we are, he says, fostering “a dedication to forgetfulness.” This leaves us with the sense that the literature, art and music of the past is valuable only as material for school and university examinations.

O’Gorman, a respected academic, is painstaking in evidencing his arguments, although there’s a digressive and free-fl owing quality to the book. A reflection on John Maynard Keynes’s notion of academic orthodoxy, for example, segues into an assessment of the educational handbook Pimp Your Lesson! which epitomises the principles of relentless “innovation” and “perfection” in teaching.

O’Gorman starts by establishing the “back-story” of forgetting, comparing the restorative power of narratives from antiquity such as The Aeneid to Christian texts, such as St Augustine’s The City of God, which blot out the past. He goes on to consider the impact of “modern forgetting” and the impact of the technology of the industrial revolution on the pace of our lives and our responses to language, literature and history.

He then tackles contemporary capitalism’s reverence of the “new” and considers the impact of the language of business planning and career development. Highlighting the way our obsessive future focus is used to justify political and economic policies, he cites George Osborne’s attempts to sell austerity in terms of delivering a “better” future for the as yet unborn. He also considers the role the concepts of clinical psychology play in alienating us from the past.

The commercialisation of academia creates a diminished sense of intellectual responsibility, an expectation of immediate gratifi cation and a lack of understanding of the effort needed to fully understand the past, O’Gorman contends, and he goes on to discuss a series of non-fiction works on the themes of place and belonging that constitute an antidote to the forgetfulness which is fostered by capitalism and modernism.

I was initially sceptical about O’Gorman’s central idea — for me, contemporary culture seems more like Mervyn Peake’s tradition-bound Gormenghast than Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which “history is bunk.” But my reservations evaporated. Yes, we do live in a Gormenghast-like museum culture, but our understanding of its rituals and texts has been deliberately erased.

While Forgetfulness doesn’t cover every aspect of culture and memory, it is an engaging dissection of an important phenomenon.

Andy Hedgecock

This review first appeared in the Morning Star

Copies of Forgetfulness are available post free from Five Leaves Bookshop, 0115 8373097

David Bowie Made Me Gay: 100 years of LGBT music, by Darryl Bullock (Duckworth, £18.99)

Review, , , ,

Working at Five Leaves, organising lots of events, you get to meet some exciting, inspirational people, last night was a fine example. I’m sure Darryl won’t mind when I say I am referring to those sparkling and sparky young people at his talk on LGBT music. We sold lots of books. The cover price (even reduced to £15 as a promotion on the night) was a struggle for some of them. I offered one teenager my battered proof copy of the book for free, but it was important to him that he bought his own proper new hardback, and got it signed. In the discussion, one young woman remarked that it was the first time she had been in a room – the shop was packed – where people like her were in the overwhelming majority. It made such a change to being the minority, even if an accepted minority. It was a good event.

Of course LGBT people have been involved in music for centuries, but this book identifies “Pretty Baby”, written in 1916, as perhaps the first song written by an openly gay person (the Black musician Tony Jackson) to someone of the same sex. The industry has been awash at times with LGBT people, in Brian Epstein’s day most significant pop acts were managed by gay men though they could not be out publicly. The book charts the ebbs and flows of the creative relationship of LGBT people to music as individuals, but also concentrates on the periods where people could be open and out – the Weimar Republic for example, when “Das Lila Lied” (The Lavender Song) of 1920 was a popular anthem.  One German woman, last night, said that her partner’s choir back home sings that song now. Harlem too was a focus, around the same time where many lesbian or bisexual Black women sang at the underground clubs of Prohibition America.

Being out was sometimes a career-killer. Dusty Springfield, though her career was somewhat on the slide, was dropped everywhere when she came out. Even up to relatively modern times musicians who everybody knew were gay, Marc Almond and Boy George, for example, were told by their record companies to deny they were. That was not the case with The Communards and their Red album included the hit single “There’s more to love than boy meets a girl”. Tom Robinson’s 1976 song “Glad To Be Gay”, however, is in a league of its own as most of the lyrics are angry, political lyrics about police violence towards gay men, raids on gay bars and what we now popularly call homophobia. Hearing it again, now, the song still has the power to shock.

The book is not just a list of LGBT musicians, but the author shows how one period, one musician, could not have happened without  a previous period, a mentor, someone who did something first. And often not for themselves alone. Punk bands, for example, could not find anywhere to play but gay bars were happy to allow them to play. Without  gay bars, said the author last night, punk could not have existed.

I was glad that the author included women from the now partly-forgotten women’s music movement, Chris Williamson and Holly Near for example, who had a big influence on many of my women friends.  Here’s Holly Near from 2004, singing at the million-strong march for a woman’s right to choose in America. It makes me well up: www.youtube.com/watch?v=johabhyURIw

Ross Bradshaw

Copies of David Bowie Made Me Gay are available from Five Leaves Bookshop post free, 0115 8373097