Tag Archives

Jew

JEWISH TUNES

Cole Porter was an Episcopalian,

a farmer’s son, from Peru, Indiana,

whose ambition was to write ‘Jewish Tunes’.

My mother’s favourite song was ‘Begin

the Begine’, which Cole Porter composed,

the story goes, one evening at the piano

in The Ritz Bar of the Ritz Hotel, Paris.

The love song is in a minor key.

It personifies longing, wit, irony.

 

My mother and father met in the city

of Kano, Northern Nigeria.

‘When they begin the beguine,
It brings back the sound of music so tender,
It brings back the night of tropical splendour,
It brings back a memory evergreen!…

She and my father, Gentile and Jew,

danced to the music at their wedding

in Kano’s driest, dustiest month –

the month Heydrich’s Wannsee Conference

agreed The Final Solution in

less than ninety minutes.

 

 

 

LIVERPOOL, 3RD MAY 1941

This is one of the great public, civic

spaces of the world – the museum,

the library, the gallery, the court house,

Wellington’s column, the Steble fountain,

the Empire Theatre, Lime Street Station,

St George’s Hall,  St John’s Gardens, vistas

of the river, the Wirral, the Welsh hills…

 

During the worst raid of the Liverpool Blitz

the museum was set ablaze – a bomb,

one of so many, supposedly

for the docks, that razed history, neighbourhoods.

My grandmother, Liverpool Welsh – who took tea

with Buffalo Bill and was offered a place

in a music hall chorus line but refused,

being the eldest of thirteen, her Da

at sea and her Ma at the sherry –

described to me in detail many times

the natural history collection:

stuffed walruses, condors and Don Pedro,

a retired Barnum and Bailey elephant –

all immolated, and washed away.

 

While mummy, daddy, grandma see ‘Evita’,

she and I make our way to the museum,

holding hands. I talk about history,

public and personal – my father,

a stranger, a London Jew, in transit

that May Saturday, joining a line

of desperate buckets. She listens –

in my company a serious,

concerned seven year old – and asks if fires

can ever be put out. ‘Yes, always…

eventually,’ I say. We decide

to explore as many floors as we can

from the top – space, dinosaur poo, bugs

but have no time for masks and totems –

and pause, me for rest, her to draw,

before, leaving a moment for ice cream,

we walk in the dusk, past the statues,

up the incline to the theatre crowds.

 

 

Note: first published April 2017.

 

 

 

SHOAH

…and, with the film-maker, he returns
to where he sang, as a boy, in a boat;
a prisoner, an orphan, a Jew dumping sacks of crushed bone in the river;
keeping the Germans entertained with the
Prussian marching songs they had taught him –
and the Poles so charmed that, now he has returned
in middle age, they reminisce fulsomely:
bemused, he turns to camera in such pain…

 

 

 

SEASONAL GREETINGS

Door, Marrakech © SCES 2009



GUBBIO, WINTER 1992


Where the tourist buses turned, the Werhmacht

had murdered partisans – La Piazza

di Martiri Quaranti.  The cold from the hill –

old, old rock – rose from the cathedral’s floor

into our very soles. Outside, February seemed mild,

seasoned with wood smoke. We bought a hand thrown,

hand painted jar with an ill fitting lid.


Since then: earthquakes, marriages…



GUILDFORD, SPRING 1998


Beneath the new Dillons in Guildford,

a mediaeval chamber, disclosed

during the refurbishment,

had been preserved.

Some archaeologists claimed

it was built as a synagogue:

others denied it.

Dillons’ MD was a Jew

the local paper informed us.


The peoples of the book misread each other.



THE CAPTAIN TILLY MEMORIAL PARK, QUEENS, SUMMER 2001


The Goose Pond was green with insecticide:

the West Nile mosquito threatened.

Named for the scion of a local family –

mutilated by Filipino freedom fighters

a century before – the Park was playground

for the replacements of the ‘teeming masses’:

Hispanics, Afro-Caribbeans, Asians.


From Memorial Hill, you could see the Twin Towers.



HOOLE, AUTUMN 2009


Two aging lovers, best friends in all the world,

orphaned late in life, walked circuits of the park

for their hearts; smiled at mums pushing buggies, scowled

at druggies near the gate; talked of ghosts and hope –

and jokes: ‘What’s this fly doing?’ ‘Waving, waving!’


Old lovers count their blessings, side by side.