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in New York. If this was the Claude from that part of the family, I didn’t know why he would be in Wissembourg in 1953. On Sunday 29 November 2015, the German television channel OKTV Südwestpfalz livestreamed a documentary by the American filmmaker Peter Blystone, called The Jewish Cemetery – the Last Jews of Wasgau. Wasgau is a five-hundred-square-mile area of the Palatinate (Pfalz) in south-west Germany, also including the French departments of Bas-Rhin and Moselle. The film focuses on four small German towns, including Busenberg, and gives an account of what
that their preparations are very slow, and they won’t be able to leave before September. And then, I assume, the war intervened. On 22 October 1940 Leonie and her husband were arrested, taken from their home and transported to the border with France. They were given a very short time to prepare, and were permitted to take very little luggage and just 100 Reichsmark each. From the border, they were taken by the French police to Gurs, an internment camp in the Basses-Pyrénées, in the far south-west of the country. They were among 6,538 Jews from Baden-Württemberg who
was released ten days later. (It was Lindner, by then running a consultancy laboratory in Berlin, who told my father that Heinz Kroch was starting a factory in Manchester, and initiated the contact that allowed my father to leave Germany in 1938.) When the excitement of the take-over had died down, things had to be re-organised. I was assured again by my superiors that what had happened was only in line with Party instructions and was nothing personal. There was no objection to Jews staying in their jobs as long as they didn’t get involved in politics. Ironically, I
collection. Public domain. As a historian of early modern Europe, that is, the period covering the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, I have long been interested in the parallel experiences of the two major persecuted minorities of early modern Spain, the converted Jews (Conversos) and Muslims (Moriscos). Like most of my colleagues, I am not often called upon to link my work to the present; and the truth is, I very much welcome the opportunity to do so. As a historian who lives in
] In fact, it is not genuine. The narrator of Hans Keilson’s 1959 novel The Death of the Adversary (described as a ‘lost classic’ on its reissue in 2010), is here a young boy, swapping stamps with his friend Fabian. The time is soon after the First World War, the place is Germany. The book records the narrator’s experience of the rise to power of an unnamed ‘adversary’ through the 1930s until he (like the author himself, a German Jew) is obliged to flee to the Netherlands. In this early episode, he had been given a children’s printing outfit for his birthday, and was
woman refuses to “know” the messenger and sends him away instead of receiving glad tidings’. It’s a nice thought. I suppose it really depends on what it is that’s on offer. hH The letter from London School of Contemporary Dance offering me a place to study was addressed to me at my parents’ house in Didsbury. Now, more than forty years later, I live about five minutes’ walk from that address, in Henry Simon’s house. It’s not quite full circle. For that I would have had to return to the streets of Cheetham Hill, now inhabited by ultra-Orthodox Jews and a variety of
means. Italy again appears as a transitional space, for Jews leaving Hungary in the 1950s or the Soviet Union in the 1980s and people leaving Eritrea and Ethiopia today. On the way from Riga in the Soviet Union to Toronto in Canada (after thinking they would end up in Los Angeles, Atlanta, Melbourne, and Israel), David Bezmozgis describes his family's temporary period in Vienna and Rome (Bezmozgis, 2018 : 36). When moving from Iran to the United States, Dina Nayeri's “The Ungrateful Refugee” describes “spending two years in refugee hostels in Dubai and Rome” (Nayeri
psychic – related to the poverty and shame of earlier generations. As I read about Ashkenazi Jews in north Manchester in the twentieth century, and recalled visiting my own relatives as a child, I began to grasp the idea of the transmission of fear, caution and suspicion, even decades after the event. The children of those immigrants from Eastern Europe retained, and in turn passed on to their own children, the unarticulated but painful recollection of persecution. What Anne Karpf has referred to as ‘the war after’ is one fought by Jews of Eastern European origins as
changed radically as building progressed – public buildings like the Cheetham Town Hall of 1853–55 (now the Saffron Eastern Cuisine restaurant), family houses and artisans’ homes. Strangeways and Red Bank, areas adjacent to Cheetham, and on the outskirts of the city centre, were developed as industrial sites, with growing numbers of workshops and factories established. When Jews from Eastern Europe began to arrive in large numbers in the late nineteenth century, they settled in these areas, setting up small businesses as tailors, merchants, cabinet makers, jewellers
– that has been the trend in our corner of the humanities and the social sciences) which is another crucial kind of uncertainty. Grey Studies, maybe. Primo Levi’s concept of the ‘grey zone’ of moral behaviour is not unrelated to this project of principled negotiation, though his subjects are acting out of what Lawrence Langer has called ‘choiceless choices’. These are the Kapos and Sonderkommandos of the Nazi concentration camps, many of them Jews and all of them prisoners, who operated as functionaries and thus, in a sense, as collaborators, helping to run the camps