With music and prose

Leonard Bernstein, Carnegie Hall, New York City by Henri Cartier-Bresson. © Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos and courtesy Smithsonian Magazine

It is when the parading of barbarism becomes commonplace that, I think, we must step around the daily din and consider, quite simply, what we are witnessing and what to do.

We see posts that Naama Levy marks her 20th birthday today, that Arbel Yehud’s 29th birthday was yesterday, and that both have been in captivity for 260 days. They are hostages, like the others, 120 altogether. Their being so is a war crime committed by their captors.

And while this crime rolls on, day after grey day, the death by a thousand cuts of western civilisation also continues, a daily siege. In the USA, where campus antisemitism is the contagion, the flags of Hezbollah and ISIS are held aloft by masked youth, swathed in keffiyehs. They are sent messages from Khameini, they now brandish photographs of Sinwar.

‘The Jewish Lane in Amsterdam’, Max Libermann (1847-1835), courtesy Leo Baeck Institute

And in the back alleys of American towns, young American women are raped and murdered. Rachel Morin, Mollie Tibbets, Lizbeth Medina, Kate Steinle, Sarah Root, Laken Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray are some names, violated and done to death by illegal aliens. But surely more than just illegal aliens, for they mirror, in their viciousness and their collective method, what has poured into Europe, through Lampedusa and the southern coast of Spain.

The headlines, as a consequence: “Hundreds protest across France after horrific rape of 12-year-old Jewish girl”, “Neo-Nazi teenager who plotted to blow up Brighton synagogue jailed”, “Police officer in Mannheim stabbing dies”. The Old World, the old continent, is besieged, from without as much as from within.

What is imperilled? The legacies of culture and science, the fabric of a way of life (and living) that has spread all around the world. I expect not at all that those who facilitated the entry of tens of thousands of infiltrators into the USA thought to acquaint them with Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, Philip Glass, Stephen Sondheim or Kurt Weill.

Men, women and children pose among their bundles on a passenger train which will take them to the port in Gdansk. Photo by Alter Kacyzne, 1921. Courtesy Yivo Institute for Jewish Research.

Nor, likewise, do I find among the ranks of Euro-apparatchiks of Europa 2024, those who bluster and wag their fatly bejewelled fingers in favour of ever more corps of infiltrators, the faintest recognition of the legacies of Daniel Barenboim, Otto Klemperer, Erich Leinsdorf, Artur Rodzinski, Artur Schnabel or Georg Solti. Nor indeed, if ever they lingered by a shelf in a bookstore, leafed through the prose of S Y Agnon, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Elie Wiesel, Saul Bellow, Anzia Yezierska or Amos Oz.

You who read this will know those names, and more besides. And still the unquenchable font of creativity and craft that is Jewry gives to this edifice of Western civilisation. It was only the other day that ‘The Piano Player of Budapest’ was received by the literary reviews, a beautifully written Shoah memoir by Roxanne de Bastion. As Anne Frank had noted, “Where there’s hope, there’s life.”

But ever deadlier trebuchets are bombarding that edifice, of Western civilisation. Herta Muller, a contemporary German writer of considerable renown (Nobel) issued earlier in June what was called “a shocking wake-up call to the West”, of the import and consequence of the madness that has gripped parts of Western society since Hamas attacked Israel: “I am appalled that young people, students in the West, are so confused that they are no longer aware of their freedom.”

Young Yiddish girls being instructed by their ‘melamedke’ (female teacher) how to pray. Photo by Alter Kacyzne, 1926. Courtesy Yivo Institute for Jewish Research.

What makes me describe this? My father, who studied history in Calcutta (as it was then known) bought his copy of a Philip Roth book from a second-hand pile on the street. That was in the 50s. I bought my copies of Chaim Potok and Leon Uris the very same way in 80s Bombay (as it was then known). A small tradition, one generation to another, but of such acts are legacies made.

“Between prejudice and persecution there is usually, in civilised life, a barrier constructed by the individual’s convictions and fears, and the community’s laws, ideals, and values.” So Philip Roth had observed in his essay, ‘Writing about Jews’, for Commentary in 1963.

To return to the question, what is there to do? In her wake-up call, Muller relates the meeting between Paul Celan, Romanian-born and French, and Yehuda Amichai, Jewish, poets both. When Celan visited Israel in 1969, Amichai translated Celan’s poems and read them out in Hebrew. Celan later wrote to Amichai, “I cannot imagine the world without Israel; nor do I want to imagine it without Israel.”