A fond farewell to a long-time friend and lunch buddy

My friend John Schnellenberg died last week. For more than 13 years, we’d met almost every Friday for lunch.

We were both refugees from Wellington. John and his wife Sonia had moved to Masterton after retiring. My wife and I made the same move several months later.

We hadn’t known the Schnellenbergs in Wellington, but we connected in Masterton because of a long-standing friendship between John and my sister and brother-in-law.

They had got to know each other through politics. John and my brother-in-law were active in a 1970s National Party faction that did its best to resist the illiberal impulses of the party’s then leader, Robert Muldoon.

I can’t recall how our Friday lunch habit came about. It just sort of happened. In recent years, we were joined by another Wellington refugee, the playwright Joe Musaphia. Two Jews and a gentile.

I was very much the baby in this trio, John and Joe both being in their early 80s. They had known each other in Wellington through the Jewish community. John was descended from the Ashkenazi Jews who settled in Eastern and Central Europe as part of the Jewish diaspora, while Joe was from the Sephardic Jewish line that ended up in Spain and Portugal.

John was the more religiously observant of the two and ate only kosher food. He would always tuttut when I sat down with a slice of Cafe´ Strada’s excellent bacon and egg pie. A lightning bolt would strike me, he would warn. He never tired of his little joke, and I always laughed.

John was a gentleman and a charmer. He was a small man whose eyes twinkled behind his glasses and whose face almost permanently wore a genial, knowing smile.

He loved to laugh – his whole body would convulse when I said something he found funny – and he loved to talk. He enjoyed engaging with people to the extent that it could become slightly exasperating.

Our lunches were frequently interrupted by John’s need to converse with whoever happened to be passing our table.

He had a Jew’s interest in business and closely monitored the town’s economic prosperity, alternating between despondency and optimism depending on how many businesses were opening or closing down.

I suspect John was always thinking about what was happening to Masterton property values.

He was never entirely convinced he had made the right move by shifting to a country town, and not just because he was missing out on the boom in Wellington house prices.

There was a part of John that remained firmly rooted in European urban culture, even though he had known it only briefly in childhood. He could at times be disdainful of what he perceived as provincial values and attitudes.

He remained unmistakably Jewish. His oldest and closest friends were Jewish and he was deeply engaged with the Jewish community.

It seemed to me that he defined himself first as Jewish and only secondly as a New Zealander, as he was entitled to do. It’s this unshakeable sense of cultural identity, presumably, that has held Jewish communities together through centuries of oppression and persecution.

History and politics fascinated him. He was a great admirer of Winston Churchill and must have read – often several times – everything ever written by or about the British wartime leader.

He acknowledged Churchill’s flaws, but I think what counted to John was that Churchill, almost alone at first, had stood up to Hitler. John had spent his early years in Germany but escaped to New Zealand with his parents before the Holocaust. His grandparents were not so fortunate, dying in a concentration camp.

Living as part of a tiny Jewish community in overwhelmingly Anglo-saxon Wellington can’t have been easy.

New Zealand in those days was suspicious of outsiders — more so than ever during the war years — when someone with the name Schnellenberg was likely to be viewed as an enemy alien.

The irony that he was Jewish, and therefore had more to fear from the Nazis than anyone, would have been largely lost on insular New Zealanders.

Paradoxically, John was an admirer of German efficiency and technological excellence.

For a long time he drove an ageing Mercedes-benz and would regale me every Friday with accounts of how it was performing. (Or not. It was what you might call a love-hate relationship.)

I’ve been trying to recall what else we talked about. Politics, certainly. Books, films, television and the media too. What I do know is, our conversation rarely flagged.

We didn’t always agree, and sometimes there was a degree of heat in the conversation. For all his geniality, John had firm views that didn’t always coincide with mine.

I think his political views were shaped, at least to some extent, by his perception of where politicians were likely to stand on the issue of Israel and the Middle East.

And now John’s gone. What am I going to do on Fridays? I dunno. Perhaps Joe and I will go on meeting. But our lunches won’t be the same.