TV JENNI FRAZER Who does she think she is?
most recently that featuring the actress Minnie Driver (not Jewish, though many people think she is), who showed sincere delight and interest in exploring her father’s mysterious background.
The hook of the programmes lies in the material sorted out for the celeb by the bona fide background researchers, the telling documents or pictures which help to fill in hitherto unexplained family stories.
And, normally, the celeb plays the game, evincing joy or despair, disappointment or glee. It is not often that you get a subject for whom the Second World War and the Holocaust appears to have come as a great surprise. At one point, the singer — the consort of Rolling Stones front man Mick Jagger in the sixties — actually breathed: “The Nazis were insane”. This was on “learning” about their racial profiling laws. Really, Marianne? Are you quite sure?
The reason that we were in Holocaust-era territory was actually a very good story. Faithfull’s mother, Eva von Sacher-Masoch, was the product of a mixed marriage between a minor Austrian aristocrat, Artur von SacherMasoch, and his Jewish wife, Flora. Halachically, of course, this meant that Eva and Marianne were and are both Jewish. But Eva apparently regarded herself as half-Jewish — except for two curious episodes towards the end of her theatrical career.
Eva was a prominent cabaret artist in 1920s Berlin and Vienna. With a female dance partner, she appeared in a series of gender-bending acts, popular at the time, and was well on the way to stardom in the German-speaking world. But the rise to power of the Nazis from 1933 onwards changed Eva’s path. She could have thrown in her lot with the non-Jewish side of her family. Instead, as the programmemakers showed Faithfull, she was keen to have her photograph taken as though she were Hanna Rovina, the star of the Jewish folk-tale, The Dybbuk. She also joined an all-Jewish theatrical troupe, the Ping-Pongs.
Ultimately, even this form of expression was cut off for Eva and she returned to Vienna to live with her parents, in the relative security of the Hungarian diplomatic mission’s apartments. Faithfull’s grandfather, Artur, played a minor role in working with the local resistance and, post-war, Eva met and married the British army officer, Robert Glyn Faithfull.
It was in the aftermath of the war, when the Red Army liberated Vienna, that it was claimed — with no corroborating evidence — that both Eva and Flora were raped by Russian troops, thus setting up a lifetime’s heritage of trauma for poor little Marianne.
Sorry, but I don’t buy it. It makes a good story, though. Could even make a good song. As Tears Go By maybe?