JEWISH BOOK WEEK TAKEN FOR GRANTED?
ORTHODOX, REFORM, Liberal, Conservative — we are “all one family”. A benign but unremarkable sentiment, you might think. Until you realise it was Emeritus Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks who, freed from the chains of office, issued this comforting message on Sunday. He may well have added “secular” or “atheist” under his breath, but I was too stunned to notice.
This was a particularly welcome development in the wake of last week’s miserable utterance by one Israel Eichler, a stalwart (“stale wart” might be a better description) of Israel’s United Torah Judaism party, to the effect that Reform Judaism is a form of mental illness.
That Rabbi Sacks’s statement was delivered at Jewish Book Week, where he was talking about his latest opus, Not in God’s Name, seemed singularly appropriate. Why? Because, now in its fifth year at the harmonious — and euphonious — Kings Place, near St Pancras in central London, JBW resembles nothing so much as a huge, family gathering.
Once a year, for several days, this smart venue is abuzz with punters browsing, carousing, eating, drinking, walking, talking, hugging and shrugging. In and around the concert halls and meeting rooms where its literary events are held, Jewish Book Week is one stupendous simchah.
Because it sails so smoothly on from year to year, it is tempting to think that the festival is taken for granted. But enter through those revolving doors at Kings Place — or indeed make your way north for the lunchtime sessions at JW3 — and it doesn’t feel like it. Not only do attendances and ticket sales keep increasing, but the enthusiasm is almost palpable. These word-seekers are in earnest. They are not there just because of what are admittedly the best smoked-salmon bagels in town.
Nevertheless, considering the extent of the riches laid on by JBW director Lucy Silver and her team, many of we people of the book don’t appreciate quite what a priceless asset we possess in our capital city.
There is, for example, only a sprinkling of under-35s among the Book Week throng. Are they so benumbed by money pressures, discordant music and social media that they are reluctant to turn off their smartphones and turn on to literature?
And not just literature but that most Jewish inheritance — argument. And not just argument but art. And not just art but music. I wouldn’t go so far as Simon Schama, who said this year that Jewish Book Week has “outgrown” the “Book” bit, but I commend whoever it was who came up with the idea to get the juices flowing by introducing the festival with evenings of Jewishly literate, American music — last year Gershwin and this year Rodgers and Hammerstein (and Kern, and Hart, and even Sondheim).
What an unalloyed pleasure it was to be treated to a tight set of musicians, with the voices of Issy Van Randwyck and the wonderful Clive Rowe, performing Lorenz Hart’s sensual plaint, Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered, and what is surely the most beautiful song to be sung in a subjunctive mood,
If I Loved You. If they ever repeat this, get a ticket! You’ll never walk alone…
This musical feast was augmented by the considerable presence on stage of Henry Goodman reading Stewart Permutt’s account of R & H’s partnership.
Goodman, like George Best, is well-named. For he is indeed a good man to have around; not content with narrating Rodgers and Hammerstein, he sang a couple of numbers, too, and later popped up to good effect in other places during the festival. He read — or, rather, acted — extracts from the works of Saul Bellow in the session featuring Bellow’s biographer, Zachary Leader, and was also on hand to read from Ingrid Carlberg’s biography of Raoul Wallenberg.
Carlberg, a distinguished Swedish journalist, interviewed by Philippe Sands, was one of the great successes of JBW 2016. Wallenberg, a famous hero of the Holocaust, who, as Sweden’s Special Envoy to Hungary in 1944, gave visas — and freedom — to thousands of Hungarian Jews, was later “disappeared” by the Soviet Union. Ingrid Carlberg accused the Swedish authorities of abandoning him. “There was no Wallenberg to save Wallenberg,” she lamented.
Lamentation was evident but somewhat ameliorated in a sold-out session at JW3 in which David Pryce-Jones interviewed Frederic Raphael on the subject of antisemitism, to which Raphael brought an arresting blend of wit and realism. He warned that antisemitism cannot be “legislated away”. It is too resilient, and life is unjust. “As soon as you try to organise fairness,” Raphael argued, “you organise unfairness.”
Antisemitism was covered in a number of sessions. The Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua suggested that it can be provoked by “the way Jewish identity is constructed” — and, here, lamentation loomed large in Yehoshua’s diagnosis of his government’s “colonising” tendencies — while Jonathan Sacks explained how Middle-Eastern antisemitism “is European in origin”.
The subject was central to the “Big Debate” on Saturday night between Howard Jacobson, Melanie Phillips and Simon Schama, chaired by Jonathan Freedland. Phillips revealed that, in its “antiZionist” incarnation, it has made her afraid to turn on her radio to listen to the Today programme. Or open a newspaper.
Schama spoke of “post-colonial guilt” and Freedland implied that Israeli occupation of the West Bank affected Jews’ ability to confront current hostility.
Strangely, not once did these debaters use the word “Islamist”, or even “Muslim”. Equally strange, among Phillips’s string of apocalyptic remarks, was her assertion that British Jews “know little and care less about Israel”.
Antisemitism was the main course on the menu in a discussion, again involving Howard Jacobson, about Shakespeare’s Shylock, now the main character in Jacobson’s new novel.
Chaired by Alex Clark, this also included the young RSC director Polly Findlay, whose 2015 production of The Merchant of Venice, opened with Antonio and Bassanio in full-frontal embrace, at which one woman in the audience had stormed out, declaring: “I didn’t come here to see two men kissing.”
“No,” Jacobson pointed out. “She had come to see a Jew being spat upon.”
Among other cherished moments at JBW 2016 were David Aaronovitch’s description of the psychological phenomenon of simultaneously “knowing and not knowing”; the unique calm emanating from Edmund De Waal; biographer Asaf Siniver’s reading of Abba Eban’s 1945 open letter to Arab boycotters of Israeli goods, listing various medical treatments they’d therefore forgo; and, of course, Lord Sacks preaching fraternity.
Beneath all the argument, this togetherness can be found annually as the winter fades in St Pancras.
Many of we people of the book don’t appreciate what a priceless asset we possess