My husband’s passion for a smelly spread
post-war Europe, with his target readership being primarily male Austrians and Germans of a certain generation, Guttmann knew the score. “We all experienced bad times, didn’t we,” he seemed to be saying, “so let’s just talk about football instead.”
His words may have sought to camouflage the truth but his life story merely exposed it. While Lipstadt has focused on the wrongheaded lumping together of all victims, both from during the Nazi years and thereafter, I would add two more forms of softcore denial, both refuted by Guttmann’s own history.
Just as the list of victims has expanded, so the list of perpetrators has narrowed. In this convenient portrayal of history we are constantly told, without any further elaboration, that it was the Nazis who carried out the Holocaust. The Nazis certainly conceived and led it. But Béla Guttmann lived in several countries whose governments or populations also participated, often enthusiastically, in the murder and persecution of the Jews, or were happy to see the back of them, or simply turned a blind eye to mass murder.
Another form of softcore denial involves detaching the Holocaust from its historical context. It is normally presented to us as a terrible blip, an appalling but brief episode which we must never let happen again. It’s almost as if it came from nowhere. The efficient mechanisation of mass murder was certainly new, but the associated Jew-hatred has been around for many centuries. The Holocaust can only be properly understood within the broad sweep of European Jewish history.
Again, Guttmann’s life betrays the truth. As a young man, he fled Budapest in 1920, escaping the Hungarian White Terror as 3000 Jews, many of whom had just returned from fighting in the First World War, were strung up and butchered throughout the country. He and his team-mates at the great Zionist football team of the 1920s, Hakoah Vienna, heroes throughout the Jewish world, were subjected to vicious racist abuse on the pitch, while their many fans were terrorised off it.
He lost his job as a highly successful coach in still independent Hungary in 1939 due to anti-Jewish laws, consigning him to poverty. In the immediate post-war years, he lived in a Central and Eastern Europe where up to 2000 Jews who had somehow managed to survive the Holocaust were then murdered by local populations.
In 1964, just after his autobiography was published, the then two-time European Cup winner resigned as coach of the Austrian team, citing intolerable antisemitism among the players, media and footballing establishment.
And this edited list excludes the carping about his alleged moneygrabbing that he was forced to endure. He certainly experienced this innuendo in Portugal, scene of his greatest glory, where in other respects anti-Jewish agitation was not so prominent, possibly because that particular country had murdered, expelled or forcibly converted its own Jews almost 500 years before.
Jews like to joke that we make better accountants than sports people. But this humour is founded on ignorance.
The sheer extent of the Jewish impact on football history was a revelation to me. When Guttmann made his debut for an excellent Hungary team, beating Germany 3-0 in 1921, there were six Jews in the starting XI. And this, don’t forget, was in the midst of the White Terror. Despite the pervasive and fanatical antisemitism, Hungarian football needed its Jews.
The first fully professional league in Europe, the high-quality Austrian league of 1924/5, was won by Hakoah Vienna, whose story is the most inspirational, gripping and tragic of any team in the history of football, let alone a Jewish one.
Great innovators of strategy and tactics, Jewish coaches were everywhere. The first time Real Madrid won their league, their coach was a Jew. The first time Bayern Munich won their league, their coach was a Jew. The first time Benfica won their league, their coach was a Jew (it wasn’t Béla Guttmann — another Jew, Lippo Hertzka, got there before him).
The most successful coach in the great Italian league of the 1930s was a Jew. Árpád Weisz, Guttmann’s former team-mate, won the league three times with Inter Milan and Bologna before being murdered at Auschwitz with his wife and two young children.
Jews in Europe don’t make such an impact on football now. That’s because, for the most part, they are either dead or gone.
People should be aware that when they laugh at jokes about Jews and sport that they are, in a small way and inadvertently and indirectly, laughing at the destruction of the European Jews. Laughing at the fact that Jewish collective memory was so devastated by the Holocaust that we simply don’t know who we were. Jokes about Jews and sport are ignorant
The Greatest Comeback: From Genocide to Football Glory ( Biteback Publishing)
IOPEN THE fridge, in the mood for a little nosherei to bridge the gaping chasm between lunch and supper, then it hits me — the tsunami of fish-stench that means I am in the unholy presence of chopped herring. The Husband has broken the First Commandment: Thou shalt not Shop Unescorted. This is not just because of Ben’s tendency to buy jazzy shirts if allowed to venture out free-range (fuchsia and black stripes, for goodness sakes – nice for a batmitzvah napkin maybe, but to wear?); it’s also because he has “Best-Before-Date Blindness” and has been known to return from the supermarket with enough food for an entire week, all with a Use-By date of tomorrow. If he nips out for cigarettes (another of my pet-hates, second only to the dreaded fishy spread), I sometimes ask him to buy a single item: a pot of double cream, say, but even then my fond farewell is not “Bye” or “Take care” but “Check the date!”
If we are hosting a tea for his extended family, it’s mandatory to have chopped herring. Ben insists it’s mitzvah no 614, and part of his birthright. He points out that all Jewish teas — whether for a simcha or a funeral —have essentially the same menu: open mini bagels and/or bridge rolls with the following toppings: smoked salmon, chopped egg, cream cheese, chopped herring. Sometimes tuna mayo may make an appearance if the hosts are wanting to show that they are a bit cutting-edge in culinary matters, but that’s as far as it goes. Cake (minimum of two types), mini-Danish and chocolate rugelach, biscuits.
It’s one of the great joys of doing a Jewish tea, he insists — you don’t need to think about what to serve; you just need to make sure that there’s too much of it. But the agreement we have, which I had written in as an addendum to our ketubbah, is that the chopped herring must be bought no more than 24 hours before the actual event to minimise the amount of time in which the herring and I will have to share occupancy of the same building. Once acquired, the tub is then placed in the fridge in a bag within a bag within a bag. I secure blue and white police cordon tape into position — DO NOT CROSS — to quarantine the afflicted shelf. And, as I know it is there, I can take an in-breath before I open the door, dash in for the milk like the SAS snatching back a hostage, and withdraw before I need another breath.
The old cliché that a woman marries a man who reminds her at some level of her father is never more true than when it comes to this love of food from the heim. My dad used to take us very occasionally to Bloom’s — where he seemed to relish the rude waiters with something like nostalgia — or more frequently to Carol’s, the salt beef bar in Soho.
There he would order salt beef, cold fried fish, or gefilte fish. I probably wasn’t the first child to assume that gefilte fish was a type of fish like cod or haddock, just one that never seemed to appear on the menu in any nonJewish restaurants. Even the idea of cold fish sticking to the plate in a gelatinous glue makes me feel slightly queasy. Sometimes I used to position the menu between us as a screen so I wouldn’t have to witness it. I wish my grandmother (who fled Lithuania when she was a child with her mother and sister) had lived long enough that I could have quizzed her about why they left. My father always claimed that they were fleeing the pogroms, but I’m willing to bet that she was fleeing the horror of gefilte fish.
Thank goodness I only had to study biblical Hebrew and Jewish ethics on my conversion course; if they’d made me eat chopped herring and gefilte fish in one of the lessons, I’d just have had to throw up my hands and say, ‘Sorry, I can’t do this — I’ll have to switch to Catholicism instead. I believe they’re offering a better menu.’
I am disturbed during this reverie by a sudden waft of Essence de Hareng Haché — Husband has zoomed in to ask me if I think we have prepared enough bridge rolls. His jowls are still moving from the ingestion of chopped herring so his breath is right up there at Danger Level One. Usually, I like to stay at arm’s length — or, ideally, in a different postcode — until he has brushed his teeth, flossed, gargled, scrubbed mouth with Brillo pad etcetera. But the guests are expected at any moment so there’s no time for all that. I avert my face and beg him:
‘Will you please, please just go outside and smoke a cigarette?’ All Jewish tea parties have the same menu
Zelda Leon is half-Jewish by birth then did half a conversion course as an adult (half-measures in all things….) to affirm her Jewish status before a Rabbinical Board. She is a member of a Reform synagogue.