My refugee dad’s level head is what we all need

His life and attitide to global events taught me that it’s best to keep a sense of perspective

IN WAR, the extraordinary is ordinary: everyone has a tale to tell. This was my Dad’s story. Aged seven, Fredi Felsenburg and his family had to flee their comfortable existence in Vienna after the Anschluss for the safety of Antwerp. You know how long that lasted, and less than two years later his mother used her fluent French to secure passage for her and her children on one of the last boats out of Dunkirk, Luftwaffe bombs falling around them as they crossed the Channel.

And here’s the kicker: two weeks later, as a refugee in north London, he was legging it from a gang in pursuit of the “Jew boy” who could hardly speak a word of English. They caught up with him and threw him into Clapton Pond. He couldn’t swim. He only survived by clinging on to a log.

How did that start in life shape him? Well, for one thing, despite that unpromising welcome, he would later always profess his love for his adopted home country and its generosity and tolerance.

But he also seemed to have gained an unflappable sangfroid that put the world and its turbulence in perspective. Even immediately after 9/11, when I and everyone I knew were frenetically recalibrating our imagined futures and fearing the threat of imminent disaster, he simply said: “Let’s wait and see.”

Now, that kind of level-headed attitude really wouldn’t cut it on today’s social media. Here we are, in 2022, and the general level of “the discourse” (as they call it) is at a fever pitch and heating up so fast you could get scorched just glancing at Twitter. You’re rarely more than a post or two away from one variety of apocalypse or another.

But the prognostications of doom and gloom stretch far wider and deeper across politics and culture. Existential threats, we got ‘em, way beyond our current and eminently sensible concern with infectious disease. Turn to Netflix and you can catch the thinly veiled climate change parable Don’t Look Up, in which Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence and assorted other A-listers play out a grimly relentless vision of humankind’s incapacity to act in the face of the threat of global doom from a planet-killer comet.

Glance over at the bestseller lists and you’ll find that Ken Follett has taken a break from his customary historical epics to pen Never, an all-too-credible account of a future conflict between the US and China going hot almost out of the blue. “You may not be interested in thermonuclear war, but thermonuclear war is interested in you,” seems to be the siren message to knock us out of our complacency.

Of course, every era has had its existential worries, from the original millennials running for the hills just before 1000AD to the anticlimactic Y2K scare exactly a thousand years later. In between were a whole slew of Malthusian population crises, imminent ice ages and all the other terrors forecast by centuries of science fiction writers.

But the sense that there’s a growing feeling of despair, particularly now, is borne out by a precipitously falling birth rate, as more and more young adults say that they’re afraid to bring children into a world which they fear will soon become uninhabitable.

Who knows what the future holds, but there’s certainly a strange kind of allure in that story: if this is the final chapter, our lives are charged with a drama that they might otherwise lack, and a lot of tedious matters – pensions, for one thing – can be left to one side.

There’s a type of epochal vanity that I’ll confess I fell victim to as a teenager, spending my spare time with the youth wing of CND in the arrogant certainty that belongs to the cultish few who know, absolutely know, what others do not: that these are the last days, and it’s only the foolish ignorance of the ordinary masses that blinds them to that fact.

Somehow, since then, we haven’t disappeared in a cloud of radioactive dust. Dad survived Hitler, and woke up to find that the world went on after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Were he alive today, he wouldn’t for a moment dismiss our problems, from climate to coronavirus. But still, I suspect, he would say: “This too shall pass.”

You might call that hope or perhaps even a fundamental sense of emunah, one that is particularly to be cherished amid the anxieties of the pandemic.

But this much can be said with certainty: that through all of human history, up at least until now, reports of the apocalypse have been much exaggerated.

Prognostications of doom and gloom stretch widely across politics and culture