I was delighted to be asked to present the lecture in Medieval Studies for this year, and to be able to use it as an opportunity to present new work on the earliest Latin Maimonides. Many thanks to Henrike Lähnemann, Mark Williams, and Oxford Medieval Studies for inviting me. Although the internet failed us at the time, I was able to have a version of the lecture recorded to share here.
And don’t miss the trumpet fanfare and lovely introduction by Henrike that we caught before the wireless failed:
Medieval historians need to do a better job of talking about race.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, at least since last January when I attended a panel on race in medieval European history at the AHA and was part of another panel on “relevance” in the study of the Middle Ages and Early Modern Europe down the street at the MLA. I’ve been thinking about it in a more systematic fashion over the last few months as the Lexicon Project — a group of faculty and students at the University of Chicago who gathered initially to talk about the lexicography of sexuality and gender — has expanded its focus and its community this quarter to discuss race, and as a goad to our discussion, we’ve been reading a range of scholarship in the area.
I have also been thinking about it because instead of working on hagiography and dialogue and nuns, as I thought I’d been doing now, my attention has been called back to the project I began my career as a medievalist with, back to the thirteenth-century archbishop of Toledo, Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada and relations between Christians, Muslims, and Jews. I’m working on two things at the moment — an article on Jiménez de Rada’s globalism, and a longer piece on Jewish and Christian intellectual exchange and competition.
Working on the article has made me realize what an awful lot of evidence historians of medieval Spain have left on the ground, evidence that could be used for a rich and fruitful discussion of race in the Middle Ages. Working on the other project has returned me to something I observed in my first book, Conflict and Coexistence: Archbishop Rodrigo and the Muslims and Jews of Medieval Spain, about the difference between the contemporary historiography of medieval Christian-Jewish relations and the historiography of medieval Christian-Muslim relations. As I wrote in 2004:
“The perceived breakdown in harmony between Jews and Christians is perceived as a puzzle, as a problem, and different factors are adduced by scholars to explain this perplexing state of affairs. By contrast, conflict in relations between Christians and Muslims is taken for granted and seems to need no explanation.”
At the time, the model of difference I was using was that of alterity, inspired somewhat by David Tracy’s Dialogue with the Other and Julia Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves. I think now that race might have been a more effective and sharper tool for understanding the difference between those two historiographies. Put simply, most of us who study Christian-Jewish relations in medieval Iberia are Jews of one kind or another. We’re of an age that we grew up, one way or another, in the long shadow of the Nazi racialist project. The one thing, perhaps, that unites us is that we know we do not want to be a race. We know what happens when Jews become a race. We’re just like you! we say. We’re white! We’re European/American/Canadian! It’s weird that you guys did all those awful things to us but we’re willing to let bygones be bygones if you let us into your universities! And we’ve been very leery of allowing race to be one of our categories of analysis for interpreting the Middle Ages, and we pretzel ourselves into knots trying to avoid it, as the news mounts up from the Tree of Life, from desecrated cemeteries, from Twitter and 8chan, that a race is not something you choose for yourself; it is something others ascribe to you.
And into this historical moment comes Geraldine Heng’s The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. I remember the man who became my doctoral advisor, Jocelyn Hillgarth, lamenting in the very first session of the very first class I took with him that no one wrote big books any more, no one took risks or made big arguments. This is a big book. And what it offers us is a way to cut through the anxiety medieval historians have felt about speaking of race in the Middle Ages — fears of anachronism, fears of a teleology that begins with us, obsession with biology, with vocabulary, with colour, with DNA, all these things that have made us wishy-washy and hesitant.
Race has no substantive content, Heng says. Race has no substantive content. Rather, it is “one of the primary names we have — a name we retain for the strategic, epistemological, and political commitments it recognizes –that is attached to a repeating tendency, of the greatest import to demarcate human beings through differences among humans that are selectively essentialized as absolute and fundamental in order to distribute positions and powers differentially to human groups.”(p. 3, 27) I’ll emphasize some of words I think are key in this formulation: Race is a name. The phenomena it describes are repeating and grave. It demarcates differences that are essentialized as foundational. These differences are used as the basis for differential distributions of power.
Race is not a single “thing.” It is a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences.” (p.3, 27) And it is one of the factors that creates the European subject.
This is not a review of Heng’s book. For one thing, I haven’t finished reading it. I’m sure there are places where I will disagree with this interpretation or that — I can already see a few spots where my own argument would be different. That’s not the point. I don’t take this as the last word. I take it rather as an invitation do further work, and as a gift of a powerful tool that we can use for understanding when differences that are religious or ethnic or physical or gendered become racialized (and when they don’t or haven’t and how this changes or doesn’t over time). Talking about race in the Middle Ages is not going to be about finding a particular word used, or a physiognomy described, though those may be the clues we use as evidence. Each case has to be argued on its own merits. We will disagree.
It was lucky and maybe surprising that I liked Estella so much, given that this was my view of it for most of the time I was there:
But Estella is lovely. Imagine the shell of a soft boiled egg once you’ve knocked the top off, leaving the sides jagged and craggy, and after you’ve eaten the egg out of it. Now imagine a town nestled in the bottom of the shell, with a river twisting through it.
In the Middle Ages, there were castles on many of these hills, protecting the town, which was founded in 1090 by King Sancho Ram irez of Navarre by annexing the fortified Basque settlement of Lizarra. The king’s plan was to move the main road, which is also the pilgrimage road to Compostela, out of the difficult hills above, so it could run more easily down through the flat. He encouraged settlers from France and also Jews to come live there, and they did, settling in what became three adjacent walled communities, and creating an important trading hub.
I got a strong sense of that medieval city, especially on the side of the river where my albergue was, right on the pilgrimage road, underneath the old Jewish quarter, pressed up against the hill. In the photo above, the Camino is the street that runs behind those two cars. The ground floors of many of the buildings that run along it are very old, even medieval, as you can see from the two behind those cars. To the right is the palace of the Navarrese kings, whose first floor dates to the late twelfth century, a rare example of civic Romanesque architecture. More on that soon. In the background to the right, the tall tower you can see belongs to the church of San Pedro de la Rua. Above it, on the hill, was one of the castles I mentioned, and when it was destroyed by the Castilians in 1572 in their war against Navarre, it fell on the twelfth-century cloister of the church, destroying half of it. I wasn’t able to get into the church or cloister (hello, Spain, and churches that are not open when they say they will be) but I did use some of my strength to climb the many steps up to the facade. It was worth it.
You can see it is as much fortress as church. Estella has been on one frontier or another during most of its existence, most recently in the nineteenth century, during the Carlist Wars.
I think when most of us look at a building like this, we think things like “Gothic” “French” “European”. Maybe that polylobed arch gives some of us pause. Pilgrims will have seen one very like it walking through Cirauqui earlier that day, but others might think more of buildings that look like this:
This is the Tin Mal mosque, in Morocco, built to commemorate the Almohad leader Ibn Tumart in 1156, four years before Notre Dame was started in Paris and a few decades before San Pedro de la Rua was constructed. The Almohad Empire extended from Africa through the southern half of Spain at this time.
Look closer at some of the figures on the portal, like these two facing griffins. See the detail still preserved on their wings, and what looks like maybe traces of paint.
Compare it to this silk roundel originally wrapped around the relics of Saint Siviard and now in the treasury of Sens.
Imagine what it would have looked like if the portal had all been painted. Not the somewhat austere, stern, pure stone we see today but a riot of colour, more like a series of silk textile borders. I also like the little stone guys on thrones. I’ve never seen that before.
It’s not a church, but the Romanesque palace has some interesting sculpture too.
This capital shows Roland fighting against the giant Ferragut, part of the tale of Charlemagne in Spain found in the Pseudo-Turpin chronicle. Their battle supposedly took place outside Nájera, a few days further on the pilgrimage road.
I love the detail you can see here on their shields and their chainmail.
Here is Ferragut himself. Evidently he and Roland paused their fight many times, to discuss the finer points of their theological differences.
But I had other reasons to be interested in Estella. This town, like many others on the pilgrimage road to Compostela, had an important Jewish community throughout the Middle Ages, and when I wrote Pilgrimage, my historical novel about the twelfth-century Camino, I set an important scene among the Jews of Estella. If you have read the novel, it is the moment when Gebirga is travelling with Yusuf, a Mozarabic Christian, and two Jewish traders. They stay with a Jewish family in Estella over Shabbat, much to Gebirga’s discomfort. That evening, their prayers are interrupted by news that their slaughterhouse, down by the river, was on fire. They confront a Christian mob, whose leader tells them a story of seeing a Jew throw a crucifix into the river. At that very moment, he says, the Jewish slaughterhouse caught on fire. When asked who it was he saw, the ringleader points to Yusuf who takes to his heels. Half the mob follows him, and a brawl erupts between the other half and the Jews. It ends in a draw, but Yusuf remains missing.
When I came to Estella, I wanted to see how well what I had invented matched what was there. I based many features of this episode on stories about the Jews of Estella, including a story that the Jewish women of Estella had their own synagogue, and the anti-Semitic legend of the Jew throwing a crucifix in the river. My source for a lot of my knowledge about Jewish communities along the Camino is David Gitlitz and Linda Davidson’s wonderful The Pilgrimage Road to Santiago: The Complete Cultural Handbook
The Jews of Estella were moved around during the four hundred years they lived in Estella, but when Gebirga would have stayed with them, around 1120, their community was on the hillside above the pilgrimage road and the river, up behind the albergue where I was staying. You can see a few house here in the photo, but much of the area is open, and occupied by a bypass highway, just out of sight beyond these houses. Its emptiness makes it easier to remember and imagine the lost community, easier for me than in Toledo or Barcelona.
The church of Santa Maria, here, was built on the site of the synagogue where the men would have prayed in Gebirga’s day. It was taken from by the king and given to the bishop of Pamplona to build this church in 1144.
To the left, and facing where the Jewish community would have been, was this big pile, now an old folks home, but originally a Dominican monastery, built in 1258. Those who study relations between Christians and Jews in Spain know that in the thirteenth century, Dominicans, the “Order of Preachers,” gained the right to be able to force Jews to listen to them preach. In this community, evidently they also taught Arabic. I have read about this and known about it for years; in Estella for the first time I could feel what it would have been like to have this Dominican presence imposed on your community.
This church has been locked since the late nineteenth century so all you can see is its facade. It sits right on the pilgrimage road into town, opposite the river. It is the church of the Holy Sepulchre, and it was originally built on the site where the Jew was supposed to have thrown the crucifix into the river. This facade dates from the fourteenth century, but as you’ll be able to see, its creators had their minds very firmly on the Jewish community that surrounded it even then.
The tympanum at the centre shows scenes from Holy Week — the Last Supper on the bottom; the Crucifixion at the top, the cross flanked by Mary and John; and in the middle, the harrowing of Hell, the women at the tomb, and Christ appearing before Mary Magdalene. But look at the figures holding up the tympanum.
They’re Jews. It’s a disquieting image and there are many ways to interpret the two figures. They hold up the Crucifixion and Resurrection the way what Christians call the Old Testament holds up the New. Perhaps Jewish taxes paid for the church — given the location of the church this would not be surprising. It may not even be an entirely negative depiction. At a time when Jews were increasingly being marginalized in Spain, their physical presence here makes a case for them to have a place, however fraught and marginalized, in Christendom.
Estella has had a troubling and difficult history, only a small part of which I have talked about here. It is also beautiful, only a small part of which I have shown you here.
It has been a very long time, after all, since Jews anywhere in the world routinely wore or wielded swords, so long that when paired with “sword,” the word “Jews” (unlike, say, “Englishmen” or “Arabs”) clangs with anachronism, with humorous incongruity, like “Samurai Tailor” or “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.” — Michael Chabon, “Afterward,” Gentlemen of the Road
When I was little and Remembrance Day rolled around on November 11, I would always be slightly ashamed and confused that neither of my grandparents fought during World War II. When I was a little bit older, old enough to enjoy looking through my grandmother’s stack of old family photos, I learned something new. Maybe nobody fought in World War II but they did fight in World War I. On the wrong side. This year, on the hundredth anniversary of the armistice, I decided to investigate.
I pulled out this photograph of my great-grandfather Oskar Bauer, and did some research. From the Verordnungsblatt für die Kaiserlich-Königliche Landwehr, Volume 37 of 1907, I discovered that at that time, he was a Kadett-Offiziersstellvertreter in the Uhlans regiment, number 4. What does that mean in English? The Kaiserlich-Königliche Landwehr was the Imperial-Royal territorial army of the Austrian half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1908, the Austrian army changed the title of cadet-officer’s deputy to that of ensign. By February 17, 1915 he had been promoted to Lieutenant, according to vol. 46, no. 17, p. 210 of the same source. The Uhlans, with the separate regiments of Dragoons and Hussars, formed the cavalry of the Austro-Hungarian army, and he was in the “Kaiser’s own” 4th regiment. Its normal home was at Olmütz, now Olomouc in Czechia, where this photograph was taken in 1914, and its composition in the same year was 65% Ruthenian, 29% Polish, and 6% “various.”
In the photograph, you can see his sabre in his left hand, and on his right knee, a helmet that would have been identical to this one, and which harked back the the origin of the Uhlans as a Polish cavalry regiment. As World War I opened, the 4th Uhlans were part of the Austro-Hungarian 3rd army, under the command of Rudolf Brudermann. They were sent north into what is now Poland with the 1st through 4th armies to face the Russian army in what would become the Battle of Galicia, a decisive loss for the Austro-Hungarian forces. The Fieldmarshal and Chief of General Staff Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf sent ten divisions of cavalry across the border to do reconnaissance on August 15th. On August 21st the 4th Uhlans met the Russian 10th Division in what was to be the largest cavalry-against-cavalry battle of the war near Jaroslavice-Wolczkowce, one of the last times horses were used effectively against each other. The battle of Galicia ended with some 400,000 members of the Austrian army killed, captured or wounded. Eventually, the Russians were able to take Przemysl, the third-largest fortress in all of Europe.
This photograph shows my great-grandmother, Marianne Grünfeld, and it was taken in Przemysl, evidently in 1914, which was the same year their first child, Oskar “Willy” Bauer was born. She was twenty and her husband was thirty-four. Przemysl was an interesting place — on the one hand, a major Austrian fortification and barracks and so a site for the elite Austrian military to gain fame and renown, and on the other, a town that had been majority Jewish in the eighteenth century with a population that ranged from comfortably wealthy to very poor. It was still 30% Jewish by 1931, the year before Joseph Roth published his The Radetzky March. Roth’s novel haunts my reading of these events of my family’s history. It is the story of the von Trotta family, grandfather, father, and son. The grandfather was a Slovene peasant-cum-soldier, ennobled at the battle of Solferino for saving the emperor’s life. The father becomes district commander in an unnamed town in Moravia where the regimental band opens every concert with the Radetzky March. Joseph Radetzky von Radetz, the Czech-born Austrian commander for whom the march was written was, for a brief yet never-forgotten time, the commander of the fortress and town of Olmütz. The son is a lieutenant in the Uhlans regiment stationed in his father’s town, until disgrace makes him shift to an infantry regiment. He ends up in a town like Roth’s own home of Brody, a smaller version of Przemysl, with its mix of Jews, Poles, and Ruthenians, and dies in the early days of the war, when my great-grandfather fought his cavalry battle.
Roth made his military hero an ennobled Slovene, perhaps because he couldn’t quite imagine a Jew, ennobled for military service. But they did exist. My great-grandmother’s father died when she was only a year or so old, and her mother, Anna Feldmann, married Wilhelm Fuchs who was ennobled in 1908 as a captain, second class, in the infantry, with the title Edler von Annshort. This was his coat of arms. Note the star of David. He lived with his family in Przemysl, and died in 1911. I have often wondered what it was like to live as a Jewish noble and military family in Przemysl, on the borderline between the military elite and the shtetl. On the one hand, they were trying to assimilate as much as they could, and succeeded to the degree that Fuchs was ennobled and earned the Signum Laudis, a medal awarded to officers for military merit. On the other hand, no one ever forgot they were Jews. Marianne and her sister Alice both married army officers; Marianne and Alice both married Jews.
When my grandmother was a young girl, Marianne and Oskar had her baptized, still trying hard to assimilate and erase their differences with those around them. She reconverted to Judaism to marry my grandfather (perhaps the only person to convert *to* Judaism in central Europe in 1936). My great-grandparents, as I have said before here, died at Auschwitz. I don’t know when or how Marianne’s mother, Anna Fuchs Edle v. Annshort, died. I know she was alive in late 1937/early 1938 because we have a photograph of her holding my father. I can guess.
L to R Marianne (Grunfeld) Bauer, Fritz Waldsheim, Liska Bauer, Oskar Bauer
My father died in July 1987; my uncle told us about our Jewish background that same summer; in 1989 the Berlin Wall came down, and in June 1993, my sister and I went to Czechoslovakia (as it still was then, though not for long) with my grandmother, Liska. Travelling through Prague and the Czech countryside with Granny was like listening to Marcel Proust. We would turn a corner, she’d see a building, and the stories would pour forth. A visit to the the Kinsky palace, in Chlumec where my great-grandparents had lived, reminded her of how when they’d pass it on their weekly drive between Prague and Hronov, my Gumper would tease, “Don’t look up. The Count will invite us for lunch, and we just don’t have time.” In the Prague Castle, we saw the Spanish Hall where she went to a Red Cross Ball then, “That’s the Schwartzenburg Palace,” she exclaimed before one sgraffitoed building, and told us how it used to be the Swiss embassy, and how she had gone there to beg (successfully) to have her Swiss visa extended, though she did not yet have her exit permit from the Gestapo. To get the permit, her father bribed a high Nazi official who came to their house and was “decent to them” and gave her the right permit. All my photos of this trip show my sister with her arm around my small Granny, holding her and protecting her.
We went to the farm where she grew up in Herelec, and the second floor apartment on Anny Lekenske street in Prague, where she moved with her parents and brother. And a lot of the stories she told were about her parents, especially Marianne, her mother. Marianne was born in 1894 in Jihlava, or Iglau as it was called then. Her father, Julius Grünfeld died the year after she was born and her mother, Anna Feldmann, remarried a man named Fuchs who had been ennobled with the name Fuchs-Anshort. It seems that Marianne lost contact with her father’s family, but just in the past year my sister and my niece have been able to reconnect with a branch descended from Julius’s oldest brother. They…look like our cousins! Which they are.
Marianne’s step-father was an army officer, and moved the family to Przemysl. Now part of Poland, it was then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where it was a crucial crossroads for trade, and a strategic barrier against the Russians. Some of the most important battles in World War I were fought there. It was also home to an ancient and substantial Jewish community, which formed a third of the population of the town. There, this ennobled sophisticated family, whose livelihood depended on assimilation to the norms and values of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its military, encountered, perhaps for the first time in large numbers, the Ostjuden, whom they would have seen as threatening and strange. It is perhaps this experience that best explains Marianne’s indifference, or perhaps better, hostility, to her Jewish background. The nineteenth-century emancipation of the Jews was not just an emancipation from the punitive restrictions of the state; it was also, for those who chose — and the families of both my father’s parents did so choose — an emancipation from the rabbis. Her son, Willy, was not circumcised at birth (and, poor boy, medical problems caused him to have to undergo circumcision as a youth). My grandmother’s name was entered in the record of Jewish births in Iglau, but the same document also records her abandonment of the “israelische religion” at the age of three to become a Catholic. Granny showed us the church where Marianne encouraged her children to participate in the Ascension day procession, and she told us how a crew of thirty Slovaks would come to bring in the harvest in the autumn. They wore their national dress on Sunday and to her mother’s delight, made grain crowns for the family, which they would keep safe until the following year. These folk customs delighted Marianne, but she showed no interest in her own tradition. Moreover, she identified herself with the traditions of Austria, not this new country of Czechs. Granny showed us the old Deutsches Haus in Prague where Marianne would go to meet friends. “Of course,” my grandmother then said under breath, “They all became Nazi collaborators.”
My grandmother loved her mother; you could hear it in her voice. The photos show them smiling together like sisters, my grandmother a little shorter, plumper, and more ordinary-looking than her elegant mother, but raised to be strong, and to value herself. I have a few things that belonged to Marianne: the family portraits that were passed down through the daughters of the family, her handwritten recipe book, a pair of earrings — chased gold lozenges, each inset with a pearl. My grandmother loved clothing, and she loved to go shopping, a trait she passed down to her granddaughters, though she wasn’t interested in labels, and she despised the boutique-ification of women’s fashion (one of my favorite stories about my Granny was her tale of walking into a Valentino boutique and picking up some of the garments, whereupon the salesman rushed up to her, distressed that she was touching the clothing. “Madame,” he said, “You mustn’t touch. If you want something I will help you. This is haute couture, you know.” Granny turned to him and said, “THIS is not haute couture; THIS is prêt-à-porter,” and stormed out of the shop.) When she died, we divided up her clothing, and one of the pieces I chose was Marianne’s alligator purse.
On December 14, 1941, Marianne and her husband Oskar were sent to Theresienstadt, and on January 20, 1943 they were sent to Auschwitz, where they perished. They had visas for Cuba, but Oskar said, “What do I want to do? Live in a hotel for the rest of my life?” and they did not go. My grandmother spoke to a survivor of Theresienstadt after the war who told her the last time he had seen her mother, she was smiling and taking care of the chickens. “And that is how I always like to think of her,” my grandmother said, voice shaking,’Smiling and taking care of the chickens.”
A few years back, my uncle put my grandfather’s home movies onto three DVDs and I spent yesterday evening watching them. I had seen them before, of course. Well, most of them. I had always been a little wary of number three, with the unpromising title, “Hunting and Fishing.” But I decided it was time to watch that one too, though I admit I gave up somewhere around “the fish hatchery in Compton.” And it was worth it.
It begins with scenes of hunting in what was Czechoslovakia, in the years right before the war. My grandmother and grandfather are both there, dressed like they are about to climb every mountain, as they indeed did a couple of years later. They hunted in the way modelled for them by the nobility of Austria, with the rows of rabbits and birds and beasts lined up, a final report for the master of the hunt, and a moment of respect for the animals who gave their lives that day. They were probably at the hunting lodge of my father’s cousin and brother-in-law, Paul, and I can’t say for certain of course, but I imagine most of the people in the film, apart from the beaters perhaps, were Jews like them. In 1848,the same time that the Jews began to be liberated from the laws that constrained their lives, the right to hunt was opened beyond the nobility in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and my ancestors took advantage of all their new freedoms. The night before the hunt, they drink and laugh, most of them in their twenties, and my uncle’s voice-over names those he recognizes: Ruda Beck, my grandfather’s best friend, who survived Auschwitz; the Winters, Ernst and Ilona, who got out in time.
After the War, my grandfather returned to Czechoslovakia, to find what was left, first in 1946 and again, with my grandmother, in 1947. A film clip shows her on a train with final destination marked “Praha,” after a little skiing at Davos, or was it Zermatt? My grandfather hunted again with Paul, who had survived Theresienstadt. The film, now in colour, shows a much diminished group, Paul’s face, gray and worn but he smiles when he receives a bottle of Slivovitz in a newspaper wrapping from one of his guests. The prizes of all these hunts, the antlers of the deer and the fanned tail feathers of the capercaillie, still hang on the walls of the house my grandfather built in the 1960s.
It is wonderful to see, in these movies, the faces of the people I loved. My father, endlessly, as a baby, looking worried, my grandmother laughing and flirting for the camera. my grandfather, handsome and debonair as he carves through the snow on skis (a relatively new pastime in the 30s). My grandfather thought he was Cecil B.DeMille, so there are rather more shots of pre-war (unbombed!) Rotterdam, moody churches in Budapest, and dark Viennese palaces (with one tentatively goose-stepping guard) than I would like, when all I really want to see is my family, the ones I knew and the ones I didn’t.
My uncle was far better behind a camera than my grandfather, though his medium was the still rather than the video. Did my uncle take the photograph at the top of this post? I love this picture, because it shows my grandmother, grandfather, and father the way I remember them. My grandmother is glamorous and vivacious, smiling and having fun. I admire the way she seized the joy out of life, right to the very end. My father is laughing in this image that shows him almost at the exact midpoint of his life — and holding one of the damned cigarettes that eventually killed him, far too young. I see both myself and my son in his face. My grandfather looks serious, but apparently he is doing his “Jack Benny face.” Whether my uncle took this one or not, his attention to the faces of our family, to the way we look from the outside made him the eye through which we look back at ourselves, as a family. Most of my favorite photos of my family were taken by him, and it is not surprising that he was the one to preserve these videos for us. He talks, at the beginning of the video, of how bittersweet it is for him to do this work, to create this bridge between past and present. I am grateful.
We celebrated Passover tonight; me, my son, and my husband. It is something I’ve done more years than not since my son was at pre-school at Akiba-Schechter, sometimes with friends, but most often just me and him, and now, this year, my husband too. It seemed a natural thing to do when my son was bringing home paper seder plates with the sections marked, a children’s haggadah with frogs pasted in haphazardly, and a tie-dyed matzah cover.
Every year it means something a little bit different. This year, I think of my cousin and uncle, celebrating in Israel on their first visit there, with the Berman family, with whom ours has been bound for so many decades. My son and I shared part of this season with them three years ago. I think of my grandfather, the first of our family to find himself in Jerusalem, who left from there for England on April 2, 1939 missing the start of Passover by only a couple of days. My grandmother probably rarely celebrated, if at all, but I am sure that until he was forced to flee his homeland at least, my grandfather celebrated every year. Did he celebrate with his fellow Czech refugees in their messy flat in Putney in 1939? Or was that the first year he let it slip? And this year the words of the Haggadah expressing the joy of the Jews at their liberation, and their gratitude to the God who protected and saved them ring especially loud. “He brought us out from slavery to freedom, from sorrow to festivity, from darkness to great light.” I imagine my ancestors repeating this over the centuries during times when they were far from free or festive. But each year they repeated these words of joy and humility and gratitude no matter their current pain.
A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I drove out of town one Saturday to visit an old friend who is dying. Strangely enough, we both knew her through completely different channels long before we met each other. We were not surprised that she was only capable of speaking to us for a very few minutes. She was in her beautiful bedroom, in a hospital bed facing a large window looking onto the sky and the trees, agonizingly slow to come into bud this year.
“You have a beautiful view,” I said.
“I know,” she replied, before she drifted back to sleep. “I’m lucky.”
The title is misleading. The question I still ask myself is not, “When did I know I was Jewish?” but, “How, in God’s name, did I not figure it out sooner?” I blame Captain von Trapp.
I cannot remember a time when I did not know the story of how my grandmother fled Czechoslovakia, weeks after the Germans invaded, with my two-year-old father in tow, to meet my grandfather in London (the story of how he got to London, however, remained a secret until much more recently). She was a great storyteller, and in her version, she was not a bold heroine, but a foolish and somewhat spoiled girl, slightly oblivious of the danger around her. I heard many times about how she charmed the Gestapo at the border into letting them leave, how they had to stay in Versailles, and how my grandmother abandoned my father every morning to the tender ministrations of “la promeneuse” so she could hot-foot it to Paris, and later, of their life in London and Wales, of ration cards, and air raids, and shoes that unaccountably did not get polished when you left them outside your door at night. What I did not hear anywhere attached to the story was the word, “Jew.” It was a word I never heard used by any member of my family, in any context.
And that is where the Sound of Music comes in. I saw it for the first time a long time ago, long enough ago that I remember standing for the national anthem before it began. My grandparents had come to visit in Toronto, and we all went together. And there, on the screen, was their story, their love for their homeland, the evil Nazis, and their flight to freedom. They even lived high on a hill with a lonely goatherd, in a Swiss Chalet. In Quebec. Here it is:
When the Captain sang “Edelweiss,” my mother says, tears rolled down my grandfather’s cheeks. Bless my homeland forever.
And once again, not a mention of the word “Jew” in the whole movie (Weirdly, when you think about it. Sure, the von Trapps weren’t Jewish. But Max? Max?). No wonder I was confused as the evidence began mounting and the questions started to come. Because I knew, I knew. But I didn’t know. I read When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit and then all the Leon Uris books. I had dreams about being chased by Nazis. I even wrote a short story for school about a young girl, oh roughly my age at the time, escaping. I asked my father where our name came from. He lied (Miners from Lancaster come to work in the Silesian coal fields. I still have not forgiven him for this one!). I asked him why Gumper was smart enough to leave when others didn’t (you can tell I am getting close at this point). I asked my grandfather what happened to his two sisters. He left the room, and my grandmother changed the subject. I knew we weren’t Catholic, like all the other Czechs I knew, though when my grandfather swore, it was by Jesus and Mary (this also threw me off). Did I think they were Hussites? But no, the von Trapps weren’t Jewish. You didn’t have to be Jewish to flee the Nazis. It wasn’t a question about myself that I asked; it was one I had already answered.
Then cousin Frances came for one of the last Christmases before my grandfather and father died, and this time brought with her a family tree. On it were large branches that were missing, unknown relatives marked only “died in the war.” And Frances told us that we had a Jewish background. I didn’t fully absorb it, confused as I still was by the Captain. Maybe Gumper’s mother had been Jewish?
After my father died, my uncle sat me and my sister down with my mother and told us the story of our origins and swore us to secrecy. My mother already knew; my father had told her before they were married in an offhand way, and she regarded it as a matter of complete indifference. We didn’t keep it a secret; we started talking about our background and history with our father’s cousins, and with our grandmother, especially when we travelled with her to the Czech Republic after the wall came down. My sister remembered revealing all to our Kitchener cousins when we visited them for Christmas a couple of years after our father’s death.
For me this knowledge came, not as a revelation but as a confirmation, an “Oh, of course.” It was like I had spent my life doing a puzzle without the picture on the box, trying to piece together the faces I saw from the pieces I had. Someone handed me some missing pieces and suddenly all the sections I had been working on began to fit together. And on the woman’s face, the pieces now formed a smile.
The official part of Christmas with my new family is over, and I have an evening alone, as the rest of them go out to shop, eat, and watch a movie, as is their usual custom on Boxing Day. We have been talking a lot about what our Christmas traditions are over the past few days, as we attempt to merge our practices and rituals, honouring what is most important to all of us. Like most of us, I have had a series of Christmas traditions, depending on where I lived and who I was living with at the time, but if you ask me what I think of when I think of Christmas, it isn’t Toronto in the 1970s or Detroit in the 1990s; it is spending Christmas in North Hatley, for many years at the incongruous Swiss chalet on a Quebec hillside house built my Gumper, my grandfather Jan Pick, and later also at our own cottage. It was always our family and my grandparents; sometimes our cousins from Kitchener joined us, and in later years, my father’s cousin Frances would come from Mexico.
What did it mean to us? It was the light in the darkness of winter. We feasted and burned candles. We skied through the woods and snowmobiled, and chopped down a tree, bringing the freshness of the forest indoors. The ornaments were battered and glittering survivors of those collected by my grandparents in their years as exiles and refugees from their native Czechoslovakia. We ate fish soup, and herring, and salmon, and eel. We ate turkey and plum pudding, and spiced beef. We ate candied orange peel, truffles, florentines, pepperkakor, vanilkove rohlicky, rum balls, Turtles, mince pies, and shortbread. We opened a mountain of presents (This was the only part my grandfather did not like — he thought we had too many presents, and he was right. And it only got worse when the Kitchener Picks joined us!). And like the Whos down in Whoville what we did most of all was sing. At Christmas Eve dinner, the apex of our feast, we would sing and sing and sing, songs in English and French; Czech, Slovak, Swedish, and Hungarian. Some were toasts and drinking songs, some were folk songs; we sang songs about the black earth of my grandparents’ homeland and about battles fought in far off Herzigovina; we sang songs my grandfather learned as a student in France and songs my mother grew up singing around a Swedish Christmas smorgasbord. We banished the darkness and drew our family together around the table. It was this family we were celebrating as we sang, especially my grandparents, especially my grandfather.
The Picks were Jewish of course, and it may be surprising for some of you to read that Christmas was so important to them. It is one of the curiosities of the ways a culture borrows from another that many Czech Jews celebrated Christmas with as much enthusiasm as their neighbors, albeit with less piety. I remember my grandmother taking about childhood Christmasses, about the carp who would come to live in the bathtub to be cleaned of its muddy interior before it would be eaten on Christmas Eve. And their family was not alone. My grandfather’s best friend from the old country was a man who survived Auschwitz and wrote a memoir of his experiences. “It was a very sad Christmas for the Jews this year,” he wrote without irony about Christmas 1939 in occupied Czechoslovakia.
The grainy photo at the top, which shows my grandmother, Liska, lighting the candles on a Christmas tree, is a still from a movie made by our cousin Frances’s father at Christmas in 1939 in the UK. He and my grandparents and my father, Michael, had managed to escape there. Also in this film are my father’s young cousins, Peter and John, kindertransport children who had been saved by Nicholas Winton, and my great grandmother Ruzena, whose necklace I wore at our own Christmas dinner last night. The people in the film are all people I knew well, so even though the film is silent I can tell what they are saying and even what they are thinking, as they greet Father Christmas, and praise my father for riding his first tricycle. And I can see the moment when the mood grow dark and they raise a toast their friends and family left behind — my grandmother’s parents, my grandfather’s sisters, all to perish, with so many more — and my grandmother knocks back her drink, and stiffens her jaw and smiles again, prepared to defy the darkness for another year.
I was tagged by Julianne Douglas over on Facebook to quickly write down ten books that have meant something to me, and then pass along the request to ten more people. I can’t do anything the easy way, so I thought it would be fun to do a blog post about it, and to explain why these books are important to me. Since it is the time of year when many people are looking for gift ideas, maybe even some of what I say will provide some inspiration. I am going to stick close to historical fiction for my list, since I have been thinking a lot recently about what makes good historical fiction in general, and medieval historical fiction in particular.
Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdattir. It is maybe cheating to begin with this because I have about fifty more pages to go, but it was reading this book that got me thinking about medieval historical fiction in the first place. Somehow Undset managed to write here a novel that continues to speak immediately to contemporary themes and problems, while at the same time maintaining a perfect period voice. I have not discovered one jarring note (though specialists in medieval Scandinavia might feel differently). I am thinking of how I could work it into a course.
Cecelia Holland, Great Maria. This novel is another of the first that comes to mind when I think of other books I have loved that, for me, capture the Middle Ages and its values perfectly. Its heroine is awkward and difficult, and unsympathetic at times. This is because she thinks and feels and acts differently than we would do. This is because she lives in a very different world, and Holland does not allow us to forget it.
Margaret Elphinstone, The Sea Road. This one will be less well known even to my book-reading and medievalist friends. It is the eleventh-century tale of Gudrid, as told to a cleric and scribe in Rome, of her role in the Viking exploration of the North Atlantic and her own journey to North America. Gudrid’s world is pagan and Christian, civilized and wild and once again, Elphinstone gets her voice perfectly. I should also say that everything Elphinstone writes is an instant hard-cover buy for me.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings. This isn’t historical fiction, most would argue, but rather fantasy. I am going to argue that it belongs on this list of books that made me think about how to write historical fiction. Tolkien’s Middle Earth is not some fantasy realm in some imaginary world, however it may appear to a casual reader. He binds it to the geography and language of the word that we know, the world that is ours, by creating stories told about stories told about stories, layering the past upon the past.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Shadow of the Wind. I saw that Julianne had The Angel’s Game on her list which I unaccountably still have not read, though I went to an author reading when it first came out, and got a signed copy. This one is a book about books by a man who loves books. More than that, Ruiz Zafon casts a spell on the reader from the very first page. We are in post-civil war Barcelona with all its beauty, menace, and danger until the last page when he lets us go again.
Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. This is the perfect book for someone raised on Georgette Heyer and Jane Austen. Like Heyer, she captures that Regency voice without anachronism, and at the same time manages to work in the magic in a way that seems seamless and plausible.
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall. Hilary Mantel in her best historical fiction, here and in A Place of Greater Safety, about the French Revolution not only writes a historical novel, but constructs a historical argument. Here, her argument is a revisionist portrait of Thomas Cromwell. Usually he is depicted as the most hated of Henry VIIIs servants, but Mantel gives us a view of him from the inside to present him as a more sympathetic character. Her depiction of Thomas Wolsey and Thomas More were equally daring.
Sarah Dunant, Sacred Hearts. Most people would think that a story that takes place entirely within the walls of a tightly enclosed sixtenth-century Ferarrese convent would not be interesting. Those people would be wrong. I read this shortly after teaching a class on Terese of Avila’s autobiography and felt it gave flesh to some of the bones of what Teresa describes.
Markus Zusak, The Book Thief. I have already discussed this book on my blog, so I won’t say too much here except that this is another book about books (I am detecting a theme here…), and it made me have sympathy for characters I thought I could not feel sympathy for.
Simon Mawer, The Glass Room. The story of the twentieth-century told through a modernist house built in what was once Czechoslovakia, this one hits close to home. Not only does it depict the world of my ancestors, the world into which my father was born, and the pain of going into exile from that world, the characters themselves reflect elements of members of my family. This may, then, seem less strictly “historical” than the other works on my list. But whether a book takes us to Tang China or Renaissance Italy, surely we love it because we see parts of ourself in it?
