the other side

I don’t hate Jews.  

They are the only tribe that ever claimed me without introduction, no word spoken, sometimes in a foreign language. Who knows how ?  My model of Jewry is Yiddishkeit – northern European Jewishness – the word Dov (Israeli, brought up in a DP camp in Ulm) wrote in the front of my first Isaac Bashevis Singer novel.  I had to ask what it meant.  I am not a secular Jew, rather an ignorant one.   I did not know about my Polish Jewish grandmother until I was 15.  Nothing sinister about that.  I was the much younger (by 13 years) of 2 daughters, all the grandparents were long gone and my parents weren’t geographically or emotionally close to their siblings. 

At about the same time, I learned that my mother’s father  –  the same genealogical distance on the other side – was Rom, gypsy, big south east of England clan called Lee. 

The Jewish line is by matrilineal descent so I was ( as a man said to me, live on Radio Four) “nothing.”   Years later, I learned from a Joseph Kanone Cold War novel the term from the Nuremburg race laws “mischling” – mixed.  That’s me.

Among all sorts of misty branches on the family tree – Irish, Spanish, French – I had the security of a loving family and a liberal tradition at home and at school, so I laughed with my mother when she said  “Mongrels are the best dogs – intelligent, nice natures, bright eyes “. 

But there is always another side.  My experience of racial prejudice is small compared to the number of people who didn’t like me or my speaking voice.  But as a child, if they didn’t like me, what I was or might be, soon came up.

  I couldn’t be my parents’child – they were too old, I was too dark, they had adopted me.  I told my parents.  They told me honestly what they knew and thought, and backed me.

Living now through the daily coverage of war, we hear two versions of everything, at least two –  we find it easier to dismiss what Putin says because we know he lives in his own state-controlled world.  And we side with Ukraine, well served by a devoted leader and the enduringly courageous. 

The Unkrainian Trident

In the Middle East we have to contend with what the Israeli Army (IDF) says, this is what Hamas as the governing body of Gaza says.  Other Israeli voices are added – various sides of the political spectrum, the families of hostages, the critics of Prime Minister Netanyahu, this voice from the US, that one from the Palestinian Authority, another from the West Bank, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon.   Not to mention who is caught in the crossfire, justified or not  – the collateral damage of children on both sides, the ill, the frail, the powerless.  And journalists looking for emotive pictures. 

There are always two sides to everything, mostly more.  

Look at what we look at, aside from endless repeats..  Because this is a wonderful series or film, it doesn’t follow the sequel will be any darned good at all. (French Connection Two is the rulebreaker, better than the original.)   Re Australian screen product, The News Reader (BBC2,series one and two) has been great: Scrublands (BBC4) may have been a terrific novel – but whoever says that what works in a novel will work on screen ?  Monotonous.  I bought the impressive Killers of the Flower Moon in hardback –  but nobody could ever have thought it would make a film.  Except Martin Scorcese in the long fight of his old age as an auteur, to make one more movie…  hours and hours of it. I think back to the discipline which formed so many scriptwriters, cameramen, actors and directors – two hours was exceptional, aim for 97 minutes.

There are other sides of fashion ie from high to none.  There are fashions in skin care, health , education, thought, social interaction.  There is even another side to common sense.  At the moment, it is noticeably missing (£146 million spent of the resettlement of refugees in Rwanda so far -and nobody has gone there.)   It’s about perception.  My commonsense may be your unkind judgement, the other side of whatever is under discussion.