Every day of the school year, from my first day at six to my last at seventeen, I crossed an international border. In the morning, I departed the 1920s Germany of our home in 1960s and 70s London for the life of a country teeming with sensibilities that never ceased to feel insuperably foreign – not only because they were, but also because I felt duty-bound to regard them so.
And, each evening, I returned, never forgetting that I was a native of one and a visitor to the other – that to feel any other way would be murderously to betray my ancestors and myself.
Once home from school, there would be a strict routine. Tea and cakes were awaiting me at precisely 4 p.m. They were cleared away thirty minutes later, whether I was finished or not, after which there was piano practice for two hours before dinner, which took place at precisely 7 p.m., and was always of the utmost simplicity: bread and cheese, or else chicken rissoles or fish fingers and potato croquettes, heated up from frozen, followed by a dessert such as reconstituted crème caramel prepared by dousing a yellowish powder with boiling water. Or Mother would open a tin of ravioli, which were factory-cooked to a state of limp near-disintegration and slid, in a single cylindrical mass, into the saucepan with a gentle plop that I never ceased to find reassuring and comical.
After that diversion from more serious matters, we would usually repair to the living room to play recordings of great musicians, sometimes listening to the same composition in two or three different interpretations, after which it was obligatory to compare and contrast their respective merits. Finally, there was homework for a couple of hours before lights out.
Television was prohibited. This was at my insistence, my mother claimed, because I thought it ‘a complete waste of time’ – a conviction to which she stuck adamantly even when we visited her friends and I at once vanished into their television rooms for the duration of the evening.
Almost nobody who wasn’t from ‘our world’ ever entered this sanctuary. Even professional services came straight out of Mitteleuropa. Our family doctor, Ernst Lucas, who had played chess with my father every Saturday, was from Cologne – and had the air of a saviour because the family of his wife, Lilly Reifenberg, had afforded my father protection and employment in one of their many businesses after he was evicted from his job at the Dresdner Bank in 1934.
The pediatrician, Kenneth Samson, from somewhere else in Germany, was a genial figure privy to the family’s foibles and furies, sometimes visiting as a friend, when he was relaxed and informal, at other times calling on us in a professional capacity, when he assumed a grave demeanour and his voice descended from a baritone to a bass.
Our dentist, Walter Nuki, and his wife Gina, both from Vienna, often visited to play string quartets.
Carl Flesch Jr., son of the violinist, who first met my mother when she was a teenager in Berlin and who continued to be known as ‘the young Carl Flesch’ into his nineties, was the family’s insurance broker.
Jupp Dernbach, a fine artist who designed our music room, was from Meyen, near Cologne.
A Dr Hell looked after our pictures. Enormously erudite, he was a restorer at the Royal Collection in Buckingham Palace as well as at the National and Tate galleries. Born in the ancient German-speaking community of Romania, he had studied and worked in Berlin before fleeing to London with his wife.
The few non-émigrés who managed to enter our fortress of the displaced were either colleagues of my mother, or else students from the Royal College of Music, where she was a professor, dropping in for a supplementary lesson.
Other intruders were schoolfriends of mine, though I didn’t dare to invite anyone whom my mother would consider ‘alien’. Not that asking my Jewish schoolfriends home was without its complications. For one thing, they would be startled to see crucifixes hanging over our beds. There were occasions when the difficulty of explaining our Catholicism was too excruciating for me to summon the necessary nonchalance when they caught sight of this idolatry, and I might guiltily hide my crucifix in a cupboard or under my mattress until my friend had left.
So many of my mother’s fellow refugees were nominally Christian, or at least knew how common it was for German Jews to convert, that for a long time I assumed that all Jews were familiar with and even relaxed about conversion. I imagined, or hoped, that fellow Jews would take this bold step of my mother and grandfather in their stride – and perhaps even admire it for its open-mindedness, or, failing that, as a sign of canny self-preservation.
I couldn’t have been more misguided. The astonishment verging on hostility of those my mother referred to as ‘English-speaking Jews’ – Jews whose ancestors had arrived in Britain or America three of four generations previously and who no longer harboured a lost European homeland – when they discovered this treachery, was overt, uncomprehending, and profoundly humiliating, throwing me into a crisis of self-presentation that often spiralled into terror.
It wasn’t so much a crisis of identity, for as I entered my teens I thought I was sure in which direction my identity lay: I was a German Jew whose family history had caused me to be born and raised in England and in the Catholic faith; the core of my world was defined by the warmth and musicality of the guests at Adela Kotowska’s Sunday teas; and its elaboration in contemporary terms would be vouchsafed by science, philosophy, and submersion in ‘Europe’. But how was I to explain this to those Jews who saw our fudged identity as a vile combination of cowardice and betrayal? In fact, the latter numbered not a few German Jews, despite the myth promulgated by my mother that they were infinitely understanding on this question.
One of these German Jews was the father of Samuel, whom I had met at my junior school. Friendship with the whole family blossomed after an end-of-year concert where I had played the piano in a Mozart duo with the school’s violin teacher, who lost her place in the score so badly that I began to convulse with laughter, and soon no longer knew where we had reached in the music either. Cacophony ensued before we managed to recover. After this shambles had ended, a man at the back of the audience boomed, with magnificent inappropriateness, ‘Funtustic! Vunderfool!’ The German accent was unmistakeable. And at once, with that tribal recognition which is second nature to the immigrant, I swivelled towards the voice that so clearly issued from the heart of our universe. It belonged to my friend’s father – another refugee from Berlin.
It wasn’t long before we, as a family, were invited for a Friday-night dinner at Samuel’s home, an evening that would turn into a nightmare.
Who were we? And how were we to explain who we were? As soon as we arrived, I realized that we were on the spot. Next to each place at the dinner table, except two – those reserved for my mother and for Samuel’s – were kippas. And Jewish prayer books. We were going to have to have a ‘proper’ Friday evening, with singing, prayers, kiddush, the works. Since I had almost never been to one, I had no idea what to do. In fact, this was not long after I’d enrolled as an altar server at the local Catholic church.
Luckily, we had a short time before we sat down for dinner when we could talk about, to us, normal subjects like music. My friend’s father was an avid amateur pianist and seemed thrilled to have discovered musicians with whom, he immediately announced, he was expecting to play. I fervently hoped that this bond might take the edge off the appalling embarrassment that was imminent. Surely, I told myself, music would decisively trump any religious or tribal heritage for our host; and so our fidelity to Beethoven would stand an excellent chance of redeeming, or at least masking or otherwise distracting from, our betrayal of Judaism. A betrayal that he and his family had not yet uncovered but inevitably would.
I sensed, though, that my hope was futile. Our pre-dinner discovery of common delight in music felt like a moment of reprieve when we could still keep secret our insolubly conflicted identity; and they could continue to assume, as I was certain they did, that a family of refugees from Hitler would be, at the least, secular Jews.
Then something terrible happened, about which I still cringe. As we sat down and the father began reading in Hebrew and his sons joined in and then they all modulated into song, out of synch with each other and grunting more than singing, I began to laugh. Uncontrollably. Loudly. I was shaking and getting redder and redder.
At first they ignored me. Perhaps because my reaction was incomprehensible; perhaps because they were absorbed in the liturgy. Presently I was thrown some perplexed glances, which became worried, then irritated.
I fought against my hilarity by imagining my father’s grave and the funeral I hadn’t been allowed to attend, but to no effect. I was able to stop only when the prayers were finally over and the kiddush wine was passed round – which gave me the opportunity to take a sip that I hoped would convey a sense of togetherness, and of knowing after all what I was supposed to do, and also of apology. For what pained me then, as now, is that they might have seen my laughter as mockery, though it was anything but. So I felt the greatest relief when their housekeeper, a Spanish woman, wheeled in the food, and I was able to be comforted by the familiarity of a meal. And the insoluble embarrassment of not knowing the prayers, or of how to present whoever I was, which had stoked my nervous laughter, did eventually trickle away.
Each time we visited this family, the Spanish housekeeper was so pleased to see us, not only because we loved and praised her food but also because after that first dinner I had confessed to her, in the privacy of her kitchen, that we were Catholic. It was a joy, she said, to have fellow Catholics in her home for once, especially on an intimate family occasion like a Friday evening.