Sarah was outraged when she heard that Oswald Mosley was to address a public meeting at the Manchester Free Trade Hall.
“How can they let him?” she exclaimed incredulously to Mr. Greenberg the fishmonger when he told her.
Mr. Greenberg wiped his wet hands on his striped apron, shoved his dusty Homburg hat to the back of his head and scratched his bald pate with a fishy fingernail. “Neville Chamberlain you should ask, not me.”
“All he cares about is having his picture in the papers!” Sarah snorted. “With his famous umbrella! Instead he should use it to drive those Blackshirts into the sea.”
Gittel Lipkin, Moishe’s mother, was prodding a haddock speculatively. “In England they believe in free speech,” she said rejecting the haddock and examining another one.
“Like vonce sey did in my country,” a neatly-dressed young woman said from beside a box of mackerel. “Nobody stamped on se acorn, so it grew into un oak tree und now only von voice is heard.”
Her accent marked her as a refugee. Her bearing, too, Sarah thought, noting the erect carriage and proud tilt of the chin she had come to associate with the German Jews who had sought refuge in Manchester. “You’re living round here?” she asked her pleasantly.
“Unfortunately, yes.”
Sarah exchanged a glance with Gittel and gave her attention to a tray of plaice. Gittel did the same with the haddock and they did not raise their heads until the young woman had left the shop.
“Who does she think she is?” Gittel exploded the moment the door had shut behind her.
“She works for someone with a lot of children, on Cheetham Hill Road, helping in the house,” Mr. Greenberg supplied.
“For my part, I don’t care where such highty-tighty persons work. Or where they live!” Gittel said, slapping a huge fish on to the scales to be weighed. “Moishe’s at home this week, he’s only travelling in Lancashire,” she explained its size to Sarah, then resumed her tirade. “When they first started coming here I was sorry for them. But the way some of them behave it’s hard to be any more!”
“They’re lucky they don’t have to live in a district like Strangeways, the way we did when we first came, and not know where the next meal’s coming from,” Sarah agreed.
“So, they’re not like us,” the elderly fishmonger shrugged. “But how can you expect them to be? They haven’t come from little shtetlach with muddy streets and no running water in the house, like we did.”
“In Dvinsk the streets were clean,” Sarah informed him. “And if you don’t include the Russians it was a very nice place.”
“Us, we didn’t even have windows to look through,” Gittel declared as if Sarah hadn’t heard this a hundred times before. “And a lavatory chain, excuse me for mentioning it, we’d never heard of. Me, I’m not too proud to remember.”
Mr. Greenberg was removing the haddock’s head.
“I’ll take that for my cat,” she told him.
“Don’t you always?” He gazed into the bulging dead eyes absently. “Everyone has their own memories, and what a person has to compare things with is bound to affect how they feel. For us, Mrs. Lipkin, what we came to was a step up in the world. For that girl who was just in here, it’s the other way round. A banker’s daughter she is, no less. She talked to me about herself one day. From a beautiful apartment in the best part of Frankfurt, where she never had to put her hands in water. Now she’s a maid for people her parents could have bought and sold. Such a comedown can’t be easy.”
“Is that a reason for her to be rude to us?” Gittel demanded. “It’s our community she’s come into, isn’t it? And if she goes around saying to the goyim what she just said to us, it won’t do the Jews any good.”
“Oy,” Mr. Greenberg sighed, wrapping the haddock in a week-old Yiddish Gazette from the pile of discarded newspapers his customers saved for him. “You remind me of my wife, Mrs. Lipkin. She won’t let me have the wireless on loud, in case it disturbs our Christian neighbours. It wouldn’t matter if we lived next door to Yidden, she always says.” He smiled wryly. “All these years our people have been in England and we’re still trying not to offend anyone.”
Sarah flopped her selection of fish on to the counter. “That’s all we need worry about here, so don’t grumble.” But what the young German woman had said about letting an acorn grow into an oak tree had lodged in her mind.
“Remember how years ago you told me not to worry about the Fascists because they weren’t very strong in England?” she said to Nathan the next time he called at the house.
“How could I forget it?” he grinned. “We ended up with a full-blown family row.”
“And also, indigestion,” Abraham recalled. “It was the day your mother served up a lecture about Hitler and Mosley along with our Rosh Hashanah dinner.”
“A lot of effect my lecture had,” Sarah said scathingly. “All it did was turn David into a Zionist, so now he raises funds to make Palestine a better place for Jews.”
“You don’t think that’s important in times like these?” Abraham asked.
“Sure. But what is anyone doing to make certain English Jews will never need to run there? A handful of Blackshirts in London is nothing to get worked up about, you all told me that day we had the row. And a few years later, Mr. Mosely is coming to speak in Manchester, in a great big hall!”
“Calm down, Mother,” Nathan said soothingly.
“Your bedside manner you can keep for your patients,” Sarah retorted, putting the kettle on to the fire with a thud that sent sparks flying up the chimney. “What I want to know is are my family as blind now as they were then? And also, what that Blackshirt is coming here to say to the goyim about us.”
“So, go to the meeting and you’ll find out.”
“You want your mother should get beaten up by thugs?” Abraham said hotly. “When the Jews marched against the Blackshirts in Cable Street, Eli’s nephew, who lives in London, got his lip split open.”
“And what did the Blackshirt who did it get in return?” Sarah said. “Tell Nat the whole story, like you told me.”
“A broken nose.”
“But a meeting is not a march,” Sarah declared. “And in any case, I’ve made up my mind I’m going.”
Abraham mopped the beads of perspiration his wife’s announcement had caused to break out on his forehead. “What can we do with a woman like her?” he said helplessly to Nathan.
“What you can do is go with me. And my grandchildren who are old enough can go also. It’s time they found out what being Jewish really means.”
Sarah raised the matter at her next tea party and her daughter and daughters-in-law turned on her irately.
She had waited for Esther to arrive from the shop, so the furore she knew was in store for her would not have to be repeated. But Rebecca, whose own child was not involved, was the first to snarl.
“What kind of grandmother are you? Sending the lambs into the lions’ den!”
“A Jewish face is like a red rag to a bull with those people!” Miriam said vehemently.
“When they get their anti-Semitic blood up, they’re like mad dogs!” Bessie shrilled.
Esther had blanched at the mere thought of it. “We have to protect our children from those Fascist pigs,” she declaimed.
Sarah surveyed their set faces and heaving, maternal bosoms from behind her teapot. She knew how they felt but did not allow it to deter her. “If you’ve all finished shouting about animals, we’ll talk about it,” she told them calmly, handing Esther and Ben their tea.
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Esther said.
“Pass your mam and dad the strudel,” Sarah smiled to Marianne whom the exchange had momentarily silenced as it had all the children.
Esther pushed the cake dish away. “We don’t want anything to eat.”
“Speak for yourself,” Ben said, taking a couple of slices.
“How can you sit there stuffing yourself, with what your children’s grandmother’s got in mind for them?” she flashed irrationally.
“I don’t have to lose my appetite over something that isn’t going to happen,” Ben declared.
“Listen, a father isn’t a mother,” Bessie shrugged to Esther when David helped himself to some cake, too.
“A grandma isn’t, either,” Miriam said pointedly.
Sarah was brushing some crumbs off the white lace cloth that graced her octagonal tea-table on Shabbos. “My life I’d give for the children in this room,” she said quietly. “And everyone here knows it. So why do I want to take them into the lions’ den, which Rebecca called it – and she isn’t wrong? Because their elders can’t protect them forever. And how will they recognize the beasts who want to gobble Jews up if they haven’t seen and heard them?”
“Photos of Blackshirts they can see in the newspapers,” Esther countered. “And the kind of things they say, I won’t stop my kids reading about.”
“It isn’t the same,” Sarah declared. “They see photos of film stars, too, and read about them. But who thinks of film stars as real people?”
“Zaidie Abraham does,” Ronald said emerging from his uncharacteristic solemnity and giving his grandfather a playful prod. “He goes to the pictures a lot.”
“The Riviera and the Premier would have to close down without him!” Sarah agreed caustically, allowing the conversation to digress for a moment.
“Is it my fault you won’t come with me?” Abraham asked her defensively. His obsession with the cinema was a family joke, but it had never amused his wife. “Fifteen years ago, Charlie Chaplin didn’t make her laugh and she hasn’t been since.”
“About Mr. Mosley,” Sarah said, returning to her subject.
Miriam rose from the sofa and began stacking the tea cups, though Lizzie and Bridie were in the kitchen waiting to be summoned to do so. “The kids aren’t going, Ma,” she snapped. “So why don’t you just forget the whole thing?”
“If I forget I’ve got a blister on my heel, will it stop it from getting inflamed, Miriam?”
Nathan smiled at Sarah’s homespun analogy and saw his sister-in-law’s expression flicker with uncertainty. His mother was a better lay-psychologist than he!
“If you’re telling me Fascism won’t go away, all right, I accept it,” Miriam said edgily. “But that’s no reason for the children to go where they might get involved in a brawl.”
Sigmund sat fiddling with his watch chain, pondering on whether or not Sarah was right. Attending a Fascist meeting would not be a pleasant experience for the youngsters. But it would instil in them an awareness that English-Jewish youth lacked. Teach them that anti-Semitism went deeper than the occasional jibes they received from Gentile children had led them to believe. Knowing their grandparents had fled from oppression was just a piece of history to them. The reality of the oppressors, even the present-day one, was far removed from their own lives.
“In a public place, with their Zaidies and their fathers and uncles, nobody will harm them,” he declaimed decisively, ranging himself on Sarah’s side. “And it will do them good to go.”
David exchanged a glanced with Ben. Sarah’s decisions could sometimes be dismissed as emotional, but for Sigmund arriving at a conclusion was always an intellectual exercise.
Hannah had been listening silently. “I agree,” she said firmly and glanced at her boys and Leona who were playing with some toys on the hearthrug. “It’s a pity those three aren’t old enough to go.”
“Not in my opinion!” Helga said sharply. Frank and Henry were the twin apples of her eye and protecting them from their mother’s unconventional attitudes had begun to obsess her.
Carl, who as usual had been reading all afternoon and had not heard a word of the discussion until his wife spoke, looked up from his book. “Go where?”
“To hear Mosley speak. And there’s safety in numbers, we’ll all go together,” David decided.
“Nat can bring his medical bag in case any of us gets a black eye,” Ben joked making it clear he had been influenced by Sigmund, too.
“I don’t believe in starting a fight, but if anyone touches me they’ll get a thump back,” Martin said quietly and looked at Marianne to see if she had remembered his philosophy about sticks and stones. The smile she gave him told him she had.
“You’re not going, Martin,” Miriam said flatly.
“Oh yes he is,” Sammy declared. “I’ve let you baby him for long enough.”
David saw the glance that passed between them and felt he was witnessing a turning-point in their marriage. Then Bessie started shrilling at him that Shirley and Ronald were not going to the meeting. Esther and Miriam also began upbraiding their husbands and he gave himself up to the general mêlée.
“Only Jews could behave like this!” Nathan shouted disgustedly above the din, as he usually did when the family gave vent to their feelings.
“You’re worse than the Blackshirts!” Rebecca exclaimed, and they began quarrelling, too.
“Troublemaker!” Abraham accused Sarah.
She picked up Leona who had started crying and shared a smile of rapport with Sigmund, over all the angry heads. Sometimes you had to make trouble to achieve a good purpose.
How the men finally persuaded their wives to let them bring the children, Sarah neither knew nor cared when she was seated in their midst at the Free Trade Hall, waiting for the meeting to begin. But of one thing she was certain. Her grandchildren would never forget this experience.
She averted her eyes from the black-shirted stewards patrolling the aisles. Just seeing them there gave her the shivers. One, with a mean mouth and a cauliflower-ear, had eyed the family speculatively as they walked by him to their seats and the youngsters had been instantly subdued, though the man had not spoken to them, sensing something predatory behind the uniformed facade.
“Those men remind me of Hitler,” she heard Arnold whisper to Harry nervously. But it was what she had wanted. After tonight, what Hitler stood for would be a flesh-and-blood thing to the children; not just a newspaper picture of someone far away who was persecuting other Jews but could not harm them.
She glanced around the crowded hall to see what kind of people had come to hear Mosley speak, but they looked no different from the ordinary men and women she passed in the street every day, and somehow this was frightening. Were they here because their ideas were the same as his? Even if only the number of Mancunians that would fit into the Free Trade Hall agreed with him it was something to be reckoned with.
There were some Jewish faces, too. Not isolated, but in clumps; seated together as her family was, like small islands of protest in a hostile sea. Would any of them raise their voices? Abraham had warned her she must not raise hers. He was sitting on her left and Sigmund and David were on her right. Carl and Sammy had taken Hannah, Marianne and Martin to sit between them on the row behind. In front, Ben and Nathan flanked David’s children and Ben’s boys.
“My schoolfriend Edie Perkins is here somewhere, with her dad,” Sarah heard Marianne tell Hannah, and was relieved that at least two Gentiles in the hall were not Jew-haters. Esther and Ben had met the Perkinses and said they were nice people.
“I was surprised when Edie said they were coming,” Marianne added.
“You don’t have to be Jewish to be anti-Fascist,” Hannah declared spiritedly.
Abraham eyed the stewards apprehensively and turned around to whisper to her. “Be careful what you’re saying in such a loud voice. They could hear you.”
Hannah smiled contemptuously. “They know I’m not pro-Fascist. I’ve got a Jewish nose.”
“Edie’s uncle’s a Communist, they’ve come with him,” Marianne informed her.
“You don’t have to be that to loathe Fascism, either, you just have to be a decent human being.”
“Keep your wife quiet, Carl,” Abraham implored. “Or we’ll all finish up in hospital.”
Then the lights dimmed down, and a pool of brilliance filled the centre of the platform.
Sarah felt her blood freeze as Oswald Mosley walked into it. She had never experienced such tension as that dramatic entrance evoked. Not just in herself, but all around her. A pin from Sigmund’s workday waistcoat could have been heard dropping in the silence that filled the great hall.
“Buggar off to Deutschland where you belong!” someone shouted.
The family saw two of the stewards pounce on the man who had dared to challenge their leader and drag him, kicking and cursing, up the aisle towards an exit.
“It’s Mendel, Father!” David exclaimed as the scuffling group passed by.
“Whoever he is, I’m proud of him,” Abraham whispered. “Mendel who?”
“He worked for me as a machiner when he was a lad and wanted to turn us into a union shop. Didn’t you recognize him?”
The stewards were dragging him backwards and Abraham caught a glimpse of burning eyes in a hawklike face. “Now I do and guts he always had. Even if he did cause you trouble.”
David silently agreed. Mendel had given in his notice after his bid to transform the factory into a union shop failed. David had not seen him since but was not surprised at the manner of his reappearance. Mendel would never be far from the political fray.
Mosley had begun his speech and the briefly dispelled tension gathered again, heightened by the ejection of the first heckler. Others who raised their voices were dealt with in the same way and the efficiency with which this was executed, engendering no protest from the respectable-looking citizens who witnessed it, was not encouraging to Sarah. The Jews here had a special reason not to cause trouble, but why were the Gentiles letting the Blackshirts get away with it?
She listened to the insidious words plopping like pebbles into a pond, insisting the speaker was not anti-Semitic, then saying in the next breath that the Jews owned the press. What sort of ripples would the pebbles cause? So far as she knew, Jews only owned the Jewish Chronicle and the Manchester Jewish Gazette, which they were entitled to do. And those papers were owned by individuals, not by every Jew in the country. She opened her mouth to shout that Mosley was telling lies, but Abraham gripped her arm so hard she almost cried out in pain instead.
Sigmund let the poisonous oratory wash over him. He had not come here to listen to it and was only breathing the same air as the Blackshirts because of the children. His brother Kurt in Vienna had a grandson, too. Young Peter had been Bar Mitzvah last year and his mother, Ilsa, had sent a photograph of him in shul with his father Rudy. Sigmund had never met Rudy and had not seen Ilsa, who was his only niece, since she was a little girl.
Why hadn’t Kurt listened to him and left Vienna, instead of saying Sigmund was making a mountain of a molehill? The Jew-baiting in Austria which had impelled Sigmund to leave in 1904 had been insignificant compared with the Russian and Polish pogroms that caused families like the Sandbergs to flee. But now the molehill had become a mountain and his relatives in Vienna could end up behind barbed wire.
He watched two more men being dragged to an exit. But it would take more than heckling to stem the evil tide that had burst the dams elsewhere in Europe. “This is what the next war will be about,” he said grimly to David.
David turned to look at him and did not want to believe the inevitability he saw in his eyes. He felt the tic in his cheek that had troubled him in the trenches in the last war flicker to life again. It had stayed with him after he returned home, then one day he’d noticed it wasn’t there anymore and had known his recovery was complete, that he’d learned to live with the things he remembered.
The memories too had receded, he had not thought of Flanders for a very long time. Even the poppy he bought and pinned to his lapel on Armistice Day, and the two-minutes’ silence, had become token gestures and did not stir up painful recollections as they had once. But now the stench of blood and fear rose to haunt him again and the voices of his dead comrades returned to his ears.
He had not wanted to be a soldier, put on a uniform which gave licence to kill, and even in their darkest hours he and the other lads had not known what the war was about. He gazed with revulsion at the black-shirted figures on the platform. Their leader was standing in front of a Union Jack, his face sinister as a death’s-head in the white light centred upon him, preaching the doctrines that contradicted everything the flag stood for.
I’d like to throttle him, so he can’t say anymore! David thought, and was shocked by his own violence. What had happened to his pacifist principles? Perhaps you had to espouse a cause in order to feel the way he felt now, and, if Sigmund’s prediction was right, the next war would be a battle between good and evil, a cause worth fighting for.
Marianne was glad when the meeting was over, and they were outside in Peter Street, away from the men she had sensed wanted to harm them, though this had not been said in actual words.
“I wish you hadn’t made us go to it, Bobbie!” Shirley burst out as the family walked to Albert Square, where they had parked their cars.
Until then none of them had spoken. The tension was still with them.
Sarah looked at her granddaughter’s tall figure in the lamplight and thought, absently, that she looked older than thirteen with her well-developed body in the grown-up brown costume Bessie allowed her to wear and her long, red hair drawn back from her face and fastened with a slide.
“A picnic I’m sure you didn’t expect it to be,” she said to her.
“But I didn’t expect it to frighten me like it did.” Shirley glanced at Marianne who was walking pensively beside Hannah. “Didn’t it scare you?”
Marianne was staring down at the pavement, which was how she always walked when deep in thought. She raised her eyes to answer and felt, as she had since childhood, that it wasn’t fair that her cousin who was three weeks her junior should be so much taller. “It made me wish I wasn’t Jewish,” she confessed.
“Me too.”
The men had strode on ahead with the boys and Sarah linked arms with her granddaughters. “Show me the Jew who hasn’t wished that at some time or other,” she said to them.
The two girls turned to look at her, and Hannah seemed as surprised as they did.
“So, you’re shocked to hear that from me,” Sarah shrugged. “But lies I’m not in the habit of telling. A Jew would have to be not human not to feel that way sometimes. It would be like our Sammy never wishing he wasn’t handicapped with his leg.”
They turned into the Square and Sarah thought how elegant it was, with its gracious old buildings mellowed by time and the imposing statue of Prince Albert on the paved centre, with the Town Hall silhouetted in front of him against the sky. When had she last seen it? Not since Martin was in hospital on the south side of the city. And she could not recall the time before that. Her world was her home and Cheetham Hill. Occasionally she went to Broughton Park to Nat’s house, but if she needed anything from town one of the family got it for her. It had taken Oswald Mosley to prise her out of her settled routine.
“So sometimes we wish we weren’t Jewish. But we are, aren’t we?” she reminded her granddaughters.
“German Jewry are much more assimilated than us,” Hannah said. “They’ve been there a lot longer than we’ve been here and intermarriage has been going on for generations.”
“P-p-p!” Sarah spat superstitiously to ensure such a curse would not fall upon her grandchildren.
Hannah was accustomed to Sarah’s incongruous combination of intelligence and belief in Yiddish folklore, and ignored the interruption. “But the Nazis sniffed out even those with a drop of Jewish blood in their veins,” she added.
Marianne recalled the menacing dark figures on the platform with Mosley and shuddered.
“They thought they were safe,” Hannah went on. “But you know the fable about what Thought did, don’t you, girls?”
“Followed a funeral and thought it was a wedding,” Shirley supplied grimly.
“Exactly. It’s dangerous for Jews to think they’re safe.”
“That’s what I wanted the children to realize,” Sarah said.
“Don’t worry, Bobbie,” Shirley declared. “We do now.”
“Do you think we ever will be, Hannah?” Marianne asked.
Hannah’s expression tightened. “Not while Society goes on producing men like Hitler and the Blackshirts, who foster anti-Semitism to achieve their political ends.”
Sarah could see Abraham and David pacing up and down at the far end of the Square and quickened her step. “Politics I’m not interested in,” she declaimed. “And neither are my granddaughters. Anti-Semitism is enough for them to worry about, Hannah, so don’t bother their heads.”
Hannah lengthened her stride to keep pace with Sarah’s trot. “How can you tell me not to bother the girls’ heads with politics when you fought tooth and nail to take them to a political meeting?” she expostulated.
“What?” Sarah stopped walking and looked taken aback. “Is that what it was?”
“Well it wasn’t a Shabbos tea party!” Hannah stood tapping her foot impatiently. How could a woman as bright as Sarah be so uninformed? But she was less so than most of the Jewish women of Hannah’s acquaintance, who closed their minds to everything but family and domesticity and had no desire to let in the light.
“Why are you standing there like lemons, keeping us waiting?” they heard Abraham call, but Sarah paid no attention.
“So maybe I’ve just found out something,” she conceded grudgingly. She had lived all her life believing anti-Semitism existed solely to persecute Jews, but she was not too old to learn. “I never thought of it as political,” she said as they resumed walking.
Hannah put a friendly arm around her shoulders and smiled. Sarah looked what she was, a little Jewish grandmother. Her coat was charcoal-grey, and a black felt hat sat primly upon her head. But in some ways she was extraordinary and behind her homely facade was a steely will that matched Hannah’s own. “It’s time you started to,” she told her.