The Goldberg Variations

Les Identites Meurtrieres, Amin Maalouf

Happy the man who can celebrate his diversity. I wonder how long, if at all, it took the author of the above to reconcile the disparate elements of his own personality, to recognise that they could live in harmony, and that his identity was a compound of them. For a large part of my own life the contradictory elements of my identity have been at war, and have fragmented rather than fused me. Despairing of any reconciliation, I’ve often wished or plotted for the destruction of all but one of them (which depended on my changing mood), so that I and it might live in peace thereafter. What follows is an account of that campaign.

‘So Abey goes into a mensvear shop …’

Sometimes we’d go into ourselves, his captive audience perpetually on hand to applaud a nightly stand-up that ran until we’d all left home.

‘I vont to buy a suit!’

With a shift of the jaw his face would fall comfortably into a parody of a ghetto Jew’s cheek-straining smile.

‘I think I can help you, sir,’ the shop assistant would reply with the bright, clipped elocution of the forties public-school-boy Dad had been.

There were certain jokes that bore umpteen retellings. Mum was usually the first to laugh, with a hearty whoop to convince you she’d never heard it before, then we’d come in, each a different note on the xylophone counterpointing the melody of his speech.

‘Here we are. If you don’t mind … slipping it on … that’s right …’

By now he’d be treading the amtico tiles that formed his stage, miming the appropriate movements of his dramatis personae.

‘But look! It’s coming up here,’ he’d cry as the Jew, hunching his right shoulder in a gesture ludicrous enough to silence the percussion of our dining.

‘Er, do excuse me, sir, but if you don’t mind my saying, that’s because you’re not standing properly. Now if you were to … that’s it. Splendid!’

‘But now it’s coming out here!’

The sight of Dad’s head between his shoulders, jacket hunched, a Jewish tortoise, snapped our last resistance and earned him the laughter he yearned for. At such times we were a team, playing catch with smiles round the table, listening for each other’s laughter with an unspoken sense of belonging engendered by the joke and its teller.

‘Sir, you’re still not standing properly. Now if you … That’s it … Excellent!’

‘Vunderful! A perfect fit!’

Bending his doppelgänger double, he’d exit his imaginary shop as a Yiddisher Quasimodo.

‘So he’s walking down the street like this, when he bumps into his old friend Morrie.

“‘Keneine hora! Abey, vot happened to you?”’

We didn’t know what the Yiddish meant, but it was a meal in itself. You could bite into the boiled chicken and smell the pickled cucumber.

“‘I’ve just been to see my tailor.”’

By now he’d be really milking it, Abey growing ever more grotesque as Dad hobbled up and down the kitchen.

“To see your tailor. I should go to see your tailor. Vot a vunderful tailor he must be! Vy, if he can fit a cripple like you he can fit anyvun!’”

And as Abey, Morrie, the tailor and the narrator left the stage, five suns formed a spotlight he could bask in, Dad’s ‘Thank you, thank you,’ reflecting our joy back at us with a nod and a bow.

Family life was played out around a circular kitchen table. The court of King Brian and his fair queen Pamela was a boisterous one at which each bite of food gained was a soundbite lost. We’d peck away incessantly at meat and conversation, all fighting to be heard and fed, picking up the debris left behind in the wake of Dad’s voracious appetite and machine-gun verbal barrage. He had a favourite image of someone eating as if Cossacks were about to swoop down and steal all his food; and speaking as if they were going to cut out the tongue that ate it, he might have added. We children developed habits of our own to survive, one of which was speed-eating. Liz, twin to Toby, extended this to speech, cramming extraordinary quantities of words into the millisecond gaps that occurred when Dad caught his breath or swallowed a chicken thigh, while I’d try speaking louder in the hope of engaging at least one other person in conversation, but woe betide any dialogue that threatened to drown the monologue.

‘Keep it down to a dull roar could you! Heard a good one the other day. Why do they have dustbins at Polish weddings? To keep the flies off the bride.’

‘Your Dad’s being very naughty.’

‘Fucking Poles!’

‘Brian!’

‘Sorry, mutteler, those damned Poles,’ he’d correct himself in pre-war officer tones before returning to those of the public school that he always joked had cost his parents a fortune.

‘Worse than the Germans. They couldn’t wait to get at us.’

‘Brian, can we stop this?’

‘Three million killed in Poland alone,’ he’d sigh, energy draining from his face. ‘And they let so many of them over here along with those bloody Ukros.’

It was ironic that, wracked daily with the torments of the Holocaust, we should be living two doors away from the Ukrainian Cultural Institute of Great Britain, which was founded and frequented by men who were reputed to be former members of the Waffen SS.

‘Brian, you’re so filled with hatred. You have to learn to forgive. At least you didn’t lose anyone. Never a week goes by when I don’t think of poor Theo. One has to carry on. I don’t understand why you’re like this.’

He’d cast me an ally’s wink. This was a scene that played at least once a month.

Jokes blessed us. They bottled an essence of something that belonged to children denied the ordinary trappings of identity portrayed on the labels of religion and suits. After all, we didn’t even own our name. Around 1880 my Lithuanian great-grandfather, a quack dentist, arrived in Ireland. B the turn of the century his sons were all qualified and practising in Dublin. After moving to London and marrying an East End Jewish girl, my grandfather opened a telephone directory at random and out popped the Anglo-house of Glanville whose scions would doubtless have had e time for him and his kind as they passed through the Rhineland en route for Jerusalem. Thus poor Goldberg, having survived a thousand years of persecution, assumed the name of one of his tormentors. After Dad was sent to where he could acquire the mannerisms to complement the new name, the deception became complete.

Mum hadn’t heard such jokes before she met Dad. Her father had been brought up in Prussian Breslau, now Polish Wroclaw, one of those middle-European cities of uncertain identity where Jews flourished, in which people weaned on wienerschnitzel and sauerkraut would have winced at the odour of lokshen soup, even if they might have eaten the carrot on the head of the gefilte fish. Deluded German Jews, Yekkes, revelling in the fruits of an emancipation not enjoyed by their kindred to the east, began calling their children Siegfried, after the hero of Wagner’s myth of Teutonic superiority, oblivious to the fact that it was his enemy Alberich, the ugly, covetous dwarf whom the composer envisaged as the prototype Jew. Meanwhile in their synagogues the plangent wail of the cantor was drowned beneath the organ-accompanied congregational wash flowing in from the church across the road.

There was nothing obviously Jewish about Mum. Her delicate, Reform nose captured the more refined scents that wafted past Dad’s Orthodox schnoz, and she laughed in hearty major keys. Another Morrie, who worked in another menswear shop, this one up the road from us in Notting Hill Gate, once described her to a colleague as ‘the tall woman with the jovial manner’, and it was a description Dad never let her forget. It was how she often seemed, but though she laughed in jolly, perfect intervals, it was really in response to the vibrations of a plaintive instrument, one she and Dad both owned, and which we, their children, had inherited. It was hard to imagine her as anything other than English, and impossible to believe that she, who always sounded so aristocratic, should have arrived in England barely able to speak the language. Despite her tolerant, forgiving approach to the Holocaust in which members of her family had been murdered, and the little attention she paid her Jewishness, it was she rather than Dad who never felt comfortable or at home in England. Dad’s Jewishness was far more belligerent, but, born and bred here, he’d assimilated, while Mum was a true foreigner, as German as she was Jewish. Like so many Yekkes she maintained a pride in German culture that overrode the ghastliness the country of its origin had visited on her people. My own feelings of alienation had more in common with Mum’s sense of non-belonging than with Dad’s soapbox stances.

After the fashion of ‘better’ Germans, Mum’s father had been sent to be educated in England. There he met his gentile wife, ‘the Ethiopian in the fuel supply’ as Dad called her, quoting WC Fields; according to Orthodox Jewish laws of matrilineal descent, she, our only non-Jewish grandparent, was the only one whose status mattered when it came to determining which side of the gentile/Jewish divide we fell. After waiting for him while he was interned on the Isle of Man during the First World War as an enemy alien, my grandmother followed him to Holland, the place of his repatriation, giving birth to my mother in Amsterdam whence they returned to Berlin. They remained there until 1933 when he was granted a visa allowing him to emigrate to England, his reward for the indignity of having to train up a young Nazi journalist on the Berliner Tageblatt. By the time she was twelve, Mum had already worn more suits than Dad would have to wear in his entire life.

While we washed up and dried the dishes, Dad would sing. Like an old-time music-hall performer, he could do a bit of everything.

‘Brian, are you just going to sit there all evening singing songs, or can we have some help?’

‘Sit here, just here all evening singing songs …’

There wasn’t a word, a phrase, a situation that didn’t remind him of some ghastly old number he’d immediately begin to croon.

‘Oh Brian, shut up!’

‘Shut up, that’s how I am without you. Shut up, alone and blue …’

Pavlov’s dog had learned many commands, but his howl was melodious.

‘Where on earth do you get all those dreadful old songs?’

‘I’m a philistinc, mutteler, but a lovable one.’

In the contrast between Mum’s polite, old-fashioned soprano and Dad’s earthy baritone, one heard the difference between the environments that had nurtured them. Snatches of lieder, the German songs Mum had heard as a girl, came to her intermittently, like her reminiscences of 1920s Berlin. Dad’s world was as clear as a photograph, but Mum’s was more like a jigsaw whose pieces she sometimes threw us but which we were never able to complete. There were parts of it we weren’t allowed to see, so the lieder became important, capturing something of the essence of Mum’s background, as songs and jokes did Dad’s. It was practically the only time we heard her use German, a language she claimed, somewhat strangely, she no longer spoke. Mum’s rendition of Schubert’s ‘Heidenroslein’ was my first acquaintance with a composer whose music was always able to take over for me at the point where words could no longer describe feelings. Schubert’s setting matches Goethe’s simple moral tale of a boy who sees, plucks, and is pricked by a beautiful rose, with an even simpler accompaniment, but the painful thorns which so often accompany beauty, wound a vocal line the cheerful accompaniment can never quite heal. It captured the essence of my mother.