Dec 28 2008
‘The Rest Is Silence’ for Self-Hating Pinter
Well, some-one had to do it. A fellow blogger named ‘Melchett Mike’ has dared to expose Nobel laureate, Harold Pinter, as a self-hating Jew even before he has been laid to rest. I bet Mike, like me, has wondered briefly if Pinter will be buried according to Jewish custom. My guess is ‘no’. Meanwhile both of us understand that the playwright beloved of the extreme left felt so uncomfortable about himself and his background that he took refuge in moonlighting as one of Israel’s most vicious critics.
I’ve long since seen the irony in Pinter’s celebrated affair with and then marriage to historian, Lady Antonia Fraser. Like many Jewish boys of his ilk he seemed fascinated by what is beautiful and forbidden. The former Antonia Pakenham, a minor artistocrat, is a convert to Roman Catholicism and her first husband, Sir Hugh Fraser, was not only Catholic but a staunch Zionist who served as chairman of the Conservative Friends of Israel. When Antonia betrayed him for Pinter, who was fleeing from what?
There are other well-known non-Jews who’ve been far better friends to the Jewish community and Israel than an embarrassing number of born Jews. The recent death of the marvellous Irish politician and journalist Conor Cruise O’Brien recalled his passionate defence of Israel and I have a sweet personal memory I’d like to share.
As editor-in-chief of The Observer newspaper he wrote warmly of a visit to Israel and his attendance there at a shiur (Talmudic lesson). I was so taken with his beautifully crafted piece that I responded by telling him of one of Manchester’s best known rabbis, Isaac Golditch, who then headed the local ecclestiastical court.
Rabbi Golditch, who adored English language and literature as much as religious works, often peppering his sermons with favourite quotations, liked to recall how his father would beat him if he ever caught him reading secular books.
But, more darkly, I must ask if it were a lingering, familial oppressiveness which caused one of his own children to ‘marry out’ and his brother to become a secular High Court judge in a land as far away from Manchester as possible?
More happily, I received a kind, considerate - but you might agree - typically Irish reply from Dr O’Brien, as his note came in an envelope which was misaddressed, written and stamped upside and back-to-front. Oh, how I wish I’d kept the darned thing!
This business of self-hating fellow tribalists is a thorny one and much too complex for a single, brief entry. So I’ll return to it another time when I’ll explain how, because of a silly family row, I’ve never met some first cousins although we must all be now in our 50s. Perhaps someone out there in the blogosphere will help me find them …
msniw
