There was a moment, about 15 years ago, when I felt I had reached probably as far in my klita, my absorption into Israeli society, as I am ever going to get. At that point, I knew that I had to choose my battles (or, rather, those areas where absorption was even conceivable). I am never going to recognise many popular Israeli singers (I’m pretty good on Arik Einstein, and Kaveret, but not much beyond that). But, then, I am never going to recognise many popular British singers, either. (Even in the 60s, my knowledge was embarrassingly partial.)

Similarly, I’m never going to become a fan of basketball, let alone Israeli football. At least 30% (and sometimes considerably more) of any Israeli stand-up artist’s routine, and most Israeli sitcoms and satirical programs, are always going to fly over my head.

At the same time, by 15 years ago Bernice and I were following not only Hebrew-language but also original Israeli theatre. I still invest time in wrestling with modern Israeli literature. Above all this, I still harbour hopes of improving my own Hebrew.

So it was that, 15 years ago, I made my first pun in Hebrew, and native Hebrew-speakers laughed. In the screening-room of my mind, this moment in my life-story plays out in glorious, celebratory slow motion, like the opening sequence of Chariots of Fire.

All of which is relevant only as a preface to explaining that anyone trying to tie the title of this week’s blog to the subject is faced with a challenge. Our subject is, broadly speaking, the answer to the question that has been on everyone’s lips in Israel this last two or three days. I apologise, in advance, for rubbing salt water into the wounds of our co-religionists in Britain and elsewhere. The fact is that, last year, most of us in Israel celebrated the Pesach seder alone or with our partner, whereas this year we were allowed to extend the seder table to accommodate the wider family. So, the question everyone is asking is: ‘Did you prefer last year’s two-person seder, or this year’s 12 (or 22, or 32) -person seder?’

Looking again at the title: to understand it, you need to translate it into Hebrew, which will give you misparim sidduri’im, which is a play on the phrase misparim sedari’im, which you could translate as seder-y numbers. Like all jokes, this gains little by having to be explained. Having to be translated makes it even feebler. I’m beginning to wish I had called the blog Seder and avoided this whole tortuous ramble. Let’s move on quickly!

Turning again to the question: What is the ideal number of participants at a seder? I have heard conflicting answers from different people, and I am not quite sure what my own answer would be. Instinctively, I expect myself to prefer a large, inter-generational, extended-family seder. This is, after all, the seder I grew up with.

In my childhood and youth, every year, we held seder with my mother’s family. She was one of four siblings, and each year, two of the four would each host one seder. With the addition of survivors of the generation above, this meant that our sedarim typically comprised somewhere around 18 people, one or two grandparents, 8 parents, 7 children, and, often, one other couple, sometimes with children. All of my parents’ generation had grown up in observant homes, and were, themselves, traditional, though almost none of them were observant. They belonged to Orthodox shuls, and, like so many of their generation, were unabashed in their non-observant identification with Orthodoxy.

All of this meant that our sedarim were what, on reflection, seems a curious blend. We always recited every word of the Haggada, for the most part in unison, and typically with a good majority of the participants taking a fully active part. However, there was, as far as I can remember, absolutely no commentary or discussion on the text. Younger children were guided by their parents, obviously, but as soon as we could read the text ourselves, we were more or less on our own.

What replaced the commentary were the family traditions. My maternal grandparents had belonged to a London shul whose rabbi was, for the time, very progressive with regard to women’s place in Judaism. (He had a daughter who was an exact contemporary of my mother, with the result that my mother, and the rabbi’s daughter, had a proper batmitzva ceremony and celebration in shul. Let me assure you that in 1932 London this was not the norm!)

Another mark of his progressiveness was that he was not opposed to girls singing in the shul choir. I believe that, when the Chief Rabbi spent a shabbat at the shul, the girls would move from the choir-loft to the adjacent women’s section of the shul, and sing from there.

As a result, my mother and her sisters were all choristers. Our seder was, accordingly, fairly ‘High Church’. The highlight of the evening was probably the last four verses of Psalm 119 (beginning Baruch Haba B’shem HaShem). Traditionally, these four verses are sung as a bride processes down the aisle of the shul to stand under the chupa. As you might expect, this was a high point of the choral contribution to a wedding. Psalm 119 forms part of the Hallel that is around the middle of the seder, and the entire family used to give it everything. The setting is perhaps, the closest Anglo-Jewish liturgy came to the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah. I have hunted in vain for the exact version we grew up singing, but this one is very, very close, and gives you a good idea of what I meant earlier by ‘High Church’.

One other feature of the seder that sticks in my mind is a very long-standing family tradition. As a child, my mother would have seder with her aunts and uncles and cousins, just as we did. Her youngest cousin, who had a fairly strong working-class London accent, would, apparently, sing Shochen Ad Marom v’Kadosh Sh’mo with great gusto, pronouncing each of those ‘o’ sounds as an Eliza Dolittle ‘O-o-w-w’. This young boy’s pronunciation was mimicked (affectionately) at every year’s seder as I was growing up, and still lives on in our sedarim, although the ‘boy’ himself is now over 90 years old.

When Bernice and I married and moved to South Wales, we at first always went to friends for seder night: one night at the parents of Bernice’s closest friend, and the other night at their elder, married daughter’s. Even to me, the outsider, these were people who were more like family than friends, and this felt like an extension of my childhood sedarim. Of course, the traditions were not all the same as those I had grown up with. The paterfamilias was one of the least musical people I have ever known, and I attended seder there for years before I realised that the tunes that he sang, and which he had taught the whole family, were, in fact the same as those I had grown up with, though no longer recognisable.

It was not until the early 1980s, after we had been married for something like 10 years, that we actually hosted our own seder for the first time. This was therefore the first opportunity that we had to use the rather grand seder dish that we had been given as a wedding present. When we pulled the dish from its box, a small gift card emerged with it, inscribed from Morry and Jean to Suzanne and Daniel. (The names have been changed to protect the guilty.)

This was interesting since, not only did we have no idea who Morry and Jean were; we could not even think who Suzanne and Daniel might be. The provenance of this seder dish is a mystery to this day. My suspicion is that either the dish was not to Suzanne and Daniel’s taste, or possibly they received three seder dishes as wedding presents. In either case, I guess that they sold the dish at a discount to friends who were planning to buy us a wedding present, and this third couple did not check the box for tell-tale evidence.

When we first came on aliya, once again we initially became seder guests, spending first chag with Bernice’s sister Sue and her family. Once again, we were at a sprawling, multi-generational family seder, with, sometimes, three grandparent couples, two parent couples, and six children. These sedarim were subtly different from my childhood sedarim, in that the balance of power had shifted from parents to children, and much of the leading, and most of the discussion, increasingly came from the older children, rather than the adults.

Gradually, as Sue and David’s children married, and started their own families, we moved to making our own sedarim again. (There is a critical mass at which the family naturally splits again.) Since then, numbers have been considerably more modest. We have sometimes invited another family, which usually opens us to new experiences. When, one year, as I usually do, I asked each of our guests to bring a thought, idea, topic or other contribution to the seder, I wasn’t expecting to hear a rendition of Ma Nishtana in Klingon. But ours is an ecumenical table.

Last year, of course, Bernice and I were alone together, which made for a slightly more subdued seder with quite a lot of discussion. This year, Esther joined us. (She and Ma’ayan felt that they should, for this year, each spend time with their own parents, having seen so little of us during the year.) This made for a slightly more lively seder. Esther is so much better at the hand gestures for Echad Mi Yodea than I am. It also meant that the reading burden was shared a little wider.

So, that’s my personal; seder history. Having reviewed it, I am still uncertain which style of seder I prefer. However, I do know that my ideal seder would have (as of now) seven participants, and span three generations. That’s my personal L’Shana Haba’a.

Meanwhile, 5000 kilometres away, a family has taken a big step towards their own Exodus from the fleshpots of Penamacor to their own promising land, by erecting their tipi, with, of course, expert assistance.

I have a theory. No, don’t laugh! You haven’t even heard it yet!

It seems to be the case that among prominent figures in the worlds of arts and sciences, Jews can be found in greater numbers than their representation in the world’s population would lead you to expect: 0.2% of the world’s population is Jewish, and over 20% of Nobel Prize winners have been Jewish. Many suggestions have been made as to why this is so.

Perhaps it is a result of generations of Talmudic study, sharpening mental faculties and encouraging analytical and critical thought. Or it could be because when the Cossacks may be coming at any time, and you have to be ready to drop everything and flee, you know that you won’t be able to take land or industrial plant with you, but you will be able to take ideas and talents.

I’d like to suggest another possible reason: Pesach. Or, more precisely, Pesach cleaning. Rather than explaining my theory in the abstract, let me give you some concrete examples that have sprung fully clothed into my imagination.

Imagine, if you will, that it is a week or so before Pesach, and a Jewish mother is talking to her son.

Mother: Felix, have you finished checking those books for chametz yet?
Mendelssohn: Almost, Mama. I’m looking at this volume of Shakespeare. I never realised how much fun A Midsummer Night’s Dream is. I think it would make a wonderful ballet and I’ve just thought of a great theme for the overture. I must just write it down before it goes out of my head.

Or:

Mother: Albert, have you finished cleaning he cooker?
Einstein: Well, it’s interesting. While I was cleaning, I found that the faster I moved, the heavier I felt. I’m sure there must be some kind of a relationship between the two, and it probably has something to do with how much energy I’m using up. I just have to go and think about this for a while. I’ll finish off later.

Or:

Mother: Have you swept behind the fridge, Franz?
Kafka: I was just doing that, when I found this huge cockroach in the corner. It’s given me an idea for a story. I must just jot it down.

In other words, confronted with a numbingly boring and mindless task such as cleaning for Pesach, most of us will clutch at any idea that might get us out of having to help, and feel a burning compulsion to apply ourselves immediately, and exclusively, to developing that idea, however much hard work that entails. Cleaning for Pesach is therefore the ideal springboard for both the 1% inspiration, and the 99% perspiration, that, according to Thomas Edison, combine to form genius, . 

Which more or less describes my situation a couple of weeks ago. With the latest edition of the shul magazine put to bed, just before Purim, and this year’s shul mishloach manot project successfully completed shortly afterwards, I allowed myself a week or two of indolence. Before I knew it, the season of Pesach cleaning was on us, and I knew that I had to find some new project to occupy my time, if I was going to stand any chance of getting out of my share of the work.

The project I found is one which has been in my desk drawer (or, more accurately, staring accusingly at me from the floor of the wardrobe in the spare bedroom) for over 26 years. In November 1995, we sat shiva after the death of my father z”l. His younger sister produced, and very generously gifted to us, a bundle of letters that Dad had written home to his mother and siblings during his army service overseas, in the Royal Artillery, from 1942 until June 1945.

It is not clear to me, and now there is nobody left alive to ask, whether Dad only started writing to the family when he embarked for the Indian sub-continent in January 1942, or whether his earlier letters simply went missing. I suppose it is just possible that he relied on phone calls home while he was stationed in England. Either way, we have almost 80 letters covering 2 years and 5 months of the Second World War.

After the death of my mother z”l, in 2005, my brother Martin found, among her effects, a further 240 letters, postcards, air letters and telegrams from Dad, covering the period from July 1940 (after he returned from France as part of the British Expeditionary Force) until, again, June 1945, when he started the long voyage home from India. Martin very kindly let me take charge of all of this correspondence, and I always planned to do something with it.

In the last 15 years, I have made one or two attempts to review this correspondence, and mulled over how I could make it easily accessible to Martin (and anyone else who might want to read it). However, there were always more pressing projects (such as earning a living, for most of this period), and my attempts over the years were rather half-hearted.

I did at least manage to sort all the letters into chronological order and to remove them from their envelopes and insert them into clear plastic sleeves in a ring-binder. I even started to dip into them. That was as far as I had got until a last May, when I started thinking about tackling the project methodically.

I quickly realised that, because of military censorship, it was not always clear where Dad was stationed in India and Burma, and that his letters did not always, or even, often, focus on the big picture. So, we applied to the Army Personnel Centre for details of Dad’s service record. Unfortunately, during the pandemic, this centre is working with a skeleton staff (if at all) and, ten months after writing, we have still not received any information.

Meanwhile, I have started transcribing the letters. Once they are in digital form, they will obviously be much easier to share, and also to cross-reference. You have probably heard about the exciting advances that have been made in OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software, and it seems that there is software now available that can make a reliable job of scanning PDF documents and images and producing text files (for example in Word), even reproducing graphics.

If you believe the hype, some of this software can also recognise handwriting and convert handwritten notes to editable Word files. This is exactly what I was looking for.

When I started experimenting with freeware, and with free trials of commercial software, what I soon discovered was that, while this software may be able to cope reasonably well with neat, block handwriting, it cannot handle fully cursive handwriting of the 1940s, such as this.

Not relishing the sheer drudgery of typing out 320 letters (some of them running to 7 or more pages), I decided to take a quicker, if more circuitous route. I started using the Google voice capability on my phone – dictating an email and sending it to myself, then opening the email on my laptop, copying and pasting the dictated text into a Word document and editing it there. I’ve used this method for the first 10 letters, and it works fairly well, although, not unreasonably, the dictation app stumbles over Dad’s occasional Yiddish term, and fails to recognise the names of some of the smaller villages in Berkshire and County Durham where Dad was billeted at various periods in 1940–41.

I have just switched to using the Voice Typing tool in Google Docs in Chrome, allowing me to dictate directly on the laptop, and copy-paste from there into Word. This should be faster and, initially, seems a little more accurate. It also has the advantage of correctly interpreting more spoken punctuation commands, correctly reproducing brackets and paragraph breaks, for example.

(If anyone out there can recommend more effective software, I would be thrilled to hear…although, to be honest, reading all of the letters aloud means that I do not miss any nuances, and gives me a much better feel of the tone and content of each letter.)

When I check the digital text against the handwritten letter, to correct any errors, I also make a note of placenames and people’s names. I am building an Excel of links to Google Maps for all of the locations where Dad was stationed.

I have also started thinking about possible readership. At least two of Dad’s grandchildren have already expressed an interest in the letters, and I am trying to bear in mind, as I read the digitized letters, what references they might need help in understanding. So, at the moment, as I go along, I am adding footnotes.

Juggling these different tasks, reading from my own perspective and also attempting to read from a younger generation’s perspective, is proving a stimulating exercise. However, in addition to that, I am finding real pleasure in discovering and savouring each of these letters in turn.

It has become a cliché that email and social media have killed the art of letter-writing. The first point most people make when bemoaning this is that it will be very unlikely that anyone’s accumulated emails will survive to be handed on to another generation. They will almost certainly have been deleted long before then.

What is also striking to me, as I read, is that letter-writing is a completely different activity from writing an email. First, when a letter is sent it is not instantaneously received; rather, time (days, or sometimes weeks) pass between sending and receiving. This gives the author incentive to be a little more reflective, to compose the letter, rather than firing off an email. It is the easiest thing in the world to send a second email immediately after the first, mentioning what was forgotten. However, nobody wants to have to send a second letter so soon after the first.

In addition, when we send a letter, we know that the reply will take time to arrive, whereas emails are responded to increasingly quickly. A snailmail correspondence is to be savoured, whereas an email correspondence is usually more pragmatic and prosaic. (Both of those last two points are, of course, even truer for SMS and WhatsApp messages than for emails, and undoubtedly even more truer for social media that I haven’t even heard of.)

Incidentally, please don’t write to point out the grammatical error in the phrase ‘even more truer‘. I am well aware of it; it’s just that:
a) I am writing for comic effect;
b) I enjoy winding some of my stuffier readers up (sorry: …winding up some of my stuffier readers);
c) I find myself increasingly sympathetic to Humpty Dumpty’s approach to language:

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

But I digress.

To read Dad’s letters is to glimpse a more leisurely, less frenetic world of social intercourse: one that was more considered and nuanced, less direct, blunt and instantaneous. 

However, the real joy for me in reading this correspondence lies in the insight the letters give me into not only Dad’s personality and interests, but also the bond between Mum and Dad. This young man (21 years old when his letters to his future wife begin in 1940) both is, and is not yet, my father. There are many traits and mannerisms that I instantly recognise; there are also, fascinatingly, hints of characteristics that are less familiar to me.

I feel extraordinarily privileged to have this opportunity to enjoy Dad’s company again. My sole, but immense, disappointment is that I am missing the other half of this correspondence – Mum’s letters to Dad. He sometimes makes tantalising references to the content of those letters, but, sadly, they did not, apparently, survive the twin journeys from India to England, and from the 1940s to the 1990s.

Meanwhile, even to process just one side of this correspondence is, I suspect, going to keep me occupied for many enjoyable and satisfying months to come.

Back in Portugal, Tao may be nowhere near ready to read his great-grandfather’s letters yet, but, on his second birthday last week, he looked as though he could have helped him out cutting herring in the shop!

*

If the title means nothing to you, then you really should read Jonathan Swift’s great satirical work, (under 3,500 words) here. And that’s the last high-brow reference today.

Is it a bit early to be writing about Pesach?

I’m prepared to bet none of you who think so are religious. The only good thing is that most of those who would have laughed out loud at the question are too busy to read my blog this week, since their every waking hour is devoted to cleaning for Pesach. Some of them are, at this very moment, standing in the kitchen, trying to work out how it is that they have dismantled the cooker, cleaned it thoroughly, and then precisely reversed their actions to reassemble it, and yet, having finished, they are left with one piece still sitting on the floor, and they have no idea what it does or where it goes.

Being men, they will quietly check that their wives are busy upstairs extracting imaginary leaven from the window-frame in the spare bedroom that nobody has slept in since the Shavuot before last. They will then back away a foot or so and, using a broom handle, turn the cooker on. Then, having satisfied themselves that everything works properly, and they have not blown up the house, they will quietly gather up the ‘spare’ part, and put it at the very back of the cupboard under the stairs.

Incidentally, if you have the feeling that Pesach cleaning begins too early in your home, let me tell you of a friend who can never enjoy Channuka, because he knows that every year, as soon as the Channukiyah is put away, he and his wife will start cleaning for Pesach. There’s always someone worse off than you.

It’s not actually Pesach cleaning that I wanted to talk about, but rather Pesach shopping. This is a surreal experience. Throughout the year, a trip to the supermarket is an exercise in replenishment: we buy what we either are soon to, or have already, run out of, and maybe one or two special things not on the list. Pesach shopping, however, is a completely different exercise, comparable only to the first shopping trip when setting up home for the first time. (Incidentally, when Bernice and I set up home in Bridgend, over 49 years ago, we went to Woolworths in the high street and bought all the household cleaning equipment we needed, brooms, buckets, bowls, dustpans, cloths and so forth. I remember the bill came to ₤1.50 and we were horrified.)

A Pesach shopping list, similarly, has to include everything from almonds to Zinfandel, via alumin(i)um foil, cling film (shrink wrap), and toothbrushes (toothbrushes). It is a list that goes on and on, and includes certain items in quantities that you would regard as laughable at any other time of year. (One more memory: my father z”l had a customer whose Pesach order was always larger than anyone else’s: she had a large family and was a very keen cook. She invariably ordered a long hundred of eggs (120 eggs). I remember one year her order came to over ₤21, or about ₤300 in today’s prices. Bear in mind that this was only for groceries and did not include fresh meat, fish, fruit, vegetables, or wine.)

This situation leaves us all with one main existential question: Do we go minimalist or maximalist? In other words: Do we buy everything that we might possibly need, or fancy, over Pesach? The upside of this is patently obvious: our chag is enhanced and we enjoy seven (or, outside Israel, eight) days of self-indulgence (knowing that the diet will start the day after Pesach). The downside is that we have to find somewhere to store all of this stuff.

The alternative is to buy what we need, reassuring ourselves that we can easily do without mixed spice, or two kinds of chocolate, or coffee, for a week. The downside here is that we spend the entire week looking for goods that we have forgotten that we didn’t buy, or opening the fridge, standing in front of it, and moaning: ‘Why is there absolutely nothing to put on a piece of matzo?’ or, at best, ‘Cheese again?!’

Revisiting that last paragraph, you might realise that there maximalism has other downsides. The first is that, when you reach the checkout, and the cashier tells you the amount to pay, you wonder for a moment whether they have accidentally charged you for a modest compact car as well as the contents of your trolley. The second, and the one that actually troubles me today, is that you know that, at the end of Pesach, you are going to be left with Pesach residue.

To give you a better idea of what I mean, let me tell you about some of the fallout from Pesach in our house.

The biggest single item is horseradish. Now, I know that there are strong arguments for using lettuce as your maror (bitter herbs) on Seder night, and I fully accept that, whereas lettuce can be bitter, horseradish is actually hot, spicy, pungent, rather than bitter. (Is there, I wonder, any other religion whose rituals involve tasting notes?) Nevertheless, horseradish is what we were brought up with at seder, and so horseradish is what we use. There is only one problem with this.

In my childhood household, we held two seder nights of about 20 people, in other words 40 servings of maror. Last year, Bernice and I held seder alone (as most of you did, I am sure), and, of course, in Israel we celebrate only one seder, so that is 2 servings. Unfortunately, when we went looking for maror in the supermarket, all we could find was great gnarled roots of horseradish, that looked as if they were hewn from Jack’s beanstalk: brewer’s dray carthorseradish, whereas what we really wanted was Shetland ponyradish. The solution we found was to get together (virtually) with a group of friends, and each buy a part-share in a root of horseradish.

A couple of days ago, it struck me that there is no reason why this solution should be confined to horseradish. There are all sorts of other things that we are forced to buy in much larger quantities than we need for Pesach. Most of them, I must admit, involve the baking that I do for Pesach.  

My cinnamon balls, for example, require one tablespoon of cinnamon, a spice that we use quite often but very sparingly through the year. I can’t tell you how many drums of cinnamon we have in our spice drawer. All I know is, if some freak tropical storm hits the cinnamon crop the way it hit the Madagascar vanilla crop a couple of years ago, bringing scarcity and rocketing prices, we will sell our stock and our children will never need to work again.

Or take potato flour. Please take potato flour! How many kilo did you want? My French chocolate cake takes 50 grams of potato flour, but our supermarket only stocks it in 500-gram bags. We currently have over 1½ kilo of potato flour, and we never use it other than at Pesach. This time next week, we will have over 2 kilo.

Vanilla essence? Throughout the year, we make our own essence from vanilla pods, but, at Pesach, we buy a small bottle, of which I use 4 drops in my almond macaroons.

Dessicated coconut? 200 grams for the pyramids, leaving 200 grams to sit unused in the bag.

For years, I bought a bottle of Israeli brandy every Pesach. For the sake of the 3 or 4 tots I would have over Pesach, I was never prepared to spend what a half-decent bottle would have cost me, so I ended up with firewater that sat in the cupboard all year. There’s only so much brandy butter you can make!

Ando so on, and so on.

Suddenly, this week, the solution sprang, fully-formed, into my consciousness. Google docs! This is how it works.

A Modest Proposal: For preventing the purchase of Pesach groceries from being a financial and spatial burden on purchasers, and for making it beneficial to the shul.

Step 1: A Pesach food spreadsheet! In every shul, a couple of weeks before Pesach, every family submits a form listing the goods they always buy but never finish every Pesach, stating the unit size of the product, and the quantity they actually require.

Step 2: The data is collated to produce a master list of the numbers of units the community requires.

Step 3: The shul buys the goods, and the members come to shul with their Pesach Tupperware and ziplock bags, take what they require of each item and leave a suitable donation to shul funds.

End result: A reduction in everyone’s shopping bills, an end to over-buying, probably a profit for the shul, nobody going without because the supermarket sold out of chraine. Win-win-win-win!

Despite my early start, perhaps a tad too late to implement this year, although we will be posting individually on our shul WhatsApp, offering 450 grams of potato flour, 6 inches of horseradish, and so on. And next year, I expect to see this proposal adopted by shuls worldwide.

Note to self: Sell shares in cinnamon.

Meanwhile, all around the world, Jews are using up their open bags of flour.

My first memory of live theatre of any kind is of going en famille to the London Palladium to see a pantomime (I think Cinderella), sitting spellbound in a box (like the one the Royal Family sat in). Incidentally, a handy tip. If you ever book tickets to go to the Palladium, avoid booking a box: they are right at the side and the seats are set back, so that your view of one front corner of the stage is blocked by the wall of the box. On one or two occasions during the afternoon (this was, of course, a matinee), below us and to the left apparently hilarious or shocking things happened of which we remained completely unaware.

My second memory of live theatre – and here we inch inexorably closer to our subject this week – is of The Mousetrap, the Agatha Christie murder mystery which opened in London’s West End on 25 November 1952, and ran continuously until 16 March 2020, when the thing I promised last week not to mention for a couple of weeks forced the closure of London theatres. That’s worth restating: an unbroken run of over 26,000 performances, spanning a period of more than 68 years. That is a world record. (Incidentally, the radio news bulletin that is heard at one point in the play was originally recorded by Dereck Guyler, whose name and distinctive voice will be known to many of you. Guyler’s original recording has been used throughout the 68-year run.)

How to explain the production’s longevity? I’ll offer three suggestions.

First, the Ambassador’s theatre, where the play opened, seats 444 patrons, and the next-door St Martin’s theatre, to which it transferred without a break in 1974, seats 550 patrons, both of which are small full houses by London standards (the London Palladium, by contrast, holds over four times as many), so it was bound to take longer to exhaust its potential audience.

Second, since its opening it has been very cleverly marketed. When patrons leave the theatre, they are requested not to reveal the surprise ending. In addition, in the United Kingdom, only one production of the play in addition to the West End production can be performed annually, and, under the contract terms of the play, no film adaptation can be produced until the West End production has been closed for at least six months.

Finally, the play is very English, evoking an England fondly remembered, not overlong, and, while it is a detective mystery, it is not, in terms of language or plot development, complex to follow. All of this meant that, once it had earned a reputation for being long-running, it became a popular theatre choice for foreign tourists.

None of which is the reason why I brought The Mousetrap up. Here comes the reason. I can remember almost nothing of that production, other than the opening moments, which represent a wonderful moment of theatre. (Spoiler alert: if you plan to see the play when theatres reopen in London, skip to the next-but-one paragraph.) The audience settle in their seats; the lights go down; we wait for the stage to be lit. There is an awkward pause. The audience starts to wonder whether there has been a technical glitch.

We are now sitting in total darkness, waiting for something to happen. We hear the notes of Three Blind Mice being picked outonthe piano. The effect of the music is chilling, sinister and menacing., Then, after a further silence, a single pistol shot rings out. The audience land back in their seats, having leapt a foot or two in the air, and, here and there, patrons fan fellow-theatregoers with programmes, in the hope that they will regain consciousness.

And so, today’s question is: Why? Why the piano? This choice is not arbitrary, as I first became aware several years ago, when I started walking the wadi paths around Maale Adumim several times a week, and wanted something to listen to. Music was out, because the extraneous noise would ruin my appreciation of music. I soon discovered that radio drama represented the audio content that combined maximum interest (to make the time fly) with optimum level of concentration required (so that I neither lost sight of the flora and fauna around me nor lost the thread of the plot).

As a consequence, I listened to a great deal of BBC radio drama in a fairly short space of time. (I had my 45-minute Afternoon Theatre walks, my 60-minute Saturday Night Theatre walks, and even my 90-minute Drama on 3 walks.) One thing which I noticed over time was that different instrumental arrangements lent themselves to different genres. My most striking observation was that the piano is the best accompaniment to psychological drama or mystery of any kind.

Why is that? Well, as you know, I’m never loath to offer a theory, so here goes. I would suggest that it lies partly in the qualitative nature of the sound of a note played on a piano, in contrast to, for example, a violin.

The soundwave that a violin produces is much more complex (you could say much richer) than the one produced by a piano. The violin strings and soundbox add resonance to the base note, to create a multi-layered sound. The following soundwave simulations make the point visually.

Here is the sine wave that would represent a single ‘pure’ note.

When that same note is played on a violin, although the pitch is the same as the basic wave (as shown by the fact that the length of the wave is the same), the shape of the wave is far more complex.

In contrast, here is the soundwave produced by a piano.

While more complex than the basic wave, it is far less complex than the wave produced by a violin. The piano produces a sound that you could describe as ‘cleaner’ than the violin’s.

I’m going to suggest (in only the very loosest sense, and with all the requisite caveats, and recognizing that it is a ridiculous generalization) that the violin is emotional, artistic, and the piano is intellectual, logical. Yes, I know about Chopin’s Ballade in A flat major Op. 47; I even know that Liszt, in his piano recitals, was the first genuine music idol, with society ladies screaming, swooning and fighting each other for a handkerchief that he had held.

I also know that the Chaconne from Bach’s Second Partita for solo violin is, according to Yehudi Menuhin and Joshua Bell, “the greatest structure for solo violin that exists” and “structurally perfect”. Nevertheless, I’m going to stick by my broad generalization: the violin is the instrument of the heart; the piano of the mind.

Three hundred words back, I suggested that the piano’s distinction from the violin “lies partly in the qualitative nature of the sound”. My more careful readers have therefore been waiting for me to suggest what the other part is. So here goes. It lies, I am convinced, in the silence, the gaps between the notes. If a reticule is a network of holes held together by string, then piano music is, to some extent, a series of gaps separated from each other by notes.

This simply isn’t true of the violin. Listening to the violin, I often feel: the song has ended, but the resonance lingers on. Here’s Itzhak Perlman, (in the first 40 seconds) illustrating my point with his customary charm and humour. On the piano, however, unless the pianist uses the damper or sustaining pedal, then, as soon as she releases a piano key, the string stops vibrating. This produces extraordinary clarity of sound and makes it possible to isolate single notes very cleanly.

Let me approach this from a different direction, with all of my arrogance as a non-musician. My favourite pianist is Alfred Brendel: I could listen to him all day. (I would certainly rather listen to him than watch him, because of his facial contortions, which I find very distracting. See, for example, the 30 seconds from 12:56 here.) I have a 5-CD set of Brendel playing all of Beethoven’s variations and bagatelles. Some of this is great music (for example, the Diabelli variations), but some of it is less so (the variations on God Save the King, for example). However, Brendel’s playing exposes and celebrates the sublime structure of all of this music.

Now, the piano, unlike the violin, is not a difficult instrument to produce music on. Some years ago, I started learning piano. (It was a short-lived experiment, but that is another story.) To my astonishment, I found that I was able to produce sounds that did not disgust me, almost from the very start.

The piano requires none of the violinist’s skilful control of bowing and fingering, none of the embouchure and breath control of the flautist, to produce notes of music. All of the hard work at that level is being done by the instrument itself. This leads me to ask: where, then, does the greatness of a pianist lie, and what is it that we prefer about one pianist’s playing?

Well, obviously, there are technical matters, such as span and speed of fingering. There is also, undoubtedly, delicacy of touch. However, there is primarily sensitivity of interpretation, and I believe that a lot of that sensitivity is exhibited in precisely those spaces between the notes.

Consider Mozart. I am sure that I once read a quote from a great pianist that Mozart’s piano music is so simple that it takes a genius to play it. However, I haven’t been able to trace the quote online. Be that as it may, it is certainly true that Mozart is offered up to beginning players (like a sacrifice, I often feel), because the notes are usually very easy to play.

The pianist Artur Schnabel’s comments are relevant here: “The sonatas of Mozart are unique: too easy for children, too difficult for adults. Children are given Mozart to play because of the quantity of notes; grown-ups avoid him because of the quality of notes.”

The composer Gabriel Fauré wrote: “Mozart’s music is particularly difficult to perform. His admirable clarity exacts absolute cleanness: the slightest mistake in it stands out like black on white. It is music in which all the notes must be heard.” That exposure is most pronounced on the piano.

The pianist Wanda Landowska wrote: The works of Mozart may be easy to read, but they are very difficult to interpret. The least speck of dust spoils them. They are clear, transparent, and joyful as a spring, and not those muddy pools which seem deep only because the bottom cannot be seen.”

In conclusion. I believe I might be able to distinguish between different great violinists by hearing them play a few unconnected chords. I am much less confident that I would be able to distinguish between great pianists on that basis. On the piano, the differentiation is on the basis primarily of phrasing, and phrasing is, of course, a consequence of the gaps between the notes.

And that seems like as good a place as any to pause…for just the right length of time…and offer you a different kind of skilled fingering.

Clearly, in delicatessen, his father’s son, his grandfather’s grandson, and his great-grandfather’s great-grandson,

This was going to be a post about piano music, and on Sunday this week I spent a couple of hours attempting to write it. Quite by chance, over the weekend I discovered exactly the right expression for what I went through on Sunday, in my own modest way. In Friday’s Times (of London), ex-England captain Mike Atherton (if you have to ask ‘Ex-captain of what?’ then please skip to the next paragraph) attempted to make sense of the extraordinary events over the previous two days in Ahmedabad. (Root’s first innings stats alone are enough to set your head spinning: 17 and 5 for 8? What’s that supposed to be?) In his match-end summary piece, Atherton quoted Red Smith: ‘The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again.’

This quote intrigued me, because I was curious to know more about Red Smith. (Atherton simply identified him as an American sportswriter – which I now realise is the equivalent of identifying Atilla the Hun as a bit of a bully.) Anyway, to get back to the second diversion: Red Smith. (And before you smile at that so-American nickname ‘Red’, bear in mind that you might have adopted something similar if your parents had had the insensitivity to christen you Walter Wellesley.)

For 50 years, Smith was recognized as “the greatest sportswriter of two eras” (at least in America – remember, he overlapped with Neville Cardus – perhaps the only sports correspondent to double as a reviewer of classical music.). Google soon revealed that the ‘…fiction is dead’ quote came from his coverage of Bobby Thomson’s 1951 home run. The actual home run starts at 1’40” on the video, but the whole video is great fun.

And then, I stumbled across another quote from Smith. There is actually some debate about the originator of the quote. What seems most likely is that the kernel of an idea was written in the 19^th Century, and picked up by a number of other writers, then developed, principally by Paul Gallico, in the mid-20^th Century. However, Red Smith’s newspaperman’s phrasing is, unsurprisingly, sharper and pithier than any other I have seen. When asked about the challenge of writing a daily column (and, faced with my weekly post, I understand the challenge), Smith replied: ‘Writing is easy. You just open a vein and bleed.’

Which is more or less – without wishing in any way to over-dramatize – what I did on Sunday. After two hours of torture, I spent the rest of the day in avoidance mode – suggesting to Bernice that we read, breaking off to make sourdough crackers, watching I Care a Lot, a film which we both knew, from the reviews, Bernice would find unbearably unpleasant. After watching it, I told her there was one 30-second patch during the entire two hours that she would not have been disgusted by, but, on reflection, there wasn’t even that. I found it well-made and well-acted, although a little too slick. I prefer a bit of grainy, myself.

However, what is most striking about it is that if you’re looking for a film that will restore your lack of faith in humanity and leave you wanting to take a shower immediately after viewing, look no further. I see that Rosamund Pike won the Golden Globe award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy) for her role in I Care a Lot. I’m not entirely sure whether I missed the singing and dancing or the humour in the film; all I know is that I certainly didn’t experience any of either.

Right. I think that’s it. We have explored all the interesting byways, and now, finally, we can get started on this week’s actual blog.

Those of you with elephantine (that’s what we in the lit biz call foreshadowing – hold that thought) memories will recall that, just six months and one day ago, I wrote about my favourite authors with the first name John. Today I plan to revisit, at least in spirit, one of those Johns – John Irving.

As those of you who are fans will know, Irving is an astonishingly consistent author. With him, you know exactly what you are going to get in every novel; and what you are going to get is at least one elephant, a circus, and wrestling. Even I, knowing what was coming there, find that last sentence astonishing. You can’t make this stuff up!

So, as my humble cap-doff to a great writer, I offer you an elephant, a circus and some wrestling.

The elephant is, as it has been for a year now, the one in the room. I have tried to avoid mentioning the coronavirus in my blog – I’m sure we all get enough of that from the media and in our zoom calls with family and friends in other countries. However, as I discovered on Sunday, I don’t seem able to focus on anything else at the moment.

As the weeks go on, our desire to visit Portugal grows and grows, just as our belief that we will be able to do so shrinks and shrinks. Until now, I have been, as I usually am, the pessimist, but even Bernice is now wondering when it will be even possible to go. One thing for sure is that the risk of travelling is becoming less and less of a deterrent. If we were able to fly directly to Lisbon, I don’t think we would hesitate at this stage.

We went back to our own synagogue for the first time together since February 1 2020, just before we flew to Portugal. Our shul has reopened at 50% capacity, for certificated double-jabbees and recovereds. We were expecting a far better attendance, but apparently more than a few people are understandably reluctant to ‘desert’ the prayer quorums they have been attending in people’s backyards, and most people with young families are unable to bring them to shul. In addition, I was amazed to discover that at least a few of our members, and not only younger members, were refusing the vaccine.

Nevertheless, I expect that the trend of the last couple of weeks will continue. The government is easing some restrictions for those who have had the double vaccination, and this is encouraging some reluctant younger adults to take the plunger. In addition, there have been a number of ‘campaigns’, such as employers arranging for (voluntary) mass vaccination of employees onsite, and offering t-shirts and shopping vouchers. Astonishingly, or perhaps not so astonishingly, the take-up in these campaigns has been high. It seems that many people couldn’t be bothered to make an appointment and drive 10 minutes for a vaccination, but if it is offered to them with no effort, they are happy to go along with it.

And so to the circus, which is, sadly, the only way to describe some aspects of the handling of the crisis by the Israeli government. This is, it hardly needs saying, a circus with only one ringmaster, but a whole gang of clowns, and a couple of high-wire artists. I certainly don’t envy Netanyahu, or the leader of any other nation, the task of handling this pandemic. There was no playbook for this. However, I believe that it would have been possible, in an alternate universe, to co-ordinate the activities of the various key players, to make decisions and abide by them, to give the public a sense that the Government had a clear strategy.

Instead, far, far too often, the people have felt confused and betrayed by their leaders, and have therefore been unwilling to play their part. We have all been involved in a wrestling match, between different sectors of Israeli society, between different factions in the government, between the powers-that-be and the people.

I said, right at the beginning of this terrible year, that the very first appointment the Prime Minister needed to make was a behavioural psychologist, who would be able to advise on how best to encourage the public to follow guidelines and instructions. Instead, the Prime Minister issued guidelines that were ignored, the Government policy stood no chance of success, and we now find ourselves at a point where civil disobedience is a very real threat.

I am really sorry to have laid all this woe on you, dear reader. I undertake to make no mention of the elephant for at least the next few weeks, and to revert to the normal trivial musings. Meanwhile, at times like these I find performing routine household chores often helps to lift my spirits. Or, indeed, watching someone else perform them.