Well, that plan didn’t work out very well. There I was, last week, thinking: “I know. I’ll plug Baron Finkelstein’s latest book on my blog, give him a while to register the jump in his royalty cheques, then write to him with a link to the blog post and see whether I can wangle an invitation to rub shoulders with genuine nobility.”

And what happens? One of my readers asks to borrow our copy of the book, one borrows a digital copy from her local library, and a third one listens to it on an audiobook app which had an amazing Black Friday offer. What does it say about me that the followers of my blog are such a bunch of cheapskates?

Ah well, back to the drawing board.

Meanwhile, I’m knee-deep this week – well, the whole of this month, really, and a fair bit of last month, to be honest – in production of the latest edition of our shul magazine. Whereas last time I had to keep extending the deadline for submission of articles, this time, for no discernible reason, we had a full complement just 48 hours after the deadline. In addition, partly by luck, and partly as a result of a little forethought on my part, we ended up with not the usual uncategorisable mix of articles, but, rather, with enough material for two or three themed sections, which I am very pleased about.

In addition, a chance encounter two weeks ago has really reignited my enthusiasm. We were invited to dinner by Bernice’s sister and brother-in-law, and the other guests were a couple who made Aliyah from Leeds a few years ago. In the course of the evening, it came up in the conversation that the husband also edits his old shul’s magazine.

I initially found this depressing. Part of the reason that I am willing to move to Zichron (if it works out; no concrete developments at time of writing) is that I will then be able to hand over the editing of the shul magazine. However, it now appears that it is possible to edit a shul magazine remotely; even moving to a different country doesn’t automatically disqualify you. Perhps I need to volunteer for a stint on the space station.

Needless to say, we starting chatting about the pleasures and pains of editing a shul magazine. I was initially delighted to discover that he too, like me, handles the layout and graphic design. However, his wife then informed us that, when one of the umbrella organisations coordinating synagogue activities in Britain ran a competition for best shul newsletter, my new friend’s magazine won…twice…after which the competition was scrapped.

He then revealed that, before retiring, he had worked for a daily newspaper, with responsibility for the layout. I realised that here was a golden opportunity for me to get a free crash course in layout, and I confess that I monopolised his company for the rest of the evening. In my defence, I will say that he seemed very willing to share his expertise with me.

In the course of the evening, he gave me the names of a couple of online resources that I wasn’t previously aware of. He also suggested that we swap links to examples of our work online. The following morning, he sent me a link to a couple of copies of his shul magazine. What I saw when I followed the link was, simply, professional. This is, perhaps, not surprising, since he is, actually, a professional. He produces a shul newsletter that looks like a tabloid daily paper, in terms of its layout, with a very large percentage of the page being given over to photos and illustrations, flexible division of the page into various areas, and witty and punchy headlines.

Unsurprisingly, I was a tad intimidated by this. In fact, it took me the rest of the week to pluck up the courage to send him a link to our shul magazine online. In the end, I decided that I had nothing to lose but my self-esteem, and, by this stage, that was in tatters anyway. So, I wrote him an email apologising for the delay, and linking to our last four editions, to show the work that our graphic designer produced until she was unable to continue, and the two editions I have produced, attempting, with limited success, to replicate her house style.

I was shocked, the following day, to receive a return email, which was, in essence, a 1300-word critique of the examples I had shared. My new friend even went so far as to illustrate several of the points he made by resetting a double-page spread from one of my editions. He expressed the hope that I wouldn’t be offended by his critique. I have to say that he opened by saying that my efforts “look pretty good”, and all of his criticism was entirely constructive.

He recognised the limitation that I impose on myself by publishing the same story in Hebrew and English versions on the same page. He argued strongly for switching to an online-only edition, which would enable me to produce two separate versions – English and Hebrew. He suggested that would not mean double the work, because I could design each page in English and then mirror-image the page for the Hebrew version.

While his idea sounded very attractive, and would reduce production costs to zero, I don’t believe that this would work in our community. Many of our members are technologically challenged, and many others always like to read the magazine on the actual chag for which it is produced.

However, he has given me the courage and energy to implement a change that I was always in favour of, and, starting with the edition I am currently laying out, our magazine will consist of two halves: a left-to-right half in English and a right-to-left half in Hebrew, with two front pages. The two halves will meet at the centrefold.

I very quickly responded to this second email, assuring my mentor that, far from being offended by his comments, as he feared I might be, I was delighted to receive them, and he should expect me to take him up on his generous offer to help further with any advice whenever I feel I need it.

Since then, I have been unable to stop thinking about ideas for making the layout of the magazine more inviting, attractive, and involving. Now, when I pick up a newspaper or magazine, I find myself reading not so much the words as the whole page. I hesitate to call what I have experienced an epiphany, but it has certainly been an eye-opener.

My chance encounter was in this particular niche where I find myself with no real training or preparation, beyond wide experience with Microsoft Office. What other areas of my life could be similarly enhanced by similar chance encounters? Would 90 minutes chatting with Rod Laver have helped me develop a penetrating topspin backhand drive. If I had found myself on a plane sitting next to Picasso, might I have unleashed artistic talents I am still unaware of.

Having said all which, I am really setting myself up for a humiliation, when I unveil the Tu b’Shvat edition of the magazine in 4 weeks, and none of the readers notices any difference. My more astute readers will realise that this week’s post is an attempt to forestall that possibility, by spreading the word in advance. Last week, and now this week: it seems every post has a dark, ulterior motive.

Recently, Bernice and I finished reading Hitler, Stalin, Mum & Dad, a family memoir written by British journalist and political analyst Daniel Finkelstein. As we progressed through the book, I found myself thinking about the qualities needed to write a successful family memoir, and I thought I might share some of those thoughts with you today.

The most important point, it seems to me, is to choose your grandparents wisely. Here, Finkelstein has done an exemplary job.

His mother’s father was Alfred Weiner, a decorated Jewish German World War I soldier, who then, as early as 1925, identified the Nazi Party as the chief danger to German society as a whole and began collecting documentary evidence of the true nature of the Nazis. This collection eventually became the Wiener Holocaust Library, a unique resource that provided most of the documentary evidence used in the Nuremberg Trials and in the trial of Adolf Eichmann. In 1939, Alfred moved to London, and later New York, to continue his work.

From then until 1945, Alfred’s wife, Finkelstein’s maternal grandmother, raised her three young daughters as a one-parent family. Their hardships under the Nazis brought them to Bergen-Belsen. Eventually, the family were reunited and settled in England.

Finkelstein’s paternal grandfather, a successful industrialist in pre-War Lwów, joined the Polish army. Arrested in 1940 by Stalin’s NKVD, he was eventually deported to Siberia. His wife and their pre-teen son, Finkelstein’s father, were later deported by Stalin to an even more remote area of Siberia. Miraculously, all three survived and were reunited in 1942, eventually settling in Tel Aviv in 1943 before arriving in Britain in 1947.

Having met and married in England, the two survivors, Mirjam from Berlin, Bergen-Belsen and stations in between, and Ludwik, from Lwów and Tel Aviv, via the frozen wastes of Semipalatinsk, produced three children. All three children have successful public careers, in academia, politics and the Civil Service, and, like their father, all three have been awarded multiple honours. They are, respectively, a baron, a knight, and, most recently, a dame.

So, yes, Daniel Finkelstein certainly chose his family well. It hardly needs saying that he has an incredible tale to tell. It increasingly seems to me that every Holocaust survivor story is amazing, because the Nazi death machine was so single-minded, and most of Europe was either vociferously, or quietly, in favour of the Nazi Final Solution. Of those who were not, most were happy to stand by and do and say nothing. So, any survivor must have shown remarkable strength of character, and almost certainly had at least some strokes of luck.

However, I have read enough Holocaust memoirs to know that not every amazing story reads well. It requires a gifted storyteller to bring it to life, and this is the second point I want to make. Finkelstein is a masterful story-teller, and his mastery manifests itself in two distinct ways.

First, he is telling his own family’s personal story, and family records, conversations with surviving family members and meticulous research enable him to provide the telling intimate details that lift the story off the page. We become emotionally involved with all of the major players in this story, through the generosity with which Finkelstein shares their lives with us.

It does not matter whether it is Daniel’s aunt’s autograph book marking her 8^th birthday, with messages from her older sister and her father, or the tricks of survival that Daniel’s paternal grandmother Lusia devised to ensure her own and her son’s survival and mental stability through a Siberian winter; we always feel that we are privileged to be allowed to share these intimate details.

The second area in which Finkelstein displays his mastery of his story-telling is the flip-side of the first area, and is, in my opinion, an almost inconceivable achievement. He manages to tell, alongside the intensely personal story of his immediate family, the sweeping story of not just one, but two, geopolitical realities: the Final Solution and the oppression of Stalin’s Russia. A frontispiece map traces the journeys of Daniel’s parents and grandparents: Germany–Holland–Germany–Switzerland–France–USA–England; Poland–Ukraine–Russia–Kazakhstan–Uzbekistan–Turkmenistan–Iran–Iraq–Palestine–England. This gives some sense of the scale of the story.

However, it is not only a huge geographic and political scale. The story also needs to convey the scale of the mass human tragedy. This is one of Finkelstein’s most impressive achievements. To give just one example: there is a brief passage, about five pages, fairly early in the story of Daniel’s mother’s experiences, in which she, her sisters and her mother, are living in Amsterdam in 1941. Together with a group of friends, the girls form a club, with membership cards, a newsletter, subscription fees. Finkelstein describes the club in enchanting detail, then states that it folded when the family were forced to move from their family home.

Over the next five pages, Finkelstein details the fate of every single member of the club. Most of the stories end in Bergen-Belsen, Sobibor or Auschwitz, and the cumulative effect is to make graspable the scale of the Holocaust. This one tiny slice of Amsterdam life exposes us to the scale of the destruction of life.

Then Finkelstein zooms one level out, and points out that the survival rate of the members of the Joy and Glee Club (oh, the aching irony of the innocence and optimism of that name) was higher than that of the residents of the street where the family had lived. In half a page, he moves from house to house in a stark catalogue: …Number 3, killed in Amsterdam; Number 5, murdered by gas in Sobibor; Number 8, murdered by gas in Auschwitz…

This was one of many, many passages in the book that brought me to tears. Bernice and I usually read as we drive up to Zichron every week, and my only criticism of this book is that we were never able to carry on reading after we finished a chapter, no matter how far from Zichron we still were. Each sobering chapter in this book needs to be pondered over before reading on.

It is possible to imagine this story being told by someone who had neither Finkelstein’s organisational skill, nor his sensitivity of language. It would, in anyone’s hands, undoubtedly be a powerful story, because it tells of extraordinary people summoning the will to triumph over unimaginable adversity.

However, it takes a particular kind of genius to balance the detail with the over-arching narrative, the intensely personal with the national and international. The author has at all times absolute command over his material. The extraordinarily complex tale he weaves is told with stunning clarity.

If you read only one history book this year, make it this. If you read only one Holocaust memoir this year, make it this. If you read only one adventure story of survival against all odds, make it this.

And if you suspect 388 pages is too long a read for you, visit us one day and I’ll let you read the first three pages. It may make you change your mind. I’m not sure I’ve ever been reduced to tears by the end of page 3 of any book, but I was by this.

[Blogger’s Note: American publishers are a strange lot. They clearly felt that the title of the book was intimidating, with those British references to ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ (as opposed, presumably, to ‘Mom’ and ‘Pop’, or, just possibly, ‘Maw’ and ‘Paw’), and so in the US it is published as: Two Roads Home: Hitler, Stalin, and the Miraculous Survival of My Family. I assume they haven’t tampered with anything other than the title. I am, however, reminded that the first Harry Potter volume was entitled, in the US, …and the Sorcerer’s Stone (shades of Mickey Mouse in Fantasia) rather than …and the Philosopher’s Stone, which has the virtue of being an actual (if mythical) thing.]