Whenever I get together with the group of friends that I was in Israel with on a year programme 53 years ago, there is one member of the group who always reminds us of his rule: each of us is allowed to show just one photo of their grandchildren, and to talk about just one of their medical conditions. As regular readers will know, I hardly ever break the first rule, and, until now, I have attempted to avoid completely boring you with details of my physical state. (My mental state, on the other hand, I regard as the natural habitat of the blog.)

However, today I do plan to talk about one of my medical conditions (and, Heaven knows, there’s lots to choose from). I do this purely to explain why you received notification of this post an hour earlier than usual. The reason for this is that, at precisely 09:00 IST, I expect to be sitting in the office of my orthopaedist, listening to him telling me that yes, he agrees, the time has come for me to have my right hip replaced, to match the left, which I had done about 7 years ago.

When I first saw the orthopaedist, 18 months ago, he suggested a range of treatments aimed at deferring the inevitable carpentry. (For carpentry is exactly what hip replacement is, if we’re going to call a spade a spade….or, in this case, a saw, a chisel and a mallet. I had the surgery under an epidural, which meant that, despite the best efforts of Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach’s Unaccompanied Cello Suites through my earphones, it still sounded as though I was in a carpenter’s workshop. This time, I plan to take Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.)

Guided by the orthopaedist, I had a short course of Feldenkrais, which served principally to confirm what I had long known – that I spend my days walking around blissfully out of touch with, indeed almost completely unaware of, the state of my body. Quite how unaware I was, I discovered when I had a 24-hour Holter ECG heart test shortly after being diagnosed with atrial fibrillation. (Incidentally, for years I thought it was called a halter test, because the recording device is carried on a strap round the neck. Fortunately, I resisted pointing out to any medical staff that they were all misspelling the name, because I then discovered that the test was devised by, and named after, experimental physicist Norman J. Holter.)

When the technician attached the apparatus and briefly ran it to test it was working, she said: ‘Is your heart-rate always like this?’, to which I replied, in my blissful ignorance: ‘Like what?’. When I saw my cardiologist later, he informed me that I had reached, at one point during the 24 hours, a maximum of 230 heart beats per minute, which is usually accompanied by total unconsciousness. In my case, it was accompanied only by total unawareness, which, they tell me, is not the same thing at all.

So, the Feldenkrais was not a total success; I felt a little like someone with severe hearing loss being asked to comment on the second theme in a Schubert string quartet. Parallel to that, I underwent a course of acupuncture, which pierced both my skin and my scepticism, followed by a brief course of physiotherapy.

Although this multi-pronged attack gave me some relief, the pain still flared up occasionally, and, at one point, I started using a stick/cane. While this made walking easier, it did nothing for my equanimity. Several times, on the bus into Jerusalem for treatment, strapping teenage boys would fail to offer me a seat, which really depressed me. Occasionally, women and men in their 80’s would offer me their seat, which depressed me even more.

Around this time, we celebrated Esther and Maayan’s wedding. As a precaution, I took the walking stick to the wedding, but left it in the boot of my brother-in-law’s car, because I was not keen for my day to be spoilt by a constant stream of solicitous enquiries. Unfortunately, I didn’t explain to my brother-in-law that I had left it there intentionally, and he spotted it and very kindly brought it to me. The expression of shock on my cousin’s face confirmed, for me, that I would rather hop all day than walk around with a stick. Fortunately, I had a very good hip-day and really didn’t need the stick.

After a while, I found that the daily stretching and strengthening exercises that the physiotherapist had given me hurt considerably more than the hip, and (I admit shamefacedly), I gradually gave them up. I then enjoyed a year or more of very little pain, and I learnt to adjust to the restricted mobility. Summer was much easier: once the colder weather came, and I had to allow an extra five minutes for putting on socks every day, life became more challenging.

Over the last month or so, I have felt less convinced that I can rely on the hip, and, although I still suffer very little pain (unless I have to spend two hours changing the kitchen back after Pesach – but how often does that happen!), I have started using the stick again, particularly for the uphill walk to shul on shabbat, a walk which I used to describe as taking 12–15 minutes, but now takes 20–23 minutes.

The first time I used a stick, I borrowed a sober dark-brown one from Yad Sarah, the Israel-wide charity that lends out a full range of medical equipment. This time, I have started using my late mother-in-law’s stick. This has a rather jazzy paisley design in red, orange and old gold, on a vibrant green background. I feel I am of an age when I can start seriously cultivating a certain understated eccentricity, and this seems like a good start. (I can remember, as a child, playing with my grandfather’s walking stick, and rather fancying I cut a Fred Astairean figure.)

Unfortunately, the rubber ferrule (the cap on the bottom of the stick) must be wearing a bit thin, and it makes a rather audible tap on the pavement as I saunter to shul. I’m seriously contemplating acquiring a matching red and green parrot to wear on my right shoulder, and teaching it to say: ‘Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!’ Walking has been reduced to a choice between no stick and stick: that is, between Boris Karloff in Frankenstein and Robert Newton in Treasure Island.

Speaking of parrots, and other pets (effortless segue, as ever– how do I do it?), the family in Portugal has just acquired a new member. Lua is only 4 months old, so she looks as though, as she gets older, she’s going to need wide open spaces: it’s just as well that the kids plan to spend more time in the tipi on their land.

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.

Still, there was one ray of sunshine last week. Bernice and I had an exciting experience. We were in our own shul again for Purim and Shabbat.

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.

For those of you planning to come on aliya, let me offer one observation. The speed and thoroughness of your klita (absorption, acclimation) will depend on two things above all. The first is very general. The world is divided into two groups of people: those who, when a day has gone badly, come home and laugh with their partner or friends about it, and those who, when a day has gone badly, come home and cry with their partner or friends about it.

For an oleh, in many respects things have improved greatly in Israel, since the early 50s, and even since the mid-80s, when we arrived. Nevertheless, bureaucracy is still bureaucracy, and its impenetrability for Anglos has not been helped by the fact that English has had to cede some of its place in Israeli officialdom to Russian, Amharic, and, lately, French.

So, any oleh has to be very prepared for frustrations and setbacks. The best you can do is take comfort from the fact that you are accumulating stories with which you will be able to bore your grandchildren.

It is, of course, not easy to change your character. If you are a weeper or ranter, then developing a zen approach to the vagaries of aliya and klita is not easy. In contrast, the second factor on which a successful aliya depends is much easier to control. It all depends on a five-step plan that couldn’t be simpler.

1. If you are married to a fellow English speaker, then, as soon as you come on aliya, get a divorce.
2. Start mixing with, and dating, native Israelis, preferably ones who (or at least whose family) do not speak English.
3. Get married and have children, with whom you speak Hebrew, as soon as possible.
4. Meanwhile, find a job in an exclusively Hebrew-speaking environment.
5. Lastly, find all of your friends from within the non-Anglophone community.

In this way, you will be well on the road to mastery in Hebrew, or at least to a level of fluency in Hebrew from which you can see that most of the population doesn’t speak Hebrew any better than you do.

Now, I must add a disclaimer here. I can’t actually guarantee from personal experience that this method works. What I can state, categorically, is that if there is not a single one of these five steps that you manage to nail, your Hebrew will be embarrassingly weak.

‘Embarrassingly’ is, of course, a relative term. Some of our Anglo friends think that my Hebrew is pretty good. I am reminded of the joke about the little old Jewish man (these used to be jokes about someone other than myself) who comes to his wife sporting a smart cap, edged with brocade, and with the word ‘Captain’ emblazoned across the peak. “So, Sadie, what do you think?”, he says, to which his wife replies: “Morry, by me you’re a captain, and by you you’re a captain, but by a captain are you a captain?”

I freely admit that my ambitions in Hebrew are very….ambitious. (I hesitated there about whether to write ‘were ambitious’, but I’m not too old to harbour, indeed nurture, unfulfilled ambitions). I want to have the same command of Hebrew that I have of English (even though I realise that is, at this stage, less an ambition than a delusion). We have friends who came on aliya 10 or 15 years earlier than we did, who followed every one of the five steps above, and, as a consequence, who have an enviable command of Hebrew.

I admit that my Hebrew is not bad. I had a couple of head starts. First of all, a decade in Hebrew classes three times a week, and a childhood of going to synagogue on shabbat, and actually praying much of the time, meant that I had a sound basis in reading, writing and grammar.

Next, I spent a ‘gap’ year in Israel that included three daily hours of intensive Hebrew, six days a week, for five months. In addition, while visiting Bernice’s sister Sue and her family in Israel in 1985, we decided to come on aliya the following year and I started preparations to revive the Sleeping Beauty of my Hebrew.

In preparation, I took home with me 3 weeks’ copies of the Shabbat supplement of the popular newspaper Yediot Acharonot, and a novel in Hebrew. I read and reread those supplements, and they brought back a lot of my Hebrew. The novel was less successful. I had chosen Amos Oz’s My Michael, on the basis of reading the fist page and a half in the bookshop and thinking: ‘Well, this is pretty straightforward’.

What I failed to realise, until I was back in Wales, was that the opening of the first chapter finds the narrating central character in a state of traumatic shock, and barely able to articulate. From halfway through page 2, the sentences become more complex, and the vocabulary ever richer and more literary. Round about page 5, in my very own state of traumatic shock, I finally gave up. I must confess that, although I have read some short story collections and even one or two novels in Hebrew, Oz’s work is something I still read and enjoy exclusively in English.

For our first year in Israel, I taught in primary school, where I soon became aware of the importance of register – the style of language, the level of formality that one uses. Teaching a class of sixth graders, I used the word emesh, which had always been a favourite of mine. It means ‘last night’, and I was always taken by the fact that Hebrew managed to achieve with one word what would otherwise take two. When I used the word in the classroom, the class responded with derisive laughter. I discovered later that the word is fairly high register and a little old fashioned, and, on my pupils, it had the same effect as ‘yesternight’ might have had in English.

After that first disastrous year of teaching (which I might tell you about some other time, when I’m fully recovered from it), I worked almost exclusively in English, and, as a result, my conversational Hebrew failed to continue to develop as it might otherwise have done, At that time, almost my only regular reading in Hebrew was the weekend edition of Ha’aretz, a paper that I enjoyed principally for its arts and culture coverage.

This helped to create a situation where, after a few years in Israel, I could more or less hold my own in a discussion about Hebrew theatre or Beethoven‘s late quartets but, if I went to buy groceries at the corner store, I would find a friendly chat with the shopkeeper very challenging. Of course, as some of you know, the same is true for me in English, so maybe it’s not really a language thing at all.

This is an illustration of the fact that what we think of as command of a language is not exclusively determined by one’s knowledge of the language. It is, rather, bound up with an understanding of the culture. When I hear Hebrew stand-up, or watch a satirical show on TV, a large part of the challenge for me is that I am not familiar enough with all of the cultural references. Oddly enough, these days I have a similar experience when I listen to English stand-up or watch a British satirical show. I no longer know anything about British popular culture, and I have never fully immersed myself in Israeli popular culture.

Of course, to some extent, the same is true of language in general. Every time I go back to England, I encounter more and more vocabulary in the press and on TV that I am unfamiliar with.

The novelist Anthony Burgess left England in 1968 to avoid paying 90% income tax, and from then until his death in 1993, he lived in Malta, Italy, Monaco, Switzerland, moving whenever his outrageous outspokenness offended the local authorities or the actions of the local authorities in each country offended him.

Over those 25 years, Burgess apparently waited anxiously for the publication of each new edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, which he had sent out to him. On receiving anew edition, he would turn immediately to the supplement, dedicated to “the treatment of those accessions and words which have become current over the last twenty years”. In my 1979 edition of the dictionary, the supplement runs to 324 pages.

Burgess would religiously scan these pages for terms and usages he was unfamiliar with, and in this way he ensured that he remained abreast of the language and could continue to write his wonderful sweeping novels in contemporary English. (At some point, I must devote at least one post to favourite authors of mine whose first name is not John.)

On a similar theme, we have good friends whose children grew up in Israel trilingual, speaking their own native Hebrew, their mother’s native American English, and their father’s native Danish. (For most of you, that probably narrows the field to either one family or none.)

I mention this because, as the children were growing up, whenever the family visited Denmark, people found the children enchanting, because they spoke the Danish that had been current among adults when their father had come on aliya a decade or more earlier, and, in the intervening period, Danish had replaced a lot of Danish vocabulary with English. If I remember accurately, barbecue and swimming pool were two examples. From my experience, in many languages such borrowing is regarded, at least in some milieux, as chic, and sometimes even de rigueur. It’s part of some groups’ weltanschaung. Capeesh?

To return to my theme: I find myself, at this stage of my life, growing no closer to an understanding of popular Israeli culture, and, consequently, contemporary Hebrew language. At the same time, I am being left further and further behind by the developing language and popular culture of the land of my birth. At this rate, Bernice may soon be the only person I can hold a coherent conversation with, and after the last year we’re starting to run out of stuff to say to each other.

And on that happy note….

Still, all of this may mean that I have more time to stop and smell the flowers.

You’ll have to excuse me if I’m not my usual bubbly self this week. The truth is that I’ve just had a bit of an eye-opener and what I really want to do is crawl upstairs, bury myself under the covers and cry into my pillow, or at least lie down for a while. The sad fact is that I’ve just discovered something that makes me feel ancient.

Of course, this has been coming on for a while now: at least 16 years. When our daughter Esther first started enjoying Beatles music, I made a quick calculation. This was, let’s say, 1995, which meant that I had first started bopping to the Beatles (all right, of course I didn’t bop! I’m not even sure I know how to bop, but I can remember playing She’s Leaving Home to my mother, in the fond, but ill-considered, hope that she would agree that it was a thing of beauty and a work of genius) which means, as I was saying, that I had first become a Beatles fan about 30 years earlier.

I then thought myself back to when I was aged 12 – the age Esther was in 1995 – which would be 1962. Thirty years before that was 1932, when my parents would have been switching on the radio to give it a chance to warm up before listening to the Mills Brothers, Noel Coward, or Ambrose and his orchestra’s rendition of such popular songs as The Flies Crawled Up The Window, a song that, I must confess, had hitherto slipped under my radar. The realisation that The Beatles were, for Esther, as far distant as Ambrose for me was a chilling moment.

Bernice and I are, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, working through a collection entitled The Nation’s Favourite Poems, chosen in 1995 by listeners to a BBC television poetry programme. At the head of each work, the poet’s dates are given, and I have found it unnerving to discover that such poets as Philip Larkin (1922–1980), Stevie Smith (1903–1971) and Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) are not quite as modern as I think of them as being.

But all of this pales into insignificance in comparison with what I discovered just today.

Our story begins in 1962 (there’s that year again), when Robert Heal, a British furniture designer greatly influenced by the Danish school and its clean, linear shapes, was commissioned by Staples, a London manufacturer of mattresses, to design a range of modular shelving. His design consisted of wooden shelving supported by steel rods that slotted into the underside of the shelves and hooked onto the metal support ladders that gave the range its name – Ladderax. The range proved so successful that Heal soon added a variety of other storage units. By 1972, when Bernice and I married, Ladderax was an immensely popular and affordable storage solution. We bought a modest run of shelving and storage for our salon/lounge in Bridgend, South Wales.

At this point, I hear Bob Dylan: May you build a ladder to the stars and climb on every rung. May you stay forever young. Bitter irony!

Then, a year later, we came to Israel immediately after the Yom Kippur War to volunteer on kibbutz for three months, where we decided that we would return to Wales, sell our house, and come on aliya the following year. In the event, we ‘postponed’ our aliya (for 12 years), but, before that happened, a local Bridgend shop was refurbishing its display units, and selling off its shop-soiled Ladderax shelving. We bought a job lot of bookshelves of two different widths and multiple ladders to add to our existing system of shelving, a drinks cabinet, a writing desk and a three-drawer chest that served us as a sideboard.

For the next 30 years, wherever we went, our Ladderax came with us. Because it is a modular system, it is incredibly flexible, and we were able to find a layout to fit our home in Bridgend, our study in Nantymoel, most of our flat in East Talpiot, and our dining room in Ma’ale Adumim.

In that last sentence, ‘we’ is something of an exaggeration. Bernice has an extraordinarily good eye for colour. She can carry a colour in her mind: on more than one occasion, she has seen earrings in a shop and bought them knowing that they were exactly the same shade as a particular outfit. I, by contrast, have to ask her whether the trousers I am wearing are blue or black.

However, every yin has its yang, and while Bernice does colour, I do layout. When we moved from the Absorption Centre to our first, three-room, flat, in Jerusalem, and took delivery of our lift, which contained most of the furniture from our eight-room house in Nantymoel, the removers refused to believe that all of our ‘stuff’ would fit into our new home. However, I had spent weeks enjoying myself with scale drawings of the flat, and cut-out shapes of the furniture, and I knew that it would. And it did!

So, for me, Ladderax was not only relatively inexpensive and endlessly adaptable. It was also (and sometimes it seemed more importantly) a wonderful construction puzzle – my very own big boy’s Lego and Meccano. Over the years, I must have filled a pack of square-ruled exercise books with trial layouts; in every case, in every home, in every room, I was able to design a layout that fitted the space or spaces we wanted to fill.

Actually, not in every case. In our current home, even I was unable to find a combination that would fill the space that we had, despite the fact that we had more shelving than we could use. We needed one shelf six inches narrower than the one we had.

Not to be outwitted, I sawed six inches off a shelf, lashed two pairs of short metal rods together to make two slightly longer rods, widened the grooves under the shelves into which the rods slipped, to accommodate the double metal and cord lashing, and hey presto, problem solved, with nobody the wiser.

And then, what can I tell you? Even though age cannot wither it, Ladderax, it transpired, was not like Cleopatra in all respects. True, at 30 years of age, it still looked pretty good, but there came a point where we felt that custom had staled its infinite variety. With some reluctance, we decided that we were ready for a change, and we bought new shelving and storage for the dining room. However, we couldn’t bring ourselves to have the Ladderax ‘put down’, like an old, faithful but ailing dog.

At that point we discovered one final benefit of Ladderax. With the exception of the cupboards (which you can stack on top of each other on the floor and use for storing linens), everything else can be dismantled quickly and easily (no screws) and stored flat on top of a wardrobe, for at least five years. At that point, we were delighted to find a new home for it, in the salon of one of our neighbour’s married daughters. She sent us a photo of it a month ago, and, at the age of 49, it’s still looking pretty good.

By chance, I stumbled across Ladderax on the internet today. It is being offered on ebay, for eye-watering prices, and there I see it billed as ‘mid-Century, retro, vintage, with manufacturer’s attribution mark’. I’m very sorry, but I am simply not prepared to be old enough to have furniture we bought new when we first married spoken about as if it were antique. When did that happen?

There’s really only one thing that might just break this mood of gloom and doom!

A story to start this week. A few years ago, my brother and sister-in-law invited Bernice and myself to spend shabbat with them at their flat in Rehavia, in central Jerusalem. On the Friday evening, Martin and I went to his regular synagogue when they are in Jerusalem – Hanasi.

This synagogue holds a service in the main synagogue upstairs and a smaller service in the study hall downstairs, which Martin and I both prefer. However, this particular shabbat marked a birthday or anniversary of Rabbi Berel Wein, the well-respected rabbi of the synagogue, and therefore the downstairs service was cancelled and everyone joined the main service upstairs in his honour.

There I noticed that one of the men saying kaddish (the memorial prayer recited for a deceased parent or other close relative) was a friend who still lived in the same area of Jerusalem that we used to live in. After the service I went over to say hello.

He was also spending shabbat as someone’s guest. He introduced us to his host, and I introduced Martin, and the four of us, for five minutes, shared the same route back from synagogue. In that time, Martin and I between us managed to find three connections with my friend’s host, one of which was that he was a judge in England who sat in the same court as a cousin of Bernice’s then sat in.  

Not much of a story, really, and yet….I have many times, since this incident, thought about how many separate, indeed disparate, factors had to be aligned to make this unexciting event happen.

When Martin and Adèle chose to buy a home in Israel, Jerusalem was, probably, the only serious place they considered, but they could have ended up in any one of a number of areas in the city.

Even having settled in Rehavia, they could have chosen any one of a number of synagogues to pray in.

On a normal shabbat, we would have attended the service downstairs, while my friend was upstairs.

If this friend had not lost a parent less than 11 months before, he would not have been saying kaddish.

If it had not happened, some years earlier, that he and I both lost a parent during the same period, and spent several months saying kaddish together, I would probably not have recognized his voice.

Had I not recognised his voice, I might well not have noticed him at all in the crowded synagogue.

Our two hosts might not have chosen the same week to invite us for shabbat. I would then not have met his host.

If this host did not happen to live in the same direction from the synagogue as we were going, we would not have chatted for five minutes.

There are many London courts at which he could have presided, other than the very one where Bernice’s cousin also sat.

I only knew where Bernice’s cousin presided because Bernice’s mother lived very close to the court, and she and her niece had a warm relationship. As a result, on her weekly session at the court, Bernice’s cousin would usually spend time with Bernice’s mum, a fact which I knew because we always updated with the cousin’s news..

I make that ten facts aligning to produce the result that we discovered this connection. If any one of these links had been missing, the connection would have remained undiscovered.

So, what do I make of this story, and why do I feel that there is a point in sharing it with you?

Let me say first that I do not believe there is a great significance to the connection, nor that this alignment was the conscious working of a prime mover, or the cosmos, or kismet, or karma, or fate. I do believe that it was a coincidence, even though I am aware that, as an orthodox Jew, I am treading a narrow path saying that.

Consequently, I suspect that this kind of alignment has the potential of happening all the time. In the last couple of decades I have experienced at least two other similar chance discoveries. (Don’t worry – I’m not going to inflict them on you; I may presume on your forbearance, but I’m not going to push my luck to that extent.)

This leads me to a kind of conclusion. I wonder whether we spend our lives accidentally and randomly doing what Pre-Cog (kind of clairvoyant but not quite the same) Agatha gets Tom Cruise’s character to do intentionally in this memorable scene from Minority Report.

In other words, when we bend down to tie a shoelace, we miss the current cycle of the pedestrian crossing lights and therefore arrive late at the restaurant and just miss seeing….who? And so on and so forth. The forests of our lives are strewn with the dried-up pods of seeds that never germinated, because we were looking the other way.

Even when we act deliberately, we really have no way of knowing what the outcome of that decision will be. Our lives are constructed from the decisions we make at thousands upon thousands of successive splits in the road, each of which leads us down a particular route.

The problem (or perhaps the magic) of this lies in the fact that, whenever we reach a decision point, there is no way that we can make a truly informed decision about how to decide. Doubtless many of you have already been thinking of Robert Frost since before the beginning of this paragraph. For the benefit of those who slept through American Poetry 101, Frost put it much better than I ever could.

The one turning-point that we always speak about at home, and that Bernice is convinced of, is the following. I spent most of my last two years in secondary school being very active in a Zionist youth movement, and to some extent (that’s coded language for almost totally) neglected my studies. (I feel my children have reached the age where I can say this, and my grandson hasn’t yet reached the age where I can’t.)

As my A-level final exams grew closer, I failed to work seriously, and, at a certain point, more or less gave up making an effort. (I did, however, complete some fine jigsaws and played a lot of excellent bridge.) This is largely because my study habits and self-discipline were very poor.

Had I studied for those exams, I might well have won a place at a good university (two good universities thought so), and the likelihood is that Bernice and I would not have married, and I would not have known her wonderful parents, and Esther and Micha’el would not have been born, and Tslil and Ma’ayan would not have come into our lives, and Tao would not have been born, and…and…and my head hurts.

And apparently, it’s never too early to enjoy the chance encounters that life sends your way!

Author’s Note: This is another of those weeks when you need to exercise a little patience if you want to know what the topic is. Take comfort in the knowledge that the ability to cope with delayed gratification is a sign of maturity.

This week we range far and wide, from the Washington DC Metro to the Bridgend Recreation Centre in South Wales, and then to Ben Yehuda Street in Jerusalem. Coupled with the title, that’s just about the most obscure clue for this week’s topic. I’m not even sure Bernice will get it.

It occurred to me on Friday night, as I lay in bed musing over possible topics for this week, that I really needed a strategy that would provide topics for multiple weeks, since the British strain seems likely to set our progress in fighting Corona back several weeks, if not months. (Incidentally, I understand from my brother Martin that the British strain is called the Kent strain in Britain, in what looks to me suspiciously like an attempt on the part of London to absolve itself of all responsibility. One wonders whether South Africans speak of the Jo’burg, or Brazilians of the Belo Horizonte strain.)

After a little thought, I came up with an idea. So, as things stand at the moment, the plan is that, at intervals of a few weeks, I am going to talk about a number of different musical instruments. (I have to tell you: the idea sounded much more exciting late Friday night in bed than it does in the cold light of Sunday morning, sitting on the page and staring at me.)

First big question: which instrument do I start with? I eventually opted for the violin, for a number of reasons, none of which is that it is my favourite instrument. It actually isn’t, although I’m not entirely sure why not. I suspect that the violin can produce a wider range of colours, of textural diversity, than any other instrument; a vast amount of the greatest music ever written was written for solo violin, or for chamber ensembles prominently featuring the violin; very many of classical music’s most striking, engaging, eccentric characters were and are violinists.

It may be because of my personal relationship with the instrument, which was short-lived but traumatic. I was actually praised for my performance of a Paganini violin concerto on stage to a paying audience in one of England’s most distinguished theatres….Well, not the entire concerto: just the slow movement….Then again, not the entire movement: just part of it…three bars, to be exact….And, to be fair, the only person who knew that it was a Paganini violin concerto was me (and that only because I knew that’s what I had been practising, and not because the tune was recognisable).

Let me give you a context. The amateur dramatics group that I was involved in in the 80s in Nantymoel, the South Wales mining village we then lived in, was fortunate enough to win through to the British finals of a one-act drama competition, with a farcical piece entitled Hidden Meanings. Please don’t feel bad that you’ve never heard of it. I played the role of a man obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, and the play opened with me playing the violin.

Much of the humour of the play lay in the character’s total unsuitability to inhabit the persona of Holmes, ranging from his complete lack of powers of logical reasoning to his very poor violin playing. We had a good friend who is a fine amateur violinist, and he foolishly agreed to lend me his violin and give me a quick lesson or two. I practised for hours, determined to put on a convincing performance as a barely competent fiddler, and my performance won praise from the adjudicator at the finals. Unfortunately, what he praised it for was my amazing ability to play so excruciatingly badly.

This experience left me with redoubled admiration for the technical skill of the violinist. To extract a single, pure note from this fiendish instrument seems to me to require great talent: to play Paganini’s Caprice #1 at all I find remarkable; to play it in 1:34, as Itzhak Perlman does here is scarcely credible; to make it sound like music, as he does, wonderfully and effortlessly, is to run the risk of attracting rumours like that which surrounded virtuoso Paganini himself, that he (or his mother) had sold his soul to the devil in order to play so fiendishly well.

Yet neither I, nor even Perlman, was one of the violinists I actually wanted to talk about today. (How about that: a sentence about violinists where I come before Itzhak Perlman; pinch me, somebody.) Three of them are great virtuosi who Bernice and I were lucky enough to see without having to travel very far from home. Indeed, we could have walked to hear Kyung Wha Chung give a recital in the hall of our local recreation centre, in Bridgend. As a young woman, she was an incredibly intense performer, as you can see from the last minute of the first movement of Schumann’s Violin Sonata #2, starting at around 16:20.

On the evening we heard her, she chose to play Bach’s Partita #1. What none of us realised was that the ‘concert’ hall shared a wall with one of the centre’s squash courts. Two or three minutes into the Bach, two players started a game, and the sound of the ball hitting the back wall came clearly though to us. To her credit, the soloist did not walk out, but soldiered on. How she managed to maintain her total concentration, absorption and intensity, I don’t know. Even so, it was an unforgettable experience, but not really for the reason we had hoped.

The strongest contrast to that level of almost painful intensity came around the same time, when we travelled only a little further afield, to hear Isaac Stern play the Beethoven Violin Concerto. This concerto has an unusually long introduction from the orchestra, about three and a half minutes, before the soloist begins playing. For all of that time, my eyes were on Stern, and I could scarcely believe what I was watching. For the entire time, he stood quietly on stage, for all the world like a man casually waiting for a Number 16 bus.

Then, a second before his first entrance, he raised the violin to his chin in one fluid movement, raised his bowing arm in another, and began producing the most tender and beautiful music. He was probably then in his early 60s, and the contrast between his matter-of-fact, ‘just another day at the office’ demeanour on stage, and the exquisite beauty of the music he made that evening has stayed with me for decades.

The last, and youngest, of this trio, is Joshua Bell, who Bernice and I were lucky enough to see in Jerusalem with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra – a very generous 60^th birthday present. He was playing Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy, which I must confess is not one of my favourite pieces: I find its whimsy a little wearing after a while. His performance, however, was mesmerising. There certainly seems to be something about the violin, more than other instruments, that attracts the showman and exudes raw, sensual charm. From Paganini to Nigel Kennedy, violinists have generated an electric charge that is palpable. Bell is nowhere near such an outrageous showman, but he is certainly a superstar, and, on the basis of our experience that evening, that stardom is well deserved.

I’ve referenced Joshua Bell mainly to retell, for the benefit of those of you who aren’t familiar with it, the interesting story of the Washington Post experiment. When Bell was in Washington in 2007 to play a single concert, he was persuaded by the Washington Post to busk anonymously in a busy arcade just outside L’Enfant Plaza Metro station during the morning rush hour. This turned out to be a 45-minute recital, on a 3.5-million-dollar Stradivarius violin, by a man who, at the time, played to capacity audiences in major concert halls, commanding an average ticket price of $100.

The busk was filmed, to see how many of the commuters and others passing by recognised him, or even stopped to listen. In the event, of over 1000 people, only seven people stopped to listen: one for nine minutes, one for three minutes, and each of the others for a much shorter time. Only one person recognised him, and spoke to him at the end of the ‘recital’; a few others, when interviewed later, had been struck by the quality of his playing. With this handful of exceptions, Bell was completely ignored. He made about $40 in the 45 minutes.

So, what are we to make of this? Many people use it as an example of the importance of mindfulness, of being aware of what is going on around you, of being in the moment. This is undoubtedly a nice-sounding lesson to draw, but I am not sure how fair it is.

There is another famous experiment, which I will not describe for fear of influencing the result for anyone who doesn’t know it, but which involves counting the passes between basketball players. What that experiment demonstrates is the human ability to concentrate on what is judged to be important at any given moment, rather than to be receptive to all that is going on.

I believe that most of the passers-by were thinking about and preparing for the working day ahead of them, worrying about other family members, or simply concentrating on not colliding with other commuters. Personally, I don’t want the driver of the bus I am on to be smelling the roses, but rather to be watching the road.

One interesting, but probably not surprising, point is that at least two of the seven who did stop were musicians, albeit amateurs, and recognised immediately the quality of the playing. For some people, music is always important.

This story reminds me of two other busking incidents. In the 1990s, a flood of aliya of Jews from Russia brought with it many fine professional musicians. (A popular joke at the time ran: ‘How can you tell a Russian orchestral conductor? He’s the one walking down the steps from the plane not carrying a violin case.’) The Israeli authorities greatly expanded music education in primary schools, to accommodate some of this influx, and this gave both of our children, among many others, their first steps in music-making.

It also strengthened Israel’s existing orchestras, and gave birth to more than one new one. My violinist friend who I mentioned earlier once told me that a friend of his, who plays in the IPO, said that, had he not auditioned before the 1990s, he would never have got a place in the orchestra.

Ben Yehuda Street is the main pedestrian precinct in central Jerusalem: it has, for over half a century, been a favourite spot for buskers. Walking down the street on an errand from work one weekday morning, I heard a busking cellist performing Bach’s first unaccompanied cello suite. I like to think that I would not have walked past Bell, because that day in Jerusalem I stood mesmerised for 20 minutes. I only heard the cellist that once, under appalling acoustic conditions, but I still remember it as a wonderful performance.

My final busking story suggests that my friend Stuart Nemtin, whom I met on my post-school year’s youth leadership course in Israel, is a finer violinist than Joshua Bell. As an activity one evening, half of us were required to spend the entire evening in Central Jerusalem, in full view, trying not to be detected by the other half, who were looking for us. Stu dressed as a beggar, took his violin, and busked all evening. Not only was he not detected; he made enough money, as he put it ‘to keep him in cookies for the rest of the year’ (which I calculate to be considerably more than $40 in 2007).

Just in case you’re still worried by that misquote in the title this week, my version of Old King Cole (celebrating the violin talents of myself, Perlman, Chang (or should that be Kyung), Stern, Bell and Nemtin) continues:

              He called for his pipe, and he called for his bowl
              And he called for his fiddlers six.

Tao may still be a little young to handle violin bowing, but, surrounded by his father’s instruments, he is taking his first musical steps.