Tales Of Two Jews: American & British

Among the joys of living in a laid-back and quaint place like Adelaide in South Australia, with its well-stocked council libraries, is the pleasure of reading books. In the past three months, apart from delivering guest lectures at the two universities here, I have been able to go through six books…accompanied with good beer and wine!!!

Here I wish to write about two fascinating biographies. First: American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Second: My grandfather’s secret by Jemima Khan (photo above). Both the books are about distinguished and brilliant Jews — who were part of the American and British establishment — but suffered, like many other ordinary Jews, from a seeming lack of identity. The past that continued to haunt them, and their sufferings.

First, the summing up about the Oppenheimer’s biography in The New Yorker: “J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who oversaw the creation of the atomic bomb, was lauded as a patriot after the United States dropped the bomb on Japan, but nine years later he was disgraced, accused of Communist sympathies and ’substantial defects of character.’

“This commanding biography, the result of twenty-five years of research, reevaluates that character, and delivers the most complex portrait of Oppenheimer to date: a brilliant but insecure child prodigy who became a charismatic leader; a polymath who learned Sanskrit just so he could read the Bhagavad Gita; an aesthete who mixed infamously strong Martinis…

“A one-time fellow-traveller who was almost willfully naïve about politics. Drawing on thousands of pages of F.B.I. surveillance records, the authors contend that the scientist was never a member of the Communist Party.” (More here…)

Second, in the biography about her grandfather Frank Goldsmith, Jemima Khan (the former British wife of the celebrated Pakistani cricket star-turned-politician Imran Khan), vividly describes about the “English Jew and a Gentleman” who was born in 1878. She writes: “He was from Germany, where he lived until the age of 16. I knew that 500 years of Jewish ancestors could be traced back to the Frankfurt ghetto, but I had not realized my father was just one generation from Germany.

“He (Frank) told a biographer: ‘I think motivation comes from… disequilibrium in the personality. Perhaps my disequilibrium comes from the very fact that I’m a foreigner. I’m a Jew to Catholics and a Catholic to Jews, an Englishman to the French and a Frenchman to the English. I’ve never been neither one thing nor the other – which can be a very unsettling thing to be.’

“Jews are used to being treated as foreigners everywhere, and to an extent every Goldsmith had felt like an outsider right back to the early 1500s when Moses Goldschmidt of Frankfurt was compelled to wear a red peaked cap and a yellow ring on his coat to identify him as a Jew.

Like many Jewish families in late-19th-century Germany, Frank’s parents, Adolph and Alice Goldschmidt, were unnerved by the increasing anti-Semitism. They decided to close the family bank, B H Goldschmidt, in 1893 and move abroad.

“Frank and his brother Edward settled in England with their parents. Adolph Goldschmidt was determined his sons would become English gentlemen. The first step was to buy a house in Mayfair, at 16 South Street. The next purchase was a 2,500-acre estate in Suffolk on which Adolph built a manor house, Cavenham Hall. With the land came ownership of the local village, Cavenham – after which my father later named his first successful business – as well as the title of squire.

“At the age of 30, just 13 years after he had arrived in England speaking the language badly, a German Jew in a country noted for its suspicion of foreigners, Frank entered parliament. As well as being an MP, a councillor and a freemason, he had become a justice of the peace, a county alderman and a member of the prestigious Tattersalls Committee, which adjudicates on betting disputes in horse-racing.

“His integration into British society, it seemed, was complete. One of his close friends was Winston Churchill, who was only four years his senior and had recently been appointed first lord of the Admiralty. But then came the outbreak of war in 1914. In four years, among the millions of lives shattered was Frank’s. Patriotism had quickly turned anti-German resentment into hysteria. Suddenly, being German was as much a stigma as being Jewish had been in Frankfurt. There was hatred and suspicion for everything German…

“…In many ways, the conundrum that my grandfather faced during his lifetime about the importance of identity and belonging has become the leitmotif of my family. At 21, I married a Pakistani politician and I lived in Pakistan for almost a decade. Like my grandfather I reinvented myself: I wore a shalwar kameez, changed religion, learnt Urdu, lived in a traditional extended-family household, involved myself in all aspects of Pakistani life and extolled the virtues (ad nauseam) of a new and radically different culture…”

To read the excerpts from the book in The Sunday Times, >please click here…