15.12.2022

Forgotten gem retrieved

Stan Keable reviews They won’t let you live by Simon Blumenfeld (introduction by Tali Chilson. London Books 2022, pp250)

Blackfriars Hall, one of two remaining Catholic colleges in Oxford university, was the venue for the December 6 launch of Simon Blumenfeld’s reissued 1939 fourth and last novel, They won’t let you live. The book itself is a riveting read which I could not put down, and swallowed at one sitting.

John King and Martin Knight of London Books should be congratulated for championing the re-publication of all four novels. The attendees included family members, friends, a smattering of thespians and academics. There was also a Dominican priest representing Blackfriars, John O’Connor, dressed in his full regalia. Having read the first three he confessed to being a “Blumenfeld convert”, quoting Edmund Burke about the price of liberty being eternal vigilance.

The book is a tale of hard times in London’s East End during the hungry thirties. But it focuses, not on how unemployment affected the working class, but the desperate plight of once thriving petty bourgeois shopkeepers and their families. They have no unemployment benefit and “no recourse to public funds” as they are relentlessly impoverished under the heartless competition of much bigger concerns.

The comparison with todays’s cost-of-living crisis, driving vulnerable people to choose between eating and heating, was highlighted by the chair of the event, professor Michael Scott, who spoke of the “cruelty of capitalism” now on display.

Tali Chilson, who wrote the introduction to this edition - a tour-de-force in its own right - is a Catholic Jew. She has taught at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and the Oriental Institute at Oxford university for over a decade. Weekly Worker readers will recall her in Labour Against the Witchhunt. Like so many other non-Zionist Jews, she was ridiculously accused by Labour Party HQ of anti-Semitism.

She considers Blumenfeld as “the forefather of an Anglo-Jewish literary revival that began in the mid-1930s”. Blumenfeld was among “the first generation of Jews born in Britain to east European Jewish parents who had escaped the pogroms”. Others include Arnold Wesker, Wolf Mankowitz, Harold Pinter, Emmanuel Litvinoff, to name just a few.

Tali gave the main presentation, in which she examined (among other things) the treatment of anti-Semitism in English literature, literary criticism and mainstream bourgeois politics, as well as how Blumenfeld himself deals with the question. Through his characters, he:

initiates a dialogue with a selection of English language authors past and present who have participated in the so-called Semitic discourse. These are Shakespeare, George Eliot, Rudyard Kipling and TS Eliot.

The story revisits the issues in Shakespeare’s The merchant of Venice by following the parallel tribulations of two shopkeepers, one Christian, the other Jewish - and examines how their ideas and prejudices stand the test of hard economic times.

Blumenfeld ‘rewrites’ the Shakespearian play’s plot to demonstrate that under financial duress, both merchants behave exactly the same regardless of their religion or race. … Shakespeare’s plot … vilifies Shylock mercilessly for being a usurer … Conversely, Antonio - the Christian - is celebrated as a virtuous and loyal friend …

Sea change

Discussing this, professor Scott reminded us that the views expressed in a fictional drama are those of the character, not the playwright. Blumenfeld, evidently, did not share the view that Shakespeare’s The merchant of Venice is anti-Semitic. Tali explains:

In Blumenfeld’s view, Shakespeare’s plot was a description, not a prescription. The fate ascribed to Shylock can be seen as a representation of the hostility that Jews faced in Europe.

And she goes on to describe the “sea change in critical opinion” that took place in 1930s America.

The prior notion that 17th-century plays such as Shakespeare’s The merchant of Venice were responsible for contemporary racism and anti-Semitism was replaced by the opposing view that these plays served as a basis for contemporary humanist movements. These movements would base their ‘moral claims on the humanist heritage of Shakespeare, Victor Hugo and other ‘cultural giants’, which validated the progressive fruit of the Shakespeare legacy.

For George Eliot, Tali writes, “nature trumps nurture”. In Daniel Deronda (1876) Eliot “expressed a common view held at the time that there was something immutable within Jewish nature, that was inextricably linked to its ancestral origins in the orient ...”

Similarly, Tali quotes Benjamin Disraeli’s claim that “[the] Jew represented religion, property and natural aristocracy - the very foundation of empire”, and notes his view that Jews are the embodiment of race … as opposed to those who are falsely universalised ‘communist’ conspirators.

TS Eliot too, also writing in the 1930s, is among the targets of Blumenfeld’s fiction, and Tali Chilson gives us some telling quotes. In his 1934 book After strange gods, TS Eliot wrote:

What is still more important, is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable … And a spirit of excessive tolerance is to be deprecated.

This suggests, Tali writes, that

TS Eliot, like George Eliot and Disraeli, believed Jews belong, in fact, to a cohesive, conservative and immutable entity. TS Elliot, the anti-progressive American who settled in Britain, the Unitarian who converted to the Church of England, believed in homogeneity of communities. People, he argued, should live where they were born, and a class system is an inevitable, natural phenomenon. The homogeneity of the community is necessary to preserve its culture.

Yiddish culture

One of the participants at the book launch asked how Blumenfeld, leaving school at 14, could become so cultured so young, producing four novels by the age of 32. I suggested perhaps his Yiddish culture, with its international reach, had something to do with it. In fact, before producing his first, semi-autobiographical novel, Jew boy, in 1935, he had scripted “one of the last Yiddish language plays to be professionally performed in Europe”, The promised land, which premiered in London at the Grand Palais on Commercial Road.

His second novel, Phineas Khan, - said to be the best one - is sub-titled ‘portrait of an immigrant’ and is effectively a prequel to Jew boy, tracing the earlier arrival of ‘the poorest of the poor’; and the third, Doctor of the lost, is the fictionalised story of the early years in East London of the now famous Doctor Barnado - a Christian, of course, alongside whom Blumenfeld places the (fictional) Marxist black doctor, spicing their self-sacrificing work together amongst London’s poorest with a discussion between charity, which does not solve the problem of poverty, and revolution, which ought to.

I was pleased to meet the late author’s 90-year-old son Eric. Like my father, Bill Keable, Simon grew up in London’s East End before World War I. Both won scholarships to continue their schooling and, nevertheless, both had to leave school on reaching age 14 because of poverty. As active members of the Communist Party in the 1930s, Eric’s parents, Simon and Deborah, would certainly have known my parents. My mother, Gladys, produced the Daily Worker’s strip cartoon, ‘Mickey Mongrel, the class conscious cur’. Deborah, Eric told me, had been a “courier” for the party, travelling to Moscow to bring back much needed funds.

Eric recalled that Simon had chosen to have his ashes deposited at the “communist wall” at Hoop Lane Jewish cemetry in Golders Green. I confess, I had no idea that such a thing exists. I am somewhat intrigued to learn which other comrades share that resting place. Initially, when Simon passed away in 2005, a memorial plaque had been put up. But, alas, it proved too costly to maintain.

Like many others after Krushchev’s famous 1956 speech, Simon and Deborah tore up their CPGB cards in disgust at what had been going on in the Soviet Union. But Eric confirmed that Simon had remained loyal to his belief in “true communism” to the end. His four books certainly reflect a deep commitment to the cause.

Stan Keable