Blindly she tried to convert her rector to Fascism, comparing Mosley to Jesus. Grundy’s theological career was doomed.Yet this is not a depressing book; at absurd moments I laughed out loud. With no sense of irony, Edna Grundy borrows teacups from the local CND for her Fascist meetings. Trevor mobilises the local thugs at home, but the only available space is next to the toilet. He spends the meeting worrying about noise and smells that might permeate well-made plans to beat up Jews, blacks or Asians. The subtext is not lost.As a teenager, burdened by virginity, Trevor is almost seduced by Sophie du Toit, a beautiful French woman. When the moment for action arrives and both are naked, he runs out in horror Around Sophie’s neck is a Star of David There are also touchingly Oedipal incidents.
Sid Grundy, released from prison after refusing to fight the Nazis, returns home. Trevor is glad to see his hero father but furious to hear “the man in bed with my mother making a noise like that”.Among isolated scenes of acid humour are shocking exposes that show how, well into the early 1960s, international Fascist and Nazi conspiracies were rife. Trevor describes the Nazi children who came to stay in Marylebone with his family; the most famous was Heinrich Himmler’s daughter.This startling book begins with Trevor Grundy burying his father. At the Mosleyite memorial Grundy – married, living in Africa and long distanced from this anti-Semitic world – involuntarily raises his hand in the Fascist salute. It is a brave revelation suggesting that the virus of Fascism is impossible to eradicate.
The ghosts of Grundy’s tragic Jewish mother and wife-beating but uxorious father are tangible. The British Union of Fascists may have changed its name, but Mosley’s dreams of a pure white Britain still filter through our society from street-corner bullies to the enduring aristocracy that produced this ignoble Sir.. Shtetl: the history of a small town and an extinguished world
by Eva Hoffman
Secker & Warburg, pounds 16.99The title of this book is misleading. This is no nostalgic evocation of the Chagallesque towns of an Eastern Europe of memory – all crooked roofs, merry fiddlers and warm, pious Jewish life Eva Hoffman’s project is far more rigorous. She challenges us to put aside the blinkers of received post-Holocaust wisdom and examine the history of Polish-Jewish relations since the 11th century not under the category of anti-Semitism, but as an experiment in multiculturalism avant la lettre.What emerges is a luminous and deeply engrossing social history. Ends have a way of determining the meanings of what came before. For years, the Holocaust has cast a long shadow over preceding relations between Jews and their host nations, or, to put it more familiarly, their Christian neighbours.
And, as the site of the major killing camps, Poland has too often been confused with the Nazis who ran them The statistics abetted this confusion. Of Poland’s 3 million pre-Second World War Jews, only 300,000 survived.Hoffman’s contention is hardly that anti-Semitism never existed in Poland, nor that a proportion of Poles weren’t implicated in the Holocaust, but simply that the Polish record on helping Jews was rather better than elsewhere; and that 900 years of Polish-Jewish history didn’t gallop in a straight line towards genocide. Visitors to medieval Poland were startled to see how integrated Jews were in daily Polish life. The Statute of Kalisz of 1264 guaranteed full protection of life and property to new Jewish settlers. It provided the Jews with freedom to practise their religion, as well as the professions, and forbade discrimination in court.