Readng Round Up Part 2 - The Posh Stuff

 So lets start with Maggie O'Farrel's Hamnet. Apologies that I can't find a picture of this one; I thought I had taken one but if I did it's not leaping to the eye. 

Loads of people I know have raved about Hamnet, which is about Shakespeare,  his wife and their son who died. I can sort of seen why. It's beautifully written, I thought a bit overwritten until  I had let myself relax into the style, That said I had a huge issue with it, which is the way that Shakespeare's wife is portrayed.  I am sick to the back teeth of historical novels where the main female protagonist is portrayed as some sort of fey seer, as well as a whiz with natural remedies. It has become a cliche.My sympathies were all with the elder daughter Susanna who was embarrassed by her mother's inability or unwillingness  to organise a household in a conventional way. Not that I'm necessarily a slave to convention, especially when it comes to housekeeping, but  there's a difference between not doing something just because everyone else does it, and not dong something and  ending up with chaos and dirt. Some nice moments though and the descriptions of how people express grief in different ways were excellent. Glad I've read it, not rushing off to find anything else she has written.  

Then, as previously mentioned, there was The Hare with Amber Eyes. This was recommended to me by several people because of my Vienna trip. It's a long way from the things I normally read, and certainly twenty years ago I wouldn't have given it the time of day. Non-fiction, written by a posh rich bloke about his researches into his posh rich family, and my reactions would have been, research your family all you want but don't expect me to subside it by buying your book, I don't expect people to fund my hobbies. And yes, I realise that's very reductionist. 

In the event I dd enjoy the book, which is structured around the travels within his family of a collection of Japanese netsuke originally purchased by a relative in Paris n the latter half of the C19, and which subsequently travelled to Vienna, to Tokyo and thence back to London into the author's own keeping, at  the beginning of the C21.The family concerned were the Ephrussi; enormously rich Jews whose fortune was founded originally on  trading grain from Odessa and who went on to rival the Rothschilds in the scope of their business interests and  wealth.  

I learned lots. In particular I earned that the oft repeated 'fact'  that the Jews of Austria and Germany were the most integrated in Europe is a glib meaningless cliche which I will never now repeat. Because they weren't integrated, they were tolerated, and they were tolerated for their wealth and because their presence couldn't be denied or ignored.The men had comfortable busy lives in which their Jewishness was barely an inconvenience. It was different for the women though, who were not so much part of Viennese female society as operating  their own parallel one. And at the first opportunity most of the movers and shakers of Austrian society were more than happy to seize the liberty afforded them by the Anschluss to terrorise, loot from and expel their Jewish neighbours. The Austrians do not come out of this book well, and for me their conduct after the war towards those few Jews who expressed a desire to return to Vienna (although who knows why they would want to!) was almost as despicable as their conduct during the supremacy of the Reich. 

But, but, but.... here's the thing I trip over. I can't bring myself to have a huge amount of sympathy for the exiled refugee Ephrussi. There's very poignant passage in the book about how, after trying for days and weeks to get together the money to buy and bribe the necessary papers out of Austrian officialdom, and a long and uncomfortable train journey, the patriarch of the Viennese branch of the family lands in Kent with only a single suitcase to his name. The thing is, millions of his fellow Jews ended up travelling on  trains in the opposite direction, with a single suitcase only to end up in Belsen/Birkenau or Auschwitz or Sobibor. When they got off their trans it was the end of the line in more ways than one. I appreciate that the escape of every single Jew from the horrors of nazi Europe was a small and significant victory, and goodness knows I don't want to suggest that I'd rather he hadn't made it. But overall the widespread Ephrussi family generally managed to escape the clutch of the Nazis wherever in Europe they were settled and it's a stark and unavoidable fact that they were able to do so largely because of their wealth. Most of it was taken away, quickly and efficiently by the Nazis, and that was unjust and indefensible, but the fact remans that their money and their international business contacts meant that most of them survived, while the less well off and less well connected members of their community were shipped in their millions to extermination camps. Money really does talk, even in the most extreme of circumstances.