CTJC Bulletin Chanukah 2021

Lucky Jews Jo Landy In a previous edition I reviewed Hadley Freemans’s “House of Glass”, a memoir of a Jewish family. I mentioned that the siblings’ attitudes made me think of my own relations. This is especially true of my stepfather’s father, Jack. He and several of his close Jewish friends who lived in France were born in Poland during the same period as the Glass children. When the Nazis’ invaded, one of the friends hid his family and stock and became a senior member of the French Resistance. A second friend was interned and visited by his son during the internment. Both survived. I wish I could discover how they escaped deportation east.

I was reminded of such history earlier this month. I heard that a Polish colleague at work had expressed interest in the firm’s Polish connection. My first reaction was influenced by a lecture I attended at one of last year’s Limmud events. It was entitled “Lucky Jews” and was about the phenomenon of Polish people purchasing items depicting traditionally dressed Jews as good luck charms. Odd to focus on one side of an anti-Semitic trope, especially in the face of the “unlucky” fate of most of Poland’s pre-war Jewish population.

My Polish colleague’s interest caught me off guard. Being curious about the perspective from which he would view our history, I sarcastically thought “Lucky Jews”. Like some of Hadley Freeman’s family, Jack’s life was extraordinary. His success was predicated upon his ability to assess and take advantage of challenging options in inter-war Europe. He used to say “We live or die by our tongue”. There was no golden lottery ticket. His life was peppered with ill-luck which would have stumped a less enterprising individual.

The first piece of misfortune was to be a Jew living in Poland after World War One. In her book Hadley Freeman mentions pogroms. What she does not mention was organised Jewish resistance to those pogroms. Jack led a group whose objective was to forestall gangs of Jew-baiting thugs who arrived by train. His tactics were definitely inventive. As the easily recognisable thugs walked down the platform Page 19