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

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their braces or belts were cut. Not much violence can be perpetrated by individuals forced to hold up their trousers with one hand. More ill-luck happened to Jack in his teens when his mother died. In addition to this, neither Jack nor his brother liked their new stepmother. Both decided to go to the USA. Upon arriving in the UK they found that they only had enough money for one of them to cross the Atlantic. A coin was tossed, and Jack lost. Using his trade as a miller, he found work in London and learnt English. Eventually an opening occurred. Chaim, a man in the feather business, wished to use milling machinery to break down and add spring to large feathers. He promised that in return for his expertise in setting up the machinery Jack would be made a full partner in the business. But this promise amounted to no more than a diamond tie pin and a request to leave the premises. Jack did not go back to flour. He had learned enough about the feather business to set up on his own. Using English and European connections the business flourished. He married and fathered four children.

I believe that Jack’s European connections made him unusually aware of future dangers. I have his passport for this time, signed by the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax. It is full of European stamps including swastikas. Jack believed that Europe was not safe for Jews and attempted to persuade his remaining relations and friends to escape. Only two of these people got to the UK. Jack paid for one cousin who was on a political watch list to escape Poland. To help the second person, Jack purchased and imported his Hungarian associate’s stock. It was then sold back when the two had arrived in the UK.

However, Jack did not consider the UK to be safe. He set up a partnership in the USA and then tried to move the family across the Atlantic. But one daughter had met her future husband and refused to move. His reaction to the engagement was ‘not that schmuck!’. Jack’s second daughter would not go without her sister, and his wife would not leave her girls. I am told that this impasse weighed upon him heavily. But in 1938 he took precautions against potential air raids by moving the younger members of his family to Buckinghamshire where

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he had purchased a warehouse. A wise move: his former warehouse in the East End was gutted in the blitz. In 1940, Jack evacuated his wife and two sons to the USA. He continued running the business in the UK and earned an MBE. I never did find out why he was given the honour. It was not for successfully evading the police when smuggling eggs from Norfolk during the war: pulled over by the constabulary he kicked up a fuss and said if they were going to search his lorry it should not be done in public. Unloading sacks of feathers is a messy business, especially when the police officers doing the unloading are wearing blue woollen uniforms. It is small wonder that they gave up before completing the job. The eggs were snuggly stowed at the very front of the vehicle. But I digress. My step-father used to joke that Jack’s MBE was for paying his taxes. It was certainly not for smuggling gold sovereigns out of the UK (whenever he travelled abroad on business) to help the struggle in Palestine. Norman, the son of the cousin whom Jack had brought out of Poland, believed that it was for Jack’s work developing better camouflage. Dyed feathers were used to simulate grass and tree leaves.

Incidentally, Norman tells of staying with the Pole who had escaped internment in France. He went to improve his French during a summer holiday. Delighted with his progress, on his return to school Norman began to speak fluently to his French teacher in front of the class. However, the French idioms he had picked up were not appropriate for classroom use and he was strongly rebuked. A reminder to me to be discriminating when applying learning. Revisiting Jack’s story has made me consider how I should react to the idea of the “Lucky Jew”. All Jews are lucky to have escaped the vortex of Nazi Europe. But many who appear lucky in life have had to create and sustain their own luck.

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