NOT ONE BUT ALL THE VERSES OF “TWO LOVELY BLACK EYES”
For those interested, this page contains a fourth selection of articles about my father, including interesting ones from today’s editions of The Economist and of the TLS, from the American magazines The New Criterion and The National Review, and from two London theatre magazines.
John Gross (above right) with the poet Lachlan Mackinnon in June 2009 at a party hosted by historian Robert Conquest for the launch of Conquest’s book of poems, “Penultimata”. Bob Conquest dedicated “Penultimata” to John Gross.
CONTENTS
1. “John Gross, man of letters,” (The Economist, Jan. 28, 2011)
2. “The most civilized man you could have known” (Editorial, National Review (USA), edition of Feb. 7, 2011)
3. “Everything mattered” (By Lindsay Duguid, Times Literary Supplement, Jan. 28, 2011)
4. “The nicest man in England” (By Benedict Nightingale, Theatre Critic’s Circle, Jan. 26, 2011)
5. “Box-Office: Gross bows out” (By Michael Coveney, What’s on Stage, Jan. 11, 2011)
6. “Remembering the life of the writer, editor & raconteur” (By David Pryce-Jones, New Criterion, Feb. 2011)
7. A chapter from John Gross’s memoir, published in Commentary magazine
THE ECONOMIST MAGAZINE
John Gross, man of letters, died on January 10th, aged 75
Obituary
The Economist
January 28, 2011
www.economist.com/node/18007298
IN THE heady years of his adolescence, John Gross sometimes fantasised that he might read everything. He would work, with slow but gathering excitement, through the plays of Shakespeare, the novels of Tolstoy and the teeming streets of Dickens. He would bathe in Keats’s “Hyperion”, bounce through the limericks of Lear, linger in the “uplifting gloom” of Gray’s country churchyard. Not only that, but he would browse the faintly carbolic-smelling columns of the British Medical Journal, and scoff a hundred cow pies with the Dandy’s Desperate Dan. But even as he imagined this, standing in some London bookshop where every shelf sagged, sheer panic would take the books and toss them in the air in swarms, like the playing cards at the end of “Alice in Wonderland”. Sadly, his task was impossible.
Yet it seemed to his many friends that he must have managed it, somehow. If you asked for a poem that featured fountain pens he would find not one, but six. Mention some minor literary figure – Churton Collins, say – and he would wonder if you knew that when he died by drowning in 1908, some lines from Langland’s “Piers Plowman”, about resting “by a bourne side”, were found in his pocket. Drop another literary clue, and he would produce not one but all the verses of “Two Lovely Black Eyes”. And all this might occur in the course of a single, interweaving, almost fugal conversation which had begun with a beaming look through the large glasses and the words, spoken softly, “Did I ever mention that David Hare told Ferdinand Mount that I was an illiterate dickhead?”
Mr Gross’s love of letters embraced almost everything. It was never limited to books, though he was books editor for the Spectator, the New Statesman and the Times Literary Supplement, and an in-house reviewer, from 1983 to 1989, for the New York Times. He rejoiced in anecdotes, gossip, jokes, slogans, hoardings, advertising jingles (“Idris when I’s dry”), popular songs. On meandering walks with friends through his childhood East End haunts he would point out both the streets where writers had lived and the old signs, for fresh milk or synagogues, fading on the walls. Favourite scraps from Masefield (“salt-caked smoke stack”) rubbed shoulders with his father’s Yiddish sighs at a life that wasn’t too bad and wasn’t too good: “s’iz nit oy-oy-oy un nit ay-ay-ay”. And, for all the charm and emollience, he could produce sharp shards himself, such as the remark that listening to Margaret Atwood was like being driven back and forth through Winnipeg on a Sunday.
The title “man of letters”, which he adopted for himself, was a consciously nostalgic one. He agreed, with Evelyn Waugh, that the species was almost extinct in the modern world, like maiden aunts. It was also a modest claim. As he explained in his entertaining book on the breed, “The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters” (1969), it meant “a writer of the second rank, a critic, someone who aimed higher than journalism but made no pretence of being a major artist.” The times had once been different, he reflected, as he sauntered through the lives of these mostly minor, mostly unremembered, finely moustachioed men: the public had hungered for intellectual guidance, literary references were commonly understood, and the book-loving man could set the critical and cultural agenda, as only media pundits could now.
He might have been an academic, being more than bright enough. But the iron grip of T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis on English literary criticism appalled him; he wanted to write what he pleased, as he pleased. “Unattached” was a good word. Even his spells as a literary editor felt too constraining. As for the New York Times, he could never get on with its pomposity. Behind their backs, he called its two chief executives “Potash and Perlmutter”, after two bumblers in early Yiddish films.
His criticism, to many, seemed less brave. Aware that he was handling “the most explosive commodities in the world, praise and blame”, he was sparing with both. He showed most boldness at the TLS, where he stayed for seven years and introduced signed reviews. Literature should be loved, he insisted, simply for itself, and not because it allowed “Mr Puff and Mr Sneer” to settle anonymous scores in his pages.
All down the years, the books also appeared. Only three – “A Double Thread”, on his childhood, the “Man of Letters”, and “Shylock” – dipped a toe in the creative pond. Otherwise, he edited: the Oxford Books of Aphorisms, Parodies, Literary Anecdotes and Comic Verse, and an anthology of pieces inspired by Shakespeare. Once again, these often featured the minor and neglected. Once again, they suggested that he had read and relished everything.
He still wished he could. When he tried to get back to the beginning of his bookmanship, it lay partly in a Jewish reverence for texts, partly in a facility at writing other boys’ essays for Kit-Kats. But he also found himself thinking of inexplicable and almost magic events, of imaginings drawn from somewhere deeper than conscious memory. He knew he could not describe them. But perhaps others could. He decided then to keep humble, constant, happy company with the multitude of men and women who had tried to express such things. Somewhere lay the words.
“THE MOST CIVILIZED MAN YOU COULD HAVE KNOWN”
Editorial
The National Review (USA)
Edition of Feb. 7, 2011
John Gross was the most civilized man you could have known. He had superb manners, and was versed in literature, theater, art, history, and virtually everything else. He was once called “the best-read man in Britain,” no less. But there was nothing stuffy or pompous about him. He was perpetually generous and amusing.
He was born in London’s East End in 1935. He became a famous man of letters, both in Britain and in America. He held a number of important positions. For example, he was the editor of The Times Literary Supplement. And senior book editor of the New York Times. He compiled many Oxford anthologies, the last of which came out only last year: a book of literary parodies (see John O’Sullivan’s review on p. 48). He was a trustee of London’s National Portrait Gallery, judged the Booker Prize.
People regarded him as a conservative, and he was, in a way. But this was mainly not a political matter. It was a matter of high standards in art, letters, and life. It was a matter of sticking up for the Judeo-Christian civilization.
John Gross has died at 75. The last of a breed? Maybe not, but there are precious few specimens left. R.I.P.
LINDSAY DUGUID IN THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
Everything mattered
By Lindsay Duguid
The Times Literary Supplement
January 28, 2011
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article7171328.ece
I was recruited by John Gross at a party, which in retrospect seems very typical of John and the way he liked to do things. Thus rescued from the British Academy and the Financial Times, I joined the staff of the TLS in September 1978, taking up an assistant editor’s desk in the old editorial offices in the Gray’s Inn Road.
This was long before any notion of the office as a place of pleasure. We worked in cramped conditions, sharing typewriters and telephones, and kept to a tight schedule in dusty cubicles, where the copy was piled in trays, galley proofs hung up in rows, and the shelves held old reference books with missing spines.
The review copies, which were casually sorted on to a couple of tables, somehow seemed of secondary importance to the dictionaries and the old volumes of Who’s Who. (There probably weren’t that many new books. A TLS editorial of 1974 had complained that too many books were being published: 35,000 in 1973, about a quarter of the number published today.)
My arrival coincided with a time of change. Since he had become Editor in April 1974, John had overseen the remodelling of the old Lit Supp with its short anonymous reviews and rigid layout. He had brought spring to the paper; signs could be seen in larger, more interesting illustrations – posters, cartoons, Victorian ephemera – and more playful headings. There were more poems – including Philip Larkin’s last major poem, “Aubade”, in 1977 (John often said that the morning on which he opened his post to find Larkin’s unsolicited offering was one of the best days of his life). And the removal of anonymity had done its work of lightening the detached and disapproving tone of the past.
Established writers and writer-academics such as Anita Brookner, Richard Cobb, Russell Davies, D. J. Enright, Rosemary Dinnage, Alistair Forbes, Victoria Glendinning, Dan Jacobson, Eric Korn, S. S. Prawer and E. S. Turner had discovered their TLS personae, and a new generation – Peter Conrad, Patricia Craig, Roy Foster, Jonathan Keates, Peter Parker, Lorna Sage – had been encouraged to write often, about subjects that interested them. They would have been sent one of John’s witty postcards with a message of thanks or congratulation in his tiny handwriting. The bedrock of academic reviewing remained the same, but there was more theatre, art, crime fiction, American literature, television and cookery, more dash and more humour. By the time John left in December 1981, the paper had established its recognizable style.
I enjoyed the fruits of this spring for about a dozen issues before the paper was shut down in December 1978, the victim, along with other Times titles, of a dispute between the papers’ owners and the printing unions. It was a fretful time. Over long months, John (who had often had to persuade the printers to print the paper) tried to keep his editors’ spirits up with regular meetings in the empty office, opening letters and parcels of books, discussing phantom issues and, eventually, hastily planning our return in November 1979.
Freed from the weekly production schedule, we were able to observe him practise the art of commissioning; wearing a suit and woollen scarf against the cold, he would take up a book from the new books table, examine it carefully, look at the acknowledgements page, then begin the process of choosing a reviewer, selecting and rejecting and reconsidering with increased refinement. These meetings distilled John’s wisdom, making use of his prodigious recall of books and their contents, and his extraordinary range, as he quoted from a pantheon of heroes which extended to Georges Simenon, the cartoonist Jules Feiffer and the comedian Roy Hudd. Through this one got a glimpse of an ideal of literary journalism.
John’s own ideal of literary journalism placed more than usual emphasis on encouraging the young – an emphasis that was reflected both in the contributors’ column of “his” TLS and in his editorial appointments. The young Martin Amis had departed, and the even younger Blake Morrison appeared, before the closure; when it dragged on, other desks became vacant as people drifted away to pursue careers in academe, publishing or writing, and in one case to work at the newly founded London Review of Books.
John happily replenished the sub-editing and production areas of the office with newcomers, some barely out of university, and he made sure they were involved in every aspect of the paper from proofreading to decisions about reviewers to the quality of some French translations of Gerard Manley Hopkins. His subtle and apparently encyclopedic intelligence was a continuing education in itself.
His commitment and nervous energy were part of his hold on the paper and on us; everything could go wrong, everything mattered, everything had consequences. Yet this dedicated, demanding man would easily relax and return to a charming and funny self; the shy intellectual, who often appeared not to notice people, would tell stories with a relish for personal detail; the fastidious scholar would suggest a drink at the Zanzibar Club in Great Queen Street, where he became a man about town.
John was a connoisseur of gossip of the higher kind; his anecdotes, which could be unflattering but were rarely malicious, were formal masterpieces, emblematic but without a moral or a punchline, finely constructed from a web of backstory, coincidence and connection, employing careful scene-setting. They were told with a selfconscious delight in the absurdity of the tale.
Dialogue was important; John never mimicked anyone’s voice, but he reproduced their actual words. A distant look would come into his eyes as he summoned up what he knew about one of a large cast of real-life characters – writers, editors, aristocrats, actors – asking rhetorically, “Do you know who I mean by . . . ?”, or saying, ironically, “Do stop me if . . .”. His interest in personality was of a piece with his interest in literature. It inspired his scholarly books, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters and Shylock, and lay behind his liking for imaginary couples – Isaiah and Irving Berlin; the Reynoldses, Sir Joshua and Debbie. It also led to his inspired commissioning; the menu-style covers of the TLSes he edited, promising encounters with interestingly diverse individuals – here it perhaps echoed his liking for television soap operas.
Over the last few years, I would have irregular lunches with John (at the Ivy, his favourite London restaurant: in New York it was the Russian Tea Room), ostensibly to help him with a planned memoir of his literary life. But it was no good. Spotting a fellow luncher, he would say “You know who that is, don’t you?”, and I would then be told something scandalous and amusing about him or her.
His reminiscences were diverted by pen portraits of the doctors who were treating him, accounts of our old friends, surveys of the current theatre, praise of his children and grandchildren. We would share a taxi back to the Gray’s Inn Road, where the TLS had returned in 2006, and agree that next time we really would get down to talking about the paper in the old days.
FORMER TIMES AND NY TIMES CRITIC BENEDICT NIGHTINGALE ON JOHN GROSS
“The nicest man in England”
By Benedict Nightingale
(Former theatre critic for The Times of London and The New York Times)
Theatre Critic’s Circle website
January 26, 2011
www.criticscircle.org.uk/drama/?ID=154
It was always hard to find anyone with a bad word to say about John Gross, who died on January 10 at the age of 75. How could anybody of his extensive knowledge and intellectual distinction – the Spectator called him “the best-read man in Britain” – be so unpretentiously agreeable? I remember teasing him by suggesting he put on a T-shirt embossed with a remark by Bernard Levin, that he was the nicest man in England. He responded with an aghast grin and a sort of bashful burble, as of a telephone scrambler in deep distress. I didn’t remind him of the celebrated remark, I forget by whom, that there must be a man living in London called John Gross-Brilliant, because so many people added that adjective to his surname. But he would have reacted as diffidently, because he was intelligent enough to know the limitations of the mind – and, in and out of print, wore his knowledge with a lightness that remains an example to us all.
That was just one of qualities he brought to the Sunday Telegraph as its theatre critic from 1989 to 2005. To look through the reviews he wrote in an exemplary year, 2002, is to be deeply impressed by his wise and temperate judgements, his willingness to give performers and productions the benefit of whatever doubts he felt he had to express and, above all, his openness to the sort of experience you might not expect a former don at King’s, Cambridge, and editor of the TLS to appreciate. Here he is, praising the clever gadgetry, design and “exuberant choreography” of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and, despite finding the plot of We Will Rock You as silly as it was and is, doing the same for the show’s songs and performances.
He was a generous critic, who recognized that the theatre has many mansions and many different inhabitants and visitors, but he wasn’t a pushover. He disliked pretentious direction and, especially, the sort of gratuitous ugliness he found in Neil LaBute’s Distance from Here: “it proceeds on the principle that the quickest way to be taken seriously in the contemporary theatre is to make things nasty”. He could be sharp, calling Glen Close’s Blanche DuBois in Tennessee Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire “about as fragile as Donald Rumsfield”. But he also acknowledged that Close was a “strong, highly proficient actress”.
If there was a positive qualification to be made he made it, lauding Douglas Hodge’s “powerful” Leontes in a Winter’s Tale he thought crassly “Americanised” and Gwyneth Paltrow’s “magnificent” acting in David Auburn’s Proof, a play he found shallow and implausible. And when he praised he really praised: the “brilliance” of Jochum Ten Haaf’s Van Gogh in Nicholas Wright’s Vincent in Brixton; the “tremendous experience” of a hilarious Tartuffe at the National; the “wit, pathos, full-blooded displays of character and challenging confrontations” of Tom Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia; even Ed Hall’s War of the Roses, an updated and pretty potted version of the Henry VI plays which made him feel “the full horror of the events being portrayed”.
Myself, I knew John pretty well. He’d been my arts editor at the New Statesman and, though he went into appalled telephone scrambler mode when I told him so, the best I’ve had anywhere: acute, thoughtful, considerate, punctilious. He’d worked as a senior books editor and reviewer on the New York Times when I was its Sunday theatre critic and, everyone said, brought fresh depth and elegance to his section. But he always had his mischievous, gossipy, wryly funny side.The news raced through the Times’s office and into the chattering frogpond of Manhattan that he had called the paper’s top editors “sentimental gangsters” in a loud voice in Sardi’s. Coward that I am, I got a bit worried, since Sardi’s was and is very much a theatre restaurant and John’s voice was as British as mine. Would the great Abe Rosenthal, who took no prisoners, call me in and ask why I thought he was a mawkish Mafioso? But there was no trouble for me or, indeed, John.
I’ll miss John at others’ lunch tables and my own dinner table but, above all, in the theatre. We often chatted in intervals, me pompously asking if we’d studied William Empson or F.R. Leavis in order to review some dismal musical, him twinkling and chuckling but refusing to be categorized as Mr Superintellectual. He had written important books – The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters and, quietly drawing on his feelings as a Jew as well as on theatrical history, Shylock: 400 Years in the Life of a Legend – but many of us will remember him as a large-hearted, delightful man.
FORMER OBSERVER THEATRE CRITIC MICHAEL COVENEY ON JOHN GROSS
Box-Office: Gross Bows Out
By Michael Coveney
What’s on Stage (London Theatre Magazine)
January 11, 2011
www.whatsonstage.com/blog/theatre/london/E8831294742093/%22Box-Office%22+Gross+Bows+Out.html
One of the most civilised and erudite of theatre critics, John Gross, has died aged 75 after suffering ill health for some time. He served on the Sunday Telegraph from 1989 to 2005, quite a long stint for someone who was primarily immersed in the world of books.
He was a distinguished former editor of the Times Literary Supplement -- introducing unsigned reviews for the first time in that august publication -- and chief book reviewer on the New York Times for five years in the 1980s.
But he made lasting theatrical contributions with Shylock (1992), his brilliant tour around that difficult character in history and related literature, and with one of his celebrated anthologies, After Shakespeare (2002), which collected a rich bouquet of literary responses to our greatest poet from his own times to ours.
Gross often sat through first nights with an open text on his knee -- you felt that, like Clive James, he'd much rather read Hamlet than watch it -- but he was always the sprightliest and most stimulating company in the intervals.
And every theatre PR lady I know (including my wife) simply adored him; he was invariably witty and charming, with an attractive twinkle about him that no-one in the critical pack ever matched, then or now.
His first book, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, will probably remain his most famous, though I suspect his modest memoir, A Double Thread (2001), will gain ground as a model of discreet, non-self-serving autobiography.
John's background was humble East End, born of Eastern European Jewish immigrants; he went down those same mean streets as Harold Pinter, who much admired his memoir, finding much he recognised.
He was a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, in the early 1960s, but he often abandoned his students to their own researches while developing his literary career in London and working on his own projects.
Famously dubbed by the Spectator "the best read man in Britain," it would be hard to think of anyone since Samuel Johnson who seemed to have read everything, or at least know something about everything, in print.
Funnily enough, this didn't really come through in his theatre reviews, which were always interesting, often impatient with contemporary playwrights and "conceptual" productions, but sometimes a little flat. But there was never a false phrase, or an ill-chosen word, and everything was expressed with perfect taste and well-modulated tone.
The theatre critic post on the Sunday Telegraph has always been something of a part-time job -- when Irving Wardle stood in for Gross occasionally, the temperature, and the stakes, rose considerably.
But there have been some highly distinguished incumbents, and Gross was more than a worthy successor to Frank Marcus, Alan Brien and Francis King, all of whom were more immersed in theatre to start with than was he. And now? Let's just say he's much missed, on and off that newspaper.
(Michael Coveney is former theatre critic of the Financial Times, The Observer and The Daily Mail.)
“THEY WERE EVERY BIT AS PENETRATING AS GEORGE ORWELL’S SIMILAR LONDON LETTERS”
I.M. John Gross, 1935–2011
Remembering the life of the writer, editor & raconteur
By David Pryce-Jones
The New Criterion
February 2011
www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/I-M--John-Gross--1935-2011-6941
John Gross, who died last month at seventy-five, was an intellectual, even a highbrow, though neither word seems quite right for someone with so much humor in him, such charm, and whose social gifts were always in evidence. What with being the spare man who caught the eye of every hostess, when did he find the time to do all that reading? He appeared to know everybody and to know about everybody who was no longer alive. A name would lead to another name, a story to another story, each one a gem of gossip, irony, and quirkiness. His memory was flawless, his quotations word-perfect. For years he used to give a party in the Basil Street Hotel in Knightsbridge. He liked to call himself the Elsa Maxwell de nos jours. His guest list was so comprehensive that people mingled who normally would not have tolerated being together in the same room.
The parties, the people, and the apparent hoo-ha provided the raw material for an imagination that never rested. It is possible, though I think it unlikely, that in his inmost self John was timid, on the qui vive for fear that something nasty might be in the offing. More probably, he just agreed with Kingsley Amis’s gospel for today that change means worse: what might be intended as progress too often ends in degradation. John watched and weighed anyone who looked like provoking nastiness, above all change for the sake of change.
Temperament, then, drove him to enlist in the culture wars of the moment. The cause of these wars no doubt lies in unfathomable depths of history, empire, the death of kings, and who knows what besides. The effect is felt continuously in matters great and small. People have to adjust to the political goals on offer, to reinterpretations of the past, to the way reputations are manipulated to rise and fall, to the use and abuse of language. As a theater critic, John particularly held out against reading into plays and operas all sorts of moral or political messages at odds with the original work. I remember John asking at one point if I didn’t think that pop music was the great divide. Those born after the era of this immense novelty in taste were condemned never to understand those born before it.
John’s regular contributions to The New Criterion under the rubric “London Journal” were despatches from the front in the culture wars, and they are every bit as penetrating as George Orwell’s similar London letters to Partisan Review, written during the real war with the Germans. When Tony Blair had just become prime minister, John pointed out that he spoke of “rebranding” Britain as though dealing with a supermarket; the wider lesson was that this encouraged a people to declare war on its own culture. The bbc was also coarsening the culture, John believed, in one instance concocting the nonsense that Wordsworth knew Coleridge to be a better poet than he and had therefore pressed him to continue with drugs in order to destroy him. After 9/11, John was particularly incensed by a bbc television program on which Muslim extremists and their apologists accused the United States of bringing this outrage on itself, and his comment revealed his state of mind: “You start thinking you can’t be surprised anymore – not when it comes to left-wing opinion-makers at least – but you end up being surprised nonetheless.” Over the last twenty-five years, John often observed that nobody from the bbc had been in touch with him. Culture wars are fought in the trenches, in close combat.
John signed several of his books for me. I have a habit of stuffing correspondence from authors into their books, and a shower of postcards fell out when I went to remind myself of the books in which he had actually written his name. Most of the notes simply evoke good times: “I do hope that I didn’t outstay my welcome the other night; if I did I can only plead it was the pleasure of seeing you that kept me.” Writing from a Park Avenue apartment, he hopes we can meet in New York. For five long years, he had the Sisyphean task of reviewing two books every week for The New York Times. He seemed to manage this easily, and the goings-on of his colleagues on the paper added to his repertoire of irresistible stories. By this time, he was also a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and Commentary – in other words, he occupied a position in no-man’s land.
One postcard asks rather typically if I had read a review by a critic we both held in low esteem of a new book by a famous novelist we held in even lower esteem: “In a grim way it might amuse you.” And here’s another dated March 1981 with a portrait of Mao Tse-tung gazing with poster-like uplift into the distance. A strap across the bottom of the card reads, “Father’s Mind Was Set On A People’s Republic.” On the reverse are five printed lines all in capitals: “The Youth of Today – Narcissistic – Depraved – Dangerous. All over the World Right-thinking Folk Are Crying Out This Thing Has Gone Too Far – Our Young People Are Sick. A New Magazine Chronicles the Terrors of Teen Tyranny. Time Is Running Out – Final Days – Edited by John Stalin.” Underneath this inspired but presumably fictitious name John has simply jotted “T.L.S.” and he thanks me for a review I had just written for him of Saul Friedländer’s When Memory Comes. Now an eminent historian, Friedländer had described unforgettably what he had gone through as a child in the war, and drawn the conclusion, equally unforgettable, that Jews “obey the call of some mysterious destiny.”
John was only thirty-four when he published The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters in 1969, but the book has the scholarship and the poise of someone at the close of a long and thoughtful career. It also opened a front in the culture wars. John wrote that some English men of letters had been gifted while others were boring, but all had contributed to a literature that was a national glory. Academics with university salaries, however, had then driven them out. Critics had become either too specialized to be of interest or they were just doormen at the discotheque. Although he was cataloguing men of letters as a more or less extinct species, John chose to become that very thing himself, like a latter-day Eminent Victorian, but one who reserved the right to flick ink from the back of the classroom. At various moments in this role as man of letters, he was literary editor of The New Statesman and Melvin Lasky’s Encounter, a commissioning editor with the publishers Weidenfeld and Nicolson, and, from 1974 to 1981, the editor of The Times Literary Supplement.
The official history of the TLS compliments John for maintaining an extremely high standard of reviewing “helped by the fact that he had no difficulty in discussing almost any subject with his contributors on an equal intellectual footing.” Roger Scruton, for one, tells me that he was virtually unknown until John commissioned long articles from him. Another contributor whom he introduced was Alastair Forbes, a member of a well-connected Bostonian family. For him, writing was an affirmation of social status. In 1976, I published a biography of Unity Mitford, a young English aristocrat who managed to strike up an improbable friendship with Hitler, becoming a fanatical Nazi and anti-Semite in the process. Forbes asked to review it and then took the opportunity to attack my father, who had been the editor of the TLS from 1948–59, for his supposed personal faults. John rejected this review, whereupon Forbes retitled it “The Piece the Jews Rejected,” and personally circulated a hundred or so photocopies around London, including one to me.
For a writer, as John put it, “the fact of having been born a Jew can mean everything or nothing,” or, he adds in a rather characteristic qualification, “(more usually) something in between.” Shylock, published in 1992, was John’s first attempt to discover what being Jewish might mean for him. Shakespeare’s Jew has long been a stereotype, a villain who has become part of world mythology. The demand for a pound of flesh has provided an enduring foundation for anti-Semitism. Actors have tried to play Shylock as a comic character, or as noble, heroic, and ultimately tragic. What’s always left, though, in John’s conclusion, is “a permanent chill in the air.”
John’s memoir of his childhood and upbringing, A Double Thread: Growing Up English and Jewish in London (2001), addresses his identity as an English Jew more directly. He dedicated the book to his children, Tom and Susanna, of whom he was immensely proud. His recommendation was that everyone with these two threads in their identity should feel relaxed about it. John did not enter the sea of the Talmud, as he put it in the words of a religious dictum, but his father, a doctor, and his bookish mother gave him a sense of Judaism, of Hebrew and Yiddish. His experience was very different from Saul Friedländer’s, but he too could come to think that Jews obey the call of some mysterious destiny.
John’s upbringing was, nevertheless, overwhelmingly ordinary and English, for which he was grateful. During the World War, the family moved from the East End of London to Egham – “A Small Town in Surrey” is the title he gives to the relevant chapter. What formed him were boys’ comics, the songs of those pre-pop music years, period films, teachers in friendly schools who led him to the poetry of Eliot and Auden and the prose of James Joyce, even cricket, and not an anti-Semite or a proper Communist anywhere on the horizon. The path was short and straight to an Oxford scholarship in a college whose warden, the majestic Maurice Bowra, liked to boom to the attending world, “All my geese are swans.”
An innately modest man, John made no claims for himself. A spasm of disavowal would certainly have crossed his face on hearing that he has influenced perceptions, and will continue to do so. His anthologies, the Oxford Books of English Prose, of Comic Verse, of Essays, of Literary Anecdotes, and the Oxford Book of Parodies that came out just before his last illness, when he was still able to take pleasure in the reviews, are statements celebrating the English literary tradition, its huge range, and its civility. I seem to hear the firing of heavy artillery in the ongoing culture wars.
A CHAPTER FROM JOHN GROSS’S MEMOIR PUBLISHED IN COMMENTARY MAGAZINE
A chapter of John Gross’s childhood memoir “A Double Thread” was originally published in Commentary magazine in June 2001. Following his death, the editors of Commentary have made it accessible to non-subscribers on their website:
www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/jpodhoretz/386077
www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/growing-up-anglo-jewish-9325
After the book was highlighted in many newspapers in the last two weeks (for example, by Charles Moore on the comment pages of The Daily Telegraph last week), the British publisher, Vintage, has decided to print further copies, since the book was sold out, and say they should be available this week.
Cover of the British edition of A Double Thread
***
Growing Up Anglo-Jewish
By John Gross
Commentary magazine
June 2001
In my youth – I was born in 1935 – every self-respecting Jewish family in England had at least one Uncle Morrie. My own family was no exception, but then it would have been very surprising if it had been. We were mainstream Jews; my father, who had immigrated from Eastern Europe in 1913, when he himself was around bar-mitzvah age, was a doctor who practiced in London’s East End, the center of the city’s Jewish population before rising fortunes allowed a movement outward first to north London and then to the sunny suburban uplands of Golders Green, Hendon, and beyond.
When it came to Uncle Morries, we in fact boasted not one but three, and among them they covered a nice span of Jewish possibilities. One – he was actually a great-uncle – was a minor official of the United Synagogue, the association of Orthodox congregations in London, with a beaming countenance and a set of well-tried jocular catch-phrases: at family gatherings, there usually came a point when he would turn to the table where the food was spread out and say, “Now where are the doings?” Another, also a great-uncle, was the oldest of the family’s Communists. As a schoolboy I once tried to get a rise out of him by telling him that I had heard that there was a particularly good book about the French Revolution by Edmund Burke. He immediately shot back, “Edmund Burke called working people ‘the swinish multitude,’ and that’s all I need to know about him.” Since my own knowledge of Burke at the time was virtually nonexistent, I was completely floored.
The Uncle Morrie who meant the most to me was a real uncle, my father’s younger brother. Partly I was impressed by him because he had a striking physical presence: he was unusually tall, much taller than anyone else in the family, with a long strong face to match. He also seemed to me to have style. Possibly this did not mean much more, in my boyish view of things, than the fact that he was rumored to have always taken taxis (which I had been brought up to consider a luxury), even in the days when he couldn’t afford them, and that, by the time I knew him, he and his family lived in a smart flat near Regent’s Park. But he was undoubtedly intelligent and independent-minded as well, and he had been determined from early on to get away from the more constricting aspects of family life.
One route he took was to Anglicize himself, more than anyone else in my father’s fairly traditional family. He changed the spelling of his name to Grose, because it was more English; he sent his daughter, who was about my age, to Bedales, a boarding school in Hampshire. But at the same time he was quite assertive about being Jewish, especially in the face of rising anti-Semitism, and he also responded strongly to the attraction of Zionism. It was his Zionist impulse that eventually won out.
He was an accountant by profession, and around 1930 he had gone to Palestine to work for the Palestine Electric Corporation. The founder and manager of the corporation, Pinhas Rutenberg, was one of the most interesting personalities involved in building up the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine. An engineer, Rutenberg had also been a leading member of the Russian Socialist Revolutionary party; as a minister in the short-lived Menshevik-dominated government in 1917, he had consistently advocated taking whatever measures were needed to head off Lenin. In Palestine, Rutenberg’s work on hydroelectric power, beginning in the early 20’s, had helped to transform the economy. He developed political ambitions there, too, in which he was less successful; but my uncle greatly admired the technocratic, businesslike side of his character.
***
While in Palestine my uncle got married. His wife came from a well-known family, originally from the Polish town of Bialystok, and considerably higher up the social scale than ours, as we were more than once reminded. She was a trim, petite woman; my uncle towered over her, and I am told that in the early days of their marriage they were known as the lulav and the esrog (the tall palm branch and the small citron carried by Jews on the festival of Tabernacles).
Toward the end of the 30’s Morrie returned to London with his family. I didn’t see much of them on account of the war, and after the war they went back to what was soon to be the state of Israel. My uncle did not have any links with the Labor party, which was the dominant force in Israeli politics at the time, but he eventually found a niche as secretary of the Chamber of Commerce in Haifa. When I stayed with him on my first visit to Israel, in 1953, he seemed to be engaged in daily battles with the leader of the local dock-workers’ union. He was also ill, and he died a few years later, still in his forties.
My father was fond of him. So was my mother; and they both respected him. We were close, in other words, to someone who had chosen to live his life in Israel. Did it not follow that we felt close to Israel itself? Would we not have felt close to it anyway?
These are questions I find it impossible to answer with a straight yes or no. As a Jewish enterprise, the Yishuv was something my family had long wished well. As a refuge for Jewish victims of persecution, it was something they had naturally supported. The Jewish resettlement of Palestine had been brought home to them in many different ways, both private and public. But it had never been a central part of their existence: they certainly were not anti-Zionist, but they were not Zionists, either.
That much is what I was told, or what I deduced. By the time I had a clearer picture of what was happening, after 1946 or so, their attitude had begun to change. The period leading up to the establishment of Israel brought new emotions into play – anxiety, anger, admiration – or at any rate greatly heightened old ones. These feelings were inevitably colored by the revelations, still very recent, of what had happened during the war; the whole situation was also rendered more painful by what everyone perceived as the clear pro-Arab, anti-Jewish bias of the British government under Clement Attlee. The role played by the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, was particularly troublesome.
Under other circumstances, Bevin would have been a hero to many Jews – for his achievements as minister of labor during the war, and indeed for his general performance as foreign secretary. As it was, however, nothing did more to produce a closing of ranks than his notorious remark that “Jews must not try to get to the head of the queue.” He was talking about restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine. Not only was the remark made in the context of concentration-camp survivors and displaced persons; it was also, so to speak, unnecessary. Realpolitik alone would not have dictated it; indeed, realpolitik left to itself would probably have shed a few crocodile tears. It felt like an emanation of pure prejudice.
When Israel became an independent state in May 1948, we joined in the general rejoicing. (In a fairly sedate fashion, however: Lou and Harry, the boys next door, stayed up most of the night celebrating with friends; we went over to have a drink with them.) Immediately after that, euphoria gave way to apprehension about the outcome of the Arab-Israeli war; and after that, there were excitements, good moments, bad moments, and readjustments. For a year or two, the sense of sheer novelty was still strong. I can recall the thrill we got from driving over to see the building that housed the first Israeli embassy, hard by the Wallace Collection in Manchester Square. Everyone was proud, too, that the first ambassador, Mordecai Eliash, was both distinguished and distinguished-looking. And then, Jews being Jews, there were the inevitable jokes. I quote one, purely for its period flavor: “A miracle! For the first time in 2000 years, Jews are driving their own trains!”
Israel was now a fact of life (except for those who wanted to destroy it). For Jews, or most Jews, it was a large fact. Before Israel became a state, my parents had not, as far as I know, contributed to the Jewish National Fund. They now made an annual donation to its much more streamlined fund-raising successor. Yet the change was only relative. For all its importance, Israel was not at the heart of their concerns, any more than the Yishuv had been. They never saw their future, or that of their children, as lying anywhere but in England.
My own enthusiasm for the new state was stronger than theirs. I was young, I was under the influence of contemporaries, I wanted to see the country for myself. I sometimes wondered, too, about going to live there. But only fitfully; and when I encountered genuine, 100-percent Zionists – people who had settled in Israel, or were planning to – I often found myself backing away from their rigidity and dogmatism, from the demands they laid on me as a potential recruit. I was even slightly put out by the fact that the textbook from which I tried, not very successfully, to learn modern Hebrew was called Hebrew for All in English, but Ivri, I’mad ivrit! – “Hebrew, Learn Hebrew!,” which sounded so very much more peremptory – in Hebrew itself. (The author of the book, who ran a couple of summer schools I attended, was anything but peremptory in person. He was an affable Scottish schoolteacher with a strong Glaswegian accent and a fondness for the essays of Charles Lamb.)
At the same time, I recognized that states are only likely to be built by men and women who make hard demands, both on themselves and on others; and I was equally troubled by the apparently iron logic of Arthur Koestler, who began arguing in this period that, now that Jews had their own state, they were faced with a simple choice. If they wanted to remain Jews, they should go to Israel; otherwise they should forget the whole thing. The only reply I could think of was that life wasn’t like that, that people are inconsistent. And so it has proved in the case of Israel and the Jews. But I must admit that Koestler’s argument can still ruffle me. At the Passover service, which ends with the prayer “Next year in Jerusalem,” I have sometimes imagined his ghost looking down and asking, “Why pray, when you can buy a ticket from El Al?”
My first visit to Israel took place, as I have said, in 1953, when I was eighteen. My parents saw me off at the station (in those days, you went by train and boat), and just before we said goodbye I had the distinct impression that my father wanted to say to me, “Don’t stay there. Be sure to come back.” In the event, he need not have worried. The visit was a success. My commitment to Israel was strengthened. I met some admirable people, and had some stirring experiences. But I came back.
***
The troubles in Palestine produced smaller troubles in Britain. Much smaller, but disagreeable enough.
I remember all too clearly one summer morning in 1947, when I was twelve, picking up the morning paper and seeing a picture on the front page of two British sergeants who had been hanged in an orange grove by the Irgun, the armed underground organization led by Menachem Begin, as a reprisal for the execution of three of its members. That episode provoked several days of anti-Jewish disturbances in London and the provinces. And there were lesser incidents that still sowed ample ill feeling, such as the notorious statement by the pro-Irgun Hollywood writer Ben Hecht that every time a British soldier was killed in Palestine there was a-song in his heart. (“What made him say it?” my father wanted to know. “What good did he think it would do?”)
Those were difficult times for British Jews. The great majority of them condemned the killing of the sergeants. Most of them, if pressed, would have agreed that an angry public reaction was inevitable, that it would have been inevitable anywhere. But in practice it was often hard to say where inevitable outrage ended and anti-Semitism began. Feelings were tense. Hostility came out into the open.
I can recall witnessing one incident myself. A few of us were fooling around on the edge of a playing field. There had been some talk about Palestine; then a non-Jewish boy suddenly pinned a Jewish boy down and said to him, “You killed Christ.” It was the first time I had heard those words uttered, and I was not so much afraid – the victim threw off his tormentor, and there was no further rough-housing – as incredulous. (The scholar Erich Heller, who was much more genial in person than one might suppose from reading such austere books as The Disinherited Mind, once told me that when he first heard those same words, as a schoolboy in Central Europe, he wanted to reply, “No, it wasn’t me, it was the Cohen boys down the road.”)
Anti-Jewish feeling specifically associated with the Palestine issue gradually subsided, even if it did not entirely disappear, and by the 1950’s the climate was very different. Nor, for all its unpleasantness, did it seriously hamper the social and economic advances that were being made by English Jews during the same period. And anti-Semitism in general, as a new postwar generation came forward, was also in decline.
In my own case, it had never been a practical problem. But alongside any direct experience – or non-experience – of anti-Semitism, there was also the knowledge that it existed. That knowledge had inevitably taken on a darker aspect since the war, so much so that I felt it important not to go too far, not to equate minor anti-Semitism (the golf-club variety) with major anti-Semitism. But neither could the two be altogether divorced.
Meanwhile, pockets of vicious prejudice were still apparent, above all with the postwar revival of the fascist movement led by Oswald Mosley. One of our routes to north London from the East End for weekend family visits took us past Ridley Road in Dalston – famous for its big street market, which was heavily Jewish but also a site much favored by fascists for their open-air meetings and the scene of frequent pitched battles when those meetings were disrupted by Jewish ex-servicemen who had joined together in a militant defense unit known as the 43 Group. We would make a small detour on our journeys through the area if there was any hint of trouble, or if we saw police vans waiting in the side streets; but one drizzly Sunday we found ourselves held up while a fascist parade marched by with an escort of mounted police. There was that jolt you always get when you see something nasty for the first time, however many times you may have heard about it. Perhaps seeing is the only form of completely believing.
Ugly though the postwar Mosleyites were, and frightening though individual fascists could be face to face, collectively they represented less a threat than a reminder: of what had happened in Nazi-occupied Europe, of what could have happened in Britain, of how things had looked before the war. In retrospect, it can be seen that the danger posed by Mosley in the 1930’s, of which I had heard a good deal, was itself exaggerated: his fortunes had been in decline by 1937 or 1938. But that retrospect is supplied by the outcome of the war. At the time, the essential menace of the British Union of Fascists had been the reflected menace of Hitler. It was not so much a matter of votes, of which Mosley never got many, as of the fact that he was part of an international pattern, and the fear that he might be riding the wave of history. After 1945, however, he was on his own, and by the end of the 40’s, with his revived movement fizzling out, he was a back number.
Around that time – 1950 is as close a date as I can get – I had a little reminder that, Mosley or no, pathological anti-Semitism lived on. The family had been spending the afternoon in Kensington Gardens. My father and I had gone for a stroll, and we sat down for a moment on a bench when a couple came and sat beside us. He was a small man with a slightly grubby and indefinably unwholesome look – the kind of man who even in those innocent days would probably have been turned down on sight if he had tried to become a scoutmaster. His wife (as I assume she was) seemed a mere mouse. Almost at once they started having a violently anti-Semitic conversation, with the man doing most of the talking and the woman egging him on. It went on for about a minute – we were transfixed – until he said, “I think they should all be towed out to sea in a ship and drowned.” Then we got up and walked away.
I was so naïve, or possibly so reluctant to face the truth, that it was a long while before I realized that the couple had obviously spotted us as Jews, and that the conversation had been conducted specifically for our benefit. What I did find myself wondering, immediately afterward, was why we had not said anything, and why I would not have been ready to hit the man if he had replied with fresh abuse. It would not have taken much courage: he was a puny specimen. Had my father and I, for a minute, assumed the role of passive victims? I felt renewed admiration for the tough tactics of the 43 Group.
One could argue, I suppose, that the couple were too feeble to be worth bothering about. But no doubt many Nazis would have looked similarly feeble if Hitler had not given them their chance. The old poison was still there. One could only hope that it would never again be put to use.
***
Jews growing up in England after the war (not all of them, I need hardly say) felt under a strong obligation to affirm their Jewishness. Attempting to deny it seemed peculiarly base. I recall a friend, in most respects highly susceptible to the charms of assimilation, saying to me, “I don’t want to be the one in whom the whole thing ends.” Not that it would have, whatever he had done; but putting the matter that way was an oblique statement of solidarity.
In my own case, a sense of solidarity helped to sustain my religious beliefs in the face of adolescent wavering. But my doubts did not go away, and one incident in particular helped to underline them as nothing quite had before.
Among the family members left behind in Poland after my father and grandparents left in 1913 there was a cousin, about ten years younger than he, called Moishe Roitenburg. By the time I first heard of him he was Maurice, pronounced in the French fashion (and hence not to be claimed as another Morrie). Unable to fulfill his ambition of becoming a doctor in Poland, he had studied in France and stayed on there after gaining his degree. For a time, I believe, he worked for a miners’ union, treating industrial diseases. In 1934, when my parents went to Paris on their honeymoon, he had shown them around, and after the war he had re-established contact. During the Nazi occupation he had inevitably been in deadly danger; juif was bad enough, juif polonais was worse. Initially he had gone into hiding in the woods, but after that he had been protected by French colleagues. He was now married to a non-Jewish girl, and working at a hospital at Evreux, in Normandy.
On our first postwar visit to Paris, in 1949, he came up from Evreux to have lunch with us. To my inexperienced eyes, he looked very French, but that was probably on account of the thick black frames of his glasses and the cut of his suit. Before lunch, my father made it clear that we still observed kashrut, the dietary laws; Maurice may have made it clear in turn (I’m not sure) that he did not. At the restaurant, he took charge of the menu. He first ordered the omelettes or fish that we had dutifully asked for, and then added with a flourish, “Et pour moi, veau au pot” (“and for me, the braised veal”).
The moment passed without comment, and I didn’t think there was going to be any fallout. But when Maurice left and we returned to our hotel, my father was furious. Not only that: his features assumed a jeering expression I had never seen before, and he repeated two or three times, in an attempt at mimicry, “Et pour moi, veau au pot; et pour moi, veau au pot.” I kept quiet, which is just as well, because I found his reaction detestable. To get so worked up over such a small thing! To make no allowance for what Maurice had gone through during the war! And wasn’t the whole Jewish taboo over food childish and primitive anyway?
Today, it seems to me that both men must have been under pressures I can only guess at. Maurice, after all, struck me as amiable and polite, not someone who would normally have been indifferent to causing offense. And even at the time I had to concede, on reflection, that my father, given how angry he was, had actually shown considerable restraint: things would have been much worse if he had said anything while Maurice was still there. I calmed down, and detestation faded. But distaste remained.
***
My father once said to me that no virtue was more important than tolerance. The remark hadn’t impressed me quite as much as it should have; I could not help reflecting that tolerance was something in which Jews had a vested interest. What did impress me, however, living with him and observing him, was the extent to which he lived up to his watchword in practice. He was patient, forbearing, and slow to condemn. He got on with people; he took it for granted that we had to live in a world where there were, in the great phrase, “all sorts and conditions of men.” Even in matters of religion, he was often prepared to relax the rules. But religion was also his sticking point. Every so often he would take a stand which was not only unyielding but, from my point of view, unreasonable as well.
I think there was another, unspoken issue lurking behind the veau au pot incident: the question of intermarriage. Part of my own heated reaction may well have been the result of picturing myself in a similar situation. I dreaded the explosion there would be if one day I were to announce that I was marrying someone who wasn’t Jewish. And although my guess is that my parents would eventually have come around (my mother much more readily than my father), there would still have been enormous distress – and embarrassments and long boring arguments, too. But I also knew, without quite wanting to spell it out to myself, that if the problem ever arose I would follow my own path.
The meeting with Maurice was an undoubted milestone, but it would be quite misleading to portray my adolescence as one long process of emancipation from religion. My inner feelings fluctuated; my outward commitment became, if anything, more obvious. As my circle of Jewish friends widened, I spent more time with people who simply took the main framework of Jewish communal life for granted. In particular, I was introduced to a small youth movement, the Study Groups, which suited my needs very well for a year or two. It was religious, in moderation; it encouraged an interest in Israel without being burdened with an ideology. And it was fun. A good deal of our energy went into writing skits and comic songs. One number, which I thought and still think was brilliant of its kind, was a parody of a hit French song of the period, “Les trois cloches” (“The Three Bells”). It recounted the rise of an alrightnik who began life as little Moishele, transmuted himself into Maurice Conway, and ended up in full splendor as Sir Maurice Conway-Ferguson. We performed it, along with some other songs, at a student concert in Israel in 1953, and were warmly received – with one conspicuous exception. The guest of honor, Golda Meir (then a cabinet minister), sat stony-faced throughout. She was not amused.
Much of my continuing readiness to believe, and to pray, was based on loyalty – loyalty to the “little platoon” into which I had been born, and to the larger tradition of which it constituted a tiny part. But religion retained my allegiance on broader grounds, too. To put it minimally, I did not think that terms like soul, spirit, and holiness were meaningless words. It seemed to me that without the realm of religious experience, life would be a thinner and poorer thing, and that it supplied the poetry of collective existence, as rationalism never could. Thomas Gray had written “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”; nobody had yet written “Elegy in a Country Crematorium.”
These were arguments, or promptings, in favor of religion in general, rather than of any one religion. But religion in general was nowhere to be found. There were only religions; and although in principle, in an open society, one was free to choose among them, in practice one’s choice had been made by history, including personal history. (I might add that history had also instilled in me a tenderness toward the Church of England – toward its liturgy and literature and traditions rather than its actual creed. The decline of the Church in recent years has saddened me, although I suppose a believer might say that I am confusing religious judgments with cultural or aesthetic ones.)
Meanwhile, the forces tugging me toward unbelief remained strong. I was never much drawn to philosophy, but when I was, it was the hard reasoners who attracted me rather than the pseudotheologians; one of the few philosophers I could read for pleasure was David Hume. Had I known it then, I would have been struck by the truth of Heine’s observation that as soon as religion solicits the aid of philosophy, it is doomed.
Not that this was the end of the matter; there are more things in heaven and earth, etc. Religion was about faith rather than reason, and there was even a perverse satisfaction in yielding to its unreasonableness. I was thrilled, at the age of fifteen or so, when I first came across Tertullian’s credo quia impossible, “I believe because it is impossible.” But my enthusiasm soon cooled. I didn’t have the temperament to subsist on a diet of impossibility for very long.
In the end, here as in other respects, I wanted the best of both worlds. “Ambiguity” became a blessed word; the fact that so many things contained their opposite was on the whole a comfort. I could have said, with the literary critic Cyril Connolly, that I believed in “the Either, the Or, and the Holy Both.” In the real world, however, I edged away from both prayer and observance, giving up my own final food taboos on that first trip to Israel – in Jerusalem, no less.
But there were still limits. To have made a clean break with Judaism would have felt like making a clean break with myself. Wavering became a way of life, and by the age of eighteen I had settled, or seemed to have settled, for a world of token observance and demi-semi-belief.
***
My father died in 1960, when I was twenty-five. He had had a coronary – in those days almost an occupational disease of general practitioners – two years before, and his smoking can’t have helped. The second time around, he took to his bed for a week or so. Then, when he felt worse, he went into the London Hospital, a grim-looking building in Whitechapel where so many of his patients had been sent in their time.
During the last few days at home he managed to read a little. There were two books by his bedside. One was an account of the younger years of Lord Melbourne, the early-19th-century statesman and prime minister. (What would they have made of that in Gorokhov, the little town in Volhynia where he was born?) “He writes beautifully,” he said of the author, David Cecil. The other was A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, the anthology edited by Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, which I had brought back for him from America. He read a story by the poet Chaim Grade in which the central character is a follower of the religious movement known as Musar, and it set him reminiscing. Only briefly; he is tired. But he spoke for a moment or two about the founder of the movement, the 19th-century rabbi Israel Salanter, and of the emphasis the Musarists put on morality – on self-examination and good deeds.
In the hospital he was much weaker, and often in pain. The last conversation we had, as opposed to exchanging a few words, was about Khrushchev, Eisenhower, and the shooting down of America’s U-2 spy plane, which had just taken place: he was worried about the consequences. (“They wouldn’t be mad enough to start a war?”) A day or two later, the young doctor who came out from behind the screen around his bed did not really have to say anything: we could read the bad news in his face.
Of the funeral that followed, I remember very little: it was simply something to be gotten through. One incident does stand out, though. On the way back from the cemetery someone introduced me to a small, smiling old woman, and told me that she had been my father’s wet nurse. It seemed incredible, a visitation from a world impossibly remote. But later I reflected that she need not have been more than eighty, and could even have been a year or two younger.
Afterward we “sat shivah,” observing the traditional seven days of mourning, while relatives and friends visited us at home. In some ways I found this a strain. Reciting kaddish, the mourner’s prayer, seemed profoundly right. So did keeping a memorial candle lit for the full seven days. But an elderly relative (not even a close one) had taken charge of the proceedings and insisted we cover the mirrors, which as far as I was concerned introduced a note of spooky superstition; and some of the conversations I was obliged to have with our visitors were either tedious or tense. There were also – a relief, under the circumstances – a few moments of farce. We were presented with a large number of well meant but unwanted gifts, mostly boxes of chocolates, including two containing a brand called Good News.
Work provided a distraction, too. In principle I should have abstained from it; but I had recently begun writing a monthly feature about paperbacks for the Times Literary Supplement, and the next one was due. So every so often I slipped upstairs and banged away at my typewriter, and when the piece was ready I took it around to the TLS by hand. In accordance with the ritual laws of mourning I had stopped shaving, and I showed up at the office with a four-day growth of beard. Today, it would probably be taken for designer stubble, and pass unremarked, but in 1960 I felt I had to explain why.
Some months later we assembled for the consecration of the tombstone. The inscription I had chosen, a verse from the book of Psalms, testified to my father’s upright character. And after that, it was more than 20 years before I saw the cemetery again. When I did, many newer graves had naturally been added. One that caught my eye was that of the East End boxer, Kid Lewis: the inscription on the memorial stone said that he had “taken the count” on such and such a day in 1971. My father’s memorial stone was nearby. It had begun to weather.
Further tributes to John Gross can be read here:
* A wonderful father (Jan. 12, 2011)
* “The Gentleman of Letters” (Jan. 16, 2011)
* “The Pleasure of His Company” (Jan. 23, 2011)
* “Remembering John Gross: friendship flooded the RIBA” (March 25, 2011)
* John Gross’s friends remember him in London and New York (Jan. 10, 2012)
* John Gross on the silver screen (Jan. 10, 2012)
* Jackson Diehl in The Washington Post: What’s sensational about the leaked documents is the way they are being marketed by Al-Jazeera and The Guardian, and these news organizations’ “gross distortions” of the truth. The leak of the documents seems motivated by a desire to bury the already moribund peace process.
* Now, thanks to Al-Jazeera and The Guardian, Palestinian leaders will have to retreat even further from compromise.
* Aaron David Miller: Can the Mideast peace process survive the release of secret Palestinian papers?
* Blake Hounshell, managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine, has suggested that Jan. 23, 2011, be marked as the day “the two-state solution died.”
* Elliott Abrams: As events in Lebanon and elsewhere show, the influence of the United States in the Middle East is declining while that of Iran is rising.
* David Pryce-Jones: “Tunisia is a copybook example of the structural fault of dictatorships, namely that change is impossible without violence. The system of one-man rule has a horrible self-perpetuating vitality, and whoever can devise a peaceful way to be rid of it deserves the Nobel Prize.”
* Lee Smith: “There is a reason why a famous Arab dictum has it that 100 years of tyranny is preferable to one day of chaos. It is meant to remind us of the nature of man, the political animal, who cannot foresee the consequences of his actions.”
CONTENTS
1. In a land of conspiracy theories, it’s the perception that counts
2. A day in the life of The Guardian
3. “The selling of the ‘Palestine Papers’” (By Jackson Diehl, Washington Post, Jan. 25, 2011)
4. “Death by a thousand leaks” (By Aaron David Miller, Los Angeles Times, Jan. 26, 2011)
5. “Will leaks end Mideast peace process?” (By David Frum, CNN, Jan. 24, 2011)
6. “The ‘Resistance’ in Lebanon” (By Elliott Abrams, Pressure Points, Jan. 25, 2011)
7. “Tunisia, put in perspective” (By David Pryce-Jones, National Review, Jan. 19, 2011)
8. “False Accounting” (By Lee Smith, Tablet magazine, Jan 19, 2011)
IN A LAND OF CONSPIRACY THEORIES, IT’S THE PERCEPTION THAT COUNTS
[Note by Tom Gross]
I attach six articles dealing with ongoing events in the Middle East, namely the release of the so-called “Palestine papers,” the revolution in Tunisia, and current unrest in Egypt and Lebanon.
It should be noted that many respected Mideast experts have serious doubts about the authenticity of The Guardian and Al-Jazeera’s leaked “Palestine papers”, and some have suggested that the media may be being fooled in the same way they were in various notorious cases in the past. For example, Prof. Barry Rubin says it reminds him of the way major news media were taken in by the forged Hitler Diaries in the 1980s. He points out that people should bear in mind that Palestinian propagandists have fooled the Western media many times in the past (the Jenin massacre, the Gaza beach massacre that wasn’t, the case of Muhammad al-Dura, and so on).
But even if the “Palestine Papers” are in whole or part a forgery, it may not matter. What matters on the so-called “Arab street” are perceptions of truth, and it seems many believe these documents to be authentic.
Some may find amusing Al-Jazeera’s video reenactment of the negotiations, using actors to play Palestinians and Israelis, including former Israeli foreign minister (and now opposition leader) Tzipi Livni:
http://english.aljazeera.net/palestinepapers/2011/01/2011122112512844113.html
A DAY IN THE LIFE OF THE GUARDIAN
Yesterday, The Guardian (international edition) devoted 80 percent of its front page and ALL of pages 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 to the “Palestine Papers”. This was then followed by a comment piece on the subject which dominated Page 24, a cartoon mocking Palestinian moderate leaders which took up almost half of Page 25, a top-of-the page editorial (for the second day in a row) critiquing Israel and moderate Palestinians on Page 26, and letters on the subject taking up almost half the letters page on Page 27.
The articles were full of spin and misinformation of every kind (and were accompanied by huge out-of-date photos completely distorting what Palestinian life is like today). No doubt all this will give solace to Hamas and other opponents of a two-state solution and of Middle East peace. (Guardian readers yesterday would hardly have known that there had been a huge suicide bomb attack in Moscow airport the day before in which a British man was among the 34 dead.)
While The Guardian may not be everyone’s first morning read in Britain, it is overwhelmingly the paper of choice for educators and BBC news staff. It therefore has influence far beyond its immediate readership, since academics and BBC News correspondents and anchors often gullibly repeat The Guardian’s spin.
Even a leading Washington Post editor yesterday noted The Guardian’s “gross distortions” of the truth.
Today, The Guardian gives a prominent platform on its comment page to a representative of Hamas – the militant, suicide bomb-supporting organization whose charter incorporates the anti-Semitic lies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and which aims to roll back any advances for women, and to do away with homosexuals, Jews and Palestinian Christians.
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All the writers of the six pieces below – Washington Post deputy comment editor Jackson Diehl, former Clinton and Bush administration Mideast peace negotiator Aaron David Miller, CNN contributor and former U.S. presidential speechwriter David Frum, former Deputy U.S. National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams, leading British author and Mideast expert David Pryce-Jones, and American writer Lee Smith – are subscribers to this email list.
-- Tom Gross
FULL ARTICLES
NOW, THANKS TO AL JAZEERA AND THE GUARDIAN, PALESTINIAN LEADERS WILL HAVE TO RETREAT EVEN FURTHER FROM COMPROMISE
The selling of the ‘Palestine Papers’
By Jackson Diehl
The Washington Post
January 25, 2011
voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2011/01/the_selling_of_the_palestine_p.html
Anyone familiar with Israeli-Palestinian negotiations over the last decade will find nothing surprising about the supposed revelations in the “Palestine papers” published this week by the Qatar-based Al Jazeera and Britain’s Guardian newspaper. Since at least the time of the 2000 Camp David talks brokered by President Bill Clinton, Palestinian leaders have accepted that Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem will be annexed by Israel in a two-state settlement, and that only a handful of Palestinian refugees will “return” to the Jewish state – the leading “news” reported so far.
What’s sensational about the leaked documents, which appear to come from advisors to the Palestinian negotiating team, is the way they are being marketed by the two news organizations – and how Palestinians are reacting to them. According to Al Jazeera, the negotiating positions on Jerusalem and refugees are shocking betrayals of the Palestinian cause, if not the Arab world as a whole. For the Guardian, they demonstrate the intransigence and the perfidy of Israel and the United States – for supposedly failing to embrace such far-reaching concessions.
“PA selling short the refugees,” Al Jazeera announced Tuesday on its English-language website, referring to the Palestinian authority of Mahmoud Abbas. “Barack Obama lifts then crushes Palestinian peace hopes,” proclaimed The Guardian.
These are gross distortions. Not only have the reported Palestinian compromise positions been widely (if quietly) accepted by Arab governments, they were broadcast years ago in the Geneva Accord, a model agreement between Israeli and Palestinian leaders that was endorsed by Abbas, among others. Israel, for its part, responded with far-reaching compromises of its own: Prime Minister Ehud Olmert offered Abbas a Palestinian state with sovereignty over Jerusalem and all but six percent of The West Bank. It was Abbas, not Olmert, who refused to go forward during those 2008 talks.
The leak of the documents seems motivated by a desire to bury the already moribund peace process. “Al Jazeera is trying to destroy Abbas, and the Guardian wants to get Netanyahu,” an Israeli official observes. They may well succeed, at least in the case of the aging and weak Palestinian president. Palestinian negotiators have felt obliged to deny and repudiate the reported concessions, even as they are denounced by their hard-line rivals in the Hamas movement.
Of course, the Palestinians helped to create their predicament. For years they have systematically failed to prepare their public opinion for the concessions that will have to be part of any two-state settlement. Is it really conceivable that Israel would or could tear down East Jerusalem neighborhoods where 190,000 of its citizens now live, or allow hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees to move inside its pre-1967 borders? No one seriously engaged in Middle East diplomacy – American, Arab or European – thinks so. But that has never been explained to most Palestinians.
In fact, Abbas and his Palestinian team are currently refusing to negotiate with Netanyahu in part because he has refused to freeze construction in East Jerusalem Jewish neighborhoods – the same neighborhoods that the Palestinians have agreed that Israel will keep.
The sad irony is that if the Palestinian papers reveal anything, it is the yawning gap that continues to exist between the most generous Israeli and Palestinian offers. While accepting the inevitability of Israeli annexation in Jerusalem, the Palestinians are shown to reject the transfer to Israel of several of the largest West Bank settlements – including Maale Adumin, a development that Abbas conceded to Israel in the Geneva Initiative. As a simple matter of practicality, it’s difficult to imagine Israel evacuating a town that lies just outside Jerusalem and contains 35,000 people.
Abbas’s number for returning refugees – 100,000 over ten years – was ten times higher than that of Olmert. Meanwhile both Netanyahu and principal Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni oppose any return of refugees.
Now, thanks to Al Jazeera and the Guardian, Palestinians are retreating even from their not-good-enough ideas. Far from coming under pressure to make new concessions, Netanyahu and his right-wing government can relax in the knowledge that the peace process is going backward. Leaks of documents are supposed to provide clarity. The Palestine papers have merely muddied the diplomatic waters.
“SOMEBODY UP THERE MUST REALLY HATE THE ARAB-ISRAELI PEACE PROCESS”
Death by a thousand leaks
Can the Mideast peace process survive the release of secret Palestinian papers?
By Aaron David Miller
Los Angeles Times (Op-Ed page)
January 26, 2011
Somebody up there must really hate the Arab-Israeli peace process. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, that the odds against serious negotiations couldn’t get any longer and the hope for a two-state solution couldn’t be more forlorn, we now have the Palestinian version of WikiLeaks.
The documents obtained and released this week by Al Jazeera – assuming their authenticity – don’t mean the end of the peace process (that never ends). But the revelations are deeply embarrassing to the Palestinian Authority and will put a chill on pragmatism and creativity for a while. More important, the episode reflects some serious underlying problems with the negotiating process, which will make quick or easy progress unlikely anytime soon.
First, a little reality therapy. Anyone who has seriously followed the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations for at least the last decade would not have been surprised by the positions ascribed to the Palestinians: willingness to recognize Israeli sovereignty over disputed neighborhoods/settlements in East Jerusalem; territorial swaps; limits on the number of returning refugees. They have been in the public domain in one form or another since the Camp David summit of July 2000.
Revealing them in “official documents” clearly puts them in a different light. But anybody who has been really paying attention would never conclude that the Palestinian Authority’s negotiators suddenly decided to sell out the Palestinian patrimony or betray Palestinian national aspirations. The Palestinian positions contained in these documents constitute the public parameters within which mainstream Israelis, Palestinians and American negotiators have been operating.
Then there is the question of what these positions really represent. At no point in the last 10 years have Israelis and Palestinians been close to an agreement. The documents reflect a particularly fertile period of exchanges between Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas and then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. But no agreement was reached, nor were any authoritative conclusions that bound either Israel or the Palestinian Authority, or for that matter the United States.
Indeed, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators live and die by the “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed” rule. That enables a negotiator to probe, offer up all kinds of positions and trial balloons, and to look for flexibility by demonstrating your own. All of this can occur without committing yourself to positions locked into concrete. Nobody was selling the farm or giving away the store. They were negotiating.
The timing of the leaks also has to be considered in judging the reaction to them. Had these leaks occurred when the situation was more hopeful, it would have been much less of a story. If Israelis and Palestinians were closer to announcing agreement that East Jerusalem would be the capital of the new Palestinian state, for example, the fact that Palestinians had agreed to allow the Israelis sovereignty over certain areas would have been far less controversial. Despair and hopelessness fills the air these days, and the leakers took advantage of that.
Unfortunately, we live in a world – and not just in the dysfunctional Middle East – in which perception is reality. These documents – and any that follow, particularly if they highlight anything that looks like collusion between Israel and the Palestinian Authority – will damage Abbas’ credibility and buck up his internal opposition and Hamas.
The leaks also point out several serious problems in the negotiations.
First, there’s no doubt that the gap is large between what Palestinian Authority negotiators purportedly were offering and what is acceptable on the Palestinian street and according to its narrative. The differences are not only between Israel and the Palestinian Authority but among Palestinians. The fact that the Palestinians today are like Noah’s Ark, with two of everything – two polities (Gaza and the West Bank), two security services, two sets of funders – is part of the problem. But the main issue is that neither the Palestinian Authority nor the government of Israel has done nearly enough to condition their respective publics about the tough choices that need to be made if an agreement is to be reached.
Second, this isn’t just a Palestinian story. The documents don’t really reveal much about the Israeli positions on core issues. We know that Olmert was prepared to go further than any of his predecessors on all of these issues. But the storyline that is left is that the Israelis offered nothing in return on the key issues. And the logic of the moment would seem to argue: If the Palestinians were so flexible, why didn’t you grab the deal? You really do have a Palestinian partner. As harmful as these leaks are to Palestinians, the Israelis don’t look very good either.
Finally, these revelations are bound to have a chilling effect on a process already in the deep freeze. Palestinians will be looking over their shoulder before they risk additional creative, clever or pragmatic compromises. And the Obama administration is going to have an even tougher time extracting much flexibility from either side.
An Israeli negotiator once told me that you could be dead, or dead and buried. The peace process is just dead. It will be back with another life, but the complications in the wake of these leaks don’t suggest a lot of confidence that that life will be a long or robust one.
FROM THE OUTSIDE, THIS PALESTINIAN BEHAVIOR LOOKS UTTERLY IRRATIONAL
Will leaks end Mideast peace process?
By David Frum, CNN Contributor
January 24, 2011
www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/01/24/frum.mideast.papers/index.html?hpt=T2
Washington (CNN) -- It’s being called a Palestinian Wikileaks: a dump of 1,600 Palestinian Authority documents to Al-Jazeera and the British newspaper The Guardian.
The first releases reveal Palestinian negotiating concessions. Later releases will (the Guardian claims) detail the extent of Israeli-Palestinian Authority security cooperation.
In the words of a Guardian columnist today:
“Who will be most damaged by this extraordinary glimpse into the reality of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process? Perhaps the first casualty will be Palestinian national pride, their collective sense of dignity in adversity badly wounded by the papers revealed today.
“Many on the Palestinian streets will recoil to read not just the concessions offered by their representatives – starting with the yielding of those parts of East Jerusalem settled by Israeli Jews – but the language in which those concessions were made.”
More bluntly, Blake Hounshell, managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine, has suggested that January 23, 2011, be marked as the day “the two-state solution died.”
Yet very arguably, the real news about the documents is that there is no news.
Former Palestinian Liberation Organization representative Karma Nabulsi writes on the Guardian’s website, “had such deals eventually come to light, Palestinians would have rejected them comprehensively.” Nabulsi is almost certainly correct, and that is the tragedy of the story.
When American officials think about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, they see a simple solution:
Divide the country along the 1967 armistice lines. The Palestinians get the West Bank and Gaza. Israel gets Israel. Jerusalem is shared somehow. The Palestinian state is disarmed, so that Israel gets security. The international community is mobilized, so that the Palestinians get money.
That rough sketch leaves aside many important technical details – water rights, for example – but basically, it’s the answer that every American president since Jimmy Carter has carried in his head.
This answer seems so compelling to Americans that you’ll often hear U.S. experts on the issue say, “Everybody knows what the answer has to be.”
“Everybody knows”? Not so fast.
The Palestinian leaks show the Palestinian Authority leadership trying to work their way to the answer that “everybody knows.”
But the secrecy surrounding the documents – and the reaction to the leak – confirms the Israelis’ worst fear: The Palestinian population does not, in fact, “know” what “everybody knows.” And a Palestinian leadership that did “know” what “everybody knows” is now being reviled by its own population as traitors and sell-outs.
What, after all, are the big, shameful concessions contained in the documents? Where are the wounds to Palestinian national pride?
• The documents as reported demand Palestinian sovereignty over almost all of historic Jerusalem, including the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism.
• The documents demand Palestinian control of lands equal in territory to the 1967 lands. Any border adjustment to reflect Israeli settlement activity would have to be balanced by an equivalent surrender of Israeli land to the new Palestinian state.
• Even after the Palestinians get their state on the other side of the 1967 line, the documents demand some kind of recognition of a Palestinian right to “return” to the Israeli side of the line. At one point, the documents suggest that the Israelis be required to resettle 100,000 Palestinians inside Israel.
If these ideas had been accepted as the basis of a final treaty between Israel and Palestine, every Middle East expert in Washington would have agreed that the Palestinians had done very, very, very well for themselves.
And yet, it never happened. It did not happen in very large part for exactly the reason now confessed by angry Palestinians themselves: because the actual demands of the Palestinian population are so much greater than any diplomat can gain.
Americans tend not to take very seriously the idea of a Palestinian “right of return”: a right to move back to Israel even after the creation of a Palestinian state. Americans think, once you have your own state, how are you entitled to the other guy’s state, too?
Yet it turns out that this claim that seems so outrageous to many Americans is indispensable to Palestinians and their supporters in the Middle East.
Likewise, Americans tend to assume that any deal should include Jewish sovereignty over the Jewish holy sites in Jerusalem. Yet this too seems radically unacceptable to Palestinians and their supporters, who envision Palestinian control over almost all of historic and spiritual Jerusalem.
The leaked documents take large steps toward recognizing reality as Americans see it. Yet these steps had to remain a desperately guarded secret for exactly the reason we are seeing now: If a Palestinian leadership publicly admits what “everybody admits,” that Palestinian leadership will be discredited and repudiated.
Yasser Arafat believed that his people would not accept peace on such terms, which is why Arafat refused to sign a similar peace in 2000: He said it would be signing his death warrant. That refusal triggered another war, the Second Intifada of 2000-03, which ended in disastrous Palestinian defeat.
Yet even after that loss, dissident politicians within the Palestinian leadership believe that their people still will not accept peace on the terms “everybody knows,” which is why one of those politicians leaked these documents. That politician expects that disclosure will destroy the current Palestinian leadership and open the way for new leaders who will continue the long war for the old hopeless goals.
From the outside, this Palestinian behavior looks utterly irrational. You can’t always get the deal you want. Still, some deal is better – you’d think – than no deal at all. And there is no deal that will give the Palestinians the things their leaders promise them. Palestinians will not be returning to Israel. Palestinians will not be getting the Western Wall. The suburbs built around Jerusalem will not be unbuilt. The deal on offer in 2020 will be worse than the deal on offer in 2010. Why not end the conflict today?
There are deep and long answers to that question. But there is also a short and simple answer, in which we are all implicated:
The conflict is not being ended because the outside world supports and subsidizes the conflict. Palestinians who have lived in Lebanon since 1949 are not Lebanese. Ditto Palestinians who have lived in Syria or Jordan. They receive international aid on the condition that they remain refugees forever. They command attention only to the extent that they do not relinquish their grievances. Everywhere else on the planet, the world community insists that wars must end. This one war is the war that the international community pays to continue.
And when – at long last! – some Palestinian leaders take the tentative steps toward peace on more realistic terms, they must do so in desperate secret. They know what would happen if the deal ever emerged into view. They’d lose their public. As has happened.
When people say that the Middle East peace process is all process, no peace, here is why: because it is only so long that the process reaches no result that the people in charge of the process on the Palestinian side can remain in charge.
(CNN disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of David Frum.)
SWORD & CRESCENT UP, STARS & STRIPES DOWN
The “Resistance” in Lebanon
The influence of the United States in the Middle East is declining while that of Iran is rising.
By Elliott Abrams
Pressure Points Blog (Council on Foreign Relations)
January 25, 2011
The influence of the United States in the Middle East is declining while that of Iran is rising. That’s the meaning of events in Lebanon, where Hizbullah has in essence thrown Prime Minister Saad Hariri from office and is about to choose his successor. Under Lebanon’s constitution, the prime minister must be a Sunni. But Najib Mikati, the Hizbullah designee, is a Sunni who will owe his office not to support in the Sunni community but to Hizbullah’s decision to make him PM. Hizbullah now has the votes in parliament to put him in, and of course to throw him out should he cross them.
Mikati will be a competent official; he’s a talented man and a hugely successful businessman. That’s not the point. He has close ties to Syria and Hizbullah, and it is clear which side is in power in Lebanon.
One can argue that this outcome has been inevitable since May 2008, when Hizbullah sent its forces into the streets of Beirut to show that it could and would use its army against non-Shiite Lebanese–and the United States, France, the Saudis and other supporters of an independent Lebanon did nothing. But that’s three years ago and only now has Hizbullah defied the rest of the Lebanese population and demanded that it name the Sunni who will lead the government. This reflects the continuing reduction in American sway in the region, and especially the “engagement” with Syria. The last straw may have been the decision to send an ambassador to Syria by recess appointment despite the Senate’s unwillingness to confirm the Administration’s candidate. That foolish gesture must have indicated to the Syrians and to Hizbullah that the Administration had learned nothing from two years of insults and rebuffs by Damascus.
What now? Beyond the speeches, two issues arise. The first is how Lebanon’s Christians and Sunnis will conduct themselves (the Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt, has thrown in with Hizbullah). Will they keep up a political resistance to Hizbullah and to its hand-picked prime minister, with votes in parliament, demonstrations, and requests for international support? Will they, for example, ask the Obama Administration and the Government of France, and indeed the Arab League, to refuse to receive Mikati, and try to make it impossible for him to keep his poisoned office? Second, will the United States make it clear that a Hizbullah-governed Lebanon cannot be our partner?
Hizbullah’s power grab is a consequential event for the Middle East. Hizbullah claims that it is the “Resistance” but that mantle now moves to the other side, the March 14 movement that has won Lebanon’s recent elections. The key questions now are whether they will resist, and whether we will back them.
TUNISIA, THE FIRST ARAB COUNTRY WITH CONSTITUTIONAL RULE
Tunisia, Put in Perspective
By David Pryce-Jones
The National Review
January 19, 2011
www.nationalreview.com/david-pryce-jones
The Tunisian revolution has raised expectations throughout the Arab and Muslim world. It takes courage to come out in those police states and welcome the demonstrations that have overthrown the Tunisian ex-president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. Commentators in the media are expressing hopes that other Arab and Muslim countries will follow this example, and democracy will be the happy outcome. A sense of déjà vu, however, is in order.
To start with a historical footnote: As far back as 1860, a remarkable man, Khayr Ed-Din, tried to make Tunisia the first Arab country with constitutional rule. Perceived as transplanting alien and unwanted European ideas into a Muslim society, he was removed from power and went into exile. His experimental modernizing left no trace and might as well not have happened.
Dictatorship imposes narrow patterns of behavior. Ben Ali had no inclination for European ideas. Tunisia was there for him and his family to control and plunder. Prisons were full. Hundreds of thousands of the best educated Tunisians were in exile. When protesters finally could endure no more and took to the streets, he had a simple choice: either to order his security forces to start a massacre as Saddam Hussein had done with the Shia after the first Gulf War; or go into exile like the Shah of Iran. Had he been younger than 74, Ben Ali might well have decided to shoot it out, but he had got what he wanted out of life and in any case sweetened exile by stealing a ton and a half of gold. Saddam had stolen on a similarly extravagant scale, and trucks filled with dollars were intercepted on Iraqi roads.
After the downfall of the Shah, Ayatollah Khomeini remade the state of Iran to suit himself, and in the traditional fashion he and his successors have shown themselves willing and indeed eager to kill all who might be in their way. After the downfall of Saddam, a whole lot of ambitious men jostled for power in Iraq, and only the presence of large American forces ensured that some sort of orderly political process with vaguely Western political features was introduced rather than another Arab-style dictatorship. Now in Tunisia another whole lot of ambitious men are jostling for power. Mostly they are old, and compromised by years of toadying to Ben Ali. What they are calling a government of national unity is really only an elitist clique whose members are competing to replace each other. The purging of Ben Ali’s single party is the local version of de-Baathification in Iraq. And this time there are no American forces supervising the introduction of a political process for which there is no precedent. Instead a nephew of Ben Ali’s has been murdered, and there is looting of the villas and shops of the rich, incineration of cars, vigilantes, and random firing from unidentified snipers.
One of the ambitious men is Rashid Ghannouci, the head of An-Nahda, the Tunisian Islamist party. He is returning to Tunis after years in exile in London. Elie Kedourie once showed me an essay Ghannouci had written about the British in the Middle East, a compendium of errors, mistaken names, and conspiracy theory. It is a short step from ignorance like that to willingness to kill opponents in the style of the ayatollahs.
Perhaps civil society will manage to come together out of these disparate and selfish elements. Perhaps the security forces, the old Ben Ali party men, the Islamists, and the angry rioters will evolve due processes to mediate their interests and differences. But in the century and a half from Khayr Ed-Din to Ben Ali, the traditional Arab and Muslim order has been repeating and renewing itself with an energy that keeps Western ideas about democracy at bay.
What’s happening in Tunisia is a copybook example of the structural fault of dictatorships, namely that change is impossible without violence. Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali has ruled that country since 1987, and was set to go on ruling it indefinitely. He had of course made sure to have no successor; that is standard procedure. After all, Ben Ali came to power through just such a coup against his predecessor, Habib Bourguiba, who had declared himself President-for-Life. It is also standard procedure that Ben Ali had an aircraft standing by so he and his family could fly out – with probably as much of the treasury as could safely be loaded in the hold.
Hundreds of dissidents – some of them democrats, but others Muslim extremists – have been jailed or are in exile. The secret police and the army kept Ben Ali safe from assassination, so there was nothing for it except a popular uprising like this. We do not know the true number of those shot and killed on the streets, and probably never will. Riots and corpses are to states like these what elections are to democracy.
Someone will emerge to take power – he will declare that he expresses the will of the people, pay whatever price is necessary to obtain the loyalty of the secret police and the army, and set about eliminating opposition – and the whole nightmare cycle of dictatorship will begin once more.
In neighboring Egypt, Hosni Mubarak has been in power for over thirty years, and nobody can predict how or when he will go or who will succeed him. Once again, dissidents and Muslim extremists are in prison or in exile. Same in Libya, where Mu’ammer Gaddhafi has been in power for forty years. Same in Saudi Arabia where the king and the crown prince are both over eighty and succession is uncertain; some are predicting violence there. Same in Syria, where the elder Assad pushed his son into power. In Iraq it took a military campaign and 150,000 American soldiers to break one-man rule, but even that show of superior strength may not be enough to do the trick. The system of one-man rule has a horrible self-perpetuating vitality, and whoever can devise a peaceful way to be rid of it deserves the Nobel Prize.
REALITY OVER RHETORIC
False Accounting
Hillary Clinton told Arab leaders to clean house last week, encouraging an age of accountability. But until the Arab world has democratic institutions and an engaged populace, her words may be meaningless.
By Lee Smith
Tablet magazine
January 19, 2011
www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/56347/false-accounting/
In the Middle East, reality always overtakes rhetoric in the end – whether that rhetoric comes from an Arab president on the official government TV station, a preacher in the pulpit, or an American diplomat with a microphone. Take, for instance, last week, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stood up in Doha, Qatar, and told the Arab leaders gathered for a conference on democracy that they need to get their house in order. “While some countries have made great strides in governance, in many others, people have grown tired of corrupt institutions and a stagnant political order,” Clinton said. “Those who cling to the status quo may be able to hold back the full impact of their countries’ problems for a little while, but not forever.”
If it weren’t for the historic events in Tunisia–where for the first time in Arab history a people rose up to send their ruler packing–people in Rabat, Morocco, where I’m traveling for the next week, and throughout the region would still be talking about Clinton’s speech. What made it surprisingly welcome is that, up until last Thursday, the Obama Administration had been putting as much distance as possible between itself and President George W. Bush’s “Freedom Agenda.” It wasn’t clear whether President Barack Obama believes that democracy promotion is likely to destabilize the repressive and volatile political systems of the Arab world–and that the survival of those regimes would be in America’s best interest–or if he was just following an anything-but-Bush handbook.
But Clinton picked up the gauntlet and laid it at the feet of Arab regimes, timed perfectly to herald an age of Arab accountability: Right after the Tunisians deposed their president-for-life, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, sealed indictments were handed down in the United Nations investigation of the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, and while the names are yet to be revealed, the indictments are expected to identify Hezbollah members as well as government officials of its Syrian and Iranian sponsors.
Tunisia’s so-called Jasmine Revolution is the culmination of demonstrations that started with the self-immolation of a produce vendor in Sidi Bouzid after his goods were confiscated. Other suicides followed, accompanied by widespread protests against the lack of jobs, housing, freedom of speech, and food price inflation and corruption. Police and security forces shot and killed demonstrators, but when the army refused to turn on their countrymen, Ben Ali fled the country for Saudi Arabia last Friday, leaving Tunisia without a government and Tunisians elated with the rarest of achievements: vanquishing an Arab strongman.
In the days following Ben Ali’s exit, the Tunisian army skirmished with security forces still loyal to the ousted president. One hopes the military can now serve as the guarantor of a more or less peaceful transition as Tunisia takes its first steps toward a more democratic political culture. The more pessimistic interpretation is that the stark image of city streets vacant of any human beings except those who are armed to the teeth is a living tableau of Middle Eastern political culture. Here the masses are merely props to be chewed up and tossed away, and the real action is nothing but security chiefs and generals in a fight to the death.
That is to say, as thrilling as it is to see a people take its own destiny in its hands, there is reason to be concerned – for Tunisians and for the rest of the region, where protests seem to be gathering momentum. Algeria, Egypt, and the Islamic Republic of Mauritania have already reported cases of self-immolation–an ostensibly selfless and heroic gesture that is unfortunately reminiscent of one of the Middle East’s more popular forms of political expression: the suicide bombing. Something is happening in the region – in fact, has been happening for some time–that is simply not going to be solved with the downfall of one dictator.
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Which is why it’s not surprising that the Moroccans I’ve met here, on a trip sponsored by the Moroccan American Center for Policy, do not share the excitement with which the Jasmine Revolution has been received in many corners of the U.S. policy establishment. Some of the Moroccan diplomats, human rights activists, and parliamentarians I’ve spoken to even believe that Obama’s carefully modulated statement on Tunisia was too enthusiastic, given that no one has any idea yet whether democrats or Islamists or the army will wind up in power, and what the consequences will be.
Because many of these Moroccan officials are close in one way or another to the ruling regime, it is reasonable to interpret their vivid worries about “security” – all couched in terms articulating brotherly concerns and hopes for the citizens of another Maghreb state–as the fears of a ruling order imagining a bad end for itself. However, while it is important to understand the worries of any elite class in terms of its own self-interest, it is also foolish to discount the misgivings of those who actually have experience in Arab politics and governing Arab people.
From here in the region, it is perhaps easier to see the fundamental problems with Clinton’s welcome brand of Western-style honesty. For instance, what she calls “corruption” is just one family or tribe advancing the interests of its own clique while shutting out the others. Corruption as such is standard operating procedure in the Middle East. Only a lunatic, or an American public official, would give money to an armed gang with uncertain loyalties.
In Doha, Clinton argued that “[i]t is important to demonstrate that there is rule of law, good governance, and respect for contracts to create an investment climate that attracts businesses and keeps them there.” The problem here is that this isn’t necessarily true–a fact borne out by Ben Ali’s Tunisia. The regime was corrupt to the core–Ben Ali’s wife’s family had a hand in virtually every business venture in the country–but the country’s pro-business climate and liberalized economy won praises from all corners, including the IMF. Good governance then had nothing to do with building Tunisia’s economy or creating the country’s middle class, for it was all crafted by the heavy hand of a dictator.
“If leaders don’t offer a positive vision and give young people meaningful ways to contribute, others will fill the vacuum”– namely, “extremist elements, terrorist groups and others who would prey off desperation and poverty,” Clinton warned. Visitors to the police state that Ben Ali ruled admired the country’s relatively open atmosphere–open, except for political dissent – but its secularism, educational system, and the relative freedom of women, had very little to do with a positive vision. Rather, it was all engendered by the single-minded obsession of a tyrant who perceived, perhaps rightly, that the country’s Islamist movement constituted his most serious and best-organized opposition. It is the fact that Ben Ali thoroughly repressed the Islamists and eradicated any evidence of their potent symbols and discourse that gave Tunisia’s its left-bank flair. Alas, this isn’t true either.
What is more depressing is that while we believe poverty, hopelessness, and despair may pave the way for extremist elements and terrorist groups, we know that democracy has empowered them where repression sidelines them. Even avid Bush partisans cannot ignore the fact that the gospel of democratization propagated by Bush and his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, during the president’s second term helped bring Hamas to power in Gaza and strengthened Hezbollah’s hand in Lebanon.
There is a reason why a famous Arab dictum has it that 100 years of tyranny is preferable to one day of chaos. It is meant to remind us of the nature of man, the political animal, who cannot foresee the consequences of his actions. The Arabs’ ancients would have been right to fear how an uprising that began in a suicide might end. If this saying is frequently held up as an example of Arab timidity, the same might be said of any society, and the fact is that the Arabs have stood up before and will invariably do so again. Still, it is unlikely that the uprising in Tunisia will serve as a model for the rest of the region. The Tunisian middle class succeeded where, for example, the Iranians failed in June 2009 only because the divisions in Ben Ali’s security apparatus were decisive. Presumably, rulers around their region right now are worried less about crowds in the street than about whether their intelligence officials are happy with their latest paycheck.
Moreover, it is unseemly for Americans to gloat about the fate of Arab regimes when the real issue is Arab people, like those getting shot in the streets of Tunisian cities or setting themselves on fire in Cairo. Their problems are not going to be solved with the exit of one Arab dictator – or even the whole pack of them, from Riyadh to Algiers. What’s wrong with Arab reform is that in most cases the institutions that need to be fixed do not yet exist – a fact that makes the content, though perhaps not the rhetoric, of Clinton’s speech no less irrelevant to Arab reality than the high-flown language of democracy favored by Condoleezza Rice. If there is a formula to fix what’s wrong with the region, no one has it.
John Gross, last year
“THE PLEASURE OF HIS COMPANY”
I hesitated to post a third batch of articles about my father. (The first two are here and here, and a fourth one now here.) Many of you read this website only for Middle East-related items, and don’t know me personally. Also, my father himself was so modest that he would feel almost embarrassed by all the praise.
All week, however, people have been writing to say they would be interested in seeing more pieces, so I attach a selection below. The tributes to him have been wonderful. I almost can’t recall anyone being so affectionately treated in the columns of British and American newspapers.
Among the articles about John Gross below are ones by Jay Nordlinger who says “London is barely imaginable without him,” a piece titled “The Pleasure of His Company” by John O’Sullivan, and one by Theodore Dalrymple, who noted that “Though John Gross wrote a book called The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, he proved by his life that the man of letters had not yet quite fallen.”
Also included are a column by Charles Spencer explaining how Philip Larkin sent his last great poem to John Gross to publish, and a column from the Irish Independent which ends with a traditional Gaelic blessing on the soul of the dead for my father (“Ar dheis de go raibh a anam uasal”) which translates as “May his noble soul stand at the right hand of God”.
John Gross, in 2009
There are also a number of amusing letters below about John Gross published this week in The Times, Guardian and Spectator, and a reprinting in this week’s TLS of a piece he originally wrote for the paper as long ago as 1960, about J. D. Salinger.
On the comment pages of The Daily Telegraph this week, Charles Moore generously re-reviewed my father’s childhood memoir (A Double Thread) about growing up Jewish in England, noting that “What made Gross’s imagination, and what makes this book so subtle, was the Englishness and the Jewishness double-threaded, neither vanquishing the other.” As a result of this and other press citations of the book in recent days, the publishers say that tomorrow they will print more paperback copies, since the book is sold out.
As the third item below, I include remarks made by myself at my father’s funeral.
-- Tom Gross
Cover of the British edition of A Double Thread
CONTENTS
1. “London is barely imaginable without him” (by Jay Nordlinger, National Review, Jan. 18, 2011)
2. “A civilized man: John Gross, R.I.P.” (by Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal, Jan. 21, 2011)
3. Remarks by Tom Gross at the funeral of John Gross (Jan. 14, 2011)
4. “A Jewish boy’s profound faith in England” (by Charles Moore, Daily Telegraph, Jan. 17, 2011)
5. “The Pleasure of His Company” (By John O’Sullivan, National Review, edition of Feb. 7, 2011)
6. “When a masterpiece arrives in the post” (by Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph, Jan. 17, 2011)
7. Extract from weekly column by Eoghan Harris (The Sunday Independent, Ireland, Jan. 16 2011)
8. A third batch of letters on John Gross in The Times (Jan. 18, 2011)
9. Letters on John Gross in The Guardian (Jan. 17, 2011)
10. “A little light reading” (Letter in The Spectator, Jan. 22, 2011)
11. Russell Davies pays tribute to John Gross on BBC Radio 2 (Jan. 16, 2011)
12. BBC Radio 4’s The Last Word discussed John Gross (Jan. 21 & 23, 2011)
13. “Gregarious, astonishingly well-read literary critic, editor and author” (By Anthony Bailey, The Independent, Jan. 21, 2011)
14. “Erudite literary critic who grew up in the East End and loved gossip” (The Sunday Times, Jan. 16, 2011)
15. “John Gross, critic, editor and ‘best-read man in Britain,’ dies at 75” (Washington Post, Jan. 22, 2011)
16. “John Gross in the TLS on J. D. Salinger from 1960” (Times Literary Supplement, Jan. 14, 2011)
ARTICLES AND LETTERS
JAY NORDLINGER IN THE NATIONAL REVIEW
London is barely imaginable without him
By Jay Nordlinger
The National Review
January 18, 2011
John Gross – the superlative English writer passed away last week. You can read a great many articles about him, in publications both British and American. (In publications originating in other places too, I imagine.) I will say just a little about him.
I loved him. He was one of the most delightful friends I had, or anyone could have. He was learned, witty, humane – totally civilized. I’m not sure I ever knew a more civilized man. David Pryce-Jones, Tony Daniels – they are in the same league. But the league has very few players.
London, for me, was barely imaginable without him. We would meet for lunch or pastries, to catch up on the latest, to range over the world. When he was up to it, he’d give you a tour, of some London neighborhood. He would point out who had lived there and why the neighborhood was important. I doubt there was ever a better London tour guide, or a more devoted lover of London.
John knew everything – essentially everything – and it was said that he was “the best-read man in Britain.” But, as others have observed, he wore his learning lightly – very lightly. There were no airs about the man, at least that I could detect. He was humble and courteous, big-hearted and amusing. A lover of life, a drinker-in of life: of literature, of course, and art, and music, and theater, and politics, and history, and jokes, and everything. A couple of hours with him went by like a breeze.
On the very weekend I heard that John was in the hospital – “in hospital,” he would say, like all Brits – I was intending to e-mail him. The reason? Kind of an odd one. More than once, John told me that, when he read my “New York Chronicle” in The New Criterion, he was amazed that I would seldom use the word “performance,” “perform,” or “performer.” How could I do that? How could I write about performers and performances, while using those words so sparingly?
When I was writing this particular chronicle, two weekends ago, I kept saying “perform,” “performance,” etc. I was conscious of it. I wanted to tell him so!
His son Tom and I once had a discussion of him – how John was a little of everything: a great Englishman, a great Londoner, a great Jew (secular division, maybe), a great American (after a fashion – he spent a lot of time here), a great critic, a great anthologist – hell, a great man. I wish I had known him a little longer. But I’m glad I knew him at all. And he is unforgettable.
***
There is a further item by Jay Nordlinger about John Gross, here:
www.nationalreview.com/corner/257359/conservative-kind-jay-nordlinger
THEODORE DALRYMPLE IN CITY JOURNAL
A Civilized Man: John Gross, R.I.P.
By Theodore Dalrymple
City Journal (New York)
January 21, 2011
www.city-journal.org/2011/eon0121td.html
To be in the company of John Gross, who died on January 10 at 75, was to experience a unique kind of pleasure, as well as a relief from the woes of the world. No man ever shared his erudition more delightfully, with less thought of imposing himself on others or of discomfiting the ignorant – as almost everyone was by comparison with him.
Like a surprising number of literary figures – one thinks of Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Proust, and Auden – Gross was the son of a doctor, in his case a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe to the East End of London. He described his Anglo-Jewish upbringing in a delightful memoir, A Double Thread, published in 2001. He won a scholarship to Oxford and thereafter entered literary circles that he never left. He became without doubt the best anthologist of his time and also among the foremost literary scholars and critics. He was successively editor of the Times Literary Supplement, chief book reviewer for the New York Times, and theater critic of the Sunday Telegraph, all positions that he filled with distinction.
Without any display of pedantry, he gave the impression of having read, and remembered, everything. His New Oxford Book of English Prose, published in 1998, was evidence enough of his prodigious knowledge, his broad sympathies, and his excellent judgment. Who but he would quote with equal facility and felicity from Richard Knolles’s The General History of the Turks of 1603 and Dwight Macdonald’s “The Bible in Modern Undress” of 1953? Letters, diaries, sermons, speeches political and forensic, short stories, novels, critical essays, works of philosophy, science, and travel: all are included in his anthology, and all aptly.
But he was not made priggish by his learning. Once, when I relayed to him a remark by a second-hand bookseller of my acquaintance – that the authors of the popular novels of the 1920s and 1930s wrote very well – he brought up Edgar Wallace, about whom he was surprisingly knowledgeable (though I should not have been surprised). He even quoted from Margaret Lane’s biography of Wallace. Further, though few people could have read more books than he had, he was not bookish. He was genuinely interested in the human race, of and upon which literature was a reflection; he had the power of inspiring immediate confidence in his interlocutor. He loved gossip (one of his anthologies was of literary anecdotes), and though he was clear-sighted, he was without malice, which he could safely leave to others to supply.
The excellence of his critical judgment derived from the free play of an intelligence and sensibility that refused to be constrained by fashionable theories. Literary excellence could not, for him, be reduced to any one aspect of a work. Two works could have equal but opposite virtues, and it would be our loss if we refused to acknowledge both. Writing of our current aversion to purple prose in the preface to his anthology, he wrote:
“We should be . . . on guard, however, against a provincialism which estranges us from some of the great achievements of the past. If we don’t distinguish between true eloquence and fake eloquence, if we allow our fear of pretentious or precious ‘fine writing’ to frighten us off the real thing, the loss will be ours; and it will be a large one.”
There is a provincialism of time as well as of place, perhaps the more dangerous to civilization because it is less obvious. John Gross – incomparably learned, modest, tolerant, and humorous – was a civilized man. Though he wrote a book called The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, he proved by his life that the man of letters had not yet quite fallen.
(Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.)
REMARKS AT THE FUNERAL OF JOHN GROSS
By Tom Gross
January 14, 2011
My father was an exceptional person. I have known that all my life, of course, but nevertheless I have been taken aback by the outpouring of grief and admiration for him in the last three days, including wonderful letters and emails from all over the world and magnificent tributes in the press on both sides of the Atlantic, and in continental Europe too.
My father had an outstanding intellect. But because of his modesty I hadn’t quite realized to what extent his intellectual prowess went back to his earliest days, until reading some of the tributes this week.
On Wednesday, in The Times, a Mr Derek Taylor wrote a letter to say that he had been at the Perse school in Cambridge with my father. Mr Taylor wrote: “There was a school debate one day in 1946. The speakers were always sixth-formers. But John was 11 at the time and astonished the audience by standing up to make his point, quoting for his purpose the Russian Foreign Minister of 1927. It was a moment not to be forgotten.”
And yesterday in The Times, Gillian Tunkel wrote: “I have never forgotten the comment that John’s English teacher wrote to John’s parents at the end of one of John’s essays when John was 14: ‘I am not sufficiently equipped to mark this!’”
People who didn’t know my father, might have assumed that someone as erudite and bookish as he was, might somehow be deficient in common sense or worldly wisdom. Nothing could be further from the truth. He had unerring judgment and good sense in matters great and small.
He was unfailingly kind and sensitive too. He was always courteous and patient. I’ve never heard him be rude to anyone. He was immensely generous in every way, especially with his time and with his knowledge and advice. He would spend hours on the phone with people he hardly knew who had rung to pick his brain. And, as one of the many friends who have written to me said, he never looked over anyone’s shoulder at a party.
He remained friendly and totally unpompous to the end. Two days before he died, when I was urging the staff at St Mary’s, Paddington to do all they could to comfort him, a West Indian nurse said to me “Oh we all know about Mr Gross. He is the best conversationalist we’ve ever had here”.
My father’s intellect was also in tact until his final days. When he was almost unconscious, one of the doctors said to him: “Mr Gross we are moving you now, from the Samuel Lane ward to the Zachary Cope ward”. And my father, with his eyes still shut, suddenly mumbled “Ahh, Dr Zachary Cope – the famous abdominal expert who wrote an article about Jane Austen’s last illness.”
My father loved London. He delighted in taking visitors round tours of the East End, and literary and other places of interest elsewhere. As one American friend, Roger Kimball, wrote to me yesterday “John knew the city as well as any London taxi-driver – better in fact, because he could not only take you to any address you named but he also knew what had happened there from the time of Julius Caesar until the day before yesterday.”
My father loved literature and theatre, and all things English, but – without being religious – he had an intense sense of Jewishness too, hence his childhood memoir A Double Thread, and his groundbreaking study on the uses and misuses of the character Shylock over the last 400 years.
He also had a very happy temperament and a great zest for life. And because of this, after my sister has spoken and after the rabbi has offered the final prayers in Hebrew and said kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead -- as we say goodbye to my father, we will conclude with an uplifting song (Tumbalaika) that my father liked in Yiddish -- the other ancient language spoken by Jews of east European origin, the culture, literature and theatre of which my father adored almost as much as he did English literature.
One of the last lively conversations he had just before Christmas, when he was rushed to hospital by my mother, was to show visitors, with the greatest of pleasure, a rare Yiddish edition of Oscar Wilde.
Everything will be duller, and sadder without him.
He was also, of course, a fantastic father. I couldn’t have asked for a better father, and I feel privileged to be his son.
(Several people have reproduced this, for example, here on the website of former American presidential speechwriter David Frum: FrumForum.)
CHARLES MOORE IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
A Jewish boy’s profound faith in England
By Charles Moore
The Daily Telegraph
January 17, 2011
John Gross’s childhood memoir “A Double Thread,” re-reviewed on the comment page of The Daily Telegraph.
This column reserves the right occasionally to review something which is not new. I exercise it today because of the death last week of John Gross. Gross was known to readers of our sister paper, The Sunday Telegraph, because he was, for 15 years, its distinguished theatre critic. His brilliant book, Shylock, about the history of Shakespeare’s most controversial creation, was published during the period when he held the post.
Shylock benefited from the fact that Gross had both a literary sensibility and a Jewish one. A Double Thread explains why. First published 10 years ago, it is John Gross’s account of his boyhood, based chiefly in the East End of London. The title refers to Jewishness and Englishness. The book traces the connection and the difference between the two, as the author experienced them. In his synagogue, the foreign rabbi said prayers for the royal family, pronouncing “our sovereign lord King George” as “her suffering lots Kins Odds”.
It is a book in which nothing much happens, unless you count a world war. Gross’s father was a refugee from Eastern Europe who arrived in Britain in 1914. He became an able and conscientious GP in the East End. John was born there in 1935. Because of the Second World War, the family moved to Egham in Surrey. John, who was always bookish, was educated there, and, briefly, at the Perse in Cambridge, then at the City of London School. He won a scholarship to Oxford. There the story ends.
Gross says that he experienced no anti-semitism in Egham, and very little anywhere else. For a short time, he was evacuated to a farm in Shropshire. With deft economy, he sets out what it meant to him: “My first real experience of life away from home, it must have helped lay down a substratum of trust, an expectation that the world would prove friendly rather than not.” In matters of race and nationality, that substratum of trust is the most important thing. John Gross believes that the England that he knew (he prefers the word “England” to the more political word “Britain”) provided it. His book gives thanks.
So, large parts of his memoir concentrate on the English culture of the 1940s and 1950s, as encountered by a boy whose reading was both omnivorous and discriminating. His observation of comics like the Dandy or the Hotspur is as attentive as his early reading of W H Auden. I was delighted to discover from this book that one of the scriptwriters for Children’s Hour was called L du Garde Peach. Being 20 years younger than Gross, I did not listen to the programme, but I noticed this curious name when, as a boy, I bought all the Ladybird history books, of which he (she?) was the author. My private theory is that a funny name like that must have been an anagram, but I have never been able to prove it.
Anyway, rather like George Orwell, but less politically motivated, Gross captures that era of writing and entertainment. He celebrates early Penguins: “In those days the imprint seemed rather like the BBC: not so much a publisher as an estate of the realm”.
The prevailing educational culture offered “a certain idea of England” – “Hymns Ancient and Modern…fair play, the King’s English, the Mother of Parliaments, trial by jury, Hearts of Oak, the bulldog breed, the Lady with the Lamp, the Workshop of the World, the RSPCA [not now!], Magna Carta “‘What say the reeds at Runnymede?’)”. As national ideas go – and they often go terribly – it wasn’t a bad one.
Gross also captures how children come to appreciate writing even before they understand it – “pictures formed with very little to go on”. The young John was entranced by God’s promise to Abraham that He would multiply his seed “as the stars of the heaven, and the sand which is upon the sea-shore”. This “summoned up a persistent image not only of sea and stars, but also of clumps of grass in the foreground, ruffled by the breeze. Perhaps I had been wondering exactly what ‘seed’ was, and got it mixed up with the idea of grass-seed.” Of his first excited encounter with a poem by Rimbaud, he writes: “It plainly meant something. Exactly what could wait.” Thus does imagination work.
What made Gross’s imagination, and what makes this book so subtle, was the Englishness and the Jewishness double-threaded, neither vanquishing the other.
He gives an exquisitely delicate account, for example, of his admiration for T S Eliot – the “sense of authority” about his writing, “the glow of interest to everything about him”. And yet he confronted clear examples, in Eliot’s poetry, of anti-semitism. This did not lead him to reject Eliot, but neither did he excuse him.
Gross’ father, with whom John discussed the matter, said, “T S Eliot may be a great poet, but he isn’t greater than the Jewish people.” “I was very struck by this,” records Gross, “Not so much by the sentiment as by the manner in which it was expressed, which was very different from his normally low-key, non-rhetorical style. He was perfectly calm, but it was obvious he had been upset.”
Touchingly, Gross senior said that Eliot should meet a Talmudic scholar called Abramsky whom, above all, he admired, as if a conversation between these sages would solve matters. Even at moments of pain and unease, the substratum of trust.
JOHN O’SULLIVAN IN THE NATIONAL REVIEW
The Pleasure of His Company
By John O’Sullivan
Reviews of The Oxford Book of Parodies, edited by John Gross
The National Review
Edition of February 7, 2011
[For space reasons, I attach only the end of what is quite a long review of John Gross’s last and widely praised book, The Oxford Book of Parodies.]
John Gross died on the 10th of January in London. His death was mourned with unusual unanimity across the spectrum of literary opinion. It was marked by obituaries that combined great respect for his scholarship with enormous affection for the man. He was “the best-read man in England.” He was also someone whom every woman hoped to find next to her at a dinner party and whom every man hoped to run into at the bar. His eventual reputation will doubtless rest over time on such important books as “The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters,” “After Shakespeare” and “Shylock.” He was nonetheless an anthologist of genius because, as several tributes have stressed, his interests ranged outwards from the great books into the furthermost nooks and crannies of popular literature, journalism, vaudeville, Broadway song lyrics, anecdote, limericks, and literary gossip where angels fear to tread. This magpie sensibility produced a series of Oxford anthologies which, because of their range, variety and freshness, it is not at all illogical to call original.
Reading the Oxford Book of Parodies is a little like meeting John at a party when he had just run across some new and unexpected item of amusement. He would have been reading old copies of Punch or listening to songs from forgotten musicals when some minor gem suddenly glistened and caught his attention. A year ago he delightedly produced this couplet from an ancient theatrical revue:
“He’s Hengist, I’m Horsa
We’re mentioned in Chaucer.”
We both chuckled, in my case for the umpteenth such time.
His friends can no longer enjoy the incomparable pleasure of John’s company. Nothing else can really substitute for it. But to pick up his anthologies, of which this one particularly reflects his genial but learned temperament, is for a few hours to fall under at least the shadow of his company.
I can imagine no higher recommendation for any book.
***
(The full book review can be read here:
http://nrd.nationalreview.com/article/?q=NTcxNDhlNWE2YmNiM2Q4ODEyY2U3NDFjMThmMDhjYWQ= )
(There is also a further tribute to John Gross by the editors of the magazine, which appears in the introductory section at the start of this week’s National Review, and is available online to subscribers only.)
CHARLES SPENCER IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
When a masterpiece arrives in the post [Print version headline]
John Gross will be sorely missed [Online version headline]
By Charles Spencer (from his weekly column)
Theatre critic
The Daily Telegraph
January 17, 2011
www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/8281790/John-Gross-will-be-sorely-missed.html
One of the happiest consequences of my job was getting to know John Gross, who died last week. He was once described as the best-read man in Britain, and he was a critic, anthologist, editor and writer of great distinction.
Many distinguished men and women prove a disappointment when you meet them. John didn’t. When I first encountered him, he was the theatre critic of The Sunday Telegraph and I was then a newly arrived third-string reviewer on the Daily Telegraph. John couldn’t have been warmer or more welcoming.
Though he was undoubtedly a great man of letters, he was never grand. His conversation was full of anecdotes, about both the living and the dead, and they were always entertaining and superbly told. Only rarely, however, were they touched with anything approaching malice. There was a warmth and a wise sense of proportion about John that I valued greatly and will miss sorely.
One of the great days of his life, he once told me, was when he arrived for work as editor of the Times Literary Supplement and discovered an unsolicited poem from Philip Larkin for him in the post. It was Aubade, that terrifying, deeply felt poem about the fear of death that was the poet’s last great work.
It would be unusually bleak fare for a memorial service, but, since John was the first to publish it, perhaps Aubade might just fit the bill on this occasion.
EOGHAN HARRIS IN THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT (Ireland)
Extract from weekly column by Eoghan Harris
The Sunday Independent (Ireland)
January 16, 2011
Let me finish with a brief tribute to John Gross, the literary critic, who died last week. Although I do not normally collect books or authors’ signatures, in 1998 on a short trip to London I rang him up and asked him if he would sign his New Oxford Book of English Prose because he, Gross, would have included a piece by William Carleton, the protean Tyrone man who straddled the Protestant-Catholic divide.
Gross said he would meet me in a coffee shop in Westbourne Grove called Byzantium but could only give me 10 minutes. When he arrived he checked that I knew Yeats’s Byzantium by heart, as he did, then gave me three hours of laugh-a-line literary gossip studded with gems like “Tom Stoppard is a middlebrow’s idea of a highbrow”.
And I still cherish his reply when I provocatively asked him how he could reject post-modernism without studying it: “Look, I don’t have to study alchemy to know you can’t turn base metal into gold.”
Ar dheis de go raibh a anam uasal.
[Tom Gross adds: The last line by Eoghan Harris means is a traditional Gaelic blessing on the soul of the dead which translates as “May his noble soul stand at the right hand of God”]
A THIRD BATCH OF LETTERS TO THE TIMES
Letters published in The Times (of London) on Jan. 18, 2011
www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article2877740.ece
Lord Donoughue writes:
Your excellent obituary of John Gross (Jan 11) covered thoroughly his remarkable career, intellect and literary output. He was the cleverest man I ever knew. However, I most remember his warm friendship and hilarious wit. We first met in 1954 on a staircase at a student party in north Oxford. With a few funny words behind his quiet smile, he engaged me for life. I visited his father, a gentle old-style family doctor in Mile End; met his mother, much stronger and with her son’s steely clarity of mind; and bought spectacles from his able optician brother.
Our careers diverged, but whenever we met his warmth was immediate. His humorous dissection of the British chattering classes, with their self-righteous moralising humbug, was penetratingly exact but never malicious as he also appreciated their liberal values. At lunch in Normandy last summer he was sadly frail but his mind glittered as brightly as ever. He was a wonderful example of the great contribution of our Jewish community to British society and culture.
Jeremy Rosenblatt writes:
I first became acquainted with John Gross in the Nineties in one of the few vanishing coffee shops still prevalent in Moscow Road, Bayswater. In La Vie en Rose, the sister owners prepared his suppers with care and respect and he was sometimes joined by his beautiful daughter with her long reddish hair. For my 40th birthday he signed A Double Thread, his memoir that was published at the same time and stated with a terrible poignancy that he so wished to be 40 again.
My mother, Ruth, relied upon his book Shylock both as a lecturer and for her thesis. He was the cleverest, the politest and kindest of men.
LETTERS PUBLISHED IN THE GUARDIAN
Letters published in The Guardian on January 17, 2011
www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2011/jan/16/letters-john-gross-obituary
Martin Dodsworth writes: In his most sympathetic obituary of John Gross (12 January), Ion Trewin mentions John’s brief time as an academic at London University. It was spent not at University College, however, but Queen Mary – significant because it was just round the corner from where his parents lived and where he had been brought up.
The example of his father, a doctor in the Mile End Road, was probably in his mind, for John was a man of great loyalties, to place as well as family. He was a devoted Londoner, for example; his love of Dickens and his membership of the English Heritage blue plaque committee both reflect this. Queen Mary used the old People’s Palace building, and this too would have appealed to him, for his love of popular culture ran deep.
He had an amazing ability to quote from old music-hall songs, as well as those of the Cole Porter generation. He loved the old Players’ theatre under the arches of Charing Cross. In his marvellous book Joyce (1971), he observes that to his most extreme admirers James Joyce “is rather like the girl in the Marie Lloyd song: ‘Every little movement has a meaning of its own, every little motion tells a tale.’” Who else would have said that? His friends will remember him for that breadth of sympathy and the wit that went with it.
Peter Baker writes: John Gross was my tutor at King’s College, Cambridge, in 1964. I was studying for one of Cambridge’s literary marathons, the Dickens paper, for which reading all the novels, associated works and criticism was a given. At our first tutorial, John’s room was knee high in Dandys and Beanos – he was writing an article on comics. We had a conversation about the connections between the novels and across Victorian literature. He was able to quote great chunks of texts from memory while pacing the room and smoking. John clearly had expectations that not only should I have read the novels but I should be able to remember them all in detail and was slightly irritated that I couldn’t keep up. His depth of knowledge, range of reading and erudition was immense. To find out that he was only eight years older than me makes me feel even more inadequate than I felt on that day in 1964.
LETTER IN THE SPECTATOR
Letter published in The Spectator on Jan. 22, 2011
www.spectator.co.uk/politics/all/6629988/part_2/.thtml
From Martin McKeand
London NW1
A Little Light Reading
Sir: John Gross (Your article “The man who read everything,” 15 January) started early. I remember, at the City of London School when we were both 15, telling him about a memoir I had discovered by one Marcel ‘Prowst’ who spent the first 40 pages describing his difficulty in getting to sleep at night.
John gently corrected my mispronunciation and told me what pleasures lay in store with another 11 volumes (in the old Scott Montcrieff translation) to come. He had read them all.
He also suggested I might enjoy the first volume of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time – only recently published – Angus Wilson, and The Charterhouse of Parma, all of which he had read during the holidays. It was rumoured he did all his homework and much extra reading on his way home on the tube from Blackfriars to Mile End, seven stops away.
RUSSELL DAVIES PAYS TRIBUTE TO JOHN GROSS ON BBC RADIO 2
Russell Davies pays tribute to John Gross on BBC Radio 2. among other things he discusses John Gross’s love for American music and then he dedicates a song to him.
It starts at 53 minutes, 20 seconds into the recording:
www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00xbcj3/Russell_Davies_16_01_2011/
JOHN GROSS DISCUSSED ON BBC RADIO 4’S THE LAST WORD PROGRAM
BBC Radio 4 Documentaries
January 21, 2011 (repeated 8.30 pm today, Sunday January 23, 2011)
It can also be heard here:
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00xj141
OBITUARY IN THE INDEPENDENT (London)
John Gross: Gregarious, astonishingly well-read literary critic, editor and author
January 21, 2011
By Anthony Bailey
The Independent (London)
Many child prodigies burn out. Some grow into narrowly smart adults. John Gross remained a wide-ranging prodigy to the last. Rosy-cheeked, twinkly-eyed, schoolboy-faced, the writer and editor with most claim to be Britain’s foremost man of letters was, despite years of ill-health, still enriching and astonishing friends with his conversational prowess, springing on them obscure but absolutely relevant references and quotations which (he proffered gently) “you might find useful or – possibly – be amused by.” In his twenties his talkativeness was observed by Michael Frayn and his then wife, Gill, who, driving to Venice, were asked by Gross for a lift to Dover. (Gross said he was going to Boulogne for a few days, “to bring his address book up to date.”) But Gross was still in their car at Ostend, and also at Strasbourg, where he got out, still talking.
Gross was born in the East End of London in 1935, his parents of East European Jewish descent. The family moved out of Mile End at the start of the Second World War, first to Bracklesham Bay, Sussex, then to Egham, Surrey, where the turreted towers of Royal Holloway College later formed a Guermantes chateau-like image in young Gross’s memory. At war’s end, the Grosses returned to Tredegar Square, E1. Gross’s father was a local GP, remarkably like the genial Dr Dreyfuss who revives a suicidal Shirley Maclaine in Billy Wilder’s film The Apartment. At home, Dr Gross let his son John take centre stage, proudly prompting him to provide digested passages of Bleak House or Hard Times. A walk around the neighbourhood accompanied visits to Tredegar Square for Gross’s school and college friends: Mile End and Whitechapel Roads; Petticoat and Brick Lanes; many a verdant bomb site. Gross would point out Black Lion Yard, where a dairy sported wooden doors and the painted sign of Evans & Son, “Cowkeepers – Milk fresh from the cow”, a faded slogan both in English and Yiddish. Bevis Marks synagogue and the Jewish cemetery next to Queen Mary College could be on the route, together with Blooms eatery, Whitechapel bell foundry, Toynbee Hall and Spratts dog-biscuit factory. He led the way down a dreary street off Commercial Road full of Jewish liturgical bookshops – “More bookshops here than in Golders Green,” said Gross.
However, the aftermath of war was finishing off the old Jewish East End, with the spread of GLC council estates and a rising Jewish middle-class decamping to Hampstead Garden Suburb. Gross’s education engendered a lasting restlessness. He moved from school to school, his parents concerned to cherish his Jewish roots while nurturing his obvious brightness. Egham Grammar was followed by a period boarding at the Perse School in Cambridge. There he was a pupil in Hillel House, in its last year as a haven solely for Jewish boys. The house magazine, The Orient, published in 1948 a piece by the 13-year-old Gross, “The Cinema as a Living Art”. In this, Gross mentioned “the booksie boys”, a term borrowed from Timothy Shy, the penname of D B Wyndham Lewis and Ronald Searle for their St Trinian’s stories, and was followed by allusions to the Andrews Sisters, Milton, Tchaikovsky, Harry James, Malvolio, Chaplin, Frank Capra, Al Jolson, Jean Kent, Jean Gabin, and Jean Sablon, among others. Stanley Price, also a Perse pupil and later a writer, recalls using his prefectorial status to request from a several-years-younger Gross advice for an essay about Keats.
“Have a look at Hyperion,” opined Gross.
“Isn’t it rather long?” Price said.
“Yes,” Gross replied, “but you’ll find you only need quote a stanza,” – which he then proceeded to recite, text unseen.
Such prowess bowled over those who examined him for entrance to the City of London School and then Wadham College, Oxford. He arrived at the university in the autumn of 1952, at 17 one of the youngest among an entry of older youth, many of them National Service veterans. (Gross had been turned down for flat feet, among other things.) His contemporaries included George Macbeth, Anthony Thwaite, Adrian Mitchell, Gordon Snell, Gabriel Pearson, Philip French, Eddie Mirzoeff and Christopher Ricks. Among the young women, Anne Harrop (later Thwaite), Gill Palmer (later Frayn), Sarah Rothschild, Carol Goodman, and Susan Loewenthal. He served on the staff of Isis, the weekly in which he was later featured as an “Idol”, hailed for having read all of Proust by 14 but now catching up with back copies of Hotspur. A memorable issue of Isis carried a riskily irreverent parody of the New Statesman, assembled in part by Gross. He was by no means a swot; he could be seen talking in La Roma, the Kemp, and the Kardomah cafés more often than researching in the Radcliffe Camera or Bodleian. Despite this, he won a seemingly effortless First, and a fourth year in which to do a never-completed B Litt.
Gross moved on to a fellowship at King’s, Cambridge and posts with Queen Mary College, London, and Princeton in the US. But although he had a don’s skill of asking and provoking the right questions, he felt more at home on Grub Street than in the Groves of Academe. Even so, his publishing jobs didn’t always last: at Victor Gollancz, where an heir was needed, Gross fatally turned down as glib and meretricious several books which went on to be bestsellers; his career as literary editor of the New Statesman was shortened by colleagues who had political and artistic differences with him. His editorial life was capped by a seven-year spell at the helm of the TLS, which he rescued from moribundity, naming the hitherto anonymous reviewers and bringing a knowledgeable sparkle to its grey pages.
As a writer and anthologist, Gross produced a number of good books. Among his own works were essays on Kipling, Dickens, and James Joyce, a study of Shylock, a memoir of his East End boyhood, A Double Thread, and a vivid and instructive survey of English literary life, The Rise & Fall of the Man of Letters (1969, reprinted 1991). This neatly gave F R Leavis his due as a critic, but also put him in his place as a would-be literary policeman. Gross never completed a long-considered work on the literature of Empire. Successful anthologies – of essays, parodies, aphorisms and comic verse – were put together every few years by him for OUP. All the while he served without self-interest on innumerable committees: for the National Portrait Gallery, for the Government’s honours advisors, and notably for three long spells at the London Library. Gross was an eloquent enthusiast for that institution’s quirks, and would delight in showing novice members such trophies then on the open shelves as a first edition of Moby Dick and the (also priceless) boxed scrolls which formed the catalogue of the Imperial Library in Peking. Douglas Matthews, a former librarian of the LL, says, “It was amazing at meetings how quiet he could be until near the end, when he’d turn the debate with a brilliant, thoughtfully worded summation.”
Although Gross’s own reading was voracious and wide-flung, from Chaucer to Saul Bellow, he was entertained by detective stories, from Agatha Christie to J.I.M. Stewart, from Simenon to Ed McBain. He enjoyed TV thrillers, particularly the CSI series. His love of games was expressed in party charades and as a judge of competitions: he was thrilled to give a New Statesman prize for a palindrome to “You look Welsh, look you.” The only sense in which he ducked Jewish “issues” was in disclaiming intimate involvement except by birth: regarding the Holocaust, his parents had managed to sidestep it and he had been “one of the lucky ones”. He thought he remained lucky in rarely having to confront hostility as a Jew. The threatened sacrifice of Isaac always raised his doubts about what kind of God the Jews worshipped. He observed generously on one occasion that “the history of non-anti-Semitism remains an unwritten subject.”
In later life he got closer to his Hebraic roots with lengthy periods in New York, that half-Jewish city. He worked as a daily book critic for The New York Times, a paper whose corporate culture he never warmed to, and later as a reviewer for The Wall Street Journal. In his passion for books and films he had what he called “the true addict’s thirst for detail”, but as a critic, though immensely perceptive, he sometimes let his generosity take the place of the brashly assertive judgements contemporary journalism favours. Clive James noted this tendency to fairness in his witty verse gazeteer to the London literary world, “Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage”:
And there was Big John Gross, the Man of Learning
Who kept his massive mental motor turning
By feeding it some colourless, Slavonic
Extractive lightly qualified with tonic.
To go away, or else to stay behind?
Big John could never quite make up his mind...
But wavering, Gross noted, went with the territory; from the start he felt he had had simultaneous roles in two different plays.
Gross’s even-handedness didn’t prevent him from being the most helpful person any questioner on literary matters could turn to. He had a taste for improbable connections and he knew nearly everything. (Such as the answers of 49 out of 50 of the questions he once overheard a television contestant on Mastermind being made to face.) An early enthusiast for the boys’ books of Herbert Strang, Gross delighted in revealing that a Mrs Herbert Strang also wrote books for girls, and that the name of both Mr and Mrs was actually a pseudonym for two middle-aged men who worked most of their lives for OUP. Hearing a friend mention a book about Sarah Bernhardt, Gross immediately listed other biographies of the actress that might be useful. A scathing reference to Peter Rachman would prompt from Gross the suggestion that one read a certain book about the notorious landlord that didn’t reveal quite as much evil as one had been led to expect. A conversation with him might touch in minutes on Virgil, Stendhal and the early Catherine Cookson. His good friend, the TV film-maker Eddie Mirzoeff, says (as do many) that he’d never have read half the books he did without Gross’s input.
His life was private but very social. Friends rarely saw the inside of his small flat in Bayswater, but for an essentially solitary man, who had never had a best friend as a child, he was relentlessly gregarious. He was to be met at local pubs to begin with and then at drinking clubs like Zanzibar and latterly, in his Sunday Telegraph drama critic days, at the Ivy and Wolsely, where the doormen and proprietors greeted him as an old friend. He repaid hospitality with an annual do at the Basil Street Hotel in Knightsbridge at which former college mates were seen and Nobel and Booker prize-winners encountered publishers’ secretaries and starlets Gross had run into a few days before. “Come and say hello to...” he’d say, as he led a bemused guest over to Claus von Bulow, Vidia Naipaul, Lady Lever or Lord Heseltine. He was married for 23 years to the beautiful Miriam May, also a redoubt-able literary editor, and after the marriage ended in 1988 they remained close friends, having long telephone conversations every day until Gross’s death. Their son, Tom, is a journalist, living in Israel, and their daughter, Susanna, is books editor of the Mail on Sunday.
Despite his air of practical incompetence, Gross mastered the communication skills of Skype – his love of conversation made it vital, though he always found it hard to close down. In his last years of serious illness his correspondence was largely e-generated. Old friends took him to concerts and Glyndebourne, and an affable Iranian chauffeured him on country visits. Heart problems didn’t stop him talking: the medical staff in his final days at St Mary’s in Paddington claimed he was their most loquacious patient ever. His son Tom and his daughter, Susanna, were with him at the end, Susanna reading aloud a Shakespeare sonnet to him as he died.
* John Jacob Gross, writer and editor: born London 12 March 1935; editor, Victor Gollancz 1956–58; assistant lecturer, Queen Mary College 1959–62; Fellow, King’s College, Cambridge 1962–65; literary editor, New Statesman 1973; editor, Times Literary Supplement 1974–81; editorial consultant, Weidenfeld 1982; writer, New York Times 1983–88; theatre critic, Sunday Telegraph 1989–2005; married 1965 Miriam May (marriage dissolved 1988; one son, one daughter); died London 10 January 2011.
OBITUARY IN THE SUNDAY TIMES (OF LONDON)
Writer John Gross: Erudite literary critic who grew up in the East End and loved gossip
The Sunday Times (of London)
January 16, 2011
www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/newsreview/theweek/obituaries/article510740.ece
[Sunday Times photo caption: Once described as ‘the best-read man in Britain’, Gross was one of the most enlightened and erudite figures in London literary life.
John Gross, who died on Monday aged 75, was one of the most enlightened and erudite figures in London literary life – a highly cultivated critic, exuberant talker, editor of The Times Literary Supplement and inveterate compiler of anthologies. The son of an immigrant Jewish doctor in the East End, he grew up with a love of that area and was educated at the City of London school. When barely 17, he astonished the examiners at Wadham College, Oxford, with his omniscience and was awarded an open scholarship.
Once described as “the best-read man in Britain”, he was probably best known among his literary peers for his first book, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: English Literary Life since 1800, a racily entertaining romp through the history of literary criticism and its practitioners, which established his reputation as a man whose huge erudition was matched by a well-developed sense of humour and a Proustian love of gossip.
For a brief year in the early 1970s he was literary editor of the New Statesman. He was perhaps too aloof and unwilling to delegate, falling out with a feminine coven in the office. In 1974 he was appointed editor of The Times Literary Supplement. At the time the supplement could still be described by one magazine editor as “a purely academic periodical, run by Oxford dons and written by anonymous writers analysing learned books”.
Gross set out to broaden its appeal by expanding its coverage, increasing the number of poems and pictures and recruiting younger writers to contribute. Perhaps his most controversial decision was to insist on giving his reviewers bylines, on the grounds that anonymity had allowed “the worst critics, Mr Puff and Mr Sneer, to sound like impersonal oracles”. Gross felt it healthier for reviewers to take responsibility for what they wrote.
He was not always easy to work with. He was a perfectionist who might spend more than an hour discussing with his staff who might review a book on numismatics. But, as Craig Brown wrote in The Spectator, “Though he always read everything with a singular intensity, the moment he looked up he would start talking and smiling, his eyes a winning mixture of intensity and glee.”
Brown recalls giving him a copy of the 1968 Simon Dee Book to read while in hospital recovering from a heart attack some years ago. “There are not many former editors of the TLS who would welcome such a gift, but within minutes he seemed to know it off by heart.”
He had a good deal of illness in his last years. But he remained a keen diner-out, and for some years gave a large and jolly annual party for his friends in the Basil Street hotel, Knightsbridge. He is survived by a son, Tom, and a daughter, Susanna, who read Shakespeare’s sonnets at his bedside as he died.
THE WASHINGTON POST ON JOHN GROSS
John Gross, critic, editor and ‘best-read man in Britain,’ dies at 75’
By Matt Schudel
The Washington Post
January 22, 2011
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/22/AR2011012200002.html
John Gross, 75, a British literary critic and editor whose wide-ranging interests seemed to be a modern-day reflection of the learned writers he memorialized in his 1969 bestseller, “The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters,” died Jan. 10 in London. He had heart and kidney ailments.
A onetime academic who fled the cloistered life of the university for the hurried world of journalism, Mr. Gross was once called by the British Spectator magazine “the best-read man in Britain.” He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the works of Shakespeare and was equally adept in politics, drama and history.
From 1974 to 1981, Mr. Gross was editor of the Times Literary Supplement, helping transform the review section of London’s Sunday Times newspaper into one of the pre-eminent literary journals in the world.
At the TLS, as it is generally known, Mr. Gross took the controversial step of including bylines on reviews that had traditionally been anonymous. The old practice, he said, permitted “the worst critics, Mr. Puff and Mr. Sneer, to sound like impersonal oracles.”
From 1983 to 1989, Mr. Gross was a book reviewer and cultural critic for the New York Times. After returning to England in 1989, he was the drama critic for the Sunday Telegraph newspaper until 2005.
Mr. Gross wrote or edited several books but remained best-known for “The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters.” His book, he noted, was about a particular kind of British writer who “aimed higher than journalism but made no pretence of being primarily an artist.”
Noting that the term “man of letters” had the musty scent of the antique, Mr. Gross wrote, “nothing has really taken its place.”
His book revived the half-forgotten careers of such Victorian early 20th-century writers as Matthew Arnold, Edmund Gosse and John Middleton Murry, who toiled in the low-paying but combative literary world. Mr. Gross’s book became an unexpected bestseller.
John Jacob Gross was born March 12, 1935, in London’s East End. His father, a doctor, was an emigrant from Poland.
In a 2001 memoir, “The Double Thread,” Mr. Gross described his early life, in which his Jewish roots and his emerging identity as an English literary figure sometimes clashed.
He graduated from the University of Oxford in 1955 and worked in publishing and as a college professor early in his career.
Later in life, Mr. Gross drew on his vast knowledge of literature when he edited a series of books for the Oxford University Press, including anthologies of essays, English prose, literary anecdotes and parodies.
He served on many British cultural councils and was chairman of the judging committee of Britain’s prestigious Man Booker literary prize.
His marriage to Miriam May Gross ended in divorce. Survivors include two children.
JOHN GROSS IN THE TLS ON J. D. SALINGER FROM 1960
The current edition of the Times Literary Supplement has a wonderful tribute to John Gross, but that section of the magazine which is not available online. The TLS also noted that, in addition to editing the paper for seven years, he wrote for the paper for just over 50 years.
The TLS this week also reprints John Gross’s review for the paper, of J. D. Salinger from April 8, 1960.
***
Then and Now: John Gross on J. D. Salinger
From The Times Literary Supplement
January 14, 2011
The growth of Mr J. D. Salinger’s reputation in this country has been a curiously underground affair, depending more on word-of-mouth recommendation than on conventional critical esteem. His work has always been sympathetically reviewed, but where thousands of readers, particularly young readers, have been bowled over, established critics have tended to remain polite but basically unresponsive to all the fuss. There have been a few exceptions – Mr Salinger was one of the last of Middleton Murry’s many enthusiasms – but in general it is more characteristic that when The Catcher in the Rye first appeared it was dealt with briefly by a leading Sunday newspaper towards the end of a review in which pride of place had been given to Miss Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel. So, too, the peculiar hatred which Mr Salinger’s work inspires among many American intellectuals seems to be in direct proportion to the hold which he has had over American undergraduates during the past decade: produce a style which it is disastrously easy for adolescents everywhere to parrot or parody, and it is only a matter of time before the tide begins to turn.
But meanwhile Mr Salinger’s popularity increases steadily and in a world in which most collections of short stories are notoriously difficult for a publisher to sell, Ace Books have just re-issued their paperback edition of For Esmé – with Love and Squalor. This is the author’s second book, a collection of nine stories, mostly reprinted from the New Yorker, which first appeared some seven years ago. At that time it served to confirm that The Catcher in the Rye had not been a mere flash in the pan, but in the light of Mr Salinger’s subsequent development it can now more easily be thought of as marking the transition from the schoolboy universe of the earlier book to the involuted chronicles of the Glass family, that outlandish tribe of superannuated child prodigies who have been perplexing readers of the New Yorker in recent years. It is not only that the family itself makes a characteristically zany début with the account of Seymour’s suicide in Miami, or that the author casually lets drop that Boo Boo Tannenbaum, the heroine of “Down at the Dinghy,” was born a Glass, but also that in several other stories Salinger’s preoccupation with mysticism and the eccentricities of his full-blown style first make themselves felt.
The best piece in the collection, however, the title-story, is in Mr Salinger’s earlier vein. “For Esmé” is a minor triumph, though one of a precarious nature. The G.I. and the solemn little girl in a tartan dress: at first sight the story seems to cry out for illustrations by Norman Rockwell. And indeed Esmé and Charles are dream children; for all the wit with which Salinger captures their conversation, they are essentially the fruits of a slightly morbid fantasy rather than of accurate observation. (It is interesting to note that they are orphans, which is what Holden and Phoebe of The Catcher in the Rye seem to be in all but name: parents, and particularly fathers, inhabit a twilight zone in the lives of Mr Salinger’s children.) But if the author, walking along an artistic knife-edge, never quite topples over into sentimentality, it is largely on account of the power with which he is able to evoke the “squalor “of his title: the requisitioned house in postwar war Germany where the soldier sits shielding has eyes from the harsh glare of a naked bulb, full of nausea, plagued by a boorish companion, very near the end of his tether. This kind of scene Mr Salinger can draw to perfection and the reader is readily persuaded that the wrist-watch which Esme sends to the soldier might very well act as a talisman giving him the strength to go on; though there is no suggestion that her gift can dispel his entire malaise and in the end the story remains only a fine fragment.
There is a considerable talent for mimicry on display throughout this collection; and no one would dispute Mr Salinger’s mastery of the wisecrack the idiom of the campus the endless jabbing and sparring of Manhattan cross-talk. But gradually one succumbs to a nagging sense of emptiness, of a writer trapped by his own cleverness and increasingly cut off from his true subject-matter. The baffling trick-endings add to this effect; here is a writer who talks in riddles without inspiring much confidence that he knows the answers. At one point in “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes” he sinks to the level of slick commercialism and then immediately follows up with the first two stories in which his religious preoccupations come to the fore.
“Teddy” presents an alarmingly precocious schoolboy who is also a budding mystic; “Du Daumier-Smith’s Blue Period” is the story of a rather tiresome adolescent hoaxer who experiences a sudden sense of religious illumination while standing in front of a shop-window full of orthopaedic appliances. Both characters point forward to the more complex figure of Franny Glass the young girl for whom true religion has come to be symbolized by the legend of a peasant who trudged across Russia reciting over and over again a single prayer : “Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me”. Like Franny, Teddy and Du Daumier-Smith are both in different ways fascinated by the idea of total renunciation; and like her they never quite ring true.
It is partly a question of style. Already in For Esmé – with Love and Squalor, there are many traces of what is to come: “I’m not saying I will but I could go on for hours escorting the reader – forcibly if necessary – back and forth across the border. This is the kind of mannered and maddening self-consciousness which gains the upper hand throughout the Glass series until it culminates in “Seymour” that interminable exercise in evasion where parentheses enfold parentheses like the layers of an onion and a whole battery of footnotes, italics, adverbial clauses and throw-away lines are deployed to produce the effect of an infinite regress of self consciousness and self-mockery. Not for nothing has their creator christened this family “Glass”; at times the name suggests a miniature world of bright artificial creatures, at others the endlessly multiplying images of a hall of mirrors. The author has abandoned what he wryly refers to as “the heart-shaped prose” of his earlier manner, but the contortions of his recent style belie the seriousness of his subject.
The peasant chanting his prayer incessantly may or may not be an admirable figure, but the effect will certainly be ruined if one has him constantly glancing over his shoulder to make sure that he isn’t being laughed at by the readers of the New Yorker.
As this proliferation of defence mechanisms suggests, Mr Salinger’s later work has involved a flight from his creative origins. More and more his characters have come to inhabit a social void, where the crucial fact that they are predominantly half- assimilated middle-class Jews is almost entirely suppressed. And yet Salinger has a very precise sense of the world of Ginnie Graff, Lionel Tannenbaum, Sharon Lipschutz and the rest; as Mr Maxwell Geismar puts it in an extremely perceptive essay, if Salinger has primarily been concerned with the pure, the isolated, the causeless child, one sees that he can describe the milieu of their origin very well indeed when he chooses to, even under its pseudonymic and self-protective colouring.
But there is no counterpart to this kind of sociological insight in the hodge-podge of world-religions which the Glass clan have evolved, and as a result Salinger’s work has come to seem increasingly hollow.
Below: John Gross, in 2009
Below: John Gross in 1969, the year The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters was published.
Further tributes to John Gross can be read here:
* A wonderful father (Jan. 12, 2011)
* “The Gentleman of Letters” (Jan. 16, 2011)
* “The plays of Shakespeare, the novels of Tolstoy and the teeming streets of Dickens” (Jan. 28, 2011)
* “Remembering John Gross: friendship flooded the RIBA” (March 25, 2011)
* John Gross’s friends remember him in London and New York (Jan. 10, 2012)
* John Gross on the silver screen (Jan. 10, 2012)
Above: John Gross, last year
THE GUARDIAN: “JOHN GROSS: MY HERO”
Thank you to all the many, many hundreds of people who wrote expressing condolences on the death of my father. I have been inundated with emails, letters and calls, and heartened by them all, and I am sorry that I don’t have time at present to reply to everyone individually.
Because there are a large number of people on this list who know me or knew my father personally, and because many of you said you would be interested in seeing additional articles about my father, below is a further selection from the last couple of days.
Among the articles below are a perceptive and amusing piece in the American magazine, The Weekly Standard, entitled “Gentleman of Letters”; a second piece in The Guardian published yesterday by the author Victoria Glendinning entitled “John Gross: My Hero”; a tribute by Roger Kimball in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal titled “A Tonic, Humane and civilizing force”; pieces by Craig Brown and Charles Moore in The Spectator; a tribute by D.J. Taylor in today’s Independent on Sunday (in Britain); and various other items from The Evening Standard, Daily Telegraph, and elsewhere.
-- Tom Gross
Further tributes to John Gross can be read here:
* A wonderful father (Jan. 12, 2011)
* “The Pleasure of His Company” (Jan. 23, 2011)
* “The plays of Shakespeare, the novels of Tolstoy and the teeming streets of Dickens” (Jan. 28, 2011)
* “Remembering John Gross: friendship flooded the RIBA” (March 25, 2011)
* John Gross’s friends remember him in London and New York (Jan. 10, 2012)
* John Gross on the silver screen (Jan. 10, 2012)
CONTENTS
1. “My hero: John Gross” (By Victoria Glendinning, The Guardian, Jan. 15, 2011)
2. “Immeasurably saddened” (By D.J. Taylor, The Independent, Jan. 16, 2011)
3. “A Tonic, Humane and Civilizing Force” (by Roger Kimball, Wall Street Journal, Jan. 15, 2011)
4. “The man who read everything” (By Craig Brown, The Spectator, Jan. 12, 2011)
5. “Remembering John Gross” (By Charles Moore, The Spectator, Jan. 12, 2011)
6. “Gentleman of Letters’ (By Joseph Epstein, The Weekly Standard, Jan. 24, 2011)
7. “RIP John Gross, distinguished man of letters and warm companion” (By Toby Young, Daily Telegraph, Jan. 12, 2011)
8. “One of our last great men of letters” (By Sebastian Shakespeare, Evening Standard, Jan. 14, 2011)
9. Other articles (from the TLS, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Commentary, Scotsman, Week and elsewhere)
A SECOND TRIBUTE IN THE GUARDIAN
My hero: John Gross, “the best-read man in Britain”
By Victoria Glendinning
The Guardian
January 15, 2011
www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/15/my-hero-john-gross-victoria-glendinning
John Gross, the distinguished literary critic and editor, known as “the best-read man in Britain”, died this week. Much has been said and written in the past few days about his stature as a man of letters, his unbeatable knowledge of books and authors, and his own books, including The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters. Working with him, as I did as an editorial assistant on the TLS, was like playing tennis with a much better player than yourself, and even when you sent the ball into the net the game went on. He saw in all of us capacities we did not know we had, and we responded. No one has ever been a more supportive friend, both professionally and personally.
But there were many other sides to him, such as his sense of the ridiculous and his genius as an anecdotalist. He was, in his diffident way, a man of the world. Well informed, and a graceful guest, he had many real friends among the wealthy and aristocratic, who appreciated not only his intellectual distinction but his transparent integrity. His response to the “great world” was Proustian.
In what one could call his middle period, he and I used to meet for drinks in the Zanzibar, that pre-Groucho haunt in Covent Garden, or for tea in the vast lounge of the Piccadilly Hotel (now the Meridien), where we were often alone except for the harpist plinking away in the middle distance, her large handbag at her feet.
He had total recall for dialogue, and launched into long, louche stories about his social experiences, spinning off in colourful tangents (“There’s a subtext here you may not know about”), always coming back, as in a well-turned essay, to his narrative – very funny, wildly indiscreet but never, ever malicious. This was gossip as an art form.
He could be dismissive, because some ideas have to be dismissed, but he did not mock or sneer. What gave him joy was the human comedy, of which he was an astute and affectionate observer.
THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY
From D.J. Taylor’s column
The Independent on Sunday (London)
January 16, 2011
Like many another labourer in the valley of the shadow of books, I was immeasurably saddened to hear of John Gross’s death last week.
In a career that lasted over five decades, Gross – don, publisher, editor, anthologist and critic – was the consummate all-round literary professional, but his reputation will rest on his study of English literary life, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1969), inset left.
His great theme, in an age of academic specialisation and the McLuhanesque valuing of the medium over the message it conveyed, was the enduring worth of the old-style reviewer. If anything supported his argument that “the idea of the man of letters has a place in any healthy literary tradition”, it was his own efforts to keep that tradition alive.
He was one of my great book-world heroes, a bright Olympian torch flaring out over the Grub Street wastelands, impossible to replace.
John Gross in 1984 (Photo by The New York Times)
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
A Tonic, Humane and Civilizing Force
By Roger Kimball
The Wall Street Journal (Features page)
January 15, 2011
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704803604576078200505997010.html
“As an adolescent,” the distinguished critic, editor and anthologist John Gross wrote in his memoir, “A Double Thread: Growing up English and Jewish in London” (2001), “I believed that one day I would find time to read everything.” Many of his friends and admirers assumed that he had long since achieved his ambition. Last year, Bevis Hillier, writing in the Spectator, called him “the best-read man in Britain.”
Earlier this week, when I wrote to tell the literary scholar John Ellis, who had been at the City of London School with Gross in the 1940s and early 1950s, that our friend had died, age 75, he passed along a story about Gross at school. The headmaster used to compose a 250-point general-knowledge quiz for the entire school, masters as well as pupils. The questions ranged over art, history, literature, science and politics. Occasionally some of the older boys placed among the masters with the top scores. But in 1950, the astonished headmaster announced that the winner was a mere fourth-former – what we would call a sophomore. Gross was 14.
In his memoir, Gross casually cited “curiosity” as the prod for his reading. “Taste wasn’t allowed to get in the way.” Mysteries as well as 17th-century poetry, potboilers as well as serious novels, Eliot and Joyce but also “the incomparable Simenon”: literary, historical, biographical, political lore of all sorts were his goad. One evening after dinner in Manhattan, my wife and Gross began singing the Rodgers and Hart song “I Wish I Were in Love Again.” My wife, no slouch in these matters, knew a couple of verses. Gross knew them all.
One of our favorite pastimes when in London was going on tours with Gross. He knew the city as well as any London taxi driver – better, because he could take you to any address you named and also knew what had happened there from the time of Julius Caesar until the day before yesterday. He sat on the English Heritage committee that dispensed new Blue Plaques to the clamoring line of worthy (and sometimes not-so-worthy) dead, and he introduced us to some delicious conjunctions. At Hyde Park Gate, for example, you can see not only the plaque for Robert Baden-Powell, “Chief Scout of the World,” but also the one for Winston Churchill and the 19th-century man of letters Leslie Stephen and his daughter, the future Virginia Woolf. Just around the corner, in De Vere Gardens, Henry James lived for some 15 years.
Like Stephen before him, Gross was a distinguished representative of that vanishing race he wrote about in his most famous book, “The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters” (1969). The title, he noted, was something of an exaggeration. Homo litteratus was not, is not (not quite), extinct. But it belongs on the list of endangered cultural species. In a new afterword for the 1991 American edition, Gross delicately acknowledged that “some of the more extreme developments inside universities have gone further than I would have dared predict in demonstrating the dire effects that might follow if literary studies ever became an academic monopoly.” “Rise and Fall” – indeed, Gross’s entire career – was a quiet, good-humored battle against that reader-proof leviathan. These days academics use the phrase “belle lettrist” as a term of diminishment. Gross gloried in it, noting that “the belittling of the belle lettrist, the person who writes as he pleases, is at bottom a demand for ideological conformity.”
He had brief stints teaching, but his real career was in the world of live literary endeavor. He worked briefly at the late, great Encounter magazine in London and had a distinguished tenure as editor of the Times Literary Supplement (1974-81). He was a book critic for the New York Times back when the paper had critics and a theater reviewer for the Sunday Telegraph in London. One of the first people he called when he took over the TLS was the poet and critic William Empson. “‘Oh, it’s you,’ came [Empson’s] strange sing-song voice over the phone. ‘Are you in the chair already?’ ‘Yes.’ A long pause. ‘Does it swivel?’ “
Before Gross’s editorship, reviewers for the TLS had been anonymous, a pleasing system for disinterested expertise in theory but one that in practice invited all sorts of abuses, from score-settling to self-serving. Gross remembered a long essay on the state of comparative literature that began by asking whether there were any heirs to the great European practitioners of the genre, men like E.R. Curtius and Erich Auerbach. Only, intoned the anonymous reviewer, perhaps George Steiner . . . Gross, from his new swivel chair, looked up the piece. It was by George Steiner.
Gross loved to tell such stories. And he had so many by heart that he was the natural person to edit the “Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes.” “The urge to exchange anecdotes,” he wrote in the introduction, “is as deeply implanted in human beings as the urge to gossip.” It was an urge he indulged with innocent zest. “We value anecdotes about a writer, beyond their immediate point, because they bear the stamp of his or her personality.”
Oxford was on to a good thing with John Gross, anthologist. He turned out a short shelf of them: of essays, aphorisms, comic verse, quotations by and about Shakespeare and, most recently, parodies. All are distinguished by a commanding erudition lightly worn and an intellectual impresario’s talent for balancing the serious and the amusing. His anthology of essays, for example, begins with Francis Bacon and includes such worthy and entertaining figures as Sir Thomas Browne, Dryden, Swift, Hume, Oliver Goldsmith, William Hazlitt, Matthew Arnold, the James brothers (William and Henry), Oscar Wilde, John Jay Chapman, H.L. Mencken and many others. He ends with one of the funniest reviews I have ever read, Clive James on Judith Krantz’s novel “Princess Daisy.” (“To be a really lousy writer,” Mr. James began, “takes energy.”)
In his introduction to the volume, Gross remarked that the 18th-century editor and essayist Joseph Addison “transformed the essay into a civilizing force, an engine against coarseness and pedantry.” Gross was himself such an engine over the course of his career. His friends lost something precious with his passing; our cultural life lost an engaging, tonic, humane and civilizing force.
(Mr. Kimball is editor and publisher of the New Criterion, and publisher of Encounter Books.)
CRAIG BROWN IN THE SPECTATOR
The man who read everything
By Craig Brown
The Spectator
January 12, 2011
www.spectator.co.uk/books/blog/6613533/the-man-who-read-everything.thtml
Mark Boxer once drew a caricature of his friend John Gross half-buried beneath piles of hardback books while glancing up from a copy of Tatler. It’s a caricature that contains a nugget of truth – it is rare, these days, for anyone so bookish to keep such a close eye on the toings-and-froings of high society and showbiz – but there is still something not quite right about the rather severe, tight-lipped expression on John’s face. Though he always read everything with a singular intensity, the moment he looked up he would start talking and smiling, his eyes a winning mixture of benevolence and glee.
John had a startling breadth of knowledge, aided by what seemed to me an almost photographic memory: when he watched Mastermind on television, he was as swift with his answers in the specialist rounds as in the general. From time to time, he would join a team for a charity quiz; his team would always win. He was once stumped by a question about which school was attended by the hero of Lorna Doone. I remember the look of admiration in his face when he told me that his fellow team-member, the late Hugh Massingberd, had come up with the right answer in a flash: ‘Blundells’.
When he was recovering in hospital from a heart attack some years ago, I gave him a copy of the 1968 Simon Dee Annual: there are not many former editors of the TLS who would welcome such a gift, but within minutes, he seemed to know it off by heart. He loved improbable connections between people, particularly high and low. A couple of days ago, I discovered that Lucian Freud had once had a small part in a George Formby film, and, furthermore, that George Formby had, many years earlier, shared a music-hall bill with the wife of Dr Crippen. ‘I must tell John,’ I thought to myself. And now I never can.
He was interested in everything (except, perhaps, sport). This is what made him such a perfect person to invigorate the TLS as well as a brilliant anthologist. Though anthologies are, by their nature, devoted to the works of others, his anthologies also serve as a sort of silhouette of the sharp and capacious mind that edited them, and of his underlying humanity.
In his last but one, The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, he includes a story about the popular novelist Catherine Cookson, who was serving as a laundry girl in a workhouse when, in the South Shields library, she came across a copy of Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son, written in 1737. Lord Chesterfield spoke directly to her: ‘If you improve and grow learned everyone will be fond of you, and desirous of your company.’ Cookson recalled falling asleep reading the letters and awaking ‘round three o’clock in the morning, my mind deep in the fascination of this new world, where people conversed, not just talked. Where the brilliance of words made your heart beat faster.’ Other anthologists might have rejected Catherine Cookson as too lowbrow, but John had not only read her biography (how many of us can claim that?) but had clearly been moved by this unlikely union of two quite different minds separated by two centuries.
John himself was a tireless anecdotalist; it is easy to transpose many of the literary anecdotes in his anthology into his own idiosyncratic delivery, rapid, but full of asides and qualifications. In one, Kingsley Amis is quoted by John Mortimer as admitting that he had ‘hit his son with a hammer’, when in fact he had said that he had hit his thumb with a hammer. In another, also involving a mishearing, Kenneth Tynan quotes Tom Stoppard as saying ‘I am a human nothing’ and then suggests that all his plays should be read as an attempt to come to terms with this bleak truth. Thirty years later, Stoppard writes a letter to the Guardian stating, with characteristic good humour, that what he in fact said was, ‘I am assuming nothing.’
He had a particular interest in the humour of social embarrassment. I remember him telling the tale of Mark Boxer at dinner with Noel Annan, getting carried away with listing all the people they knew who never lived up to their early promise. ‘Yes – and of course there’s Noel Annan!’ said Mark, forgetting for a fatal second that it was Annan to whom he was talking. While Mark collapsed on the ground, writhing in embarrassment, John remembered thinking to himself, ‘I may be able to get through the rest of my life, but how can I get through the next five minutes?’
As a critic, he never mistook the po-faced for the serious or the flashy for the innovative. He had a passion for comedy. He was a member of the committee that advises the government on the awarding of public honours, and remained cross and bemused that Ronald Searle had for some reason been denied a knighthood.
He was no cultural relativist. His literary and theatre criticism was always underpinned by sanity and sound judgment. He once wrote of another critic that ‘One major source of strength in his work is an exceptional breadth of culture. He doesn’t parade his knowledge; his cultural allusions are almost always casual and unforced. But you never doubt that the knowledge is there, or that it has a living value.’ Had he been less modest, he might have written this description, with equal accuracy, of himself.
He was a modest man, beady but unassuming, and by temperament understated. In his memoir Experience, Martin Amis recalls bumping into him in a shopping centre, a month or two after he had suffered a major heart attack. ‘It wasn’t too bad. Bearable. I’ve had worse toothaches,’ reported John.
He remained friendly and unpompous to the end. A day or two ago, a West Indian nurse at St Mary’s, Paddington, told John’s son Tom that ‘Mr Gross was the best conversationalist we’ve ever had here.’ It can’t be said of many people, but I think John died in just the way he would have chosen: to the sound of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, read by his daughter Susanna.
CHARLES MOORE IN THE SPECTATOR
Remembering John Gross
By Charles Moore
The Spectator
January 12, 2011
www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/6617183/from-the-archives-remembering-john-gross.thtml
John Gross, who has just died, had many distinctions in the world of letters, but his obituaries did not report that he was the shortest-serving literary editor of The Spectator ever. In 1983, Alexander Chancellor, the editor, sacked A.N. Wilson from the job for a piece of mischief involving Clive James and Bel Mooney, and appointed John in his stead. John commissioned, it was alleged, one book review, and was then poached by the New York Times. He later returned to England and became theatre critic of the Sunday Telegraph. I inherited him when I became editor there in 1992.
One day, he disparaged a new play by David Hare. Hare, who is a charming man in all other circumstances, is very sensitive to unfavourable comment on his work. ‘Your theatre critic’, he wrote to me, ‘is a subliterate dickhead.’ I have always treasured this judgment, because it was so perfectly wrong. John Gross was about as literate as it is possible to be. His learning was deep but, both in conversation and on the page, lightly worn.
The last time I saw him he corrected me when I attributed to Auberon Waugh a witticism which was actually Jane Austen’s. He did it so delicately that I only noticed afterwards what a fool I’d been. Although there have been handsome obituaries of John in the newspapers, I am left with the irritated sense that he was under-appreciated. He was too clever, too witty, too modest for our age.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN IN THE WEEKLY STANDARD
Gentleman of Letters
John Gross, 1935-2011
By Joseph Epstein
The Weekly Standard
Edition of January 24, 2011
https://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/gentleman-letters_533689.html
My friend John Gross died on Monday, January 10. His son Tom, who sent out an email announcing John’s death to a large number of his friends, noted that his father’s death was caused by complications relating to his heart and kidneys. His health had been failing in various ways for quite a long spell. Tom Gross also mentioned that his sister Susanna, John’s daughter, was reading to him from Shakespeare’s Sonnets when he died. That is a proper touch, for John knew English literature, knew it with greater breadth and more deeply than anyone I have ever met.
If a decently educated person knows Shakespeare, and someone with a specialized interest in the theater also knows the plays of Marlowe, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Kyd, John knew Elizabethan playwrights at the next level down. The same was true of every other age or genre of English literature: obscure Romantic poets, unknown Victorian novelists, barely published critics of every age – John knew them all. As a young man, John wrote a brilliant survey of English criticism and reviewing called The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, English Literary Life Since 1800 (1969). He also wrote Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend (1992), a splendid account of the differing ways the character of Shylock has been presented on the stage, from utter fiend to sympathetic victim. These were subjects that a standard English or American academic could nicely kill, but John wrote about them with easy sophistication, brio, charm, wit, and his always present commonsensical intelligence.
Such fame as John enjoyed was, I suspect, chiefly English, though for a period he worked for the New York Times as one of its daily reviewers. He also wrote with some regularity for American journals, among them the New Criterion, Commentary, and the New York Review of Books. Unlike many English intellectuals, he was a man without the least touch of anti-Americanism, and in his memoir of the first 17 years of his life, A Double Thread (2001), he recounts how important American movies, popular songs, and comic books were to him when growing up.
“Not everyone approved. Objections floated down from the adult world – political criticisms from the left, disdain for American vulgarity from the right. But among children, if I am in any way representative, the image was overwhelmingly favorable. America stood for streamlining and the open road, for excitement and optimism.”
John had a good run as an editor, both of intellectual journals and of anthologies. He was an assistant editor at Encounter. He was the literary editor of the New Statesman at a time when the so-called back of the book, where reviews of books and arts appeared, was easily the best thing about it. He later worked at the same job for the Spectator.
But John’s great editorial contribution was as the principal editor of the Times Literary Supplement, from 1974 to 1981. As editor of the TLS he put an end to the paper’s long tradition of anonymous reviewing, which too frequently resulted in the corrupt practice of puffing the books of friends and sneering at those of enemies. Quite as important, he widened the range of the TLS, making it less scholarly-parochial by opening it up to subjects of broader intellectual interest without in any way diminishing its seriousness.
His editorship at the TLS came at a difficult time. For one thing, the then very belligerent British printing union was menacing the paper, frequently threatening not to print the current week’s edition or refusing to do the lithography that made possible the photographs and drawings accompanying an issue. (This belligerence was finally put down by the new owner of the Times, Rupert Murdoch, who built a new printing plant in the London district of Wapping, which kicked into force, with the help of the Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications, and Plumbing Union (EETPU), when the printing unions announced a full-scale strike in 1986.)
The TLS had the standing of a national paper, which meant it couldn’t, like most American intellectual journals, comfortably hew to a political line. The time of John’s editorship also saw the rise, in universities, of critical theory, academic feminism, and other university waste products, whose measure one may be sure John had taken but which he could not altogether ignore in the pages of the TLS. Although John had his own politics and his own strong views on all things literary, as editor of the TLS he had to walk a high and slippery tightrope. That he did so without ever undermining his own beliefs or surrendering his standards is a tribute to his tact, subtlety, and extraordinary intellectual balance.
I wrote for John before I had met him. At the TLS he gave me, then a youngish writer, plummy assignments. I wrote about Maxwell Perkins, Edmund Wilson, and Walter Lippmann for him. He was an editor whose tolerance for the slightly outré and distaste for received opinions one could count on, so that, when asked to review a book on the Pulitzer Prizes, I knew that in his London office John would be amused at my writing that the Pulitzer Prizes tend to go to two kinds of people only: those who don’t need them, and those who don’t deserve them.
After his seven-year stint at the TLS, John worked briefly for the publisher George Weidenfeld and then took a job as a reviewer at the New York Times. How one wishes that he had instead been asked to edit the New York Times Book Review, for he would have made it, for the first time in its long history, serious and substantial. With his easy charm, he was a great social success in Manhattan. He never mentioned it to me, but I had heard that he led a book discussion club for Brooke Astor and her friends.
Working at the New York Times, which he did between 1983 and 1989, was something else. What it mostly produced was a fund of amusing stories about the ineptitude and fecklessness of the paper’s editors, at all levels. I recall John telling me a story about his mentioning in one of his reviews the name Plekhanov, whom he described as “the father of Russian Marxism.” One of the paper’s copy editors wanted to know his authority for calling Plekhanov that. “It’s almost a bloody cliché,” John told me recounting the story, “like George Washington was the father of his country.” But the copy editor wouldn’t back down until John, exasperated, said, “Look. Why don’t we compromise and refer to Plekhanov as the uncle of Russian Marxism.”
John had a keen taste for the absurd behavior of intellectuals and the vanity of writers. He got a kick out of my calling the contributors of the New York Review of Books “mad dogs and Englishmen,” and told me that the visits to London of that journal’s editor, Robert Silvers, given the obeisance that English intellectuals paid him, resembled nothing so much as the return home of the Viceroy of India.
I didn’t see the Sunday Telegraph, for which John became drama critic, but always thought it an amusing mating for a man with a taste for the absurd having to review so many plays that must themselves have been well beyond absurd. He was once seated in a London theater, watching a production of King Lear being done in mud, when he was attacked by severe angina. “Oh, Lord, I said to myself,” he told me, “dear Lord, please don’t let this be the last thing I ever see.” Fortunately, it wasn’t, though he went home afterwards and had a heart attack and, subsequently, bypass surgery.
John’s sense of the absurdity of intellectuals was nicely conveyed in his letters, subsequently his emails, and his occasional phone calls to me. He was a wonderfully entertaining gossip with a large supply of artful indiscretions at his disposal.
I don’t know when, precisely, John’s health began to break down, but when it did the steps down the precipice were all serious. He had a heart attack, as I mentioned, and at one point he suffered a stroke that, he reported to me, left one of his arms temporarily dangling out of commission. After some hesitation, I took a chance and wrote to him to say that I hoped he would not take advantage of his bad arm to do imitations of Isaiah Berlin or George Steiner, who each had a withered arm. He thought it very amusing, or so he said.
Part of John’s genius was for tact. He reviewed two of my books, praising them both, but in each case quietly getting in real criticisms, both of acts of commission and omission on the author’s part. So suave a prose stylist was he that it might seem that John had, to use Sam Lipman’s phrase, “no fist.” In fact, when sufficiently aroused John had a knockout punch. See his quietly devastating review of Stefan Collini’s Common Reading in the (London) Sunday Times of May 21, 2008. John also had little use for dogmatic critics. Readers of The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters will recall his attack on the still alive and then-highly influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis. In defense of the vigor of his attack, John wrote in an afterword to a republication of the book in 1992: “I still believe I was right to react as I did. Leavis attempted, as no one before him, to pronounce a death sentence on the entire man-of-letters tradition. He also set a precedent for trying to police literary studies and impose one man’s will on them.”
In the end I am not sure that it is as a writer that John will be best remembered. He wrote four books – along with those I have already mentioned, he did the James Joyce volume (1970) in Frank Kermode’s Modern Masters series – all excellent of their kind. He edited a number of anthologies for Oxford University Press, among them The Oxford Book of Essays, The Oxford Book of Aphorisms, The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, The Oxford Book of Comic Verse, The New Oxford Book of English Prose, The Oxford Book of Parodies, and After Shakespeare: Writing Inspired by the World’s Greatest Author – quality goods, all these volumes, exhibiting John’s immense range of reading in English literature, and books that will live on for many years. But he never thought to put together a volume of his criticism and reviews. A Double Thread, an autobiographical account of his early life, is, for an autobiography, written with an unusual tact and modesty. The truth may be that John hadn’t the egotism and vanity, the pushiness and self-absorption, required of the true writer. (Please not to ask how I know about these requisite qualities.)
John may also have enjoyed life too much. He had a natural bonhomie combined with a winning detachment. Once, in Chicago, he told me that he was the next day to visit a woman (he did not vouchsafe her name), who now lived in the city, with whom he had been close during his years as a student at Oxford. “Pity we never married,” he said, with his amused irony. “We could have caused each other much heartache.” (John’s one marriage, to the editor and writer Miriam Gross, ended in divorce, but the two remained good friends, and I never heard him utter a critical word about her.) He once took my wife and me round London, to the (in that day) with-it clubs and to the historical places only a born Londoner knew. His love of the city was palpable.
So John Gross is dead at 75. For me, he has left too early. But then I always felt John had left too early, which is another way of saying that I never got enough of him. During his last phone call to me, six or so weeks ago, we talked about a T. S. Eliot essay I had written; he told me about his own meetings with Eliot, and left me with one of his characteristic golden nuggets of gossip.
The last time I saw John in person was in Manhattan. We had breakfast together, and after breakfast we walked around the block, it must have been 10 times, trading stories, telling jokes, gossiping, laughing. At the end, I remember saying to him, “You know, John, if I were the sort of Jewish gent who went in for show-biz-like hugging, I should bestow upon you my best bear hug. But you don’t seem to me a man in desperate need of a hug.”
“Quite so,” he said, and we shook hands and parted.
John Gross was my contemporary, the smartest literary man of my generation, a sweet character, and his death marks a genuine subtraction, not merely in my life, but in the life of the culture.
(Joseph Epstein, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, is the author, most recently, of The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff And Other Stories.)
A FURTHER TRIBUTE IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
RIP John Gross, distinguished man of letters and warm companion
By Toby Young
The Daily Telegraph (London)
January 12, 2011
I heard the sad news yesterday that John Gross has died. He was a lovely man – warm, generous, clever, funny, honourable. I got to know him during my five-year stint as a drama critic for the Spectator. The fraternity of theatre critics is notoriously unfriendly towards newcomers and it became quite demoralising to be snubbed by the same group of middle-aged men three or four times a week. John, who was working as the Sunday Telegraph’s drama critic at the time, was more or less the only one who would talk to me, a characteristic act of kindness on his part. Without his companionship the job would have been a good deal less fun.
In the obituaries that appeared yesterday he was widely praised for his erudition, having edited a number of Oxford anthologies as well as the TLS, and one of the most remarkable things about him was his ability to complement almost any story with a literary anecdote. I remember telling him of my discomfiture at being confronted by Alain de Botton who berated me for having come to his book launch in spite of the fact that I’d given his book a bad review. John instantly quoted Hilton Kramer, the New York Times art critic, who had a similar experience when attending the opening of an exhibition he’d given a bad review to in that morning’s paper. The artist came up to Kramer and said, “Aren’t you embarrassed to show your face here?” “Not at all,” said Kramer. “You should be embarrassed at having produced such bad art.”
When I last saw John about a year ago he had retired as the Sunday Telegraph’s drama critic, just as I had as the Spectator’s, and we both shared a guilty secret. “Do you miss going to the theatre?” he asked. “The awful thing is, I don’t really,” I said. “Neither do I,” he replied. “Terrible, isn’t it?”
Not so terrible, in fact, given the number of dreary plays we had to sit through together. But I will miss him a great deal.
THE (LONDON) EVENING STANDARD
One of our last great men of letters
Sebastian Shakespeare’s column
(London) Evening Standard
January 14, 2011
www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23914099-the-grumbling-middle-class-is-actually-in-clover.do
The death of John Gross this week has robbed Britain of one of its most distinguished men of letters.
He was the best advertisement for this endangered species and was always eloquent, erudite and entertaining. Unlike the monstrous regiment of academics who clutter up our universities and cannot write for toffee.
Gross made his name with his book, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, published 1969. The term feels more and more like an anachronism now. Which is perhaps a sad reflection on literature and life.
SOME OTHER ARTICLES
From The Scotsman:
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/obituaries/Obituary-John-Gross-literary-critic.6689865.jp
From the TLS (with links to other pieces):
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article7170860.ece
From Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:
From Commentary:
www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/jpodhoretz/386077
From Tablet magazine:
www.tabletmag.com/scroll/55989/john-gross-75-dies/
From Jewish Ideas Daily (including a passage from John Gross’s memoir):
Charles Moore in The Spectator (for a second week in a row), Jan. 22, 2011:
Last item here: www.spectator.co.uk/politics/all/6630183/part_2/the-spectators-notes.thtml
(Previous column here.)
Evening Standard Londoners diary (Jan. 17, 2011):
“London literati turn out to pay their respects for the funeral of John Gross”
http://londonersdiary.standard.co.uk/2011/01/tiger-tiger-burning-bright.html
The Week (Jan. 22, 2011):
Obituaries of the Week: John Gross (1935-2011): Britain’s best-read man
Available to subscribers only: www.theweek.co.uk/about-the-week/latest-issue/
The Halifax Courier:
www.halifaxcourier.co.uk/8403/Obituary-John-Gross-literary-critic.6689865.jp
Paul Levy in Arts Journal:
www.artsjournal.com/plainenglish/2011/01/the-critics-critic-a-tribute-t.html
Obituary in The Nashua Telegraph (Washington Post):
www.nashuatelegraph.com/newsworldnation/906321-227/critic-editor-john-gross-dies-at-age.html
The Huffington Post:
www.huffingtonpost.com/t/tom-gross-remembers-john-_29291318161182721.html
The Frum Forum:
www.frumforum.com/the-best-conversationalist-we-ever-had
Charles Moore (second piece) in The Daily Telegraph:
JTA:
***
There have also been many tributes to John Gross and comments in various blogs, among them:
www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/01/028151.php
http://thedabbler.co.uk/2011/01/john-gross-literary-liberal/
John Gross in 2009
A WONDERFUL FATHER
My father, the writer and critic John Gross, died (through illness, aged 75) on Monday afternoon.
He was an exceptional person and a wonderful father.
Since there are many people who know me personally on this list, as well as hundreds who knew (or knew of) my father, as a change from the Middle East, I attach five of the obituaries published of him yesterday and today, from The New York Times, Daily Telegraph, Times of London, Guardian and New Statesman.
The Times of London also has a lead editorial about him on page 2 today, titled “A man of letters” which I also attach below.
-- Tom Gross
Further tributes to John Gross can be read here:
* “The Gentleman of Letters” (Jan. 16, 2011)
* “The Pleasure of His Company” (Jan. 23, 2011)
* “The plays of Shakespeare, the novels of Tolstoy and the teeming streets of Dickens” (Jan. 28, 2011)
* “Remembering John Gross: friendship flooded the RIBA” (March 25, 2011)
* John Gross’s friends remember him in London and New York (Jan. 10, 2012)
* John Gross on the silver screen (Jan. 10, 2012)
CONTENTS
1. “Man of Letters: An exemplary literary journalist and theatre critic leaves the stage” (Editorial, The Times, Jan. 12, 2011)
2. The Guardian obituary (By Ion Trewin, Jan. 11, 2011)
3. “Highly cultivated literary critic, exuberant talker, editor of The TLS and inveterate compiler of anthologies” (Obituary, The Times, Jan. 11, 2011)
4. Letters to The Times (Jan. 12, 2011)
5. “One of Britain's shrewdest and most fair-minded literary critics and men of letters” (Obituary, Daily Telegraph, Jan. 11, 2011)
6. “John Gross Dies at 75; Critic, Essayist and Editor” (By William Grimes, New York Times, Jan. 12, 2011)
7. “John Gross, 1935-2011” (By Jonathan Derbyshire, New Statesman, Jan. 11, 2011)
8. John Podhoretz in Commentary, Toby Young in The Daily Telegraph, David Blackburn in The Spectator, Jennifer Lipman in the Jewish Chronicle, and other pieces
EDITORIAL FROM THE TIMES OF LONDON
Man of Letters
An exemplary literary journalist and theatre critic leaves the stage
The Times
Editorial
January 12, 2011
www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/leaders/article2871315.ece
In his book The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, John Gross identified the task of literary criticism. “The first qualification for being a good critic”, he wrote, “will always be an interest in literature for what it is, rather than for the ends which it can be made to serve.”
Gross’s career as a literary journalist, which ended this week with his death at the age of 75, exemplified that principle. He had little time for narrowly specialist scholarship (“How can anyone who tries to keep up with Wordsworthian studies find time to read Wordsworth?” he wrote). Nor was he sympathetic to the type of abstruse modern theorising that shows more interest in radical politics and laboured wordplay than in books. His erudition was founded on nothing more complicated than a love of literature.
As Editor of The Times Literary Supplement in the 1970s, Gross upheld the highest of standards while speaking as fluently to general readers as he did to scholars. It was a time of declining circulation for most periodicals, while restrictive practices by trade unions made it almost impossible to publish a newspaper profitably. Yet he was among the most notable of TLS editors, ending the practice of anonymity of reviewers.
Gross was proud of his immigrant Jewish roots, and his book Shylock illuminated social as well as literary history. He described how successive generations had interpreted this most controversial of Shakespearian characters, including early diabolic incarnations of the Jew and strongly philo-Semitic productions of the Victorian age.
Gross would have been a great academic. But he conveyed his voluminous knowledge to a far wider readership, whose mental lives he enriched.
THE GUARDIAN (OBITUARY PAGE)
John Gross
By Ion Trewin
The Guardian
January 11, 2011
www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/11/john-gross-obituary
The title of his first book contained a phrase that epitomised the career of John Gross, who has died aged 75. In his early 30s and after spells in publishing and academia, he wrote The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1969). Every reviewer of any note lavished praise. VS Pritchett judged Gross “a very wise man”; Angus Wilson called him “invariably amusing, interesting and informative”; Cyril Connolly considered it “an important book”; and Norman Shrapnel remarked that “Mr Gross is one good argument for the survival of the species.”
Subtitled “Aspects of English Literary Life Since 1800”, it was not an obvious bestseller, but the memorable title, coupled with the superb reviews, ensured the largest number of book of the year commendations at the Christmas following publication. It went on to win the Duff Cooper prize. With this masterly book, Gross also first demonstrated publicly his own learning, deep but lightly worn. It was to serve him brilliantly for the next 40 years.
On the final page, he made two statements about the man of letters that his own career personified. “The first qualification for being a good critic will always be an interest in literature for what it is, rather than for the ends which it can be made to serve.” And he added: “Criticism remains the most miscellaneous, the most ill-defined of occupations.” But it was one he chose to lead for the rest of his life.
Gross was born in London. In a 2001 memoir he described his early life as the story of the separate but entwined legacies of being English and being Jewish, hence his title A Double Thread. Gross’s father, a Jewish doctor practising in Mile End, had been born and brought up in eastern Europe, before arriving in England with his parents. Harold Pinter, who grew up in the same working-class East End neighbourhood, called the memoir “a most rich, immensely readable and very moving book. I recognised so much.” The family were, Gross wrote, Orthodox in principle, but semi-Orthodox in practice. Gross proved a bookish youngster who found that literary life gave him a freedom which at the City of London school and then at Oxford (he gained an open scholarship to Wadham College when only 17) shaped his career.
From Oxford he leapt straight into a senior editorial job at the publishing house of Victor Gollancz, where the founder (then in his 60s) was searching for a successor. To Gollancz, the combination of Gross’s literary excellence and a Jewish background seemed irresistible. Gross, although made a director of the firm, stayed for only two years. He moved into academia, first at University College London and then, from 1962, as an unusually young fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, but found it unsatisfying and decided, aged 30, to freelance as a writer. By then he had met Miriam May, whom he married in 1965. She became a distinguished literary journalist in her own right. They had a son, Tom, and a daughter, Susanna, but separated amicably and divorced in 1988.
After the success of The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, Gross was in demand. In 1971, he chaired the third Booker prize. It was not the happiest of experiences. One of the judges, Malcolm Muggeridge, resigned halfway through because he felt most of the entries were ill-written and pornographic. He was replaced by the critic Philip Toynbee. When time came for the judges – Antonia Fraser, Saul Bellow and John Fowles, in addition to Toynbee and Gross – to decide on a shortlist, a split emerged over whether VS Naipaul’s In a Free State was a full-length novel and therefore eligible. Gross, like Fraser and Toynbee, insisted it was, whereas Bellow and Fowles saw it as stories, albeit linked ones. Gross endeavoured to bring the dissenters on side by circulating a questionnaire. Although both remained vocal in their disagreement – Fowles said afterwards that Gross viewed him as a rogue elephant in the matter – the view of the majority held.
Soon afterwards Gross had a brief but unhappy spell as literary editor of the New Statesman, where he and many of the staff of long standing did not see eye to eye over his choice of books to be reviewed, before being approached in 1973 about succeeding Arthur Crook as editor of the Times Literary Supplement. The weekly was, like its parent, owned by Lord Thomson of Fleet and was ripe for modernisation. Gross stayed for seven years: his major change, which he made immediately, was to abolish anonymity. The unsigned review had become, he felt, indefensible, not least for being used by the unscrupulous to pursue vendettas.
Victoria Glendinning, who worked as an editorial assistant on the TLS under Gross, recalled him as “brilliant and unpredictable”, yet sometimes made awkward by “stress and diffidence”. He was shy, but conscientious; she also remembered his daunting scholarship and love of gossip.
His period at the TLS coincided with a long-running and ultimately catastrophic dispute between the management of Times Newspapers and the print unions, which ended in the closure of its newspapers and journals for 11 months. The return to publication in November 1979 ultimately ended in tears with a journalists’ strike. Gross had had enough and resigned in 1981, although after the TLS, like its parent, was sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News International company, he served as an independent national director of Times Newspapers, a post from which he was due to retire this year.
Gross had become an indispensable friend of the publisher George Weidenfeld, who called him “a deeply civilised and compassionate observer of human frailty, a good-humoured sceptic who never forgets but almost always forgives”. Weidenfeld drew on Gross’s talents as an editorial adviser to his firm on a number of occasions. To “Pageant of History”, a series of short books he edited, Gross brought a distinguished list of contributors, including Quentin Bell and EJ Hobsbawm. In 1982, Weidenfeld persuaded him to become his deputy chairman but, as Weidenfeld himself recalled, “he preferred the independence of being a writer to the febrile atmosphere of a publishing house”.
As a freelance critic once more, he began writing regularly for the New York Review of Books from 1983. His first review was a group notice of three novels, including one by Bernard Malamud. That year he joined the staff of the New York Times as its principal book critic. It was a job that appealed to the pleasure in reading and reviewing books that he had defined in The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters. But it was also demanding.
He was required to read a new book every two days and write his review the day after. In one random month he published 10 reviews of more than a thousand words apiece, and not just on literary subjects (although these did include John Cheever’s letters, Maurice Sendak’s take on Grimm, and Robert Frost’s years in England). His breadth of knowledge allowed him that month also to write about books as wide-ranging as Lot’s Wife (a book on salt), a history of Jerusalem, an experience of New York (by Geoffrey Moorhouse), Alistair Cooke’s collected journalism, Grand Guignol in theatre and a biography of Laurence Olivier. He also found time to keep up his reading of detective fiction, which he also enjoyed reviewing.
After five years, Gross returned to London and in 1989 became drama critic of the Sunday Telegraph. He brought to the task a love of the theatre and of performance. Unlike many critics of the period he always looked to find the good in a play or in a performance, and once remarked that, as the lights dimmed and the curtain rose, he was rarely unexcited by the prospect of what might follow. He retired from the role in 2005, aged 70. It was no surprise that he showed in his weekly notices a considerable knowledge of Shakespeare. In 1992, he produced a highly praised study of Shylock that led John Gielgud to comment, “I read John Gross’s fascinating Shylock book straight through twice and enjoyed it more than I can say.”
At the same time, he was drawing on his deep well of knowledge of literature and writing by becoming the unrivalled king of anthologies for Oxford University Press. He began with the Oxford Book of Aphorisms (1983), but by 1991 he was in his stride, producing anthologies on essays (1991), comic verse (1994), English prose (1998), literary anecdotes (2006) and parodies (2010). John Mullan pointed out in the Guardian that, unlike many anthologists, Gross came up with the unfamiliar – less than 10% of his material had previously appeared in other Oxford anthologies. Such books are often recommended as ideal bedtime reading, but another critic, John Carey, remarked that the literary anecdotes, however, “should on no account be allowed in the bedroom, or you will find yourself awake in the cold, small hours, still turning the pages”.
Gross also produced After Shakespeare: An Anthology (2002), in which his unrivalled reading again brought to light many hitherto unconsidered or forgotten trifles.
Late in life Gross surprised many by becoming a valued committee man, serving two terms on the English Heritage advisory committee on blue plaques commemorating the homes of famous people. He was also on the arts and media committee making recommendations for honours to the prime minister.
He is survived by his son and daughter.
• John Jacob Gross, writer and editor, born 12 March 1935; died 10 January 2011
THE TIMES OF LONDON (OBITUARY PAGE)
John Gross: Highly cultivated literary critic, exuberant talker, editor of The Times Literary Supplement and inveterate compiler of anthologies
The Times (of London)
January 11, 2011
Times’ picture caption: John Gross was a quintessential man of letters, an encyclopaedic editor, an insatiable reader and an indefatigable conversationalist who delighted in gossip.
John Gross was one of the most enlightened and erudite figures in London literary life. He was the son of an immigrant Jewish doctor from Poland, Abraham Gross, who was a devoted general practitioner in the East End. He grew up with a love of that part of London, and to be taken by him on a tour of his favourite sites ending with a visit to Bevis Marks was an experience.
John Jacob Gross was born in 1935. He was educated at the City of London School and when barely 17 astonished the examiners at Wadham College, Oxford, with his omniscience in his viva voce examination, and was awarded an open scholarship.
His friends expected him to enter academic life, but he chose first to work at Gollancz before he took a post in 1959 at Queen Mary College, London. Three years later he was elected a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, to teach English, but it was at this time that he met an attractive Israeli, Miriam May, and when they married in 1965 he left Cambridge for London. In 1969 he published The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, which won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize.
The title of the book described himself. Gross was a quintessential man of letters, an encyclopaedic editor, an insatiable reader and an indefatigable talker. As Dr Johnson said of Richard Savage, “At no time of his life was it any part of his character to be the first of the company that desired to separate”. He enjoyed talking politics as well as literature and was as much at home in the Zanzibar as in the common room. He had a Proustian love of gossip and such was his penchant for qualification that he might well begin a sentence with a parenthesis.
In 1971 he published a work on James Joyce and for a brief year he was literary editor of New Statesman. He was perhaps too aloof and unwilling to delegate, and the fact that he insisted that a different type of book should be reviewed discomfited a feminine coven in the office, whom he referred to as the “tricoteuses” and who gave him a hard time. In 1974 he was appointed editor of The Times Literary Supplement.
His editorship will always be remembered for his decision to break with the tradition of anonymous reviewing. He considered that that tradition had been a cloak for assassins. In signed reviews the hand that held the dagger was to be known. Anonymity could also be a cloak for editorial sloth: there was a danger that the same reviewers would be employed year in year out, their reactions all too predictable. Gross brought in new blood. Richard Ellman was now to be found reviewing Henri Michaux, and many other American contributors started writing for the paper. Gross also tapped a new generation of young reviewers who were making their name in the new universities. He brought in intellectuals from the Right such as Elie Kedourie, Kenneth Minogue and John Vincent, and to cover the arts he appointed Jeremy Treglown, who was to succeed him as editor.
He was not always easy to work with. He was a perfectionist who might spend over an hour discussing with his staff who might review a book on numismatics. “Just a couple of points,” he would say, but one learnt not to be surprised when they mounted to four or five. He protected his contributors. If one of them sent in a bitter review he would never know the hours of work that John would spend in preventing an outbreak of bad blood. A fast worker, he was nevertheless at the office from 8 to 8.
He did not have an easy ride in the editorial saddle. Like most weeklies in the 1970s The Times Literary Supplement was losing circulation, and he had to fight off management staff who wanted to make it trendier and employ as reviewers what they called “stellar names”. Five years after he took over, the management of The Times attempted to make the printers guarantee continuous production, abolish scandalous malpractices and use new technology — in return for which they would be given handsome compensation and a guarantee of no compulsory redundancies. When the printers refused, the management closed down all the Times titles from mid-December 1978 for 11 months, only in the end to be defeated by the unions.
Meanwhile gifted staff on The Times Literary Supplement, such as Victoria Glendinning, Rosemary Dinnage and Mary-Kay Wilmers, had left, and the last of these, along with Karl Miller, founded a rival, the London Review of Books. A strike was called in August — when most journalists were on holiday — by the NUJ, whose kangaroo courts disgusted Gross. This was the last straw.
Derwent May, in his book Critical Times: A History of the Times Literary Supplement, wrote that in the first issue after Gross had left the paper “there was a charming tribute to him. The political writer Janet Morgan had reviewed British Rail’s Continental Timetable in the TLS, and got involved in a correspondence in the paper over the correct name for an attractive little town in the Pyrenees, La Tour de Carol-Enveigt. Now, addressing her letter to Gross, she suggested that the TLS should organise a special excursion to the town ‘to reinvigorate exhausted readers and contributors’ — and ‘to mark the end of your distinguished time as editor, we might toast you where there is a wineglass symbol (buffet service of drinks and cold snacks) and make speeches after knives and forks in squares (tray meals)’. In spirit, many readers and contributors on both sides of the Atlantic doubtless joined that excursion”.
In 1981 Gross moved to Weidenfeld & Nicolson as an editorial consultant but, like others who occupied similar posts, he found his position full of ambiguities. By now he and his wife had decided to separate amicably (the marriage was dissolved in 1988), and he joined the staff of The New York Times as chief book reviewer, writing two reviews a week. If he found the corporation culture of that proud newspaper somewhat asphyxiating, he soon made a name for himself in that welcoming city, taught classes at Columbia and New York University, and gave a private seminar on the novel which was attended not only by literary ladies but a number of erudite gentlemen. He returned to London in 1988 and was appointed theatre critic of The Sunday Telegraph, where Miriam subsequently became literary editor.
Meanwhile, he had been the natural choice for editor of The Oxford Book of Aphorisms (1983) and The Oxford Book of Essays (1991). He liked writing to be clear, eloquent and entertaining. He was a gentle critic, but no one was left in doubt when he thought a writer pretentious, obscure, venomous, narrow minded or intolerant. Curiosities, meditations and diversions enchanted him.
In 1992 came Shylock, his best book, which explored the genesis and various modes of playing that character, and how the Holocaust casts its shadow over the play. In that book Gross delivered some fine moral judgments and made a scholarly study into a strangely moving elegy.
He continued to produce excellent, wide-ranging anthologies. In The Oxford Book of Comic Verse (1994) he included Cole Porter lyrics as well as such items as the terse couplet Their Sex Life by A. R. Ammons: “One failure/ On top of another”. In The New Oxford Book of English Prose (1998) — following in the footsteps of Quiller-Couch’s original Oxford Book of English Prose in 1925 — he began with Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur and ended with Kazuo Ishiguro.
In 2002 he published a touching memoir of his boyhood, A Double Thread, including his memories of wartime evacuation. He returned to anthology-making with a very enterprising book, After Shakespeare (2002). For this he tracked down numerous unfamiliar writings about or inspired by Shakespeare — including the screenplay of the film Shakespeare in Love. The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes (2006) displayed the lives of authors in all their glory and squalor — from style, wit and generosity to lust, drunkenness and theft. For his last book, The Oxford Book of Parodies (2010), Gross drew yet once more on his deep, wide reading, choosing parodies that were funny in themselves, and even funnier when you knew who and what were being parodied — to which he gave a clear guide.
He had a good deal of illness in his last years. But he remained a keen diner-out, and for some years gave a large and jolly annual party for his friends in the Basil Street Hotel.
He is survived by a son and a daughter.
John Gross, literary critic and editor, was born on March 12, 1935. He died on January 10, 2011, aged 75
LETTER TO THE TIMES OF LONDON
Letters Page
The Times
January 12, 2011
From Mr Derek Taylor:
Before John Gross (obituary, Jan 11) went to City of London school, he spent a couple of years at the Perse school in Cambridge. There was a school debate one day in 1946. The speakers were always sixth-formers. John was 11 at the time and astonished the audience by standing up to make his point, quoting for his purpose the Russian Foreign Minister for 1927. It was a moment not to be forgotten.
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH (OBITUARY PAGE)
John Gross, the former editor of the Times Literary Supplement, who died yesterday aged 75, was for more than 40 years one of Britain’s shrewdest and most fair-minded literary critics and men of letters.
The Daily Telegraph
January 11, 2011
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/8251235/John-Gross.html
John Gross (right) with Lord Dacre (the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper)
Once described as “the best-read man in Britain”, Gross was probably best known among his literary peers for his first book, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: English Literary Life since 1800 (1969), a racily entertaining romp through the history of literary criticism and its practitioners which won the Duff Cooper Prize and established its author’s reputation as a man whose huge erudition was matched by a well-developed sense of humour.
In this, as in other works, what distinguished Gross’s approach was his sympathy for the more obscure and often faintly ridiculous toilers at the literary coal face — men such as the Scottish dissenting minister George Gilfillan (1813-78), a “McGonagall of criticism” known for his eccentric flowery style and erratic judgments. AN Wilson declared that the book, which he first read as a teenager, had “undoubtedly determined for me the direction I wanted my life to take... It became my Bible.”
Few could match Gross’s easy familiarity with the highways and byways of the English literary canon or his acute sensitivity to all its nuances. But he was generous with his omniscience. In an article in The Spectator (one of the numerous journals to which Gross contributed) Bevis Hillier recalled an occasion when, stumped for examples (other than Hamlet and Little Lord Fauntleroy) of the “disputed succession” in literature, he decided to ask Gross for advice: “On the telephone, without recourse to any reference book, he came up with Wilkie Collins’s The Dead Secret (1861); Ibsen’s play The Pretenders (1864); and Trollope’s Is He Popenjoy? (1878). Beat that!”
So in the early 1980s, when Oxford University Press was looking for someone to marshal a new series of literary anthologies, Gross was the obvious choice. He went on to edit several critically acclaimed collections for the imprint, including After Shakespeare (2002), a superb anthology of writings about and inspired by Shakespeare, from Ben Jonson to Ben Okri; and “Oxford” books of Aphorisms (1983); Comic Verse (1996); English Prose (1998); Essays (2002) and Literary Anecdotes (2006). His last book, The Oxford Book of Parodies (2010), will have provided entertainment for many households over Christmas and the New Year.
Gross proved equally inspired as editor of the TLS, where he was appointed to replace Arthur Crook in 1974. At the time the supplement could still be described by one magazine editor as “a purely academic periodical, run by Oxford dons and written by anonymous writers analysing learned books’’. Gross set out to broaden its appeal to the general reader by expanding its coverage, increasing the number of poems and pictures and recruiting younger, less established writers to contribute.
Perhaps his most controversial decision was to insist on ending the practice of anonymity and giving his reviewers bylines, on the grounds that the cloak of anonymity had allowed “the worst critics, Mr Puff and Mr Sneer, to sound like impersonal oracles”. It was not an easy decision. While some contributors, including Lawrence Durrell, were supportive, Nikolaus Pevsner objected that it would make life difficult when his friends wrote bad books. While admitting the balance sheet was complicated, Gross felt it healthier for reviewers to take full responsibility for what they wrote.
When he relinquished the editorship in 1981 after seven years in the chair, a tribute to Gross’s achievements there by Victoria Glendinning appeared in The Sunday Times under the heading “The high style of an English man of letters”. This seemed a fitting tag for someone quintessentially English and literary, as Gross was; yet in A Double Thread (2001), his memoir of childhood, he revealed that his literary interests – and his sense of what it meant to be English — had developed out of a very different cultural heritage.
Born in the East End of London on March 12 1935, John Jacob Gross was the child and grandchild of Orthodox Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, all of whom had come to England in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
“Being Jewish”, Gross wrote, was “one of the central facts” of his existence, but his Jewishness was almost entirely secular. His father was a GP in Mile End and so came into professional contact with numerous non-Jews; it was thus hard for him to stick to all the rules he had grown up with in eastern Europe. “Orthodox in principle” but “semi-orthodox in practice”, his parents brought up their son to be responsive to tradition but not constrained by its more rigid disciplines, and thus open to wider influences.
Gross’s retreat from Jewishness was further encouraged by the security and happiness he experienced as he grew up in wartime England. Before the bombs began to fall on the East End, his father sent John, his mother and baby brother to Sussex, and then Egham in Surrey, where he attended Mrs Gittins’s private school, then Egham Grammar School, and imbibed “a certain idea of England” which included fair play, the King’s English, trial by jury, the Magna Carta – and virtues that would lead South American traders “to seal their bargains on the word of an Englishman”.
Neither a hearty nor a swot, John happily devoured The Dandy and The Beano, collected stamps and cigarette cards, laughed at his more eccentric teachers, joined the Scouts and had fun with his friends. The war barely impinged, and if there was anti-Semitism in suburban Surrey it seems to have passed him by. “I never suffered on account of being Jewish,” he recalled, “never felt that my future was hemmed in, never endured either literal or metaphorical blows.”
Early on Gross made a conscious decision neither to ignore nor overemphasise the anti-Semitism he found in literature, but to consider it in context and to reserve the right to turn a blind eye. It was only later on that he would learn, from books, how lucky he had been as a Jew living in England during the 1930s and 1940s, but the fact of the Holocaust did not alter his fundamentally temperate approach. He felt that historians of the period had skewed the picture, not by inventing anti-Semitism but by playing down its widespread absence. “The history of non-anti-Semitism remains an unwritten subject,” he reflected.
Gross’s eclectic schooling – after Egham Grammar School, he studied at the Perse School in Cambridge and finally City of London School – seems to have contributed to the development of broad cultural interests which also extended to 1940s cinema, radio programmes and popular songs, to contemporary poetry, to music hall culture and the lore of cricket. But he was equally knowledgeable about politics and current affairs. From the outset, a consistent strand in his writing was his distaste for what he regarded as the hypocrisies and damaging policies of the bien pensant Left.
From City of London School, Gross won a scholarship, aged 17, to read English Literature at Wadham College, Oxford. After graduation he spent a year on a visiting fellowship at Princeton University and worked for two years as an editor for Victor Gollancz before returning to academia as an assistant lecturer in English Literature at Queen Mary College, London University, then at King’s College, Cambridge, where he was a fellow from 1962 to 1965.
Having become dissatisfied with the narrowness of academic life he became, in the 1960s, a regular contributor on cultural and literary topics to various newspapers and journals. After a year as literary editor of the New Statesman and seven years with the TLS, Gross spent a year as an editorial consultant with Weidenfeld. He then served as senior book editor and book critic on the staff of The New York Times from 1983 to 1989. He also became a regular contributor to other American magazines, including the New York Review of Books, Commentary and The New Criterion.
From 1989 to 2005 he was theatre critic for The Sunday Telegraph. Though always mild and generous in his reviews, he did not hesitate to condemn the superficial trendiness of many contemporary plays and productions.
Gross’s other publications include a study of James Joyce in the Modern Masters series (1970) and Shylock: Four Hundred Years in the Life of a Legend (1993), which won high praise from John Gielgud, who wrote that he had read it “straight through twice and enjoyed it more than I can say”.
As well as his literary work, Gross served as a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery from 1977 to 1984; was a member of the English Heritage advisory committee on blue plaques; and served on the Arts and Media Committee advising the British government on the award of public honours. He also served as chairman of the judges of the Booker Prize and was a non-executive independent director of Times Newspaper holdings.
John Gross married, in 1965 (dissolved 1988), Miriam May who, as Miriam Gross, also had a long and distinguished career as a literary editor. They had a son, the journalist and international affairs commentator Tom Gross, and a daughter, Susanna, who is books editor of The Mail on Sunday.
THE NEW YORK TIMES (OBITUARY PAGE)
John Gross Dies at 75; Critic, Essayist and Editor
By William Grimes
The New York Times
January 12, 2011
www.nytimes.com/2011/01/12/arts/12gross.html
John Gross, the editor of The Times Literary Supplement in London in the 1970s and a book critic for The New York Times in the 1980s who was known for his fluid style and easy erudition, died on Monday in London. He was 75.
The cause was heart and kidney failure, said his son, Tom.
Mr. Gross, a critic, essayist and editor of anthologies, was a prize specimen of a type he wrote about memorably in “The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: English Literary Life Since 1800” (1969), his prize-winning history of the reviewers and essayists who once dominated the English literary scene.
He edited The Times Literary Supplement when it was the preeminent literary journal in Britain and assembled a half-dozen anthologies for the Oxford University Press that reflected his extraordinary range as a student of literature, the most recent being “The Oxford Book of Parodies,” published last year.
He wrote a biography of James Joyce, a study of Shylock and a memoir about growing up Jewish in Britain, “A Double Thread” (2001). He also edited books on Dickens and Kipling. In 1989 he became the drama critic of The Sunday Telegraph of London.
John Jacob Gross was born on March 12, 1935, in the East End of London, where his father, who had emigrated from Poland as a boy, was a doctor. The family lived in Egham, Surrey, during the war, and John later attended the Perse School in Cambridge and the City of London School. At 17 he won a scholarship to Wadham College, Oxford, where he studied English literature and earned a first-class degree in 1955.
After working as an editor at Victor Gollancz Limited, he taught at Queen Mary College at the University of London and King’s College, Cambridge, where he was a fellow, but he became disenchanted with the academic study of literature. Instead, he turned to book reviewing and, with Gabriel Pearson, edited “Dickens and the 20th Century” (1962).
“The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters” became a popular and critical success, winning the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize and the admiration of literary A-listers like Angus Wilson and Cyril Connolly. Mr. Gross leapt to the fore as a brilliant all-rounder, the kind of writer and editor who could turn his hand to virtually anything with wit and flair.
All manner of literary arcana and trivia seemed to be at his fingertips. In a ruminative essay, he once took to task the author of a book on anagrams for omitting a few gems. The author, he wrote, missed “a celebrated transmutation of Salvador Dalí — ‘avida dollars’ — and none of his William Shakespeare anagrams seem to me as felicitous as one that I once came across: ‘I like Mr. W. H. as a pal, see?’ “
After writing a short biography of Joyce for the Modern Masters series and editing “Rudyard Kipling: The Man, His Work and His World” (1972), he became the literary editor of The New Statesman and, in 1974, succeeded Arthur Crook as the editor of The Times Literary Supplement, one of the most prestigious literary jobs on offer.
As editor, Mr. Gross broke with longstanding tradition and began attaching bylines to reviews, which had been anonymous. He also lightened the tone. For the Times Literary Supplement’s 75th anniversary in 1977, for example, he asked a panel of contributors to name the most overrated and underrated books or writers to have appeared in its pages.
In November 1983 he joined The New York Times as an editor of the Sunday Book Review and a year later began writing reviews for the daily newspaper. He later wrote a freewheeling column, “About the Arts,” for the Sunday Arts & Leisure section. On the side, he presided over a reading club organized by Brooke Astor and Carter Burden.
In 1989 he returned to London, where he became the drama critic for The Sunday Telegraph, a post he held until 2005.
His interest in Shakespeare yielded two books, “Shylock: 400 Years in the Life of a Legend” (1992) and “After Shakespeare” (2002), a potpourri of excerpts from poems, novels, essays, diaries and letters by writers well known and little known on the topic of Britain’s greatest playwright.
His Oxford anthologies included “The Oxford Book of Essays” (1991) and “The New Oxford Book of English Prose” (1998), and similarly titled collections of comic verse, aphorisms, literary anecdotes and parodies.
His marriage to Miriam Gross, later a literary editor at The Observer and The Sunday Telegraph, ended in divorce. In addition to his son, Tom, of Prague and Tel Aviv, Mr. Gross is survived by a daughter, Susanna Gross, and a brother, Anthony, both of London, and two grandchildren.
THE NEW STATESMAN
John Gross, 1935-2011
By Jonathan Derbyshire
The New Statesman (London)
January 11, 2011
www.newstatesman.com/blogs/cultural-capital/2011/01/gross-letters-death-literary
Death of a man of letters.
The writer and critic John Gross, a former literary editor of the New Statesman, died yesterday at the age of 75. After a brief career in academia, Gross gravitated in the mid-1960s towards Grub Street, where he rapidly established a reputation as one of the country’s subtlest yet most productive literary journalists.
Gross was made editor of the Times Literary Supplement in 1974, a post he held until 1981.The TLS as we recognise it today owes much to Gross’s editorship, the principal and most controversial innovation of which was the introduction of signed reviews (until then, reviewers had written anonymously). Gross didn’t abandon scholarly work altogether, however, and in 1969 he published his first, and perhaps best known, book, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, which A N Wilson described as a paean to the “the ideal of a human life, spent reading, and making a living by what one reads”.
NS editor Jason Cowley, reviewing Gross’s memoir of his East End Jewish childhood A Double Thread in 2001, saw in him a fine practitioner of the literary essay, a form that, “as perfected by Montaigne, Charles Lamb, George Orwell, E B White and Lewis Lapham . . . strives for literary permanence and concerns the search for a personal voice”. Gross’s book, Cowley concluded, had all these attributes and was a reminder that “the best essayists are those, like Gross, who have the gift of digression, those who surprise the reader and themselves, who are able to luxuriate in language and to elaborate and inflate any chosen subject”.
In October 2009, on the 40th anniversary of the publication of Gross’s masterpiece, the critic D J Taylor wrote in the NS that, with one or two “trend-defying exceptions”, the man of letters as Gross imagined him was extinct. Until yesterday, one of those exceptions was Gross himself:
Gross’s Man of Letters can range from a simple “bookman”, snug in his study with 3,000 novels for company, to the kind of highbrow critic whose followers invest his cult with well-nigh religious significance, or the moonlighting MP who sees literature as a kind of default setting for his political schemes. What unites them is a passion for books, a fixation with the culture in which books get produced and evaluated, and an assumption that, as Gross puts it in his final sentence, “the idea of the man of letters has a place in any healthy literary tradition”.
OTHER PIECES
John Podhoretz writes in Commentary:
www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/jpodhoretz/386077
Toby Young writes in The Daily Telegraph:
David Blackburn writes in The Spectator:
www.spectator.co.uk/books/blog/6609873/the-doyen-of-literary-london.thtml
David Frum writes:
www.frumforum.com/writer-john-gross-dies-at-75
Jennifer Lipman writes in The Jewish Chronicle:
www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/43547/literary-critic-john-gross-dies-75
Judith Luna writes on behalf of Oxford University Press:
blog.oup.com/2011/01/john-gross/
***
There will also be pieces in the coming days in The Wall Street Journal, The Independent, The Spectator (by Charles Moore), The Weekly Standard (by Joseph Epstein), The Jewish Chronicle and the Frankfurter Allegmeine (by Gina Thomas) and the French press.
* Phillips: “Israel and its defenders have been outclassed and outmaneuvered in a war of the mind being waged on a battleground it never even acknowledged it was on... You cannot resist or overcome a threat unless you first understand its nature.”
* Glick: “Today the Left operates in a closed universe in which reality has no place and opposing views are systematically ignored.”
* The Israeli Left claimed that withdrawing from Gaza in 2005, and adhering to UN resolution 1701 on Lebanon in 2006, would increase Israel’s international standing and legitimacy. But the opposite has proven to be the case.
CONTENTS
1. A dose of realism?
2. “The challenge of public diplomacy for Israel” (By Melanie Phillips, Jan. 3, 2011)
3. “The Left’s loser message” (By Caroline Glick, Jerusalem Post, Jan. 4, 2011)
A DOSE OF REALISM?
[Note by Tom Gross]
I have not sent out or posted what might be termed right-wing articles on this list for some time. Most of the mainstream international and Israeli media are dominated by journalists and commentators on the Left who are constantly pushing a particular worldview, such as the absolute tosh of the kind I heard this morning on the BBC by their senior (but clueless) Middle East editor, Jeremy Bowen.
So I feel it is important for people on the Left or Center – which include many of the international journalists and commentators that subscribe to this list, as well as longtime supporters of an independent Palestinian state such as myself – to at least listen carefully to what others have to say.
I attach two articles, the first by a leading British journalist, the second by a leading Israeli one. As is the case with many of the articles I send out, I don’t agree with some aspects of what they have to say. But to avoid repeating the mistakes the Left made in their mishandling of the Oslo peace process that led to thousands of unnecessary dead and injured Israelis and Palestinians, policy-makers should consider a variety of opinions in future.
The pieces arise from last week’s conference on Law and Mass Media at Ariel University of Samaria. The writers, Melanie Phillips and Caroline Glick, are both long-time subscribers to this email list.
FULL ARTICLES
“NOTHING SHORT OF A MULTI-LAYERED CIVILISATIONAL CRISIS”
The challenge of public diplomacy vis-a-vis the delegitimisation of Israel
By Melanie Phillips
Address to Ariel Conference on Law and Mass Media on December 30, 2010
Published January 3, 2010
As we all know by now, Israel has lost the battle for public opinion in the west. Even the Israel government is now acknowledging this fact. Israel and its defenders have been outclassed and outmaneuvered in a war of the mind being waged on a battleground it never even acknowledged it was on.
Calls for more and better hasbara [public relations], however, are meaningless if the message or narrative promoted by Israel and its defenders misses the point of the attack being waged upon it. And it does miss that point, by a mile.
You cannot resist or overcome a threat unless you first understand its nature.
The first thing to say is that this phenomenon is characteristic not just of the media animosity or economic or academic boycotts. It goes across the intelligentsia and political class, spreading well beyond the normal suspects on the left into the mainstream middle-classes.
In Britain, the universities, the established church, the theatrical and publishing worlds, the voluntary sector, significant elements within the Foreign Office, members of Parliament across the political spectrum, as well as the media have overwhelmingly signed up to the demonization and delegitimisation of Israel.
The scale of this phenomenon is nothing short of a multi-layered civilization crisis.
The west is experiencing a total inversion of truth evidence and reason. A society’s thinking class has overwhelmingly subscribed to an immoral, patently false and in many cases demonstrably absurd account of the Middle East, past and present, which it has uncritically absorbed and assumes to be true.
In routine, everyday discourse history is turned on its head; logic is suspended; and an entirely false narrative of the conflict is now widely accepted as unchallengeable fact, from which fundamental error has been spun a global web of potentially catastrophic false conclusions.
This has led to a kind of dialogue of the demented in which rational discussion is simply not possible because there is no shared understanding of the meaning of language. So victim and victimizer, truth and lies, justice and injustice turn into their precise opposite.
This madness is being promulgated through a global alliance between state and non-state actors – diplomats and journalists, politicians and NGOs and websites. Many of these are waging war not just against Israel but against the west.
There are two preconditions for an effective fightback. First is to form effective structures of resistance. Those structures, however, depend in turn on correct understanding of nature and scale of what up against.
So far, the structures are not in place, and more important still, what Israel is up against is grossly – and fatally – underestimated and misunderstood.
The problem is that we are dealing with a pathology – to which we nevertheless respond as if it were rational behavior.
What’s happened is a pattern of thinking in the west which turns reality upside down. Remarkably, this in turn echoes a very similar inversion of reality within the Islamic world, where such inversion has a theological base.
Because Islam is considered perfect, its adherents can never do wrong. All their aggression is therefore represented as self-defense, while western/Israeli self-defense is said to be aggression.
So in this Orwellian universe the enslavement of Muslim women is said to represent their liberation; democracy is a means of enslavement from which the west must be freed; murder of Israelis is purest form of justice.
Furthermore, this is overlaid by the phenomenon of ‘psychological projection’ in which the Islamic world not only denies its own misdeeds but ascribes them instead to its victims.
So while Muslims deny the Holocaust, they claim that Israel is carrying out a holocaust in Gaza. Anti-Semitism is central to Jewish experience in Europe; Muslims claim that ‘Islamophobia’ is rife throughout Europe.
Israel gives all Jews the ‘right of return’ to Israel on account of the unique reality of global Jewish persecution; the Muslims claim a ‘right of return’ – not to their own putative state of Palestine, but to Israel. They even claim that the Palestinians are the world’s ‘new Jews’.
These and many other examples are used within the Islamic world to negate Jewish experience and appropriate it for itself to obtain what Muslims want in terms of status, power and conquest.
What is remarkable is that instead of treating this as a pathological deformity of thinking, the western progressive intelligentsia has largely embraced it as rational and true. And to a large extent this is because that same western intelligentsia has itself supplanted rationality by ideology – or the dogma of a particular idea.
Objectivity, evidence and truth have been ditched for ideologies such as moral and cultural relativism, multiculturalism, feminism, environmentalism, anti-capitalism, anti-colonialism, transnationalism, anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism.
Across a wide range of such issues, it’s no longer possible to have a rational discussion with the progressive intelligentsia, as on each issue there’s only one story for them which brooks no dissent.
This is because, rather than arriving at a conclusion from the evidence, ideology inescapably wrenches the evidence to fit a prior idea. So ideology of any kind is fundamentally anti-reason and truth. And if there’s no truth, there can be no lies either; truth and lies become merely ‘alternative narratives’.
Moral and cultural relativism – the belief that subjective experience trumps moral authority and any notion of objectivity or truth – has turned right and wrong on their heads.
Because of the dominant belief in multiculturalism, victim culture and minority rights, self-designated victim groups – those without power – can never do wrong while majority groups can never do right. And Jews are not considered a minority because – in the hateful discourse of today – Jews are held to be all-powerful as they ‘control’ the media, Wall Street and America.
So the Muslim world cannot be held responsible for blowing people up as they are the third world victims of the west; so any atrocities they commit must be the fault of their victims; and so the US had it coming to it on 9/11. And in similar fashion, Israel can never be the victim of the Arab world; the murder of Israelis by the Arab world must be Israel’s own fault.
So the way has been opened for mass credulity towards propaganda and fabrication. The custodians of reason have thus turned into destroyers of reason – centered in the crucible of reason, the university.
All these different ideologies are utopian; in their different ways, they all posit the creation of the perfect society. That is why they are considered ‘progressive’, and people on the progressive wing of politics sign up to them. That helps explain the distressing fact that so many Jews on the left also sign up to Israel-hatred, since they too sign up to utopian ideologies.
But when utopias fail, as they always do, their adherents invariably select scapegoats on whom they turn to express their rage over the thwarting of the establishment of that perfect society. And since utopia is all about realizing the perfect society, these scapegoats become enemies of humanity.
For Greens, such enemies of humanity are capitalists; for anti imperialists, America; for militant atheists, religious believers. Anti-Zionists turn on Israel for thwarting the end to the ‘Jewish question’: the redemption of western guilt for the persecution of the Jews – a guilt which can never be redeemed as long as the wretched Jews continue to make themselves the targets of attack.
In short, therefore, the west cannot defend itself against the Islamic jihad because it can’t itself even think straight any more.
But this lethal muddle in the minds of the intelligentsia must be viewed in turn in the context of a global diplomatic process which itself embodies upside-down thinking, which fans the flames of bigotry and defeatism – and in which Israel itself has been tragically, and suicidally, complicit.
It cannot be stressed enough reason why those promoting genocidal bigotry are winning is that the western world has not sought to defeat them but instead has appeased them from the very start.
In Palestine under the British Mandate, when the Arabs used terrorist violence to frustrate the will of the League of Nations in restoring the Jewish home, Britain rewarded them by offering them part of the Jews’ legal and moral entitlement. When the Arabs started hijacking planes, the west’s response was to invite them to the UN to plead their cause.
And despite the Arabs’ repeated refused to accept the two state solution, offered in the 1930s, in 2000 and under Ehud Olmert and their current refusal to negotiate at all, America punishes Israel for not making enough concessions to them – while giving a free pass to those who still refuse to accept Israel’s right to exist.
It is astonishing that the west expects Israel to make any concessions to such attackers at all. After all, forcing a country which has endured more than six decades of existential siege to give any ground to its attackers amounts to forcing such a victim to surrender. This is expected by the civilized world of no other country.
Yet we are repeatedly told even by certain supporters of Israel that the Palestinians have a right to a state. Why? In any other conflict, such aggression forfeits any rights at all.
I am not saying that Israel should retain all the disputed territories; it may well be in its own interests to give some of them up. But the point is that Israel has made all the concession s over the years while the Arabs have made none – yet it is Israel, not the Arabs, that is under pressure from the west.
This is diplomacy as scripted by Franz Kafka.
The single greatest reason for the endless continuation of the Middle East impasse is that Britain, Europe and America have continuously rewarded the aggressor and either attacked the victim or left it twisting in the wind.
That’s what needs to be said by Israel and its defenders. But Israel and its defenders themselves have been crippled or cowed by the false analysis of the enemy’s narrative.
Even many of Israel’s friends spout the demonstrably absurd proposition that a Palestine state would solve the problem, that the impediment to a Palestine state is the ‘settlers’, but that Israel is not taking action to remove the ‘settlers’ – and so therefore they too inescapably agree that Israel is the problem.
Israel and its defenders have been fighting on the wrong battleground: the one that has been chosen by its enemies. The Arabs brilliantly reconfigured the Arab war of extermination against Israel as the oppression by Israel of the Palestinians.
That has transformed Israel from victim to aggressor – the reversal of reality which lies at the very heart of the western obsession with the ‘settlements’ and the territories.
Yet since Oslo, Israel meekly gone along with this mad pressure. It has never said it is totally unconscionable. It has never put the all-important argument from justice on its own account. So it has allowed its enemies to appropriate this argument mendaciously as their own. But if Israel doesn’t make the case properly on its own behalf, how can anyone else do so?
To which Israel says realpolitik dictates it has to go along with the diplomatic game being played. But diplomatic realpolitik is what brought us all to this position – the brink of a terrible war with Iran which is treated by America with kid gloves while Israel is put under the cosh.
For the west to suck up to its enemies while bashing its friends like this is the diplomatic version of auto-immune disease. And eventually this disease will kill it.
What has Israel failed to recognize is that the battleground on which it is being forced to fight is not just military. It is also a battleground of the mind, and the strategy being used against it – and to which it needs to respond in kind – is psychological warfare.
The Arab and Muslim world long ago realized if it set the narrative in its own image, it would recruit millions of fanatics to its cause and also confuse and demoralize its victims. In this it has wildly succeeded.
There is therefore an overwhelming need for Israel to alter its strategy. Indeed, it needs to have a strategy.
And this brings us to perhaps the most difficult challenge in all of this – the fact that the role played by the Israel government is of critical importance. Unless it adopts the correct strategy, its defenders will remain crippled.
Yet any promising initiatives seem to fall victim to Israel’s chaotic political structure, which appears to prevent the Prime Minister from being master in his own house. Good ideas are habitually destroyed by rampaging egos and turf wars between Israeli Cabinet ministers.
This is no way to run a chip shop, let alone a country under existential siege.
The fact remains that both Israel and diaspora Jews have to rethink. They have to realize they must start fighting on the battleground where the attack is actually being mounted against them. And the goal has to be to seize and retake the moral high ground.
This strategy requires two different tactics: one for those who are capable of rational thought, and another for those who are not.
The first group comprises those who are not irrational but merely desperately ignorant. Much of the obsession with Israel’s behavior is due to the widespread belief that its very existence is an aberration which, although understandable at the time it came into being, was a historic mistake.
People believe that Israel was created as a way of redeeming Holocaust guilt. Accordingly, they believe that European Jews with no previous connection to Palestine – which they believe was the historic homeland of Palestinian Muslims who had lived there since time immemorial – were transplanted there as foreign invaders, from where they drove out the indigenous Arabs into the West Bank and Gaza. These are territories which Israel is now occupying illegally oppressing the Palestinians and frustrating the creation of a state of Palestine which would end the conflict.
Of course every one of those assumptions is false. But from those false assumptions proceeds the understandable belief not just that Israel’s behavior is unjust, illegal and oppressive but that it is unjust and oppressive by virtue of its very existence.
For these people there is an urgent need for a proactive educational approach. No-one has ever told them that these beliefs are false – and when they are told, the effect is often transformative.
There is a desperate and urgent need to educate such people in Jewish and Middle East history; to enlighten them about the shameful role played by Britain in Palestine in tearing up its treaty obligations; to tell them that under international law Israel is entitled to the disputed territories – land within which Britain undertook to settle the Jews’ from the river to the sea’ because of their historic and unique rights to that land.
That’s all necessary for those who are still rational. For bigots, however, there is no point arguing with them. They are, by definition, beyond all reason. Their influence simply has to be destroyed. They have to be held to account for their lies and bigotry which should be forensically exposed.
So Israel and its defenders should be demanding of the world why it expects Israel alone to make compromises with people who have tried for nine decades to wipe out the Jewish presence in the land and are still firing rockets at it.
They should expose the pretence of Britain or European countries which claim to have Israel’s security needs at heart but forbid it from using military means to defend itself; which – as did the British Government recently – turn Israeli self-defense against the jihadi lynch-mob on board the Turkish terror ship Mavi Marmara into an attack to be condemned, or demand the opening of the border with Gaza which would allow in arms to kill more Israelis.
Israel and its defenders should be asking why so-called friends in the west want a Palestine state, since once the IDF depart the disputed territories they will become in short order yet another Iranian-backed Islamic terrorist entity which will pose a further threat not just to Israel but to the west.
They should be asking why the EU is continuing to fund the genocidal incitement against Jews promoted by the Palestine Authority.
They should be asking so-called ‘progressives’ – including Jewish ‘progressives’ – why they support the racist ethnic cleansing of every Jew from a future state of Palestine.
They should be asking them why they are not marching against Hamas on account of its tyrannical oppression of Palestinians in Gaza. Why they are ignoring Arab and Muslim persecution of women and homosexuals.
Why they are not mounting a boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Mahmoud Abbas’s PA and Hamas, on account of Abbas’s Holocaust denial and the clear evidence of continuation of Nazi Jew-hatred in a direct line of descent from predecessors who were Hitler’s supporters in Palestine.
As for western Israel-bashers, Israel and its defenders should accuse them not of Jew-hating motives that cannot be proved but of absurdities and contradictions and untruths they cannot deny. They should ridicule them, humiliate them, destroy their reputations; boycott them, not invite them to social gatherings, show them disapproval and contempt. Treat them as pariahs. Turn their own weapons against them.
They should be telling the Jews ‘own story of refugees and ethnic cleansing – the 800,000 Jews expelled from Arab lands after 1948, and who now make up more than half of Israel’s population. It’s good to see that at last Israel is beginning to bring this to the world’s attention. In Britain virtually no-one knows about it. At a stroke it takes the ground from under feet of those demanding the ‘right of return’ for Arabs.
They should be holding Arab and Islamic democracy weeks on campus, to expose the oppression and persecution within that world against women, homosexuals and others.
They should be singling out the Anglican church and the revival of ancient theological Jew-hatred being spread within the Anglican world by the Palestinian Christians of the Sabeel centre.
At the same time, they should be focusing on their true friends within the Christian world, not just in America but also in Africa and Asia where there is an enormous reservoir of goodwill towards Israel which could be mobilized into a global fighting force.
They should be campaigning against the UN and the hijacking of international law and human rights by anti-western, anti-Jewish and anti-Christian ideologues.
They should be confronting head-on the false claim that bigotry is confined to the right. They should be pointing the finger at the ‘progressive’ left to show how it is actually supporting the mortal enemies not just of Israel but the west.
And they should be making this case to Israelis themselves, to counter the delegitimisation and ignorance in Israeli universities and to educate the Israeli young in their own national history.
In other words, both Israel and diaspora Jews have to stop playing defense and go onto the offence. Israel has nothing to be defensive about or for which it needs to apologize. It is the enemies of Israel who are promoting injustice and the denial of international law and human rights. Playing defense intrinsically cedes ground to the enemy.
It is time for Israel and its defenders to stop conniving with that smokescreen for the war of annihilation being waged against Israel – the claim that the Middle East impasse would be solved by establishing a state of Palestine to which the settlements, and thus by extension Israel, are the obstacle. It is time for them to stop agreeing that the Jews are to blame for their own predicament.
Israel and its defenders need to make the argument from justice and reclaim that moral high ground from the enemies of Israel and the west, both at home – including within Israel – and abroad. It is those enemies who deny truth, justice and human rights. It is those enemies who should be in the dock. It is time to take the gloves off and put them there.
In short, Israel and its defenders must understand that the tsunami of bigotry against Israel sweeping the west is intimately related to Israel’s seriously flawed diplomatic strategy.
For years, Israel has been playing a defensive diplomatic game, which suggests inescapably that it has a case to answer. Such diplomatic cringing has badly undermined it and hugely strengthened its enemies, who are taking advantage of such weakness over and over again.
It’s time for Israel to realize that military campaigns against enemies are not enough. It has to call time on its false friends too, and start fighting both these and its more obvious enemies on the battleground of the mind.
“OPERATING IN A CLOSED UNIVERSE”
The Left’s loser message
By Caroline Glick
The Jerusalem Post
January 4, 2011
The Israeli Left was once an optimistic place. But that is no longer the case. It once promised peace and happiness. But that is no longer the case.
Today the Left is marked by equal doses of doom and gloom, irrationality and delusion. It operates in a closed universe in which reality has no place and opposing views are systematically ignored.
The Left’s defeatism was brought home to me last Thursday during the Ariel University Center of Samaria’s conference on Law and Mass Media. There I participated in a panel entitled, “Is the idea of a ‘two state solution’ feasible or doomed to failure?”
The first two speakers on the panel were Dr. Martin Sherman from Tel Aviv University and myself. Sherman explained in great detail how a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem will imperil Israel.
Without control over these areas, Israel will lack defensible borders. And given that there is no Palestinian leadership willing to accept Israel’s right to exist, this strategic vulnerability will invite a war that Israel will be hard-pressed to survive.
Both Sherman and I explained at length that due to the Palestinian and the larger Arab world’s rejection of Israel’s right to exist, the “two-state solution” policy paradigm is delusional. It is not a policy paradigm. It is a fantasy. A debate about the two-state solution is not a policy debate, but a debate about the attractiveness of a pipe dream.
Our point was emphasized last week in an op-ed by Deputy Knesset Speaker MK Ahmad Tibi in the Washington Times. Tibi called for the Obama administration to end US support for the Jewish state. Instead of supporting Israel, Tibi asked the US to lend its support to support the partition of the land west of the Jordan River between a Jew-free Arab state of “Palestine,” and a non-Jewish state in the rest of the area.
Given our arguments on the panel, and Tibi’s effective international declaration of war against Israel in the name of its Arab community, one might have thought that at the Ariel conference, our fellow panelists from the Left would have been hard pressed to maintain their allegiance to the two-state formula. Then too, the fact that the PA’s chief negotiator Saeb Erekat published an article in The Guardian two weeks ago in which he implicitly called for Israel’s destruction, one could be forgiven for thinking Ma’ariv’s former opinion editor Ben Dror Yemini and Shaul Arieli from the EU-funded Council for Peace and Security might have attenuated their support for Israeli land giveaways.
But one would be wrong for thinking that. Abiding by the Left’s standard practice, rather than contend with opposing views or reality, our fellow panelists pretended we didn’t exist.
I devoted most of my time to discussing a policy that is not based on fantasy. Such a policy, which I call the Stabilization Plan, (and here), involves a mix of military and law enforcement operations, a political and international law offensive, and the application of Israeli law in the Jordan Valley and the major blocs of Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria. As I said in my presentation, the policy has advantages and disadvantages. But it is a policy, not a fantasy. Therefore, I argued, it represents a major step forward in Israel’s national discourse.
Yemini has done good work exposing the European campaign to delegitimize Israel. He has been outspoken in condemning the New Israel Fund and J Street for their efforts to delegitimize Israel. He has angered his fellow leftists with his warnings that Fatah continues to reject Israel’s right to exist. Yet despite all of this, in his remarks, Yemini ignored what I had asserted just moments before and claimed there is no alternative to the two-state solution. The international community, which is waging a political war against Israel, will accept nothing less. Surrender is the only option.
Arieli for his part said that Israel has two options. We can surrender voluntarily or we can be forced to surrender by the international community. If we want to remain part of the Western world, we’d better do it ourselves. The two-state solution, he said, is Israel’s only hope.
Arieli assured his audience that Israel has no reason to worry about surrendering defensible borders because everything will work out fine. If we go with option one and voluntarily deny ourselves the means to defend what will remain of our country after we fork Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem over to the Palestinians who reject our right to statehood in what will remain of the country, we will definitely be safe.
During his remarks, Arieli repeatedly argued that his position is the same as opposition leader Tzipi Livni’s. And he was correct.
In her interview on Friday with the Post’s Editor-in-Chief David Horovitz, Livni made also argued that Israel has no option but surrender. Israel will lose all international support, not to mention its Jewish character if we don’t give the Palestinians what they want.
Livni’s withering criticism of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu revolves around what she considers his insistence on placing limitations on the scope of Israeli surrenders. Livni admitted that Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas rejected former prime minister Ehud Olmert’s generous offer of a Palestinian state in Jerusalem, most of Judea and Samaria, and Gaza. But she denied that his action means that the Palestinian leader isn’t interested in Palestinian statehood.
Ridiculously, Livni claimed that what her own boss offered the Palestinian leader was irrelevant. Livni asserted that as Olmert’s foreign minister, she was the only one empowered to make offers in Israel’s name. Since she says she made no offer, as far as she is concerned, the fact that Abbas rejected her boss’s offer is irrelevant.
Like Yemini and Arieli, Livni sees no option but surrender. And like them, she admits that surrender will not bring peace. As she put it, a surrender deal “would be very fragile,” and “it might be accompanied by terrorism.”
As she summed things up, if she gets her way and Israel gives up the store, “I have no illusions about a ‘New Middle East.’ I don’t believe that, the moment an agreement is signed, we’ll live in a fairy tale world of prosperity and happiness.”
But still, as far as she is concerned, this is Israel’s only choice.
And it is not only regarding the Palestinians that the Left feels that Israel can do nothing but surrender. The same is true regarding Hizbullah and Syria. In her interview Livni defended her role in producing UN Security Council Resolution 1701 that set the terms for ending the war with Hizbullah in 2006.
Resolution 1701 by most accounts was the single worst failure of Israeli diplomacy in recent memory. It placed Hizbullah - an illegal terrorist army run by Iran - on equal footing with Israel. It empowered the Hizbullah-dominated Lebanese government and army to prevent Hizbullah’s rearmament and so paved the way not only for Hizbullah’s rearmament, but for Hizbullah’s takeover of the Lebanese government and military. Moreover, it enhanced the power of the Hizbullah-appeasing UN forces in south Lebanon.
All of these things made 1701 a strategic disaster for Israel. But Livni refuses to acknowledge this.
In her interview, she defended 1701 by claiming that unlike then prime minister Ehud Barak’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, 1701 gave Israel legitimacy for striking Hizbullah in the future.
As she put it, “We for the first time created a situation in which that rearmament was not legitimate, with the natural consequent options if we need to use them.”
Ironically, that is precisely what Barak claimed he was doing when he pulled out in 2000. In March 2006, just four months before the war which was to see Israel demonized on virtually every diplomatic stage, Ha’aretz’s Ari Shavit claimed that by withdrawing to the internationally recognized border with Lebanon in May 2000, “Barak built the invisible wall of international legitimacy,” for future Israeli combat operations in Lebanon.
And since 2006, the international campaign to deny Israel the right to defend itself has only gained ground.
As for Syria, following the Obama administration’s lead, today the Israeli Left is revving up its old push to surrender the Golan Heights. The Left contends that Syrian dictator Bashar Assad is keen to abandon his strategic alliance with Iran and that by handing over Israel’s defensible border in the north, Israel will convince him to do so and so weaken Iran.
But of course, reality tells an opposite tale. If Israel renders itself defenseless, it will invite war.
Moreover, Assad’s growing power owes solely to his alliance with Iran. As Michael Young from Lebanon’s Daily Star wrote last week, “Washington wants to engage Syria so that it will give up on alliances that the Syrians will never willingly surrender, because doing so would so weaken Damascus politically that it would defeat the very purpose of engagement.”
The Americans wouldn’t care about Syria if it were moderate. The US wouldn’t be seeking to appease Assad if he didn’t allow Hizbullah to use Syria as its logistical base, if he hadn’t directed the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri or if he wasn’t Iran’s junior partner in its proxy war against the US in Iraq. If Assad weren’t a nuclear proliferator together with Iran, North Korea and Venezuela, he would be treated with the same reproach as Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak.
And yet, none of this matters for the Left. In its view, Israel can completely change Syria - and Iran – by denying itself the ability to defend northern Israel.
To support this view, on Friday Ha’aretz’s Aluf Benn wrote that outgoing IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi intends to make a name for himself in politics by championing an Israeli surrender of the Golan. Ashkenazi – who has enjoyed an intimate relationship with the Obama administration – has been the chief opponent of an IDF strike on Iran’s nuclear installations. His personal mentor is Maj. Gen. (ret.) Uri Saguy. Saguy has served as the chief champion of a Golan Heights surrender for more than a decade.
Until the peace process spawned the Palestinian jihad and the surrenders of south Lebanon and Gaza brought war, the Left’s message was, “Join us and we’ll bring peace and prosperity.”
That was an optimistic, attractive message and it won the Left a couple of elections. But now that their plans have all failed, the Left’s message has become, “Join us because resistance is futile. We are doomed.”
This is not an attractive message. Happily, it is also not true.
What is true is that together with the reality of the failure of the Left’s delusions, its defeatist message has lost the Left the support of the public.
* British consulate staff arrested for role in planned terror attack on Jerusalem’s main soccer stadium. (No condemnation yet from FIFA. Virtual silence from Britain.)
* Hillary Clinton’s disgracefully extravagant and unqualified praise for Bahrain’s brutal dictatorship.
I attach a number of news items from the last two days.
CONTENTS
1. Iran blames Jews for Coptic Church bombing
2. Salafi Sunni group behind bomb, but Egyptian Bar Association blames Jews
3. Leading Coptic journalist makes scathing denunciation of Egyptian regime, society
4. The Obama White House’s reaction
5. Two British consulate employees in Jerusalem arrested on terrorism charges
6. WikiLeaks: Iran can attack Israel with less than 12 minutes warning
7. Greece to build wall along Turkish border
8. “Dangerously silent on human rights” (By Jackson Diehl, Washington Post, Jan. 3, 2011)
[All notes below by Tom Gross]
IRAN BLAME JEWS FOR COPTIC CHURCH BOMBING
Iran’s state television station has blamed the New Year’s Eve suicide bombing at an Egyptian Coptic church that killed 21 people and injured almost 100 others, including many children, on “Zionists”. Similar accusations have been made by a Muslim Brotherhood official, an Egyptian lawyers group, and the Grand Mufti of Lebanon.
“Mossad behind Egypt church blast,” reads the headline on the website of Iran’s official television outlet, Press TV. On air broadcasts also blamed Jews.
“It goes without saying that no Muslim, whatever their political leanings may be, will ever commit such an inhumane act,” claims Press TV, which also blames Israel for the recent radical Muslim terror attacks on churches in Lebanon, Iraq and Tunisia.
(They seem to have forgotten to blame Israel for the Christmas Day bombing of a church mass in the Philippines by a Filipino Islamist group.)
Press TV has an increasingly large audience in Britain and other Western countries for its English-language channel. Several relatively prominent British journalists, including Tony Blair’s sister-in-law Lauren Booth, work for Press TV. (Booth recently converted to Islam; for more details, please see: Saudi employer hammers nails into Sri Lankan maid (& Booth converts to Islam).
Press TV’s English-language website (which employs British journalists to write its reports) also alleges that the U.S. and Britain conspired with the perpetrators of the suicide attacks on churches in Egypt and Iraq.
Dozens of people were killed after terrorists took more than 120 Christians hostage in a Baghdad Catholic church in October, and there have been many other attacks on Christians in Iraq recently. Tens of thousands of Christian have fled in into the sanctity of non-Arab Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.
The only places in the Middle East where the Christian population is growing in numbers, and living safely, are Israel and Iraqi Kurdistan – not that you would be given this impression by reading papers like Le Monde and The Guardian, or by watching the BBC.
SALAFI SUNNI GROUP BEHIND BOMB, BUT EGYPTIAN BAR ASSOCIATION BLAMES JEWS
Egyptian police say a radical Salafi Sunni group in Alexandria was behind the New Year’s Eve church massacre. The targeted church appeared on a list of 50 Coptic churches in Egypt and Europe published a month ago by Shumukh al-Islam, a group tied to al-Qaeda.
But anti-Semites in the Middle East and elsewhere have blamed Jews, just as the Nazis used to claim that the Jews were responsible for all the world’s problems.
The Egyptian Bar Association, a group representing many of the country’s lawyers, said “Israel carried out the church operation in a natural reaction to the latest uncovering of an Israeli espionage network”.
And Moneim Aboul al Fattouh Abdel, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Shura Council in Egypt, said the Mossad was behind this “evil act.”
Adding to the barrage of conspiracy theories, Lebanon’s Grand Mufti, Sheikh Mohammad Rashid Qabbani, said: “This assault... is not an individual internal Egyptian act, but a criminal act with Zionist fingerprints)”.
Arab and Iranian extremists regularly blame the Jews for all kinds of things. Among recent examples, please see: Egypt claims Mossad to blame for shark attacks (& details of new Mossad head).
LEADING COPTIC JOURNALIST MAKES SCATHING DENUNCIATION OF EGYPTIAN SOCIETY AND REGIME
Following the New Year’s church massacre in Alexandria, Hani Shukrallah, a leading Egyptian Coptic journalist and the managing editor of the Egyptian Al-Ahram weekly, published a scathing op-ed on Al-Ahram’s English-language website, under the headline “J’accuse.”
In it, he accused the Egyptian regime of failing to combat Islamist extremism, and of nurturing Salafist Islam in the hope of undermining the Muslim Brotherhood. He condemned Egypt’s “supposedly moderate Muslims” for their increasingly hostility towards millions of Egyptian Christians and of applying a double standard: forcefully condemning any Western measure they perceive as anti-Muslim, while turning a blind eye to the “flagrant persecution of Christians in their own country.”
He writes: “I accuse those among us who would rise up in fury over a decision to halt construction of a Muslim Center near ground zero in New York, but applaud the Egyptian police when they halt the construction of a staircase in a Coptic church in the Omranya district of Cairo.”
He also condemned “the liberals and intellectuals, both Muslim and Western Christian, for keeping silent in the face of the violence against Christians.”
THE OBAMA WHITE HOUSE’S REACTION
www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/01/01/statement-president-terrorist-attacks-egypt-and-nigeria
The Obama administration said: “The attack on a church in Alexandria, Egypt caused 21 reported deaths and dozens of injured from both the Christian and Muslim communities.”
This is misleading to say the least, since all the dead were Copts and only a few of the “collateral injured” outside were Muslims. The bomb targeted Christians during their New Year’s service. It did not target what Obama calls the Muslim community.
TWO BRITISH CONSULATE EMPLOYEES IN JERUSALEM ARRESTED ON TERRORISM CHARGES
Two staff at the British consulate in Jerusalem were arrested yesterday on terrorism charges, accused of supplying Hamas with weapons for a planned attack on the Israeli capital’s main soccer stadium.
The Palestinian staff were accused of working with two Hamas terrorists (Musa Hamada and Bassem Omeri) detained in November who were indicted in the Jerusalem district court on Sunday and charged with planning to commit a terrorist attack.
The police said the suspects were “systematically checking how best to launch a rocket while the [Teddy soccer] stadium was crowded with people during a game.”
Israeli security officials said the pair acquired a number of guns and rockets from contacts in East Jerusalem, including the two members of the staff of the British consulate, which represents British interests with the Palestinian Authority.
Israeli police said the suspects had confessed – and boasted – about their involvement in buying the weapons.
A British Foreign Office spokesman in London confirmed yesterday that two members of staff at the consulate had been arrested. He said: “We have been told by the Israeli authorities that the investigation into our two employees is unrelated to the work they do at the consulate. It is not appropriate to comment further on what is an ongoing legal process.”
There has been no condemnation yet on the planned soccer stadium massacre from the world governing soccer body, FIFA. (For more on FIFA’s double standards and appeasement of Arab extremists, please see this article.)
British politicians and journalists might also want to ask the British Foreign Office what it was doing employing Hamas activists. (I doubt that too many will, of course, since those murdered in the soccer stadium carnage would only have been Israelis.)
WIKILEAKS: IRAN CAN ATTACK ISRAEL WITH LESS THAN 12 MINUTES WARNING
“U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks yesterday reveal that Israel believes it would have a 10-12 minute warning should Iran launch rocket attacks against the country,” reports VOA News. (In fact, like the vast bulk of the WikiLeaks “exclusives” regarding the Middle East, most have been reported before, including on this website.)
The Norwegian daily Aftenposten published a cable on Monday from the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv that discusses a Nov 15, 2009 meeting between an American congressional delegation and Israel’s military chief.
According to the daily, Gabi Ashkenazi told the delegation that Iran has 300 Shihab missiles that could reach Israel. He added that Israel’s biggest threats were the Iranian-backed Hamas terrorist militia that has taken over Gaza and Hizbullah in Lebanon, which has more than 40,000 rockets that can reach almost any point in Israel.
In the cable, Ashkenazi is quoted as saying Israel was preparing its army for a major war in the Middle East. He added that the Israeli army sends out unmanned planes over Lebanon to identify potential targets.
The Israeli defense chief said Israel is not able to protect its entire population despite its anti-missile defense systems. He said 1 million Israelis could be exposed to missiles that cannot be fought from the air.
GREECE TO BUILD WALL ALONG TURKISH BORDER
Greece has announced that it plans to build a wall along its border with Turkey. The wall – which is designed to keep out illegal immigrants, rather than terrorists as Israel’s security barrier is – is one of several such walls built by many countries around the world in recent years. Yet only Israel’s is constantly scrutinized, vilified and demonized, even though it has saved the lives of many thousands of Israeli civilians.
Greek Citizen Protection Minister Christos Papoutsis told the Athens News Agency: “Greek society has reached its limits in taking in illegal immigrants. Greece can’t take it anymore.”
Greece shares a 206-km border with Turkey.
***
I attach an article below from yesterday’s Washington Post by the paper’s deputy comment editor, Jackson Diehl. (Diehl is a subscriber to this email list.)
-- Tom Gross
HAS THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION SPOKEN UP FOR THIS RELATIVELY OBSCURE AND “VOICELESS” DISSIDENT? OF COURSE NOT.
Dangerously silent on human rights
By Jackson Diehl
Washington Post
January 3, 2011
In a speech to the U.N. General Assembly last September Barack Obama suggested that his administration’s notoriously weak defense of human rights around the world would be invigorated. “We will call out those who suppress ideas and serve as a voice for those who are voiceless,” he said. He went on to urge other democracies: “Don’t stand idly by, don’t be silent, when dissidents elsewhere are imprisoned and protestors are beaten.”
Just over two months later, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited Bahrain, an important Persian Gulf ally that hosts the U.S. Fifth Fleet. The emirate was in the midst of a major crackdown on its opposition. Two dozen dissidents, including intellectuals, clerics and a prominent blogger, had been rounded up, charged under anti-terrorism laws and allegedly tortured. A human rights group that had received U.S. funding was taken over by the government. Human Rights Watch had concluded that “what we are seeing in Bahrain these days is a return to full-blown authoritarianism.”
Clinton’s response? Extravagant and virtually unqualified praise for Bahrain’s ruling al-Khalifa family. “I am very impressed by the progress that Bahrain is making on all fronts - economically, politically, socially,” she declared as she opened a town hall meeting. Her paeans to Bahrain’s “commitment to democracy” continued until a member of parliament managed to gain access to the microphone and asked for a response to the fact that “many people are arrested, lawyers and human rights activists.”
Clinton’s condescending reply was a pure apology for the regime. “It’s easy to be focused internally and see the glass as half empty. I see the glass as half full,” she said. “Yes, I mean people are arrested and people should have due process . . . but on the other hand the election was widely validated. . . . So you have to look at the entire picture.”
So much for a fresh start on human rights. Clinton’s Bahrain visit reflected what seems to be an intractable piece of the Obama administration’s character: a deeply ingrained resistance to the notion that the United States should publicly shame authoritarian regimes or stand up for the dissidents they persecute.
Yes, Obama made a public statement the day an empty chair represented Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo at the Nobel peace prize ceremony, and both he and Clinton issued statements last week when Russia’s best-known political prisoner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was convicted on blatantly trumped-up charges. But in all sorts of less prominent places and cases, the U.S. voice remains positively timid - or not heard at all.
After Egypt’s terrible elections in November, in which ballot boxes were blatantly stuffed and the opposition brutally suppressed, the administration’s commentary was limited to bland statements issued by “the office of the press secretary” at State and the spokesman of the National Security Council. Three weeks earlier, at a widely watched joint press conference in Washington with Egypt’s foreign minister, Clinton made no mention of the elections, the crackdown or anything else related to human rights.
In Latin America, friends of the United States marvel at its passivity as Hugo Chavez and Daniel Ortega systematically crush civil society organizations and independent media. “I don’t see a clear policy,” Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez - a good example of the sort of dissident Obama promised to defend - told me.
When the administration touts its record it often focuses on the declarations it has engineered by multilateral forums, such as the U.N. Human Rights Council. The ideology behind this is that the United States is better off working through such bodies than acting on its own. The problem is that, in practice, this is not true. Set aside for the moment the fact that the U.N. council is dominated by human rights abusers who devote most of the agenda to condemnations of Israel. Who has heard what the council said about, say, the recent events in Belarus? The obvious answer: far fewer people than would have noticed if the same critique came from Obama or Clinton.
Back to Bahrain for a moment. The “entire picture” Clinton referred to is that virtually no one, outside the Bahraini royal family and the State Department, shared her judgment that the parliamentary election was “free and fair.” The dissidents are still on trial; their defense lawyers resigned en masse last month because of the court’s refusal to consider any of their motions.
Recently, Human Rights Watch spoke up again on behalf of Nabeel Rajab, the president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, who has been repeatedly harassed by security forces, prevented from traveling and called a terrorist by the state news agency.
Has the Obama administration spoken up for this relatively obscure and “voiceless” dissident? Of course not.
FROM THE BEATLES TO BOLLYWOOD TO THE STARSHIP ENTERPRISE TO OLYMPIC GOLD
This is the fifth in a series of “Video dispatches”.
To welcome in 2011, before resuming the usual Middle East-related dispatches, which can often be depressingly serious, here is something lighter. (I originally sent out and posted this dispatch 18 months ago; a large number of people have joined this list since then.)
CONTENTS
1. A rich series of multicultural variations on a Jewish theme
2. Texas-style
3. Performed by Spock and Kirk
4. And with the help of Russian soldiers
5. A rendition by Dutch violinist and conductor Andre Rieu
6. A beautiful version from Iran
7. Hava Nagila on ice
8. Performed by former Miss Egypt, singing superstar Dalida
9. The Jewish Beatles
10. A Bollywood film version from India
11. Performed by members of the small Jewish community of Cuba
12. Hava Hagila (baby let’s dance)
Extra
13. American Jewish gymnast Alexandra Raisman wins a gold medal at the London 2012 Olympics, dancing to “Hava Nagila”
A RICH SERIES OF MULTICULTURAL VARIATIONS ON A JEWISH THEME
[All notes below by Tom Gross]
Hava Nagila is a Hebrew folk song, the title of which means “let us rejoice”. It is a song of celebration, often performed at Jewish festivals (and also at some Roma ones).
The music originated among Ukrainian Jews and the most commonly used text of the song was composed by Abraham Zvi Idelsohn in 1918 to celebrate the 1917 Balfour Declaration which gave rise to the modern state of Israel. It was first recorded in Berlin in 1922.
But, as the videos I have gathered below demonstrate, while it remains part of Jewish and Israeli tradition, the song now has an attraction that transcends frontiers and appeals to all people of good will.
HAVA NAGILA, TEXAS-STYLE
This version has some amusing local Texas lyrics in English thrown in (“A little bit of dog and a little bit of cat”) and is particularly dedicated to all those Texans who follow this website.
HAVA NAGILA PERFORMED BY SPOCK AND KIRK
William Shatner (Captain James T. Kirk), Leonard Nimoy (Spock) and several other actors playing members of the crew of the Starship Enterprise are Jewish, so they may well approve of this video production.
HAVA NAGILA PERFORMED WITH THE HELP OF RUSSIAN SOLDIERS
A RENDITION BY DUTCH VIOLINIST AND CONDUCTOR ANDRE RIEU
This is a particularly good performance.
A BEAUTIFUL VERSION FROM IRAN
HAVA NAGILA ON ICE
A breathtaking version on ice from the 1999 World Ice-skating Championships, danced to by Russian figure skater Evgeni Plushenko, who went on to win the gold medal at the 2006 Winter Olympics and is a three-time world champion.
PERFORMED BY FORMER MISS EGYPT, SINGING SUPERSTAR DALIDA
THE JEWISH BEATLES
A BOLLYWOOD FILM VERSION FROM INDIA
PERFORMED BY MEMBERS OF THE SMALL JEWISH COMMUNITY OF CUBA
Click here to listen to the audio.
HAVA HAGILA (BABY LET’S DANCE)
A more modern version for younger people who follow this website.
Update July 31, 2012. Additional video.
AMERICAN JEWISH GYMNAST ALEXANDRA RAISMAN HELPS TEAM USA WIN THE GOLD MEDAL AT THE LONDON 2012 OLYMPICS, DANCING TO “HAVA NAGILA”
American Jewish gymnast Alexandra Raisman wins a gold medal for Team USA at the London 2012 Olympics, dancing to “Hava Nagila”. (She later one a further gold at the London Olympics, also dancing to Hava Nagila.)
[Videos above compiled by Tom Gross]
Other dispatches in this video series can be seen here:
* Video dispatch 1: The Lady In Number 6
* Video dispatch 2: Iran: Zuckerberg created Facebook on behalf of the Mossad
* Video dispatch 3: Vladimir Putin sings “Blueberry Hill” (& opera in the mall)
* Video dispatch 4: While some choose boycotts, others choose “Life”
* Video dispatch 5: A Jewish tune with a universal appeal
* Video dispatch 6: Carrying out acts of terror is nothing new for the Assad family
* Video dispatch 7: A brave woman stands up to the Imam (& Supporting Bin Laden in London)
* Video dispatch 8: Syrians burn Iranian and Russian Flags (Not Israeli and U.S. ones)
* Video Dispatch 9: “The one state solution for a better Middle East...”
* Video dispatch 10: British TV discovers the next revolutionary wave of Israeli technology
* Video dispatch 11: “Freedom, Freedom!” How some foreign media are reporting the truth about Syria
* Video dispatch 12: All I want for Christmas is...
* Video dispatch 14: Jon Stewart under fire in Egypt (& Kid President meets Real President)
* Video dispatch 16: Joshua Prager: “In search for the man who broke my neck”
* Video dispatch 17: Pushback against the “dictator Erdogan” - Videos from the “Turkish summer”
* Video dispatch 18: Syrian refugees: “May God bless Israel”
* Video dispatch 20: No Woman, No Drive: First stirrings of Saudi democracy?
* Video dispatch 21: Al-Jazeera: Why can’t Arab armies be more humane like Israel’s?
* Video dispatch 22: Jerusalem. Tel Aviv. Beirut. Happy.
* Video dispatch 23: A nice moment in the afternoon
* Video dispatch 24: How The Simpsons were behind the Arab Spring
* Video dispatch 25: Iranians and Israelis enjoy World Cup love-in (& U.S. Soccer Guide)
* Video dispatch 26: Intensifying conflict as more rockets aimed at Tel Aviv
* Video dispatch 27: Debating the media coverage of the current Hamas-Israel conflict
* Video dispatch 29: “Fighting terror by day, supermodels by night” (& Sign of the times)
* Video dispatch 30: How to play chess when you’re an ISIS prisoner (& Escape from Boko Haram)
* Video dispatch 31: Incitement to kill
* Video Dispatch 32: Bibi to BBC: “Are we living on the same planet?” (& other videos)