Walking north along Whitehall in the direction of Trafalgar Square, I felt an odd stirring as we passed the memorials to Britain’s bygone military heroes. I didn’t really know who most of the statues represented, many of them seemed to be related to the Great Wars of the twentieth century, but it didn’t matter. Or maybe it did – the First and Second World Wars seem to loom over this country in a way that is much more present, much more remembered, than in America.
The war – it certainly loomed over Virgina Woolf. Curiously, walking past all those memorials, I found myself feeling rather like Peter Walsh. I am hardly one to wax on about the British Empire, Winston Churchill, or the glories of the monarchy; like Peter Walsh, I consider myself a man of the left and opposed to all those things. I have an undoubted Anglophile streak, but my affections tend to be for those elements of British society who fought against King and Country, be they the republican soldiers of the seventeenth century or the revolutionary radicals in the wake of 1789. Yet all the same, I couldn’t help but feel a certain reverence toward those statues, that they possessed a tangible aura of greatness which commanded my respect. They signified a heroism of another age; of a time when men and women fought and died for the Union Jack and all it stood for. The First World War had been ignoble, certainly, and I’ve been tuned into Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owens and Robert Graves – the voices of disenchantment – yet even so – in spite of myself, there seemed to me something glorious about those days of imperial pride, another world now lost to us, when millions of Britons made the ultimate sacrifice out of duty or love of country. Of course it’s all wrong, all false, a horrific excuse for the cruelties unleashed by a sick world of quarreling aristocrats and rivalrous empires, but walking in Whitehall, one might be forgiven, like Peter Walsh, for forgetting one’s history, if only for a moment.
Dreams from My Grandfather
Of all the walks we have been on, Monday’s in the East End may have been my favorite. I loved hearing about the heroism of the anti-fascists, who were really just ordinary members of the Jewish community, defending themselves against Oswald Mosley’s fascist goon squad and their police protectors. Though I don’t have an obvious personal connection to those events, I felt myself being drawn in by what happened, and I think I might have an idea why.
My surname is Fennell-Chametzky – as far as I know, there are only three persons in the world with that name, my two brothers and myself. The Fennells, as one might suppose, came from England, at least patrilineally; whilst the Chametzkys, as one might also suppose, were Eastern European Jews. I am undeniably the descendant of both English people and Jews, as my name bears witness to. One could say those Eastern European Jewish immigrants in London, who so bravely fought fascism at Cable Street, were fighting for the right of someone like me to exist.
But I think the main reason that this history resonated with me is more to do with a specific member of my family. My grandfather was called Jules Chametzky, and he passed just a few years ago. He was special in so many ways, but I think what made him Jules, what made him Grandpa, was the way he lived, as a person, in the world. As learned and as brilliant as he was, and he very much was, it was his openness to the world, his boundless friendship for others, his embrace of humanity and all its vast possibilities which made him so remarkable. Every year when I was a kid we would visit him over the summer, and at his house there would always be guests, or stories of guests, of the most interesting sort. One of his friends we met was called Michael Thelwell, a Jamaican author who wrote the novelistic adaptation of The Harder They Come. Grandpa had also been friends with James Baldwin, Chinua Achebe, and other engaged writers whose significance I was too young to understand at the time. What I always understood about Grandpa was his Jewishness, and he would often tell us about growing up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, then a Jewish ghetto, with his butcher father and brother Leslie, speaking Yiddish as well as English. Also, Grandpa’s politics: I always knew him to be some sort of radical leftist, that his Jewish background figured deeply into it, which there were signs of all over the house.
The back staircase was filled with posters, so many which seemed to form the actual materiel of the wall, celebrating things like the centenary of the Paris Commune, and there were references to Jewish-American (as well as European Jewish and worldwide Jewish) history and literature wherever you looked. There were also a fair amount of modern/contemporary, as in mid twentieth century, pieces of art and poetry framed upon the walls, and Jules’s wife Anne Halley, who I only met as an infant, had been a poet. But now, to return to the walk – this whole time, as we went along with our guide discussing the Jewish anarchists and communists of the 1930s who stood up to Mosley, it all felt very familiar, very close to home. When we got to the end of the walk, which was at the big mural painted in the 1970s for the battle of Cable Street, I experienced another shock of connection; both the subject and the style reminded me of Grandpa. I was thinking about him as we went along, and about myself, my identity, and it all sort of seemed to be coming together in this way which I can’t quite articulate, but felt right. Like I was discovering something not only about Jewish history in London, but something about myself and who I was. Despite my background, I’ve never felt particularly “Jewish”, culturally or otherwise; I was raised in an agnostic household, and I’ve never leaned into any religion. My English background, arguably, is what I’ve “chosen” to identify with, as I have become something of a musical and cultural Anglophile, finding solace in the shared tendency toward introversion and emotional repression in fucked up English people as well as myself. But what if there’s more to me yet than that dour English side, a part of me I haven’t fully discovered? Next time, before I retreat to the warm teacup and blankets of my flat, I’ll try to ask myself: what would Grandpa have done?