In his career as a Sunday Times culture writer, Jonathan Dean has interviewed everyone from Angelina Jolie to Kristen Stewart. For his first book he has turned his attention to two less starry subjects; his maternal grandfather and great-grandfather.
Both were Jewish immigrants who established new lives; forced to leave everything behind during the 20th century’s darker moments, Heinz Schapira fled Vienna as a teenager on the eve of the Holocaust, arriving here when foreigners were viewed with suspicion but carving out a very British existence.
Heinz’s father, David, had embarked on a not dissimilar journey at age 16, escaping a shtetl town in what is now the Ukraine as pogroms broke out for the more cosmopolitan Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was soon conscripted by his adoptive country, deployed to the region he had just fled. He survived the First World War after shrapnel was lodged in his eyes; blinded for life at 19. He subsequently became the first lawyer in Austria to train using Braille.
As Dean says, you wouldn’t believe David’s story if it was fiction. “How he managed to keep going, the things he copes with, like never seeing his children, it’s hard to get my head around,” he says. “But then you forget he was a refugee before that.”
It was during the centenary of the so-called Great War that the seed for the book was planted. “What was being written and what David Cameron was saying about British values confused and annoyed me because I don’t have any relatives who fought for the British,” explains Dean. “There’s a more twisted past than anyone gave note to and that’s the same for millions. So I delved into it.”
Having met his great-grandfather only as a baby, and with Heinz dying when Dean was five, he knew only the bare bones. Helpfully both were prolific diarists and letter writers, with David leaving a detailed memoir.
Dean was fascinated by what he unearthed. Having just become a father (his second child was born this year), he was particularly struck by Heinz and his brother saying goodbye to their parents, not knowing if they’d ever be reunited. “That affected me the most.”
I Must Belong Somewhere tells both stories, interwoven with interviews with today’s refugees, and meditates on what identity and belonging mean in an age of global migration and resurgent nationalism.
For David, Austria — which sent him to war, and then to Terezinstadt — became home. He was instrumental in rebuilding Vienna’s post-Holocaust Jewish community.
Heinz, meanwhile, sought sanctuary and identity in the country his father had fought against. His diaries record how he embraced life here; playing croquet within a year or so. “It’s like he’d read a manual of being British,” says Dean.
Save for always counting in German, Heinz stripped himself of all vestiges of his past, marrying a non-Jewish woman and never telling his children of his experiences. When he died, neighbours were surprised to learn he had been a refugee.
If he could, Dean would ask Heinz about his British identity. “He latched onto an idea of Britishness but I’d be interested to know what he thought it actually was.” Dean questions whether there are distinctly British values — or indeed French, German or American ones.
“It always goes back to something very basic, like fish and chips and cricket,” he says. He points to the gulf between Leave and Remain, or voters of Le Pen and Macron, or Trump and Clinton. “More and more you see a 50-50 split and it’s very hard to say there are shared values between those people. It just doesn’t work.”
Dean, who is not Jewish (although he grew up steeped in Jewish literature), was raised in leafy Surrey in a quintessentially British family and now lives in Walthamstow. Yet, as he points out, he is this rather than Viennese Jewish only because someone gave his grandfather a permit. But for a twist of fate he could have had a different life; in America, say, where a distant cousin is now Rabbi Elliot Holin of Philadelphia’s Congregation Kol Mi. “It’s interesting how differently a life can go over the stretch of 80 years,” he says.
Recently he went back to David’s birthplace near Rava Ruska, where his great great-grandmother is likely buried. “Seeing what happened to the community there was devastating. There is this sense of ‘but for one little change.’”
As the descendant of refugees who successfully assimilated and contributed to their new countries, he feels a responsibility to draw attention to the plight of refugees today. “I don’t think there is enough respect for the work that immigrants do, going back decades or 100 years or five years,” he says. He wrote the book to show that these stories are everywhere. “People don’t realise who has an immigrant past. It’s pointless to do this nit-picking of what a nationality might be when pretty much everybody has it.”
Heinz was a child refugee; nearly 80 years on Dean is aghast about the Government’s decision not to bring in more child refugees from Calais. “I don’t understand the humanity of not helping out more. I find it baffling.”
The conflation of immigration and the refugee crisis doesn’t help, he says, pointing to Ukip’s Brexit posters, showing refugees at the Slovenian border under the caption “Breaking Point”. “There seems to be an idea refugees’ lives are less important than animals’ lives. Somehow that narrative has happened — everything has just been lumped into this ‘others’ bracket.”
“What’s depressing is that when I’m writing about it now, despite the fact I’ve led a daftly easier life than him, I feel less positive about the future,” he says, which he thinks is linked to the rise of extreme politics, not least in Austria. Observing that in the UK, “the more far right, uniform wearing-fascists” have never succeeded, he suggests that nonetheless figures like Nigel Farage have shifted politics to the right. “People can say and get away with things I don’t think they could a few years ago,” he says. “And there is no real opposition.”
Towards the end of our conversation, Dean worries he is coming across as gloomy. He points to something David said in 1984, near the end of his life: “Despite the difficulties occasioned by my fate I have maintained towards this highly disagreeable world a fairly positive attitude,” he wrote. “I try to look upon the future of mankind… not totally without hope.”
I Must Belong Somewhere is published by Orion
