By Tony Judt
William Heinemann, £16.99
Tony Judt was a brilliant historian of the European left, a social democrat, and a Jewish intellectual in the great dafka tradition. His later views on Israel were controversial and radical (the one-state solution) but they were thought through and he retained an open mind.
For the last two years of his life, he lived out his destiny - with a version of motor neurone disease that left him, in his own words, with no movement, no loss of sensation but no pain, and his mind 100 per cent active - in what can only be called a heroic way, continuing to think and dictate his thoughts.
The Memory Chalet consists of short autobiographical chapters, drawing on different phases of his life in different countries. The arrangement is discontinuous, making a virtue out of the necessity to compose in short bursts. It was rendered possible, he says, by a spatial mnemonic trigger - in his case a holiday chalet from his childhood - which became a storage device enabling him to retain nocturnal memories until the next day, when they could be recorded. It also helped him sleep.
This is not his best book, for two reasons, both of which do him credit: first, he is not interested enough in himself to have composed a great autobiography, even in normal circumstances. He remained a historian till he died. Secondly, it was not, and could not be, actually written.
Dictated, it betrays signs of the understandably great pressure of time he was under: had he been able to revise, he would not have written "when I was growing up Jews were the only significant minority in Christian Britain".
Assuming he was growing up until 1964 (when he was 16) - there were already important minority communities from Poland, the Caribbean and the Indian sub-continent etc. Then, he states: "For all their brazen philandering and posturing, Clinton and Blair, no less than Bush, Gore and Brown… are still married to their first date". While they are all posturers, only Clinton was a philanderer. Also, Gore announced his divorce in June.
But these are quibbles. For this book contains many richly evocative narrative treasures, which can be cherished even by those who are not, unlike myself, more or less of his generation. For example: his travels on trains as well as on the single-decker Green Line buses which went beyond the London suburbs; his early childhood (amid austerity not poverty) in Putney and the difference between English and Jewish food; his schooldays and his educational elitism.
The book ends where it began, with a memory of Switzerland and a train: "We cannot choose where we start out in life, but we may finish where we will. I know where I shall be: going nowhere in particular on that little train, forever and ever".
