Books
How a top columnist started out on the left foot
Daniel Snowman enjoys a red-blooded read
February 4, 2016 14:19
ByDaniel Snowman, Daniel Snowman
2 min read
Daniel Snowman enjoys a red-blooded read
February 4, 2016 14:19ByDaniel Snowman, Daniel Snowman
Party Animals
By David Aaronovitch
Jonathan Cape, £17.99
Readers of the JC and of The Times will be familiar with the work of David Aaronovitch, one of today's leading columnists. Whether he is writing about Corbynites or conspiracy theorists, sex, cyclists or philosemites, Aaronovitch is always worth a read, his sometimes combative style rendered painlessly palatable by an arresting fact here, a witty turn of phrase there and, always, an argument worth chewing over before you decide whether to digest or reject it. He has also written a number of books. This one, he says, took him half a decade to complete. One can see why.
The central focus of Party Animals is on Aaronovitch's family background and, in particular, his parents' total and inflexible commitment to Communism. Sam, David's father, was born in Cable Street in Stepney in 1919 to Moishe and Gitel, Jewish immigrants from the old Russian Pale. Moishe became Morris and repaired button-holes on jackets for second-hand suits. Sam had little more than a rudimentary education. But he grew up a natural autodidact, consumed classics by Goethe, Tolstoy, Dickens and others, and came to reject Judaism, replacing the Magen David with the Red Flag.
Lavender, Sam's third wife and mother of David (and of a daughter from a previous relationship), was the product of a rather classy, non-Jewish, English family. By the time she married Sam in 1954, Lavender had become an equally ardent Marxist.
Aaronovitch paints a vivid picture of his parents' political activities, the meetings and lectures, the marches, the rallies, the banners and the slogans. He grew up knowing that "we" didn't believe in God, go to church or support the monarchy. "We" didn't moan about strikes because we approved of them. It was the heroic USSR that had led the victorious fight against fascism during the war. And America? A capitalist warmonger irresponsibly enhancing the danger of nuclear annihilation.
Sam and Lavender were so committed to their politics that little time was left for parenthood. And when Sam's responsibilities came to involve late-night intimacies with female co-workers, Lavender took out her anger (sometimes physically) on her son.
Eventually, as the marriage went into tailspin, Sam and Lavender sought counselling from the psychiatrist Robin Skynner who later wrote of the family (suitably renamed) in a book from which David quotes extensively in his final chapter. Other sources include Doris Lessing's Golden Notebook - in which Sam appears as "Comrade Bill" - and, above all, the diaries Lavender kept from 1963 until her death in 2005.
While Party Animals is primarily about Aaronovitch's parents and the wider Communist history of the times, he does give us a few headlines about his own early development, his chequered schooling and university career, his eventual rift with the political world of his youth and his emerging hopes and fears.
I was left wanting more about the ways Aaronovitch's complex and sometimes painful childhood might have gone on to influence his adult life and career. Maybe this is for his next book. I hope so.
David Aaronovitch will be discussing 'Party Animals' with Stephen Grosz at Jewish Book Week on February 23. Daniel Snowman's books include a study of the cultural impact of the Hitler Émigrés