In Ukraine, all that God gave is good, all that man made is rotten

And the Ukrainians didn’t fight. On the contrary. They were active partners in the realisation of the New Order, which was a world without Jews. There were individual and communal acts of heroism and compassion but collective collaboration and a great deal of added venom. I found medals celebrating the liberation of Odessa by the Red Army at a market stall and I brought them back for my children. Vedibarta Bom.

I find it shameful that the British state has never recognised the sacrifice and the suffering of the Russian people in the Second World War. We should honour it and we are still snubbing them. The Russians weren’t invited to the D-Day celebrations when Donald Trump came to town. We don’t even invite them for tea when we remember our dead. It’s very rude and very stupid. I can say with complete conviction that there would have been no D-Day without the Russians.

I would like Her Majesty the Queen to go to Moscow and express her respect and gratitude to the Russian people for their loss and for their courage. She lived through the war and she knows, and I thought that you should know. In my day job I go on about this all the time. It’s one of those things that make my eyes bulge and my heart swell.

Yitzchak Arad wrote an amazing book, In the Shadow of the Red Banner, published by Yad Vashem. It chronicles the courage of the Jewish fighters in the Red Army, more than half a million of them, who fought the Nazis with the red five pointed star on their cap. They are also Yidden. I say Kaddish for them. I honour them, all of them, including the Litvaks.

The Ukrainians, on the other hand, are being fast tracked for membership of the EU and Nato. A pox and a chaleria on all that. In other words I didn’t really want to go to the Ukraine. I knew I would have to face the brutal truth that life goes on, that the bad guys win and I found even the thought of it painful. I’m a Spurs supporter after all. I know how it feels.

I had only one sustained encounter with a Ukrainian.

About 15 years ago my Mum was afflicted by an illness called Progressive Supra Nuclear Palsy, every word of which is terrible. She became a silent witness to her own decimation and was cared for by a Bulgarian called Galina. She will always be remembered by me as a valiant angel who fought for my mother’s dignity when all was lost.

She lived upstairs in our old family home in Palmers Green with her Ukrainian boyfriend whose name was Vasil and she looked after my Mum as she progressively disintegrated. He supported Chelsea. He had represented his country in Judo at the Olympics, as Galina had hers. They met at an Eastern European Judo tournament. Not the sort of place I would recommend for Jewish singles looking for love. His forearms were the size of my thighs and we made each other feel uneasy.

He looked at me and saw a zhida-kommuna, a very popular Ukrainian and Polish phrase meaning ‘Communist yid’. A lot of them think that Communism was conceived of and enforced by Jews. I looked at him and I didn’t want to acknowledge what I saw. My mother’s life was in his hands. None of that went away over the three years of her decimation. It’s the last thing you want to hear when you go to the doctor: it’s progressive.

My journey to find my Zaida’s shtetl started at Manor House Station as I stood outside its locked gates with my suitcase and my back-pack at 5.10 in the morning. It didn’t feel like an ordinary trip. I felt a sense of reckless trepidation. I didn’t know what was going to happen. In a way I felt like I was going to meet my wife-to-be in an arranged marriage and I had no idea what would greet me when I lifted the veil. That kind of feeling.

I stood on the platform with the nicotine stained tiles and the navy blue lines next to a group of Chasidim with special cases for their Shtreimels. Hand luggage apparently, and in mine I had packed my blue Singer’s Prayer Book, my Soncino’s Tehilim and my cuppel.

I have my Zaida’s tephilin in my care, with which he left the Ukraine, but I didn’t bring those. I don’t really like tephilin and Shacharit is always too early. Leather and mornings are not my thing. Ma’ariv is my favourite, at a good time and no repetition.

I had a list of the 10 Psalms to be read at the grave of Reb Nachman of Bratslav. I was told that if you say them in the right order, give Tzedoka and then talk to him as you would to a good friend about what hangs heavily upon your heart, then all your sins would be forgiven, however terrible, and he would drag you out of Gehenna by your payos. I was taking this very seriously. I opened the Tehilim up on Psalm 41. Ashrei Maskil El-Dal.

Blessed is he who acts wisely for the weak

On the worst of days Hashem will save him

The Lord will protect him from grief and he will live in his Country in peace

Hashem will not surrender him to the malice of his enemies

As often as he is wounded the Lord restores him to health.

Sounded good to me. I carried on reading all the way to Kiev and finished on Psalm 59.

Rescue me from my enemies

OMG

Keep me beyond the reach of those that rise up against me.

Protect me from those who do wrong

And deliver me from the men of blood.

And with that I was through customs and a man stood with my name on a placard and he took my bags and loaded them into the waiting car. My Zaida left the Ukraine as a pauper but I was returning as a Lord. I couldn’t have done it without him.

In the car I looked straight ahead for a while but then I found the courage to look out the window, to raise the veil, and the truth was obvious. The nature was beautiful, the buildings were ugly and the nature was a far more powerful force than the architecture.

The Brezhnevite sterility of its council flats, office blocks and public buildings were smothered by the fecund intensity of its trees and flowers. It looked like Barnsley in Gan Eden. All that God gave was good, all that man made was rotten. I wrote that thought down in my little black reporter’s notepad that I always carry in my pocket.

I was driven through a hilly wood in the centre of town. Kiev was shrouded in the cotton snowflakes of cascading poplar seeds that floated down all the time yet could not be caught. The pavements were strewn with Old Man’s Beard. I wondered how Jews who get hay fever ever lived in the Ukraine. It is impregnated with pollen. Its belly is an ever swelling mass of allergies and it gives birth every spring with a seemingly limitless energy. There are not enough anti-histamines in this world to counter it.

I opened the window and the air smelt sweet. This was not what I was expecting. I’ve been to Moscow and it didn’t look or smell like that at all.

Looking out from my hotel balcony the sky was huge with red, blue and black clouds absorbing the flashes of fierce sun. The buildings in the old city looked like Turin or Milan. A kind of modern baroque; creamy, leaf green, dusty yellow or pink facades with clean long windows. But as I looked down what struck me most were the rusty corrugated iron roofs that crowned their restoration and which emphasised the truth of fallen glory. What’s wrong with tiles? The city it reminded me most of was Detroit, with an encompassing sky mocking its rusting skyline.

It didn’t strike me as a happy place. Strip clubs were advertised on enormous electronic street screens in the middle of the road that had replaced the statues of Lenin with tall blond women in all kinds of postures of erotic rapture. A very basic capitalism was not yet ready to hide its shame. It felt like everything was for sale. There were many older German men walking round with younger Slavic women. Plus ca change.

It wasn’t all bad. On Thursday night I had a proper shvitz in a Russian Baths with a personal assistant who beat my back with eucalyptus leaves and twigs to help my circulation while I lay face down in the dry heat of the sauna and brought me tea when I emerged from the ice cold mikvah that followed.

Seven times he told me I had to submerge myself and we did the whole cycle three times. And then I lay down on a bed and had a shluf for two hours. A proper shvitz. I felt in a state of grace for the whole of Shabbos. I was so clean you could eat off my forehead.

The tour organised by YIVO was dreamy. We had as our guide Professor Sam Kassow, the one who wrote about the Warsaw book-buriers and smuggling scholars that was codenamed Operation Oyneg Shabbos. He was born in a Displaced Persons Camp in Stuttgart just after the war to Lithuanian parents who had somehow survived and met up. They made it to America and he spoke German and Yiddish and is a professor of Ashkenazi history with a remarkable knowledge of Russian history, language and culture. He is a great historian of our dead Yidden.

On the long coach journeys from Kiev to Vinnitsa and then on to Odessa, with all the stops along the way in Zhitomir, Berdichev and Uman, Sam would give talks through the microphone on Tsarist policy to the Jews 1740-1917, or the religious thought of Reb Nachman of Bratslav, or Jewish organised crime in Odessa and the smuggling tunnels they dug. On Bialik as a poet and Jabotinsky as a novelist.

I claimed the back seats for myself and used to lie down and close my eyes as Sam’s impeccable analysis drifted into my ears.

I used to say when I was at primary school that I fell asleep in lessons to help me concentrate. No-one believed me then. My mother said that she’d never heard anything so ridiculous in her entire life. Which is quite a claim because she’d heard a lot of things. But I ask you to believe that I learnt a huge amount from Sam Kassow’s talks.

Listening while sleeping is one of the great features of the House of Lords and I fit right in. I learn all manner of interesting things with my eyes shut in the Chamber, the voices pumped through little speakers behind a grill on the cushioned back of my seat next to my ear. Perfect. You can tell if I disagree with something. My eyes open. But not for long.

My dad used to fall asleep in Rabbi Shaw’s droshas at Brownlow Road Shul in Palmers Green. He was very dispirited if, after a long high lingering Kekedem, Rabbi Shaw alighted to the pulpit. Our eyes would meet in disappointment and my Dad would lean back in his seat and pull his trilby hat down over his eyes and be completely motionless, as if someone had injected him with a tranquiliser. When it was over and a subdued ‘shekoyach’ had evaporated into the stagnant air he would tip his hat back and start reading the Chumash again. Only when we got to the Amidah would he stand and reluctantly reach for the Siddur.

And I would say of Sam Kassow that he was a perfect teacher and scholar, meticulous without being pedantic. He was like a figure from Sholem Aleichem, the kindly Misnag who teases out the logic from a child with kindness rather than a lazy bullying. And Kiev was all about Sholem Aleichem.

We read the short story Dreyfus in Kasrilevke together and discussed it. We went to see Sholem Aleichem’s statue in front of the flat he lived in when he was first married but there was something odd about it. The statue looked like Mark Twain. We visited his shtetl of Voronkov, and his statue looked like Mark Twain there as well. I never had Sholem Aleichem down as a Mississippi River boat gambler with a cane and a cravat. And in the Sholem Aleichem Museum, which has fantastic posters of Tevye Der Milchiker, before they added the music and dancing and turned it into Fiddler on the Roof, he looked like Mark Twain there as well. I’ve seen photos and he didn’t look like that. And the local lecturers kept on describing him as the Yiddish Mark Twain. I was scribbling away in my little black book.

Charles Dickens was the English Sholem Aleichem. It’s so obvious. You could say that all of Dickens’ morality could be summarised as a Christmas Turkey, with all the trimmings, with all the family sitting round the table with sparkling eyes and candles. Memories of the past, hope for the future, goodwill to all men. We, thank god, have that every Shabbos. The Friday Night Chicken is as much the centre-piece for Sholem Aleichem as the Christmas Turkey was to Dickens. The whole family together round the Shabbos candles eating chicken and singing Sholem Aleichem across the generations.

And they shared an ethical view, which was that of Menschlichkeit, that we should be honest and kind. That most of the troubles of the world are the result of greed and cruelty and the little people matter more than the big people. This is hated by modernists as sentimental escapism and if you say that the capitalist system turns people into greedy self-regarding narcissists who are willing to prostitute their soul for money, then that is a bad thing about capitalism. But if you say that the state will turn them into angels then I have to disagree. Love and justice, kindness and mercy, faithfulness and friendship, family and sacrifice are fragile gifts that we should nurture and practise in the way we live with each other. That is Menschlichkeit and Sholem Aleichem and Dickens are right. Everyone knows who and what a mensch is and they save the world in every generation.

Another thing you should know about the Ukraine is that when it comes to shuls and Yiddishkeit, Lubavitch have a monopoly on the franchise. They are the McDonald’s of Moshiach. They have an outlet in every town. I visited the shuls in Zhitomir, Kiev and Odessa, and all of them have the same framed oil paintings of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the bright one of him carrying a small Sefer Torah wearing Talles and Tephilin and the darker one of him wearing a fedora, looking at you with hard eyes, like an Odessan gangster who just asked for his money.

I go way back with Lubavitch. Between the ages of ten and 13 I was sent to Lubavitch camp every summer. It was called Camp Gan Yisroel. I think that my Mum sending me to a single-sex, ultra-Orthodox summer camp in a dilapidated hotel in Bournemouth where all we could do all day was study Mishnais because the greenish swimming pool was infected and it was always raining was her attempt to protect the integrity of the Jewish people for future generations by isolating me. When I asked her, she said she thought I would enjoy it. You decide.

Sometimes the songs I learnt there come into my head and I start singing “wake up Yidden, from your dreams of Goles, get ready to meet Moshiach Tzidkeynu, Geulah is coming, swiftly towards us …”, or the one that goes AY YAY YAY YAY Tzioyn. There’s many more. Meylech Goyel Umoshia. Emes. I even got a personal letter from the Lubavitcher Rebbe on my barmitzvah which my Mum framed and hung on my bedroom wall as a silent witness to my depredation.

It caused quite a stir in Palmers Green in 1974. Rabbi Shaw came round to read it and he looked impressed. He held it gingerly between his fingers, examined the front and the back as if it was treyf, stared at the cramped Hebrew words written by a typewriter for a long time then nodded his head in approval. My Dad kept out of sight. It was a thin sky blue airline letter that had Par Avion on the top. It felt like it was made of tissue paper. I never quite had the heart to take it down.

It was Lubavitch that taught me to be sceptical of what we call on the left “the cult of personality”. They gave me an immunity to Lenin to Trotsky to Blair and to Corbyn. For that I thank them. Menschlichkeit and messianism don’t mix very well in my experience. Revolutions are a false Messiah. Memories, people and things endure through time and not everything can change at once. And when it doesn’t, you get impatient violence.

Even Levi-Yitzchak of Berdichev’s Matzeyvah was controlled by Lubavitch. The only one that wasn’t was Reb Nachman’s in Uman and he said that every Jew can be a Tzadik. Sam Kassow taught me that while I was sleeping.

I was most offended by Lubavitch ownership of what they called the ‘Choral Synagogues’, which pioneered chazonos and the choir in our liturgy, that were built on respectability and Torah im Derech Eretz. My Mum’s family were Adass and my Dad’s were Federation but as a couple they found their eternal home in the United Synagogue. They were married at Egerton Road Shul, perhaps the greatest Anglo expression of the choral synagogue and Brownlow Road was its little sister up the road.

The Brodsky and Podil Synagogues in Kiev and the Brodsky Synagogue in Odessa are of the same glorious family as Egerton Road and were also called Central or even Cathedral Synagogues. Princes Street in Liverpool is of the same kind. A modern Orthodox vision of sublime order based on harmony, patriotism and decorum that was once so strong. He who.

On Kol Nidre, when we were asked to “please be upstanding for the Honorary Officers”, Sidney Goldschneider and Alan Grant were transformed into distant civic titans of immense stature, their names written in gold leaf on the oak boards behind me, their black top hats perched on their heads standing out against the intense white of the bima. And then the chazan whispered the words “Kol Nidre” with plaintive sobriety to a penitent shul, with a quiet choir humming behind him, and all was as it should be. It overflowed. Lubavitch can’t give you that. That is what these shuls were built for and it felt like a beautiful local cinema had been taken over by the Jehovah’s Witness.

My Siddur is Singer’s, my Chumash is Soncino’s, my Machzers are Routledge. These are our holy books that we should all have in our homes and on our shelves where we can see them. I know we now have Art Scroll, and the new Sachs Siddur but I think we got it right the first time. The Hebrew print is perfectly clear, the table of contents are comprehensible and the Hertz Soncino Pentateuch and Haftorahs is the best of us. When did Shema Yisroel become “Listen Israel”? It’s not as good. “Hear Oh Israel, The Lord our God, the Lord is One”. You don’t need to re-translate that. It’s perfect as it is. Four beats to every line. Memorable. We don’t know much but we do know that. Why would you want to take it away?

Where was the United Synagogue when Communism fell and the quiet Jews of the Soviet Union were allowed to say their prayers in public once more? Where was the glory and grandeur of our exile? Is everyone working as a session vocalist? Does every Jewish singer want to work in show business?

Where are the singing disciples of Rabbi Rosenfeld who leads us every year in the consecration of this tradition in the Slichot service in Marble Arch Shul? We lift our eyes to god on the Motzei Shabbes before Rosh Hashanah but we didn’t look down and see the distress of our Chazen-less kin. We did not share our gifts with them. Odessa built its Opera House before it had clean running water. The Chazen in the Brodsky Synagogue had four full time deputies in 1912 so that Pinchas Minkovsky could save his voice for the good bits. They love singing in that city.

I read that in 1915 you could hear the women crying during Yizkor two streets away in the deserted market. Imagine Rabbi Rosenfeld leading the Slichot service in the Brodsky Synagogue, with the choir behind him and his daughter Shlomit by his side. That’s a gig. All of Odessa would come to that and the dead would live.

Even in my manor the Bobov have captured Egerton Road and our Anglo star of exile has fallen but in Stamford Hill at least I still have choices. I could say Kaddish on my parents yoorzeit at the Bratslav or the Belz, at the Satmar or the Ger, but I end up saying it at Pinter’s because Reb Avraham is always there to stand by my side when I do and they have a permanent rolling minyan so I can never really miss it.

Lubavitch have a monopoly on the abandoned Jews of Eastern Europe when there is so much more to this than that.

Having said that, we were invited to Lubavitch for Friday Night and I sang Lecha Dodi in the communal hall/shul that they run in the City of Vinnitsa. “Boyi Kala Boyi Kala” sounds joyous in the dusk of a Galitziana spring when the first vodka hits and surges through your body. During the meal, and there was also challah and schnitzel and fried fish, the rabbi asked me what Zmiros I would like to sing and we celebrated our first Shabbes in der heim by singing Shalom Aleichem. Everyone knew the words and our voices rang out into the night as clear and as strong as a primary school bell tolling at the end of a difficult week.

As I looked around the room at all of us, the locals and the visitors, at the Hebrew-less Jews and the completely lost, I thought of Bob Dylan’s lines:

Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed.

For the countless, confused, accused, mis-used, strung out ones and worse.

And for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe

We gazed upon the majesty of Shabbos.

We looked like the congregation of Egerton Road in its final years. A collection of the weak, the lame and the heartbroken, and I watched with wonder as the abandoned Jews of Vinnitsa meekly stumbled back to reclaim for themselves the greatest Jewish gift that we have ever given to the world; the Sabbath Day. A day of rest and respite from the merciless powers that rule our world. A day offline. A day sublime.

In the gloaming of Friday night, in the pounding rain, in the city that was Hitler’s Eastern Front headquarters, in a place where 30,000 Jews were shot in two days of meticulously organised slaughter on 16 and 22 September 1941, it was only Lubavitch that was giving the remnant of our people any shelter from the storm that never ends. Ashrei Maskil El-Dal. I felt ashamed of my anger. Emes. The fault was with me and my tradition and not with theirs. We just never showed up. After all that. Shame.

And another thing you should know about the Ukraine is that both the President and Prime Minister are Jewish.

What?

I also discovered that Ukrainians are geniuses at painting eggs. They had hundreds of them at a museum I visited in Odessa and they were stored in wooden botanical glass cabinets, arrayed like different kinds of insects on cotton wool. They were astounding in their beauty and intricacy. I was awed by the skill and the scale of the work that went into them. Slender mustard yellow and thin lines of the darkest green outline a bouquet of deep blue petals in a two inch space of egg shell. Who would have thought? Baytzim. Sometimes it’s hard to understand people and their passions but you have to try.

And there was something very distressing that was emerging from the tour and which grew stronger all the time. It became obvious that the Soviet Union not only had a tendency to turn Choral Synagogues into puppet theatres or “Rosa Luxemburg Youth Clubs”, it had a real animosity towards old Jewish cemeteries. And that this got worse after the war.

At Babi Yar, where more than 37,000 Jews were shot in two days, in blocks of a hundred at a time on 29 and 30 September 1941, the Bolsheviks built a 20-storey media complex with adjacent offices, studios and car park on the grounds of the second Jewish cemetery of Kiev next to which the massacre occurred.

At Babi Yar there are no tombstones for the buried or the unburied. Their lives have been erased because their deaths have been eviscerated. It’s my blood down there and it boiled. The Nazis killed the living, the Soviets the dead.

There were well developed plans in the early 1960s to turn Babi Yar into a fun-fair. It was a large undeveloped space in what is now a quite central city location. Huge suburbs lie behind it when once it was on the outskirts of town. Who could object to the people of Kiev having a fun day out? It could even attract tourists.

It was an act of pure spite, of a desecrated loathing that led to an unprecedented reaction. Non-Jews responded. Yevgeny Yevtushenko wrote a poem called Babi Yar that screamed against the denigration of Jews and their loss, and their effaced contribution to the war against Hitler. Shostakovich wrote a requiem built around these words and called it Babi Yar.

It was performed and the audience was silent throughout. Then there followed loud applause. There was public dissent from those who had benefited most. They couldn’t take this one, and through a galvanisation of a sense of shared disgust, the plans were halted. It was a first. No-one was executed and the dissent grew from poets, scientists, professors, journalists, composers and all the other beloved children of the Soviet Union. The ones who lived in special flats, with special shops and special clothes. Spetz was the word for them. The privileged ones. They rebelled.

It is of some comfort to me that the fall of the Bolshevik regime started with the plan to turn Babi Yar into a fun fair. It cannot free the blood from the land but they were seen for what they were and punished for their spite.

I sat down on the edge of the ravine and I was shocked by the beauty of its dappled sunlight and the scent of the air. I wrote down, “the silence of their death, the sweetness of its breath” in my little black book. I thanked those people who allowed me to mourn my beloved Yidden in peace. And then I was overwhelmed by the absence of their descendants. Behold the deserted city where once we loved. Kiev.

It was the same in Uman where Reb Nachman of Bratslav wanted to be buried to show his solidarity with the more than 1,000 Jews who were killed in the massacre of 1768. After the war they built a council estate that looks a bit like Grenfell on the old Jewish cemetery. They renamed the road Pushkin Street. The dead are allowed neither to live nor to rest in peace. Who says Kaddish for them?

The trend is longstanding. The elimination of the old Odessa Jewish Cemetery, where the Bund self-defence group buried their leaders in 1905, was one of the first acts of the Revolutionary Government in 1920.

Isaac Babel describes this dispossession in The End of the Almshouse. The man who is in charge of destroying the cemetery is called Broidin, a zhida-kommuna, and he is giving a tour to his Bureau Chief.

The former tailor’s assistant showed his Party Boss the hundred years of Odessa’s history sleeping beneath the granite stones. He pointed out the monuments and ornate tombs of the wheat exporters, shipping brokers and sugar kings who had created this Russian Marseille in a place, where, before them, there had only been a settlement called Hadjibey. They lay there facing the main gates — the Ashkenazis, the Hessens and the Ephrusis, the millionaire shnorrers, the philandering philanthropists, the creators of Odessa’s wealth and Odessa’s Jewish stories which still breathed beneath the pink marble family vaults in the shade of their chestnut and acacia trees.

And the first thing they did; they closed it. Beginning with the demolition of Almshouse, and over a period of 50 years, every single Jewish headstone was smashed and removed. There is no trace of the glory of what was once called ‘the star of exile’. It is now a desolate park where all the demons of Old Odessa come out to play at night.

No one wants to walk in it and when I went there with my spade all I could really find were used condoms and syringes lurking in the beautiful foliage. Most of the marble had been used to build luxury flats for the elites in the 1970s. I kept digging and I found some stones near the surface but the inscriptions had been washed away by time and neglect.

I went in the search of the First Jewish Cemetery of Odessa founded by the pioneer Jewish Citizens in the 1700s in the new Free Russian Port City of Odessa. I finally found the place where once it shone and it was suffocated by a half empty office block, a Shashlik restaurant, a tattoo parlour and a sex-shop. I faced with sober senses the iron law of progress:

Everything solid melts into air and all that is holy is profaned.

What a bunch of bastards.

Part four: I thanked my Zaida for sacrificing this splendour so I could live