NOTE ON 'LEOPOLDSTADT'

I cry in movies. I'm a rank sentimentalist. But there are different kinds of weeping. You can be reduced by beauty, or at the simply very good, by the wiles of nostalgia, by acts of courage (however fictional), and so on and so forth. Occasionally, however, the tears come out of a kind of shame, and this is what happened to me at the end of Tom Stoppard's new play, ''Leopoldstadt'. And now I have just finished reading the text, and again I can hardly stifle a sob, as I sit among the quiet and the studious in a British Library reading room.

Republica de La Boca

My Boy Thomas

He done good.  Of course it is all in the genes - his mother's, obviously.

Dr Thomas Arnold

BOOKS

If, by the age of 70, I have managed to read 25 books every year since I was 10 years old, I will have read 1,500 books. A few of those will be repeats ( Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, and Shakespeare account for most of these). So let us say 1,450, and let us also be honest and say that from 10 to 15 it was probably closer to ten books a year, if that. So 1,400 in all. Doesn't really seem very many. Not in the great scheme of things. And I still have to read Ulysses and Joseph and His Brothers and the last two volumes of Proust and the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and the Bible and Milton. I'm extremely unlikely to read all these, if any. I'd like to read Burke. I'd like to finish Conor Cruise O'Brien's biography of Burke and Painter's biography of Proust. I'd like to read more Balzac (now that is a possibility). When am I going to get around to Turgenev? Or David Foster Wallace? Let alone books by friends, or the latest Booker or Nobel winner or Pulitzer prize winner.... the truth is that the only book I know for sure I'll read, should I still be living, is the new Lee Child.

GRIEF

This is an extract, quoted by Tom Stoppard in a 1999 NYRB article, 'Pragmatic Theatre', from a play by James Saunders, entitled Next Time I'll Sing To You.  Saunders was an exponent of Absurdist theatre.  He died in 2004.  Next Time I'll Sing To You was staged in the West End in 1963, and featured Michael Caine, Barry Foster and Liz Fraser.  Stoppard credits the play for providing the impetus to write for the stage himself.

There lies behind everything, and you can believe this or not as you wish, a certain quality which we may call grief. It’s always there, just under the surface, just behind the façade, sometimes very nearly exposed, so that you can dimly see the shape of it as you can see sometimes through the surface of an ornamental pond on a still day, the dark, gross, inhuman outline of a carp gliding slowly past; when you realize suddenly that the carp were always there below the surface, even while the water sparkled in the sunshine, and while you patronized the quaint ducks and the supercilious swans, the carp were down there, unseen. It bides its time, this quality. And if you do catch a glimpse of it, you may pretend not to notice or you may turn suddenly away and romp with your children on the grass, laughing for no reason. The name of this quality is grief.

BOOKS 2020

Blue Moon by Lee Child
Zed by Joanna Kavenna
A Dangerous Man by Robert Crais
Fever Dream by Samantha Schweblin
Leopoldstadt by Tom Stoppard

Review of The Fighting Jew in Jewish Renaissance

Review of The Fighting Jew in the JC

Daniel Sugarman's kind review in the JC, back in November,  I missed it completely.

https://www.thejc.com/culture/books/review-the-fighting-jew-1.494504

The Fighting Jew by Wynn Wheldon (Amberley Publishing, £20)

Daniel Mendoza was the first British Jewish celebrity. And, as this fascinating work by Wynn Wheldon relates, the champion boxer would break new ground in a variety of different ways. Even his boxing style, which was considered abnormal when he first employed it, became orthodox.

In his celebrated three-fight rivalry with Richard Humphries Mendoza would employ, together with his competitor, an early example of “trash talking”, two fighters taking pot-shots at each other in the recently established British press via mocking letters covered with a thin veneer of civility.

After his retirement, Mendoza wrote what could be viewed as the first proper sporting autobiography, sprinkling the text with a variety of anecdotes from his career. For a century after he stopped fighting, “a la Mendoza” was an idiom used to describe settling a dispute with one’s fists.

While Mendoza was not the first Jewish boxer, he was the first to reach such heights, becoming the acknowledged “champion of England” in a period when the sport had no official federation (and, more dauntingly, no weight classes, so that a fighter could find himself facing someone much larger in the ring). The Jewish pugilist would meet the Prince Regent, a follower of “The Fancy”, as devotees of the bare-knuckle contests referred to the sport. He would even, in 1792, while convalescing in Windsor, conduct what he described as “a long conversation” with George III. As Wheldon writes, while Mendoza would probably not have been the first Jew to meet the king, it is likely that he was the first to have had a long discussion with him.

Wheldon’s passion for his subject shines through — perhaps augmented by the fact that his interest is not just general, but familial. As he reveals in the introduction, his wife is a Mendoza, descended from the champion’s uncle. But the book is filled with information designed to provide a sense of familiarity for present-day readers. Such-and-such a pub, the author tells us on a number of occasions, still stands today (then, more so than now, it was customary for retired sportsmen to operate drinking establishments).

The Fighting Jew charts Mendoza’s rise to fame, his years at the top of his game, and his descent into extreme poverty as his star waned.

Contrary to the popular tropes, then and now, that Jews make bad sportsmen/are good with money, Mendoza was an excellent boxer but woeful with his finances, having somehow managed to spend everything he made (a considerable sum) and then some.

Although not religious, Mendoza was proud of his faith and conscious of the fact that, to Jews and non-Jews alike, he was seen as the physical defender of both the bodies and the pride of his co-religionists. While, as the author is careful to point out, public antisemitism certainly did not vanish due to Mendoza, the idea that he “liberated Jews from attack” as a result of his rise, helping boxing gain popularity among young Jews, is “largely true”.

While there is a certain amount of speculation in Wheldon’s description of events, this does not detract from what is an entertaining and informative book, offering a picture not just of Mendoza himself, but of the conditions of late 18th-century Britain and some of the remarkable characters present in genteel society at the time.

We are told that, after one fight in which he had triumphed, Mendoza was carried to a nearby inn on the shoulders of a friend, with a crowd made up of many Jews shouting “Mendoza Vekhayam” — “Mendoza is alive and well”. Wheldon’s book will surely help keep the story of Daniel Mendoza remain “alive and well” for many years to come.

Daniel Sugarman works at the Board 
of Deputies of British Jews, and is a former JC reporter

MISTLETOE by Walter de la Mare

Mistletoe

BY WALTER DE LA MARE

Sitting under the mistletoe

(Pale-green, fairy mistletoe),

One last candle burning low,

All the sleepy dancers gone,

Just one candle burning on,

Shadows lurking everywhere:

Some one came, and kissed me there.

Tired I was; my head would go

Nodding under the mistletoe

(Pale-green, fairy mistletoe),

No footsteps came, no voice, but only,

Just as I sat there, sleepy, lonely,

Stooped in the still and shadowy air

Lips unseen—and kissed me there.

JACOB INTERVIEW ON BIG SMOKE

Starts around half way through, and followed by '666' from the EP.

DR ZHIVAGO (film)

Just watched Dr Zhivago for maybe the first time in 40 years. Tremendous film. Maurice Jarre's quite brilliant score sometimes meld into sound effect. The cast, mostly British stars - Courteney, Richardson, Guinness, Tushingham, Christie, Chaplin - somehow manage not to overweigh Robert Bolt's script. Perhaps the sheer magnificence of Lean's direction puts them all in the shade. Omar is, well, Omar, and properly intense, but the outstanding performance is Rod Steiger's - all passionate malevolence and moral ambiguity. A treat.

ROB HOLDS FORTH ON NEW SBC EP

FORCED OUT - LABOUR RESIGNATION LETTERS

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

MEASURE FOR MEASURE
RSC at the Barbican
Director: Greg Doran
Designer: Stephen Brimson Lewis

Talent: Antony Byrne (Duke), Lucy Phelps (Isabella)

Club: Self, RW and Mr Peter Huhne

Shakespeare set it in Vienna, so so did SBL and Doran, though three hundred years later.  Plus ca change, eh?  Well, it kind of worked.  The set design - very clever photographic projection and lighting (the famously long final scene was set in a magnificent railway station, fit for dukes and punks alike).  I didn't really get a proper sense of the decadence and moral decay that is one of the themes of the play.  Still, that may be because I missed much of the language of the first half, as my new bluetooth loop app-fangle didn't appear to work (I had head phones for the second half - a treat).  It is a terrifically intriguing play, that can be done in all sorts of ways.  Usually the duke is played as a rather neutral deus ex machina, but the truth is he is not ex at all - he has almost a third of the lines.  It is HIS play.  This production seemed to recognise that, and Antony Byrne gave an energised, driving performance.  Lucy Phelps was a bit too shouty for me.  I tend to think of Isabella's anger as controlled.  Anna Maxwell Martin, ten years ago at the Almeida, is my model.  It also has to be said that last night's Angelo maybe lacked a little sleaziness.  Then again, it is interesting that it is a Nun who gets the character going, so perhaps Shakespeare intended to suggest that even the upright can succumb, given the right temptation.

Miller and James

With difficulty Flick forbore to cringe
In terror at the sight of DR FRINGE.
He loomed before her like a basketballer
Who if unwound might well be even taller,
And in his bulging optics blazed unchecked
The flames of his amazing Intellect.

(from 'The Fate of Felicity Fark in the Land of the Media' by Clive James)

RIP Jonathan Miller and Clive James

ROB GETS HIS T SHIRT

The Legendary Rob Holds Forth on Kukachu

SAD BOYS CLUB 'KUKACHU'

New spin