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YOUR DEAL, PARTNER A pack of playing cards has been a wonderful embellishment of my life experience, and I can access so many memories by simply recalling the faces confronting me across a card table. Bridge, which I learned to play in the University Common Room at LSE, has been a skill I have cherished and nourished up to the present time. My commitment to the game has fluctuated over the years, from an initial desire solely to add to the list of card games in my repertoire, through a period of several years post-university when it formed a useful alternative to somewhat more carnal activities, then as an intellectual challenge learning more arcane bidding systems in order to amass a great number of "master points" whose possession has, in retrospect, meant very little to me. Nowadays it has reverted to being a regular social game of little intellectual challenge, but a pleasant enough pastime. But the love of card games started at so early an age that it is no longer capable of recall. Certainly before the age of ten, that is before the outbreak of war in 1939, I played a variety of children's games such as Snap and Happy Families. But it was during the War that I played the game of Klabjas (or five-hundred as it was sometimes called in my family) with my maternal grandfather. This was a game beloved of the Jewish immigrant population. Actually, though, with other names and slight variations, it is of far wider universal appeal. I remember my surprise during my first visit to France in 1946 to discover that the popular French card game of Belote was barely distinguishable from Klabjas. And then, in the 1960s, when living in Switzerland, I joined with a group of locals in the bar-room of the Inn where I was staying, to play Jass, and to discover that it was almost precisely Klabjas - even to the similarity of name. It was, however, necessary to learn a strange new vocabulary, quite unlike German (although it was called Swiss-German) in order to play the game. "Shieben", we would shout; "Zueruck", we would respond. "Ober aber"; "Unter uefer". Strangely the game does not seem to be played in Germany itself, where the main national card game is Skat. But it served the very useful - albeit unintended - purpose of familiarising me with the Swiss German dialect and thereby rendering my business dealings during my few years in Switzerland that much more fruitful. I confess, however, that many of the expressions that were bandied around that card table were hardly of the kind that would be appropriate across an office desk. Then I went to work and live in the Netherlands . . . and played Klabberjas with the locals. This was even more like the Jewish Klabjas, and it is hardly surprising that the names are practically the same. Indeed, the Dutch are adamant that the game originated in their country in the 19th century before spreading throughout Europe. All these games (and, indeed, Skat) are played with a deck of 32 cards - the twos through the eights being removed.
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