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1. Main Theme
- Roots - Being a consideration of my origins
and several metamorphoses.
2.
London Book Fair 2016 - Advance notice of my participation in
this year's event.
3.
Health
Champion Project - An update and digression into the
joys and woes experienced.
4.
Family and
Friends.
5.
Metaphors and Matzo
Balls. - Finally!
Main Theme
Roots
It has taken me the best part
of seven decades to come to terms with my racial origins.
There was the period,
covering several years of my removal from home, family and
ethnic influences. My evacuation from London during
World War II began in Northampton where - as I have
recounted in my free verse autobiographical section of
Metaphors and Matzo
Balls -
. . . once upon a
time I was told
I was the first
Jew they had seen.
"But you can't be
a Jew" they protested,
"because you
haven't got those
hair pieces that
hide your horns".
An earlier experience
that had produced a ripple in the belief system adopted and
adapted from birth was at the age of six or seven, when a
young teenager accosted me in front of the Catholic church
which neighboured our home in Commercial Road, London East
One, with the devastating accusation that "I had killed him"
- pointing to the crucifix on the church's wall which I had
always scurried past on my way back from school, averting my
eyes because of some superstitious feeling of shame.
Running to my
mother,
sobbing fit to
die.
"Hush now.
Hush now. They're just jealous".
But it's no real
answer; it's not an explanation
And I'm too
ashamed to press for an answer,
but the memory will return to
haunt me
at intervals throughout my
life.
And then, during my own early
teenage years, being evacuated to South Wales I was exposed to
the influence of the religious fervour of evangelists, which
appealed both to my intellect and my romantic nature. It did
little to detract from this temptation that these revivalist
meetings seemed to attract so many young and winsome women.
This fascination with Christianity ultimately clashed with
my initiation into the ranks of left-wing politics.
So, to revert to the
traumatic experience of my encounter outside the Church of
St. Mary and St. Michael in 1936, and its subsequent effect
on me, I wrote in the autobiographical section of Metaphors
and Matzo Balls
As when,
decades later, Stanley Lloyd
in a
Moorgate office high above the Halifax
demanded
reassurance of his general manager
that “He’s
not one of those, is he Melvin?”
And my mind
and memory instantly winged
to that
encounter before the church
in
Commercial Road.
It was only
later that the truth surfaced
to confirm
that it was politics and not religion
that Lloyd
had queried,
referring to
the reds of the L.S.E.
and not the
“dreads” of the Jewish East End;
although
guilty was I on both counts.
Well, I am and shall
remain a secular Jew, a humanist and freethinker, for the
remainder of my days, but there is a sense of
belonging, that has been absent for far too long, and my
removal to a Jewish area of London in recent years, my
renewed association with the extended family of my late father, has
given me a sense of "connectedness" that I was unaware had
been missing from my life.
London
Book Fair 2016
This is always an exciting
time in my annual calendar. Tuesday, Wednesday and
Thursday 12-14 April is this year's London Book Fair at the
Olympia Exhibition Halls. I shall be sporting my usual
Press Badge in anticipation of reporting developments in the
literary and publishing fields, as well as renewing my
contacts with the various publishing houses whose books I
have reviewed for years in the Nurturing Potential magazine.
Health Champion Project
Together with my "buddy" Caroline
Allison, we had our first weekly session at the medical
centre to which we had been attached. This
followed our having addressed the local Pensioners Club
at the Burnt Oak Community Centre on our role as Health
Champions.
The response was mainly favourable and
I'm looking forward to further developments in this
activity.
Friends old and new . . .
and family.
Daughter Emily's wedding ceremony takes
place just a few days after this blog "goes to press".
I find myself getting quite excited at the prospect.
Given the trauma of serious ill health that has afflicted
both of us during the past year, this positive event will
have even more than usual meaning. I'll report more
fully (with pictures) in the next issue of this blog.
Metaphors and Matzo Balls.
[Click to enlarge]
All bugs have finally been removed and the
CreateSpace version is now available on Amazon.
In the meantime I had had a private
printing of the book, mainly so that I could replace the few
copies that had been ordered online before the defects had
been spotted.
Several of these privately printed copies are still available and,
if anyone wishes to purchase one, I can supply them at cost
price of £4.00 sterling to include postage. Just send
a cheque made out to ASPEN, together with a mailing address,
to the address shown below.
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