EXTRACTS

Extract from The last Jews in Harehills by Mark Dapin

My uncle rang early in the morning to tell me about my dad. It was the first time I had spoken to him in a decade, but I am the elder son, so he called me first. It was a courtesy I did not deserve.

The phone in my house took only incoming calls. I had to go into the street to ring my grandparents from a telephone box. My grandmother answered, but she had already drifted past the point where she could distinguish her ghosts from her dreams, so I asked for my grandfather.

He came to the phone excited, because I did not often call. His voice was tobacco-rolled, peat-rich, loving cockney despite all the years he had lived in Yorkshire. I told him my dad, once his son-in-law, had climbed out of his bath and collapsed. Gerry Dapin had died on his bed, a towel around his waist, as my stepmother combed his hair.

‘When she told me Mark was on the phone,’ said my grandfather, ‘I thought you were coming up to see us. I thought we’d go for a drink.’

I lived in the Midlands, my brother in the south of England. We met on a train travelling back to Leeds, the city where we were born. I had borrowed a dark suit. My brother was in the shirt and tie he wore to the shop where he worked. I had not had a cigarette for twelve months, but I started smoking again in a second-class carriage with my brother, who had loved my dad more than I had. It was 30 December, and the only thing I had achieved throughout the previous horrible, pointless year was to give up smoking. By the new year, I was back on a pack a day.

We stayed at my grandparents’ house, a two-bedroom terrace in Harehills where my mother and her three sisters grew up. By this time, my grandparents were the only white family on the street, perhaps the last Jews in Harehills. Their small house bore a mezuzah on the doorpost. There was a menorah on the sideboard with eight branches for Chanukah. It used to stand among a forest of wedding photographs of swarthy men in dinner suits and their brown-eyed brides, but my mother had since divorced my dad, and her twin sisters had left their husbands, and the last photograph showed my aunt Gloria and uncle Bill, wearing gumboots on their farm in Seymour, Victoria, Australia, where none of us had ever been. (‘Cows and sheep,’ muttered my grandma, with wonder. ‘Gloria’s got cows and sheep!’)

There was a vast, guilty emptiness in my heart. At the funeral, my brother and I would have to say Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer for the dead. My brother could not read Hebrew, so I spent an hour phoneticising the verses for him, searching for distraction in the rhythm of the exercise.

My dad was buried in the Jewish cemetery, several kilometres out of town. I did not know most of the people at the service, a long procession of footballers he had trained and managed, each of whom wished me long life, according to the custom. The rabbi noted the large turnout, said everybody had loved my dad. I imagined the other mourners were all looking at me, thinking: everybody but him, and I was swallowed by horror.

Extract from Exorcism in the Driveway by Paul Mitchell

My 35-year-old brother clambers down his porch steps and starts throwing punches at me. I grab his beefy arms and he slams me hard against his ute. His face is red and drunken, his eyes white, his mouth seething curses. Over his shoulder, I notice my parents at the bottom of the steps, shouting at us. My girlfriend Jo is moving towards me, a shocked expression on her face; further down the driveway, my kids—seven and ten—are in the back seat of my station wagon watching their father being attacked by his younger brother.

Until it happens in your own family, domestic violence is what goes on in housing commission flats or in poorer suburbs and towns. But my brother’s house is a double-storey number with two living areas, four bedrooms and a widescreen TV. His violence is not born out of poverty: although I am the one feeling the effects of the assault, he is actually wrestling with the past.

Extract from The Question of Decadence by Fiona McGregor

Pope Benedict XVI has arrived in Poland. We watch him on TV. I have always found his face ghoulish but there is something cheerful, excited, even humble about the way he walks through the crowd. Arms stretch towards him like Balinese dancers’. People surge to touch him, kiss his hand, kneel before him. Cripples are pushed forward, babies offered. The Pope is on television every night on every channel. We have resurfaced from work amazed at this mania. We channel surf for a proper news bulletin but it is all Papiez Papiez Papiez. We were considering a trip to Kraków this weekend to see a friend’s video installation. How grateful we are to have stayed in ?ód?. More than a million people have descended on Kraków to see Papiez. He addresses them in Polish from the Archbishop’s residence in the old town, a medieval maze of tiny narrow streets, now utterly choked. Kraków’s population of one million has more than doubled for the Pope’s visit. Up to 600,000 youths have attended a special service in the rain, on B?onie common just outside the city.

A subtitle runs across the bottom of the screen: Three dead in an earthquake in Java. There won’t be a full report on this disaster for days.

The Pope is going to Auschwitz-Birkenau. There is great anticipation about his address. Will it be in German? Surely not. A hundred and fifty survivors will be there, as well as thousands of descendants of internees. Mandelbaum, a Polish Jew, shows his tattoo. He says he carried the bodies to the ovens. He worries he is viewed critically for this but, he says, If I hadn’t carried the bodies I would have been one of them. I wouldn’t have survived to bear witness.

The Ministry of Education wants to make religion (Catholicism) a matriculation subject. Students have begun protesting. Benedict XVI is not ecumenical like his predecessor, who reached out to Muslims and apologised to Jews for the Church’s anti-Semitism. These weeping wounds. The Kaczy?ski brothers’ vitriol towards Germany and Russia rampages on. Aren’t they digging another grave for their country with this Catholic supremacy? All down Piotrkówska Street are life-size bronze statues of famous ?ód?iania—many Jewish, some Protestant—from the past. Arthur Rubinstein playing his grand piano. Writer Julian Tuwim relaxing on a bench. Pozna?ski, Scheibler and Grohmann conferring around a table. W?adis?aw Reymont (a Catholic but, according to my friend Jola, secretly gay). Many Poles are nostalgic for their multicultural past. They point excitedly to the growing Jewish population in Warsaw, the sprinkling of Asians, Africans and South Americans who came from poor Socialist countries to get an education during Communism, and stayed. But how welcome really are non-Catholics in contemporary Poland? The young folk have camped all night on B?onie in the rain again. Mass is being said. The priest tells them not to take drugs. He rails against decadence. The audience claps and sings and cheers.

Extract from Drugs, Dransfield, Women and Songs by Pip Proud

Have you any idea how brave I was to do that music? It’s a bit like in a video game, you lose a life every time you fail. I suppose there’s a difference between strength and bravery. The less strong you are the braver you are.

After all these years I say it now with very little feeling, but I always knew I was the bravest. Apart from those guys in Vietnam. It was almost like a whole theocracy that had to be overthrown. I wasn’t alone. Maybe I was the most outrageous. Listening to those soft words of mine, can you imagine they could outrage people? But yeah, they did.

I never understood why people laughed at my music. I still don’t understand why I wrote such stuff and thought I could get away with it. Arrogance or naivety, maybe a bit of both. The trouble is I can’t understand why I should have been arrogant. And with my upbringing, I certainly wasn’t naive. Maybe it’s a form of retardation or displacement. I think the whole hippy thing was kind of like that. We just had to escape this horrible world, so Adreneline and Richard carried sticks in the forest, and yeah, we’re only worth our weight in meat.

I was spaso from birth. Something to do with RH-negative blood. I was knocking my knees together for a few years and then I was bow-legged. I couldn’t talk properly for a long time and I certainly couldn’t write. It was damning and I felt ashamed. I suppose that’s why I tried to do music. It was a ‘fuck you’ sort of gesture. I guess that’s why my lyrics are kind of dreamlike. I lived in my own world. But Christ, I was sick of being laughed at. I developed an artificial arrogance. Maybe that’s bravery. Maybe it’s showmanship.