How a Jewish story may link to others

© Oliver B. Pollak

RICHMOND, California — Some observations suggest sharing. They may be intimate, personal, or idiosyncratic. The task is to make them meaningful for a wider reading audience. My mission is to identify stories by Jews and of interest to Jews. Three recent San Diego Jewish World stories appear to have threads.

I reported in “The Unifying effect of Passover” on May 1, 2018 that I attended a presentation by Stanford emeritus professor Peter Stansky on Leonard Woolf (1880-1969), spouse of Virginia Woolf. Born in a well off Jewish family in London he ceased as a teenager to be interested in the Jewish faith. Stansky discussed Leonard’s 1913 novel The Village in the Jungle drawn from his experience as a British colonial administrator in Ceylon. Unfamiliar with the book I purchased two copies for myself and Edith Piness coauthor of  “Rereading and Revisiting Burmese Days in the Early 21^st Century.”  We both read Burmese Days in the mid-1960s and wrote dissertations on 19^th century Burmese (Myanmar) history in the 1970s.

The Village in the Jungle is a dark, ominous and foreboding novel featuring three oppressed Job-like characters.  I read it in small bites, fearing the worst and not wanting to swallow it too soon. On May 5, halfway through the 179-page novel I interrupted the novel to read the New York Times obituaries. It reported the death of 99-year old Lester James Peries, Sri Lanka’s (Ceylon) preeminent film maker. It listed some of his film credits. On a hunch I googled Peries. Bingo, in 1980 he produced The Village in the Jungle. YouTube had some clips with subtitles. I clipped the obituary and placed it inside the paperback. If this copy printed in India lasts another few decades, it will pick up newspaper stain on its adjoining pages.

George Orwell (1903-1950) published Burmese Days in 1934. It too is a dark story of the jungle penned by a colonial administrator. There is no evidence that Orwell read Woolf, but why wouldn’t he? Few people keep lists of books they read, nor are their personal libraries preserved in tact in institutional libraries. Orwell was a voluminous reader and reviewer. What books do school boys preparing for colonial service read? Winston Churchill read George A. Henty stories about daring-do on imperial frontiers. Writers don’t refer explicitly to everything they have read or have been influenced by. They want to write their own thing. But stories of human frailty, sexual lust, officious tax collection, and bureaucracy, published 21 years later is not a hollow echo. British imperial corruption and racism, and indigenous race, status, caste and class prejudice infiltrates the pages. Orwell’s characters exude despicable British colonial attitudes about Burmese, Indians, women, and included a line on “aged Jewish whores with the faces of crocodiles” in Rangoon.

The second thread is about Andrew Friedman’s book Chefs, Drugs, and Rock & Roll which I wrote about May 2, and the importance of Jonathan Waxman to Friedman’s research. On May 7, I interviewed Rabbi Judy Shanks for an under-construction Richmond Museum of History exhibition. Rabbi Shanks is about to retire after 26 years at Lafayette’s Temple Isaiah. She served Richmond’s Temple Beth Hillel from 1984 to 1991. She was an early female entry into the Reform rabbinate. Her job application had to surmount the traditional preference for a male Rabbi. Arnold (Arny) Waxman, a member of the selection committee, owned the House of Kitchens in Albany. Arny visited one of his sons, a cook in New York, and took the opportunity to visit Judy Shanks at her Queens apartment. It was Jonathan Waxman, an early Chez Panisse cook, whom Andrew Friedman relied upon. Arny died in 2012 at the age of 90. Arny’s widow Michele lives in Rossmoor retirement community in Walnut Creek.

Finally, on April 20 I wrote “Trysts with the Nobel Prize in Literature.” Apparently, there were more malevolent trysts and the Swedish Academy will not be awarding a Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018.

The discovery of these juxtapositions, ‘Higher Gossip,’ are unbidden fruit. Unearthing facets of Jewish life proves once more there is a Jewish story everywhere.

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Pollak, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, is a freelance writer now based in Richmond, California. He may be contacted via oliver.pollak@sdjewishworld.com