The event described in the book O Vous frères humains (O ye Human Brethren). by
French author Albert Cohen took place in Marseille in 1905, on the author’s tenth birthday.
As he was walking home from school he encountered a street vendor around whom a small
crowd had gathered. Fascinated by the objects on sale, the child bought some trinkets with
the money his mother had given him for his birthday. Noticing his dark curly hair and dark
eyes, the vendor proceeded to hurl epithets at him, ‘Dirty Jewboy! We don’t like
bloodsucking Yids here, Shove off.’ etc. Adding insult to injury, the people standing around
him laughed or did nothing.
Anguished and stunned, the boy wandered away and the rest of the book consists of the
thoughts that run through his head, his inability to reconcile the insults he has heard with the
knowledge of his parents’ kindness, the history of the Jews, the biblical injunction to ‘love
thy neighbor,’ compounded by Christianity’s teachings of kindness and love. Worse still, as
he wanders along, the boy comes across slogans such as ‘Death to the Jews,’ and ‘Dirty
Jews,’ scrawled on walls, and these only serve to intensify his confusion and desolation.
Of course, the emphasis at the gathering to mark the liberation of Auschwitz was on the
wholesale massacre of the Jews of Europe. Albert Cohen points out that the anti-Semitism he encountered as a child, and which came not long after the Dreyfus trial in France, was endemic throughout most of Europe, and eventually led to the Holocaust, which is now known officially in France by the Hebrew word Shoah.
And the anti-Semitism that pervaded Christian Europe even found its way to my ten-year-
old self (some time in the early 1950s), as I lay in hospital in London, with a suspected (but
eventually unconfirmed) case of scarlet fever. No visitors were allowed, though I was able
to receive parcels of sweets and chocolates, and even the occasional much-yearned-for
reading material.
The nurses, many of them Irish, were practical, generally getting on with the job in hand without bestowing great affection on their young patients. My one consolation was being able to listen to the ward radio, with the customary sequence of light music and talk programs broadcast in those days on the BBC’s Light Programme.
One day, the bed nearest the radio became vacant, and I asked Maureen, one of the nurses,
whether I could move there. She helped me with what I thought was a good will. But when I
found that my arm was just too short or the bed too far away for me to reach the radio to
adjust the volume, I asked if it could be moved a bit nearer to me. At that she exploded.
‘You Jews,’ she said. ‘Next thing you’ll want to sit at the right hand of God!’
I had never heard that phrase, had no idea what it meant, but knew instinctively that it was
an insult. I had never been slighted before for being Jewish (or not knowingly, as there were
probably others I was too naïve to recognize as such), and felt totally crushed by what the
nurse had said. Alone in my hospital bed I began to cry, and just could not stop. The
separation from home had been long and hard, and this was just the last straw. I continued