A Book Report That’s 30 Years Late, Or Is It?
It’s human nature to collect things. My neighbor collects postage stamps, and one day invited me over to watch while he paged through his albums. I’ll admit I found it hard to maintain attention while staring for a minute at literally stamp-sized portraits of Presidents Harding and Coolidge (well, maybe Washington and Lincoln, and, for me, Reagan and Trump, maybe, but Coolidge?).
Ok, I collect something too – books about Jewish history, not those literally titled “A History Of The Jews” (ok, I have a few of them too), but books, most meaningfully if written by the participants themselves, on momentous Jewish history events, mostly Zionism and Israel, from my haunting of used book stores and Jewish neighborhood library book sales. I have maybe a thousand (my wife, not entirely adoringly, says maybe “ten thousand”).
Two shelves have pride of place: Zionist classics – Herzl’s Jewish State and Lowenthal’s translation of his diaries, Hess’ Rome & Jerusalem, Dr. Weitzmann’s Trial and Error, etc – and books about what has always seemed to me among the most inspiring actions of our people during my lifetime – the people of the Aliyah Bet, the crews and Holocaust refugee passengers who sailed rickety ships, especially between the War’s end in 1945 and Israel’s independence in 1948, into the teeth of the determined British blockade.
I’ve hoarded a dozen Aliyah Bet books, of which I’ve read (at least once) so far eleven (the twelfth came this week). These include Holly’s, Dagan’s, Kaniuk’s, Thomas’s, Grauel’s and especially Ruth Gruber’s Destination Palestine on the Exodus; I.F. Stone’s moving Underground To Palestine; Avriel’s and Dekel’s more general treatments of the B’riha movement; and two books by the captain or commander of other Aliyah Bet ships, Captain Patzert’s of the Paducah (Geula), and Commander Arie Eliav’s of the Ulua (Haim Arlosoroff). If I have a favorite as most inspiring, it’s Eliav’s.
Two particular scenes in that book, The Voyage of The Ulua (not the subject of this week’s “book report”), go beyond inspiring, the first in renewing our faith in some WWII era Europeans, and the second in renewing our faith in not all coincidences being coincidences. The British got wind of the Ulua as it was being fitted after the War in the Copenhagen port with many-tiered rows of shelves for packing with Holocaust refugees, and leaned hard on the Danish port authorities to keep it from sailing. The commandant of the port comes aboard and demands from Eliav, ship’s “administrative officer van Groot,” the purpose of the hull-filling shelves. “Van Groot” explains that scientists are taking the ship to the Arctic to study the food chain and will put aquariums on the shelves “to sort and classify the fish they catch.” Ok, says the inspector, scientific expedition, free to go. “But let me ask you this,” he adds under his breath: “And how much are the Jews of New York paying for this fishing expedition?” The second incident occurs at the second clandestine site at which the Ulua stops to load young refugees in the dead of night unseen by the British. One of the young survivor girls they pick up is the sister of one from the first loading site, each of whom had believed that she’d been the family’s sole survivor. Can you top that for a coincidence being not maybe a chance coincidence?
In this media watch’s “new year’s resolutions” edition two weeks ago, in the “go read a book” resolution, I suggested that after tackling one or more Zionist classics, you read Eliav’s Voyage of The Ulua for “inspiration.” My friend Steve Kramer in Israel emailed to tell me about an Aliyah Bet book, The Jews’ Secret Fleet, written thirty years ago by a friend of his, Murray Greenfield, an American volunteer on one of the ships who after that settled in Israel. Amazon came up with this book, which arrived at the end of this week, and I’m into it far enough to agree with Leon Uris (“an inspiration to our people”) and Ruth Gruber (“inspiring and exciting”) on the jacket. Very deeply researched, it tells, in “dramatic, moving and engrossing” terms, as Ruth Gruber put it, “the story of some young American seamen who sailed the so-called ‘illegal ships’ that carried half of the 70,000 survivors of the Holocaust to the Land of Israel.” Greenfield’s book brings together, from the American volunteer crews’ perspective, the stories of all eleven of these ships, including the Exodus, Paducah and Ulua. Go read Mr. Greenfield’s book (and all the others I mentioned).
But the point that I’d leave with you this week is why this week’s “book report” on a thirty year-old book is not thirty years out-of-date. If there were one moment in the course of the Zionist movement in which one nation in Europe should have had a modicum of rachmones for European Jews’ aspiration to live in our historic homeland, that European nation should have been victorious Britain, promulgator of the Balfour Declaration, in its moment of Allied triumph in World War II, when the utter reality of the enormity and barbarity of the European Holocaust lay inescapably before it. The British did their level-best to return the remnant of Europe’s Jews to their “homes” in Europe, including in Poland and elsewhere where mistreatment of Jews didn’t go away on V-E Day.
It’s difficult for even an ardently Zionist Jew who has read of Dunkirk, the Blitz, especially the Battle of Britain, to remain permanently mad at Britain, the land of Bass Ale and Guiness, Tolkien, Rowling, Sherlock Holmes and Shakespeare, but Britain, which was perfectly happy with the 1948 invading Egyptian army bearing down on Tel Aviv, threatened to fight alongside Egypt against Israel when Israel reversed the tables late in that war and set foot in Sinai. In post-US election late 2016, in the closing days of the Obama administration, Britain, along with its EU compatriots, rejected the pleas of the incoming Trump administration and voted in the UN for resolution 2334, on which the U.S. abstained, seeking to force Israel back to the perilous ceasefire lines of that 1948-49 war in which Britain, including by keeping Aliyah Bet Jews imprisoned on Cyprus after the end of the Mandate, had all-but-physically-intervened on behalf of the invading Arabs. And in 2018 Britain and its EU partners voted in the UN to call the Temple Mount and other Jewish-and-Christian Holy Land holy sites exclusively by their Muslim names, courageously appending that maybe next year they might reconsider if the Jewish-Christian names were again not referenced.
The story of the Aliyah Bet, so movingly brought to life by Greenfield’s, Gruber’s, Eliav’s, Stone’s and other first-person accounts, vividly makes clear that it was only by incredibly courageous conduct by incredibly courageous people that the Dream of Generations for the Jewish homeland’s sovereign redemption has occurred – nay, is occurring – in our time. The least that we in our comfortable American homes can do is grasp the enormity not just of that redemption but of the difference that redemption has made and is making for our people not living in comfortable American homes. We have to convey a meaningful sense of this to our next generations. Part of my long appreciation of the first-person memoirs of the Aliyah Bet has been that imbibing them helps make the great struggle for redemption of that Dream of Generations inspirational to the imbiber. Through my Israeli friend Steve, I express my appreciation to Mr. Greenfield for that.