Second Violin (59 page)

BOOK: Second Violin

13.75Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

ads

Arthur Kornfeld gave up mathematics, physics, and his Cambridge fellowship to found a London publishing house in the late 1940s. As all London publishers seemed to him to come in pairs, Eyre
& Spottiswoode, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Chatto & Windus, although he found it hard to believe there’d ever been anyone called Windus, he named his after his old mentor, Drax. Drax
& Kornfeld survived for forty-three years, publishing quirky, poorly selling but often well-reviewed books, until they were bought out by the aforementioned Weidenfeld & Nicolson, shortly
before they in turn were bought out by Orion. Arthur retained his editorial position and is often to be found wandering the corridors at St Martin’s Lane lost between lunch and literature.
Had Rod Troy offered him Klemper’s manuscript in all probability he would have published it.

Elishah Nader emigrated to Israel in 1974 and was crushed to death by an Israeli tank while protesting at the demolition of Palestinian houses in 1992.

In 1975 Zette Borg, by then in her late sixties, shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with two other physicists for her work on superconductivity, experiments approaching absolute zero, and papers
that pointed to the development of the Bose-Einstein Condensate, a condition attained some twenty years later at temperatures only a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero. At such
temperatures, Einstein had hypothesised the inversion of atomic waves and the merging of atomic identities into a single entity. Absolute zero (0 deg. Kelvin, –273.15 Centigrade) is a
theoretical condition and is unattainable. Her former lover, Frederick Troy, having little or no grasp of physics, regarded all this as merely metaphor.

Historical Note

Yes . . . there were internment camps on the Isle of Man . . . no, there was no all-male camp as far south as Port Erin.

There is no synagogue resembling Heaven’s Gate or Elohim in the East End of London – indeed such is the paucity of synagogues these days that I based both buildings
on the Eldridge Street Synagogue on New York’s Lower East Side. Just around the corner from Eldridge Street is a former synagogue, as tiny as any still standing in London, which was once
known as ‘Gates of Heaven’.

Why this topic now? Well, I think we have lived these last few years in a world dominated by a man to whom the rest of the world, other than those from his own green acres in
Texas, are just ‘kikes and niggers’. A man who cannot even pronounce the name ‘Iraq’. If you will substitute ‘towelhead’ or ‘ayrab’ for kike and
nigger . . . it doesn’t alter the concept one jot.

A hit list drawn up by a British fascist of critics to be bumped off or dealt with? Of course, I made it up . . . until . . . towards the end of writing this book I stumbled
across a reference to just this kind of list in the wartime diaries of Frances Partridge, a friend of whom was revealed to be on Sir Oswald Mosley’s ‘hit’ list after writing to
the
Daily Telegraph
urging Mosley’s arrest.

The only point at which I think I have displaced a real figure with a fictional one is that, of course, Freud was rescued from Vienna by Professor Ernest Jones, subsequently
Freud’s biographer; and himself the subject of a recent biography by Brenda Maddox. (Anyone who wants a straightforwardly factual account of Freud leaving Vienna should turn to Jones’s
book – anyone who wants one more bizarre and dramatic than mine should turn to
The End of the World News
by Anthony Burgess.) Many of the minor characters in this novel were real
– Cazalet, Ciano
et al
– many more are made up . . .

I’m deliberately vague about the date of publication of
Moses and Monotheism
(it was, loosely, the summer of 1939) and, whilst Freud was criticised widely for
choosing that subject, at that time, to the best of my knowledge, the Board of Deputies never wrote as one body to any national newspaper.

Red Vienna is a slight misnomer and could more accurately be used to describe the Vienna of the early 1930s than the city Hitler seized.

Coming at the war for the third time I was keen not to return to the same sources. Apart from Frances Partridge (Hogarth Press, 1978), the most interesting books on the subject
I discovered were the dispatches of Ernie Pyle (McBride, 1941), the diaries of Joan Wyndham (Heinemann, 1985),
Home Front
by E.S. Turner, who died while I was writing this book (Michael
Joseph, 1961) and
The Making of an Englishman
by Fred Uhlman (Gollancz, 1960). Uhlman was a refugee who became a well-known North London painter – he died only about twenty years ago.
On pp. 201–3 Uhlman offers a celebration of Englishness that I suspect only an immigrant could make . . . I used chunks of it in a speech by Viktor Rosen (pp. 297–9) as I cannot better
it.

Acknowledgements aplenty . . .

Gordon Chaplin

Sarah Teale

Cosima Dannoritzer

John Fagan

Sarah Burkinshaw

Chris Greene

Clare Alexander

Justin Gowers

Francine Brody

Linda Shockley

David Cantor