The principal character of W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, for whom the book is named, recalls how he was brought as a four-year-old from Prague on a Kindertransport train to Liverpool Street station where he was met by an austere couple, a vicar and his wife from North Wales. The boy was renamed Dafydd Elias, and subsequently raised in a small village. As an adult, having reverted to his original name, Austerlitz made his way back to the Czech Republic and, unable to detect the borders between the distortions of memory and fact, relived his life as a child. As I reread Austerlitz, I came across the following passage recounting the memory of Dafydd Elias’s boyhood in Wales:
I had never heard of an Austerlitz before, and from the first I was convinced that no one else bore that name, no one in Wales, or in the Isles, or anywhere else in the world. And since I began investigating my own history some years ago, I have never in fact come upon another Austerlitz, not in the telephone books of London or Paris, Amsterdam or Antwerp.
As a boy in Wales, like the fictional Austerlitz, I had never heard of a Moritz outside of my uncle’s family in Manchester. There were none that I knew of in Cardiff and none that I had heard of in Wales. Once a year, when a new telephone directory landed on our doorstep, I immediately flipped the pages to the ‘M’ section, hoping that we would not be alone, that there would be another Moritz listed, that we would have company.
I did eventually come across many people named Moritz in a telephone book, but only much later in my life. I found them in an online archive of the directories for Munich from the 1930s, which listed six people of our name, including a doctor, an innkeeper, a graduate student and a piano teacher. My grandfather was there listed as Maximilian Moritz, and his telephone number was given as 37 23 47. The telephone had been installed to help my grandparents follow what my father once described as ‘the latest developments’. The same number was repeated in the directories for 1938 and 1939. In 1940 there was no longer a listing.
When the First Minister of Wales asked, ‘What’s a nice Jewish boy like you doing in Silicon Valley?’ my skin shrivelled and all my feelings about being Jewish in Wales in the 1960s came flooding back. It was 2001. He posed the question as a lunchtime conversation opener in a restaurant in San Jose, where I had met him and other members of a Welsh delegation sent to uncover the mysteries of Silicon Valley. Later, he used pauses in the conversation to ask me why there were no great Jewish rugby players and why I, as the eldest son of Jews, had not become a doctor. Later, dwelling on his questions, I couldn’t help but wonder whether part of the reason a nice Jewish boy like me was in Silicon Valley was that, while I was growing up, my schoolmates, their parents, my teachers, the shopkeepers, the man who hired me to deliver newspapers, our dentist and doctor and the people my parents had hired – once they had sufficient money to do so – to hang wallpaper, or tend to the garden, or replace the roof tiles, or repair their cars, had all been asking themselves (for, on the whole, they were too diplomatic, too restrained, and too tactful to say it out loud), one of two questions: ‘What’s a nice Jewish boy like you doing in Wales?’ or, ‘Moritz. What sort of a name is that then?’
These people were, for the most part, Anglican, Protestant, Methodist or Presbyterian in a country that, at the time, was far from multicultural. A few people, and they were also considered oddities (but not as odd as the Jews), were Catholics or Quakers. In Britain in the 1960s a ‘first’ name was known as a ‘Christian’ name. My schoolmates were called Ian, Rosemary, Catherine, Evan, Hugh, Harry, Rhys, Gareth, Morgan, Robert, Hywel, Sandra, Felicity, Sian and Dewi. They were certainly never known as Mordecai ben Aharon ha Levi – which is what my own name is in Hebrew. Moritz was so much of a marker that I sometimes used to say that my family came from Switzerland since, at the time, there was only one thing worse than being Jewish in Wales, and that was being German in Wales.
The local shopkeepers also had thoroughly Welsh names. The tobacconist’s belonged to Miss Morgan (its interior was guarded by a stuffed black bear clutching a collection box for the Salvation Army between his ossified paws ). Two of the nearby shops (one with a small post office counter and the other a general store) were each operated by a Mr Williams – one known as Mr Williams the Top and the other, Mr Williams the Bottom. And in between Mr Williams the Top and Mr Williams the Bottom were the greengrocer, Mr Bowen, and the chemist, Mr Thomas. Years later, I was at a dinner with an editor of an American business magazine whose wife, to my surprise, was born in Pontypridd, about twelve miles from where I grew up. After moving to Wales, her father, whose last name had been Rabinowitz, decided it would help him assimilate if it was changed to Jones. Thereafter he was known as ‘Jones the Jew’.
The distance between being a Jew in Wales and an Anglican, Protestant, Methodist, Presbyterian, Catholic or Quaker in Wales was illustrated by a wooden panel, topped with a small electric light that was always illuminated, in the chamber of the synagogue, a bomb-damaged former chapel, to which my parents belonged. Tidy gilt lettering marched across this panel, listing the names and home towns of the relatives of the congregants murdered during the Shoah: Bortstieber, Cohn, Epstein, Folkmann, Gottschalk, Gross, Gunz, Hersch, Hornung, Kamerase, Karpf, Kotlan, Magid, Mandler, Mayer, Pinkus, Polak, Riemer, Rosenthal, Schindler, Seidner, Silberschatz, Stach, Steidler, Stoger, Ullmann, Weil, Wiznitzer, Wurm and Zander. They were from many of the places from which the Nazis had deported Jews: Brod, Vienna, Brussels, Breslau, Brno, Prague, Žilina, Berlin, Fischach, Frankfurt am Main, Munich, Ingolstadt, Hamburg, Enschede, Jarosław, Brunswick, Bleijerheide, Tarnów, Stříbro, Klatovy, Weiden, Nuremberg, Aachen, Brotzen, Cologne and Trebnitz.
A few of the Jews in this converted chapel had changed their names. An optician named Rosenberg had become Mr Montrose. Mr Grunebaum, who ran a men’s clothing shop for his father-in-law, became Mr Greenwood. As if, with their foreign accents that no form of anglicised name would ever conceal, they, or any of us, were going to deceive the people in Cardiff about who we were or where we came from. We were Jews. My family even advertised the fact that we were the only Jews on the block by the mezuzah pinned to the right-hand side of our front door. We were Jews and we were living in plain sight. My friends did not have grannies and grandpas with names like Josef, Mendel, Fritz, Fanny, Sigmund, Emil, Gertrude, Siegfried, Gustav, Pavel, Zdenka, Erna, Lieselotte, Karoline, Mariska, Judis, Regina, Herz, Moshe, Heinrich, Elas, Leopold, Bona, Grete. They called their grandmothers Gran or Nan and their grandfathers Gramps. Not Oma. Not Opa. And definitely none of them had an Opa whose name, when spoken, seemed like a girl’s – Salli.
The First Minister’s question transported me across the ocean and the decades. Being a Jew in Wales, where every slight, though small or unintended or inconsequential and rarely delivered with real malice, nonetheless reverberated within me. Finding a swastika carved on the inside of the lid of my wooden school desk while I was in elementary school. Or the high school English class where, when we were made to read from The Merchant of Venice, the teacher amused himself by assigning me to play the part of Shylock and the other Jewish boy the role of Tubal.
The experiences that lodged the deepest were the Church of England services which marked the start of each school day. That was when the handful of Jewish students, sequestered during the prayers in a nearby room, could hear the full-throated renditions of ‘Christ Triumphant, Ever Reigning’. After the singing stopped, we did not sidle into the back of the hall. We were paraded down the aisle to take our seats in the front as if the head teacher was saying to the other boys, ‘Here come the circumcised.’
In my last year at high school, after I had been appointed head boy – one of those positions that doesn’t exist in American high schools – I had to stand on the stage during these assemblies alongside the senior teachers. As the hymns rang forth and as the prayers were read, I found myself looking at the school organist who was seated directly beneath us. He was a Welsh speaker who taught English, lived with his mother, and was completely incapable of quieting the classroom titters as he struggled to explain the mysteries and beauty of Paradise Lost. Despite his diffidence, as his feet skittered across the organ’s pedals playing the melodies that he knew by heart he would fasten me with his gaze, as if to say, ‘You’re a Jew and I know it.’
Decades later, when I came across this stanza from ‘Refugees’ by Louis MacNeice, I immediately thought of that Welsh-speaking English teacher: ‘With prune-dark eyes, thick lips, jostling each other / These, disinterred from Europe, throng the deck . . .’ I found myself humming – as if to retaliate – the tune of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’.
The author as a boy with his grandmother, Luise Rath, Cambridge, 1958
Photograph courtesy of the author
The extract from ‘Refugees’ by Louis MacNeice is from Collected Poems by Louis MacNeice, published by Faber & Faber, reproduced by permission of David Higham Associates
