I liked my aunt Gretl enormously, and developed a deep respect for her common sense. What is less usual between parents and touchy teenagers, I liked to talk to her about the problems of life, and parts of my reading. Furthermore, I took her opinions seriously, even on such subjects as sex and love, of which I knew nothing. However, obviously, she could not replace my mother.6 As I passed people in the street, I would sometimes stare, shut my eyes for a moment and say to myself, ‘he or she has eyes like Mama’.7 The youngest, prettiest and socially the most successful of the Grün girls, cherished by both her sisters, and the only one never to have had to earn a living, Gretl faced the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortune of her life and family – and there were plenty – armed with charm, sympathy, an inborn sensibleness and a notable lack of self-pity. ‘Sidney won’t believe it, he is always the optimist,’ she wrote in a brief note to her sister, as she waited for the operation to remove from her stomach a suddenly discovered tumour ‘as big as a fist’, a few months before I was due to go up to Cambridge. She was neither an optimist nor a pessimist. She took things as they came, and she knew, in this instance correctly, that what might come tomorrow was death. Sidney took me to see her corpse in bed in the old Hampstead General Hospital. I pass the site, now the car park of the Royal Free Hospital, most days on my way to and from Belsize Park. Hers was the first dead body I had ever seen.
I am not sure that I respected Sidney. I did not want to be like him. Indeed I was embarrassed by, and contemptuous of, his self-pity, his temperamental instability, those characteristic swings from outbursts of rage to effusive sentimentality and back again, the one an expression of impotence, the other a cry for help. As we both had the well-developed sense of confrontation (i.e. contrariness) so often found within Jewish families, our conversations at home tended to be loud, dramatic and often absurd. I think he was absolute hell for Nancy, especially after Gretl’s death deprived him of ballast. Fortunately I was by then that much older, and knew myself to be on the verge of independence. And yet, I remember him intensely and with pleasure. We talked, especially in Paris, and on the long journeys when I acted as his chauffeur – for after a year we were prosperous enough to buy a car, which I learned to drive, just in time to pass the newly introduced driving test. He knew about the ways of the world, and what he said about them I took seriously, not least the observation that men should keep quiet about the women they slept with. His tips on what was good in the French cinema of the 1930s came from the horse’s mouth. He gave me what I clearly had not had from my biological father. And he, in turn, hoped that I would compensate for the repeatedly disappointed hopes of his own life.
For though Solomon Sidney Berkwood Hobsbaum, short, wearing pince-nez below a forehead that (unlike my father’s) folded vertically, was the only one of Grandfather David’s sons to become a full-time businessman, making money was not his dream. He had the salesman’s ability to believe passionately in the product of the moment, the body armour protecting him against the blows of the unreturned phone call and the cancelled order. Years later I recognized much of him in Arthur Miller’s wonderful Death of a Salesman , as must the intellectual sons of so many Jewish fathers. But though he had ambitions – Napoleon was his favourite character in history, Rawdon Crawley of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair in fiction – money was not what inspired him.
What had his ambitions been in his East End youth? Had he been born much later, when there came to be money in the game and the British took to it, he might have made something of his natural talent for chess, which was evidently considerable. Putting up his hand somewhere in France when chess players were asked for had got him from the western front into intelligence (i.e. codebreaking) in the First World War. He seemed to know something about such matters, but then anyone in his position knocking around central Europe in 1919–33 was quite likely to have come across people involved in secret services. He kept out of politics.
In other respects he was not creative, but he had the self-educated poor Jew’s passion for culture and loved being in the milieu of creative people – musicians, theatre actors and above all movie people. On his and Gretl’s phonograph in Vienna I heard for the first time and many times after that, a still somewhat Victorian selection of the great vocal classics of the first recorded generation – Caruso, Melba, Tetrazzini – and the repertoire of the great, mainly Italian and French, arias: Verdi, Meyerbeer, Gounod. In practice his musical contacts were more modern: Rose Pauly-Dreesen, the most famous Elektra of her day, with whose career he was associated in the late twenties, was the leading dramatic soprano in Klemperer’s Berlin Krolloper, very much at the cutting edge of Weimar music. He tried to mobilize on her behalf Dame Ethel Smyth (1858–1944), Edwardian feminist and the most celebrated female composer of her day, with whom he had somehow established a relationship as a young man. But it was the cinema that captured his heart for good. Not so much the atmosphere of bigshots, wheeler-dealers, the entrepreneurial adventurers and confidencetricksters, though he had got to know them in his time with Universal. It was the milieu of the studio floor – the large world-creating hangars, small emigrant Jews around big stages, cameras, lights, make-up and scenery, all drenched in the atmosphere of technique, gossip, bohemian informality and scandal. I drove him there on his visits to Isleworth and Elstree. For him it was where man was in touch with creation. He succeeded in fighting his way back into it in England by convincing a British photographic firm that his contacts in the movie world made him the man to sell their film-stock in competition with Kodak and Agfa. After a few years of losing battle armed with an uncompetitive product (‘Uncle Sidney goes to Budapest tomorrow. Furious telegram from Joe Pasternak. Selofilm apparently poor quality’) he gave up the struggle, emigrated again and, presumably introduced by his brother Berk, invested his small capital in a share of a modest Chilean enterprise producing kitchenware. At the end of the war he left an unexciting but safe business on little more than the hint from an old contact that there might be a place for him on some new film operation to be launched in connection with the new United Nations. Nothing happened. The dream of the creative life was over. He had thrown up a reasonable livelihood in his mid-fifties for a dream. He never succeeded in getting another.
Still, for a few years in the 1930s he managed to live his fantasy on the edge of the European tragedy and I received some of the benefit. For who else would give him a chance but those on the margins of the film world – the refugees and the radicals? So he found himself involved in political movies financed by the French left in the Popular Front days, notably Jean Renoir’s La Marseillaise, and in the political news-reels which enabled me to see the great Bastille Day of 1936 from the Socialist Party’s camera truck with a Socialist Party steward’s badge. During the Civil War he took up his Spanish, or rather Catalan, contacts again. He returned from visits to Barcelona in 1937 with stories of conversations with the Catalan leader, Luis Companys (later executed by Franco) and with an upper-class Englishman called Eric Blair. These were losing causes. My uncle, though his sympathies were with the left like the great majority of Jews from poor working-class families, wanted nothing better than to keep out of party politics. The logic of history pushed him into earning his living from and with the battling antifascists, while he and they still could. It was not to be for long.