And when the viscount finally left the country, to further pursue his career back in Britain, he took with him a vision. In his memoir of his time in Palestine, he recorded the wide roads, bordered by little white single-storeyed houses, well spaced out, with creepers over their porches; around them, little gardens of flowers and patches of vegetables, with fields of waving corn and young plantations of trees beyond; groups of men and women in working-clothes, smiling girls and beautiful, healthy, white-dressed children; overhead, the cloudless blue sky. That, he said, was the vision with which he had left.
It wasn't Haffner's vision. Haffner thought it was schmaltz.
But it was with pride that, towards the end of 1942, he had learned in the newspapers of the viscount's speech in the Lords, on the reading of the declaration against German extermination of the Jews. This was not an occasion on which they were expressing sorrow and sympathy to sufferers from some terrible catastrophe due unavoidably to flood or earthquake, or some other convulsion of nature, the viscount had said. These dreadful events were an outcome of quite deliberate, planned, conscious cruelty on the part of human beings. Hear hear, the Lords had murmured. And Haffner with them, in Egypt. Absolutely.
Authority like this was what Haffner was destined for, thought Haffner. It was his inheritance: the natural deference shown to the political classes, the happy comforts of the Finanzbourgeoisie. A class to which he naturally belonged, thought happy Haffner, confirmed in this belief by the speech in the newspaper just as much as he was by his first ever deal — at Anzio, when he persuaded some desperate American, a friend of Morton's, just for a cheap bottle of whisky, to part with his regulation, all-terrain, multi-gear jeep.
The viscount, however, had still been moved by the ghettos. Whereas Haffner felt more distance from the Jewish underclass. The stories from the ghettos distressed him but they were not his. Partly, this was from a sense that as a cossetted Londoner he could hardly adopt the tragedies of people he never knew. A position which seems calmly moral, precisely modest, to me. But there was also a more complicated distance. The person Haffner knew best, whose stories were ghetto stories, was Goldfaden. With Livia, thought Haffner jealously, Goldfaden possessed a tragic European past. So this meant, I think, that Haffner sometimes exaggerated his haughtiness in regard to history. For Haffner was not without his own sense of racial possessiveness. In Haffner's opinion, there was no reason for the working classes, for the Blacks and the Chinese, to avail themselves of this word ghetto. It was a Jewish possession. No one else had suffered like the Jews had suffered. No one else had been persecuted with such universal thoroughness.
In Venice, on holiday with Esther and her family, in the early 1980s, Haffner and Livia wandered away from San Marco: they ended up in what had been, Livia informed him, reading from a guidebook, the original ghetto (-From the sixteenth century! she exclaimed). In the bleak hot sunlight, no one was moving. On the seventh floor of a tenement building, some washing was strung on runners. A wireless was talking to itself.
In this ghetto, Haffner and Livia discussed their recurrent story of the Ghetto: the story of Goldfaden's uncle, Eli, who was now a cameraman in LA.
Eli had not been on the family holiday in London with the Goldfadens. So he was left behind in Warsaw. Before the war, he had been a member of the Bund, the General Jewish Labour Union. He believed in a strange combination of the Yiddish language and culture, and secular Jewish nationalism. Like Livia's father, and Haffner, he was not a Zionist. Unlike them, he expressed this Yiddishly, through his devotion to doyigkeyt, to hereness. His family lived on Sienna Street, near the Jewish quarter. And Eli, Goldfaden used to tell Livia, as they reminisced about Europe — while Haffner glanced at the diary pieces about his financial rivals in the evening papers — Eli was so earnest in his devotion to learning that he even read the novels which were serialised in the newspapers. A man should be prepared, thought Eli. Nothing was alien to him.
In Warsaw, before the revolt in the Ghetto, and before the uprising in the city, but when everything still was bleak, Eli had been told to go with his parents to the main square. This seemed reasonable. Or, at least, not unreasonable. In the square, they were told to walk in single file to the train station, where a train was waiting at each platform. They had asked the rabbi if this seemed advisable. The rabbi, after long deliberation, thought that the best thing to do was obey those in power. Could they really wish them harm? And this, said Goldfaden, was where his cousin became heroic. He came to a decision. No one had ever heard again from those who had got on the trains to the east. Eli knew this. Therefore, concluded Eli, he would run. So what if he were shot in the back, his kidneys torn inside him? He would prefer to stage his own death, rather than sleepwalk into it. And so he ran, and managed to hide out in the rubble of a destroyed apartment block.
Here, in the ghetto in Venice, just before Haffner had retired, Livia had praised Eli once more. But Haffner, this time, had paused. Then he had asked her: what about the others? She had asked him what he meant. They paused and looked at a dark canal. What about the others, the ones the man had left behind? said Haffner. What about his parents? And Livia had replied that they all died. Naturally, they had died. The moral value of Eli's act seemed to Haffner to be complicated by this. He had chosen to abandon his friends. And maybe this was fine, maybe this was unremarkable, but Haffner thought that, at the very least, it was a complication.
She should have known, said Livia, that Haffner would be difficult.
Yes, said Haffner, Haffner would be difficult. Why shouldn't he be difficult?
And perhaps Haffner was right, even if he was only accidentally right, by transforming Eli's story into a story of Haffner: a compromise.
Haffner saw in this anecdote the grand bravery of refusing to act in the way you were supposed to act. In Haffner's rewrite, Eli's escape from the Ghetto was also a desertion.
According to Livia, the story of Eli was not a story of a desertion, because a desertion was morally bad. An escape, however, was morally good. But I am not so sure that the two can be so easily divided. People call a flight an escape, only after having been forced to give up the idea that it is moral to remain in a bad situation. So often, people think that if one person is suffering, then everyone else should suffer too. In these cases, if someone takes flight, then their escape is just a desertion.