The end of the affair
To many British Jews between the wars, haunted by poverty and fascism, communism seemed to hold the answer. In this exclusive extract from his new book exploring the dilemmas of Jewish identity, Jonathan Freedland tells the story of his great-uncle Mick's two doomed romances - with the party, and with his closest comrade
Monday February 14, 2005
The Guardian
My great-uncle, Mick Mindel, was 19 when he fell in love. It was 1929, the year Harry Pollitt, general secretary of the Communist party, contested a parliamentary byelection in Mick's backyard of Stepney, London. Communists descended on the streets where Mick played alleyway football, leafleting, hawking copies of the Daily Worker, advertising meeting after public meeting with the candidate. Curiosity led Mick to a Pollitt rally, and he was seduced.
The room vibrated with excitement. The communists in the hall were passionate, excited and, above all, young. They were people just like Mick: the children of immigrants, fluent in English rather than Yiddish, whose zeal to change the world would no longer be confined to the narrow interests of the Jews.
Pollitt was an inspiration. When the questions came, he had an answer to everything. Mick looked around the room. While his parents seemed shaped by the past, the samovar still on the table, here was a generation striding towards the future.
Before he knew it, Mick was drawn in. He joined the Young Communist League and suddenly he was on marches, or doing his shift selling the Daily Worker on the street corner, or door to door, to his neighbours in the Rothschild Buildings and on Flower and Dean Street. In the winter he would play football with a Communist XI; in summer it was country walks with the comrades. The more he did, the more he wanted to do; his comrades were fast becoming his best friends. But one above all.
The first Mick Mindel knew of Sara Wesker was her name. In 1926, she became, briefly, an East End celebrity; Mick was walking down Commercial Street when he saw the Daily Herald poster blasting the news: "Trouser workers strike for a farthing a pair." The all-female workforce at Goodman's factory had walked out, led by a young trouser machinist called Sara Wesker (whose nephew, Arnold, would go on to become one of Britain's leading playwrights).
Three years passed before Mick met her. They were both at that election rally for Pollitt, he a curious neophyte, she a seasoned militant. She immediately set to work on him, urging Mick to join her breakaway United Clothing Workers' Union, a "red" union tied to the Communist party, rather than the TUC.
She was hardly a natural draw for Mick. Less than five feet tall, she was arrestingly sallow: Mick thought she was ill. But she always looked that way; the Communist party grew so worried they once dispatched her to a Crimean spa in a bid to improve her health. The Soviet doctors could not find anything wrong. Pale and sickly was just the way Sara was.
But when she spoke, Mick felt his pulse race. She was a ferocious speaker, as if the energy of five men was balled up inside that miniature frame of hers. In their communist circle, she was a star - a natural agitator and organiser whom others could not help but follow. No wonder, thought Mick, the Goodman girls had marched behind her in 1926. And she was respected, even by the older generation. She not only understood Yiddish but, unlike Mick, spoke it fluently. She could talk to the old women in the sweatshops, and persuade them to talk to her.
When Mick met her, he was a lad of 19 and she an accomplished activist of 27. She became his teacher, allowing him to see the world through her eyes. Such an age gap was unheard of, in the East End as much as anywhere else. Nevertheless, Sara and Mick became a permanent fixture in the Rothschild Buildings. And eventually they became lovers.
Under her tutelage, Mick soon developed into a formidable speaker and organiser himself. When he made his formal political debut, seeking a place on the social committee of the United Ladies' Tailors' Trade Union, he breezed to victory.
Amalgamation - merging this Jewish union into the wider, national movement - was the question of the age. But it turned on a much larger question, one that had run through Jewish history for centuries and would haunt much of Mick's life: which came first, the needs of his own people or the universal cause of humankind? In the merger debate, Mick and the comrades were quick to go on the offensive, pushing their vision of the Jewish working-class future. In 1937, he stood for election as vice-chairman, and won. Before long Mick had cleared out the aged men above him and in 1938, he ran for the top job in the union. His manifesto could not have been clearer: "A vote for Mick Mindel is a vote for amalgamation."
The campaign was one long row. Tailors would argue the question for hours on end, their fellow workers putting down their lead irons or giant scissors to join in. It continued at homes, over borscht and gefilte fish, and on the porches and over the stairwells at Rothschild Buildings, neighbours clashing with neighbours.
Mick had an unofficial campaign committee, made up of his fellow communists. Among them, his most trusted adviser was his girlfriend, Sara. Her campaigning, addressing groups of older workers in their workshops and in their mother tongue, was tireless. But still Mick could not be sure - until the day of the ballot itself, when he and his opponent had to make their final pleas at a mass meeting, at Mile End public baths.
"It is 1938 and we face a dire threat," Mick declared. "The world is in flames, with the Nazis planning havoc in Europe. I have seen them with my own eyes, on my visits to Germany, and let me tell you, these people are deadly serious and they have a lethal hatred of Jews. Can we fight a threat like that alone? Three thousand of us, alone? We need allies, we need comrades, we need strength in numbers, and that means taking our rightful place in a national union!"
Mick had to battle through applause to get to the end of that sentence. He could feel the room coming his way. "And let me say something else about Jewish 'independence'. None of our parents or grandparents ever imagined independence to mean a ghetto of our own making. Our persecutors made us live like that and we escaped it. That's why we came here! We didn't want to live shut away from everyone else, but wanted to live alongside them. And don't we want that now? We want our children to belong in England, to get along in England. That's why we work so hard to make sure they know the language, or learn how to play football and cricket.
"Jewish? Yes, always. But part of this country too. And that begins with the union that represents us."
By the time he was back in his chair, Mick knew he had won. The room was in tumult, clanging with feet-stamping applause. Soon he was joined by his immediate supporters, Sara planting a firm, insistent kiss on his lips. When the result came, it broke all records. He had won 93% of the vote.
A year later, in the summer of 1939, Mick, who still worked as a cutter, was returning to the home he now shared with Sara and her family after a 12-hour shift. As he turned his front door key, he heard the wireless, louder than usual. He called to Sara, but heard no reply. The moment he was out of the tiny hallway, he could see why. Sara was huddling by the wireless, her ear next to it even though the voice was loud and clear. She did not look up; her eyes were frozen. Her face, always sallow, was now a deathly white.
The room was filled by the voice of the BBC: " ... standing under a portrait of Vladimir Lenin, Foreign Minister Molotov signed the pact in Moscow on behalf of the Soviet Union, while Germany was represented by Foreign Minister Von Ribbentrop. General Secretary Stalin looked on ... "
Sara had her head in her hands, moving it from side to side. She began letting out a low noise, a sound Mick had never heard from her before. It was part wail, part growl - an animal wounded and angry.
"The text of the non-aggression pact between the two governments is as follows: desirous of strengthening the cause of peace between Germany and the USSR ... " Mick felt dizzy. He was sweating, he needed to sit down, he needed to drink water, he needed to think. There was obviously some mistake, some terrible act of deception designed to break the will of communism. Perhaps there had been a coup and the BBC was broadcasting propaganda.
Mick put his hand on Sara's shoulder and she at last raised her face. Her eyes were red raw, her cheeks wet; she seemed to be trembling. They stayed there, Sara still holding the wireless, Mick standing at her side, gripping her shoulders for what seemed like hours. Mick's mind was racing as he tried to explain what he was hearing. What elaborate trick was this that could pretend the Soviet Union, the beacon of world communism, would make common cause with its sworn enemy? Communism was to be fascism's slayer, not its accomplice.
That evening Mick and Sara's flat became a shiva house, a house of mourning. Comrades from all over Stepney would knock on the door, shuffle in and stare at their feet. Few could even speak. Occasionally someone might offer a piece of amateur analysis: "Now Hitler's got what he wants. He knows now he won't have to go to war on two fronts. He has closed down the eastern front." "Maybe it's a ploy?" But no one was in much of a mood for debate. They wanted just to share the shock with others.
Morning came and it was no lie. Mick saw the Daily Worker and felt his stomach turn. "Soviet Union and Germany Sign Pact," read the headline. The pact was real and, worse, the British Communist party had not spoken out against it.
On the first Saturday afternoon after news of the pact broke, a meeting was convened at party headquarters on King Street in Covent Garden. Mick and Sara were in the front row. The first to speak was Palme Dutt, executive committee member and editor of the party journal, Labour Monthly. A Swedish Indian by background, he commanded enormous intellectual respect, wearing the proud Marxist tag "theoretician". He was one of the very few British party members to count as a substantial figure in world communism.
Moscow had made its decision, Dutt began. It had made it not only as the representative of the proletariat of the Soviet Union but in the best interests of the international working class. Those distant from the decision were in no position to criticise it since they were not fully apprised of the facts and could not reach the objective, scientific conclusions of the leadership.
Next came Pollitt, general secretary and a personal hero to the young couple in the front row. He spoke for everyone who had huddled together in Sara and Mick's flat that day, articulating the shock they had all felt when they heard the news. He said he could not defend an accommodation with the Nazis. It was at odds with everything that communism stood for.
Suddenly, Dutt was interrupting Pollitt, denouncing the general secretary. His crime had been to disagree with him and therefore with Moscow. Pollitt was now shouting back from the lectern, but Dutt was bellowing just as loudly and gesticulating. Everyone was too stunned to do anything.
Mick wanted to cheer Pollitt, but he and everyone else in the room stayed strangely quiet. Mick even kept silent when the central committee lined up behind Dutt and voted to punish the general secretary for a violation of party discipline, suspending him from his post.
Mick looked around and, almost for the first time in the Communist party, he felt lonely. Why were all these people apparently able to make a pact with the gangsters of Nazism when he could not? Surely the crucial difference could not be that he felt differently because he was a Jew?
***
Before the war, union business had taken Mick to the Stoke Newington clothing shop B Mindel & Co. He had made the Dunilovich connection - realising they hailed from the same shtetl, the same tiny hamlet in what is now Belarus - with the owner, Barnet Mindel, working out that they must be cousins of some remove or other from the old country. How strange that they should be reunited here, in London!
Years later Mick was doing his rounds, visiting factories, wholesalers and retailers, when he called in at Goldstein's on Alie Street. As soon as he introduced himself, several of the workers there had the same thought. "You must come and meet Sylvia. She's a Mindel too!" They surprised everyone by insisting that they had not met before, though it did not take long for Mick to make the connection with Barnet Mindel of Stoke Newington.
"That's my father!" exclaimed Sylvia, her eyes bright. But Mick was not really listening. Instead he was taking a good look at this tall, thin, sparkling woman. Sylvia was an officer in the Girls' Training Corps and she was wearing her army uniform. She filled the room with her talk, charming everyone who came by the shop.
They all seemed to be in love with Sylvia and it was only a matter of time before Mick fell into line. All the determination he had once deployed to transform the United Ladies' Tailors' Trade Union he now concentrated on winning Sylvia's hand. When she was 30 and he nearly 35, she finally relented. In 1944, Mindel married Mindel and the two branches of the family, sundered by time and geography, were reunited not in Dunilovich but in Stoke Newington, north London.
The way Sara Wesker's family tell it, the first she knew of this new romance was when she visited communist headquarters on King Street. "I hear Mick's getting married," the party's industrial organiser, Peter Kerrigan, said, by way of small talk. He assumed that Mick and Sara had broken up a while ago. But then he saw Sara blanch, wheel round and head for home. Her niece, Della, found her there, sobbing in the scullery, her arm on the mantelpiece. "The bastard never even told me," she was saying again and again.
Sara never got over Mick, never fell in love again and never married. Thereafter she devoted all her energies to the causes that had brought them together, the union and the Communist party. They became her life.
The party did not fully forgive Mick either. The comrades loved Sara and resented his mistreatment of her. Worse, he had discarded her for a "mantle maker's daughter", a member of the Jewish bourgeoisie! Communists regarded this the way their orthodox parents would have seen a church wedding: Mick had married out.
The Weskers had their own theories. One imagined that Mick's mother had vetoed Sara on the grounds that she was too sickly to make a wife or future mother. Others would wonder if Mick, who had lived in Rothschild Buildings with both Sara's parents and her sister Ann, had feared the burden of providing for her family. Either way, the Weskers would speak for generations of Mick Mindel and his "terrible betrayal".
Sara herself was more forgiving. After a long hiatus, she became friends again with Mick. He would come to see her most weekends, often bringing his only child, Ruth. Sara looked forward to those visits and Mick did too. The bond between them had been too strong to break completely. Even Sara's sisters eventually allowed Mick to be woven back into the Wesker family fabric.
When Sara died of a stroke in 1971, Mick spoke at her funeral. He broke down as he addressed her coffin: "I always loved you, Sara, and I always will."
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This is an edited extract from Jacob's Gift - A Journey Into the Heart of Belonging, by Jonathan Freedland, published by Hamish Hamilton on February 24, priced £16.99. To order a copy for £16.14, including p&p, call the Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875
