JEWISH writer Eva Figes' latest book “Journey to Nowhere: One Woman Looks for the Promised Land” is both a memoir of the Second World War, and a polemic against Israel. In her unsentimental yet moving prose, Figes tells of how her family's Jewish housemaid Edith survived the Second World War after she was left behind in Berlin when the family fled Germany for London in March 1939. Eva was just six years old. In 1949, having become an unhappy immigrant in Palestine, Edith contacted the family to ask for her old job back and joined them in London. Figes draws on the story of Edith to denounce the establishing of Israel and the subsequent course of its history. This repudiation of Israel, and fury over the plight of the Palestinians, is all the more startling coming from a 76-year-old Jewish woman of German origin, some of whose family and friends perished in the Holocaust. Figes has always been a courageous and outspoken writer. In the 1960s and 1970s she established a reputation as a leading feminist writer of both novels and nonfiction. Her works include the 1970s classic “Patriarchal Attitudes: Women in Society”, and “Sex and Subterfuge: Women Writers to 1850.” In her new book she boldly strides into one of the most controversial areas of modern discourse: the foundation and policies of Israel. Figes explains that nearly sixty years on from Edith's arrival in London, she had found herself thinking more and more about her, and about the confusing years after the Second World War. One of the things Figes had most wanted to explore in her book was why Edith had chosen to emigrate to Palestine at great risk to herself and why, after only a brief period there, she had become so disillusioned that she had wanted to leave and to rejoin Eva's family. “What I discovered during the process of my researches appalled me,” Figes writes. “I have always thought that the creation of Israel was a catastrophic mistake, perhaps the worst of the twentieth century. I have also, always, had doubts about Israel's right to exist, unless the Jews managed to hold the moral high ground, which they have signally failed to do.” But what she had not expected to find was that “the creation of Israel was the result not of global remorse, but of continuing anti-Semitism. The main culprit in this sorry story was of course the United States, with President Truman at the helm.” Figes repeatedly makes the point that German Jews had been keen to emigrate not to Palestine but to the USA. In the years after Hitler came to power in 1933, only around 10 per cent of the German Jews anxious to leave considered Palestine an option, “despite the considerable inducements offered on both sides, in what amounted to collusion between Nazis and Zionists. The Nazis wanted to get rid of their Jews, and Zionists saw a golden opportunity to get recruits for a cause that had never been popular.” The German Jews' first choice as a destination was the USA, but the Americans imposed a strict quota system. According to Figes, one reason that German Jews were not keen to emigrate to Palestine was that they knew from reading newspapers that Palestine was not, as the propaganda adage had it, ‘a land without a people for a people without a land....On the contrary there were people living there: Arabs.” After the war, “contrary to popular belief”, Holocaust survivors were “not consumed by a passionate desire to reach the Promised Land of their ancient forefathers. They wanted to go where more recent forefathers had wanted to go: America.” But the strict quota system was now applied to the displaced persons in what had been German, and were now Allied, camps. The US saw the future creation of a Jewish state in the Middle East as a solution. “Then all those unwanted, displaced Jewish survivors could be dumped where they apparently wanted to be. It was by far the cheapest option, would save the need for unwanted immigrants, and would also go some way to appeasing the Jewish lobby back home, a serious consideration with a presidential election on the horizon.” When Edith rejoined the family in London, the teenage Eva was eager to hear from her how she had managed during the war years. Edith, a reserved person, hesitantly disclosed to Eva how some German non-Jews had given her unofficial jobs and had hidden her. At one point she had been forced to work in a factory supplying the German war machine. One day the foreman told his Jewish workers not to report for work the next day. This saved them, because the next day lorries arrived all over the city to pick up Jewish workers for deportation. One of the points Figes makes in her book is that considerable numbers of non-Jewish Germans, in Berlin at least, felt bad about the persecution of the Jews and secretly helped them. She wonders about the collective responsibility often attached to the Germans, and asks herself what she and her father would have done in the war had they been non-Jewish Germans. At the end of the war Edith was persuaded to emigrate to Palestine, but rather than being welcomed with open arms by Jews there, she was treated harshly and contemptuously and looked down on as a German Jew. The nickname of German Jews was ‘yekke', a derogatory term derived from Hebrew and Yiddish, meaning “jacket”. Edith told Figes that the Jews in Palestine: “Treated us as though we were scarcely human. Human dust, they called us.” They were told they should have left Europe and “answered the call of Zion” long before. Figes says the New Jew, who set out to create Israel after the war, “was secretly ashamed of those who had allowed themselves to be killed without a struggle.” German Jews were sometimes called “Hitler's Jews”. Edith remarked to Figes that she had found in Palestine that “everybody hates everybody else.” Figes comments that other people, too, had observed at the time that there was a bitter hostility not only between Jews and Arabs but also between Jews “who seemed to have nothing in common except their religion, and not always that.” Figes writes: “Year after year I have watched the situation deteriorate and grown increasingly angry. With the fall of the Berlin wall, any pretence at fairness, justice for the Palestinians, was abandoned. The idea of a Jewish state had always been inherently racist, now it became blatant.” After Edith rejoined the Figes' family in London, there was no magical “happily ever after” conclusion to her story. Eventually she and Figes' mother parted company, recognising that things had not worked out between them. The last time Figes saw Edith she was in a ward of the Samaritan Free Hospital for Women and Children on the Marylebone Road in London. Edith was homeless again and waiting for someone with authority to help her decide where to go. But the memory of Edith, and the lingering questions about her history and fate, still haunt Figes, and have provided the fuel for the writing of her powerful book. __
