Page 46 - Kol Bogrei Habonim - Autumn 21
P. 46
“APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA” London. I was born in a nursing-home off
Rochdale Road (not the most salubrious area
(A DEFENCE OF ONE'S OWN of the city), in 1942, when my father,
LIFE) according to family legend was off fighting
the Germans. Although this seems strange to
GEOFFREY SHINDLER me and it seemed to be some kind
of joke, because he spent the war
in Nigeria, which so far as I am
T aware was nowhere near the
he family in which I was
Western front. I think he was
brought up was ardently
Zionist. My father came
from London and amongst his monitoring German U-boats in
the Atlantic. It seems an unlikely
next-door neighbours, or near story, but I cannot think of a better
next door neighbours, was one.
Avram Harman, known to my As I was growing up in the
family as Abe Herman, and 1950’s, I was sent off to the 401st
Abba Eban. They lived either in the East Manchester Jewish scout troop. My father
End or after their emigration, in the Notting had helped establish this and it did me a lot of
Hill area, sometime after the First World good. I learned how to camp properly, to look
War. It was similar to other communities who after a tent, to read an Ordnance Survey map
moved from the place where they had landed and to play games that now seem ridiculous,
in England and climbed up the social scale as but at least were harmless. After two or three
time went by.
years of this, by which time I was about 15,
My mother, Florence Weidberg, was a my mother, who was the dominant character
Mancunian by birth. Her father had come to in the relationship with my father, decided
Manchester from the outer reaches of the that scouting was all very well but
Austro-Hungarian Empire from a small town, notwithstanding the title of the troop I needed
which is so small that I could not find it on a something else. So, I was bundled off to
map and when someone had found it for me, Habonim, with people I had never heard of
there were no other towns on the same map
that I recognised.
I am not sure how and why both my parents,
separately from each other, became involved
in Habonim, but they met at one of the early
Habonim camps in the 1930s and my
mother’s photograph in the last Iton
reminded me of this. Their marriage contract
(such as it was!), included the provision that
my father should come to live in Manchester,
rather than my mother going to live in 1959 Dave Kantor and Mike
46 Leigh
