Books and a video I've made about my relatives and what happened to them in the Holocaust

'The Missing' (Walker Books) (Paperback) An autobiographical account of how I found out what happened to my relatives in the Holocaust. Suitable for children, teenagers and adults. (available in Portuguese) Contains documents, letters, photos. 


'Please Write Soon (Scholastic). (Paperback) This is a fictionalised account of the lives of my father when he was a boy in London during WW2 and his cousin in Poland at the same time. It's written as letters between the two boys. The Polish boy goes through persecution, flight, and arrest by the Russians, joining the Polish Free Army and fighting at the Battle of Monte Cassino. This is suitable for 8 year olds upwards. Illustrated by Michael Foreman. 


'On the Move' (Walker Books) (Paperback) This is a set of poems about growing up Jewish, finding out about my relatives in the Holocaust, and widening it out into questions of migration and persecution in general. (available in French as 'Prendre la Route'). Illustrated by Quentin Blake.


'One Day' (Walker Books). This an account of a group of French-Hungarian and French Jewish Communists in the Resistance who escaped from Convoy 62 on its way from Paris to Auschwitz. It's a true story. Convoy 62 was the transport that deported my father's uncle and aunt. (available in French and Italian). Illustrated by Benjamin Phillips.


Video: This is  also called 'The Missing'.  It's a 45 minute video I made for anyone of any age. It tells the story of 'The Missing' and 'On the Move' with documents, letters and photos.
It's on my YouTube Channel, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iR_GiyIJ6k


'So They Call You Pisher!' (Verso Books) - an autobiography for teens or adults, the last chapter of which is written as a letter to my father (who had died) telling him what I had found out about his relatives. Includes photos. 

Israeli newspaper 'Haaretz' quoted from and summarised Antony Blinken's speech this week as follows:

'"The more people suffer, the less they feel empathy for those suffering on the other side. Large majorities throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds believe October 7 didn't happen, and if it did, then it was a legitimate attack on Israel's military," he said. "In Israel, there was almost no reporting on the conditions in Gaza and what the people there endure every day. This dehumanization is one of the greatest tragedies of the conflict."

The primary element of Blinken's vision for Gaza's reconstruction starts with the Palestinian Authority inviting international partners to help establish and run an interim administration – responsible for civil sectors like banking, water, energy, health and civil coordination with Israel. The international community, according to Blinken, would provide funding, oversight and technical support.

The interim administration, meanwhile, would include both Gazans and PA representatives, selected after "meaningful consultation" with communities. It would hand over full responsibility to a fully reformed PA as soon as feasible.

It would operate in close cooperation with senior UN officials, alongside an interim security mission made up of partner nations and vetted Palestinian personnel responsible for a creating secure environment for humanitarian and reconstruction efforts, as well as border security preventing Hamas smuggling.

Under Blinken's plan, the U.S. would stand up a new initiative training a PA-led security force in Gaza that would gradually take over from an interim mission – the details of which would be enshrined in a UN Security Council resolution.

Blinken noted that several unnamed international partners expressed willingness to provide forces, but only if Gaza and the West Bank are reunified under a reformed PA as part of a pathway to an independent Palestinian state.

"All parties need to summon political will, make hard decision and hard compromises," he said. "Key regional and international actors need to fully commit to fully supporting Palestinian-led governance and preventing Hamas' return. The PA will need to carry out swift, far-reaching reform to build more transparent, accountable governance," he said.

Blinken further noted that Israel will have to accept reuniting Gaza and the West Bank under the leadership of a reformed PA. "All must embrace a time-bound, conditions-based path toward forming an independent Palestinian state. These principles are mutually reinforcing," he continued, painstakingly detailing missteps from both parties.

"Israelis must decide what relationship they want with the Palestinians. That cannot be the illusion that Palestinians will accept being a non-people without national rights," he said.

"Israelis must abandon the myth they can carry out de facto annexation without cost and consequence to Israel's democracy, its standing, its security," he continued.

"Some in Israel argue that accepting a political horizon for the Palestinians would reward Hamas for October 7. In fact, Hamas has tried to kill the idea of two states for decades."

Blinken insisted that Israel accepting a political horizon would be "the ultimate rebuke to Hamas' nihilistic agenda of death and destruction.

"Up to this point, the parties have failed to make these difficult decisions or acted in ways that put a long-term deal and peace further out of reach," he said, charging Israel with "systematically undermining the capacity and legitimacy of the only viable alternative to Hamas – the Palestinian Authority."

"Israel continues to hold back PA tax revenues that it collects on behalf of the Palestinians – funds that belong to the Palestinians and that the PA needs to pay people that provide essential services."

In the West Bank, meanwhile, Blinken noted that Israel is expanding official settlements and nationalizing land at a faster rate than at any time in the last decade while "turning a blind eye to the unprecedented growth of illegal outposts," adding that "violent attacks by extremist settlers against Palestinian civilians have reached record levels."

"We've long made the point that Hamas cannot be defeated by a military campaign alone," he continued, noting "in north Gaza, each time Israel completes its military operations and pulls back, Hamas militants regroup and reemerge because there's nothing else to fill the void.

"We assess Hamas has recruited almost as many new militants as it has lost. That is a recipe for enduring insurgency and perpetual war," he continued. "The longer the war goes on, the worse the humanitarian situation gets in Gaza."

"Israel has pursued its military campaign past the point of destroying Hamas' military capacity," he added.

Blinken, however, charged Hamas with having "cynically weaponized the suffering of Palestinians," recalling how slain Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar sent a message to mediators deeming the deaths of Palestinian civilians "necessary sacrifices."

"Israel's efforts have fallen far short of meeting the colossal scale of need in Gaza. We've been clear publicly and privately, there are steps Israel could take to transform the humanitarian situation in Gaza," he continued.

"The longer the war goes on," Blinken warned, "the greater the risk that Israel's longstanding peace accords with Jordan and Egypt will collapse."

He further warned that Israel "remaining bogged down in Gaza will only harm Israel economically," noting hits to foreign direct investment and Israel's credit rating, as well as how the extended mobilization of reservists is undermining small businesses and private sector productivity.

Blinken further lamented the PA repeatedly failing to undertake long overdue reforms, such as reigning in corruption, and its refusal to consistently and unequivocally condemn October 7.

He said the latter point only entrenched doubt among Israelis that the two communities could ever live side-by-side – as has the PA's prisoner-payment system and "antisemitic remarks of its leader."

He further attacked regional leaders for not forcibly condemning October 7, nor the general operating mode of Hamas. "Had countries around the world applied this collective pressure," he said, "Hamas leaders might have been forced to make different decisions many months ago."

Despite this, he noted "much of the heavy lifting" on Israeli-Saudi normalization is complete, including U.S.-Saudi negotiations on making Saudi Arabia a treaty ally, energy agreements on civil nuclear cooperation and economic agreements to bolster bilateral trade and investment.

The two main elements blocking Israel-Saudi normalization, in his words, are the end of hostilities in Gaza and a credible pathway toward a Palestinian state.

END

Why doesn't the Dept of Education ask poets who do poetry writing workshops, to tell them how we get children to write poems?

 So here's a mystery: for as long as I've been writing poems for children, I've been doing poetry writing workshops for primary and secondary school students. So that's since about 1971, when I did it first on BBC School Radio Programmes, and then from 1974 onwards, in schools, and at festivals.

While I've been doing it, 100s of other poets have been doing it too. There is a huge body of experience there. Some of us have written books based on our experience. Some of us have worked alongside teacher training institutions who've produced booklets based on our work, sometimes publishing the work that the children have done, when we've done our visits. 

That is a huge body of work and experience. It's not all the same - far from it. For example, (using me as the example) for a few years I worked alongside teams of other poets at the Barbican in London, while 100s of children came in from local schools. There, we could see how we all worked in huge variety of ways, to help and encourage children to write. On one occasion the Barbican produced a beautiful book based on the work and there was a proper formal evaluation done of what we were doing. On another occasion, I worked at the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education for a year with primary teachers who met every few weeks, having tried out ideas with their classes. They came to the meetings,  shared their ideas, and developed as the year went on. We produced a book that came from that year. Last year, we repeated the process, we worked with a group of teachers across the year. They're busy writing up their work and of course the children's work, right now.

And one more example: for nearly 10 years I've been working with schools in Cambridge and Cambridgeshire on local history, Holocaust Memorial Day, and awareness of refugees. I've done research, written poems (as in 'On the Move', (and just last week a book came out based on some more research 'One Day'). In that time, Professor Helen Weinstein things that we've worked with something like 20,000 school students. On her website, History Works TV, there are many examples of what we've been doing.

I've also supervised MA students at Goldsmiths University of London, doing poetry workshops in schools as part of their MA studies, whether that's with their own poems or with others. Their work has appeared in our book, 'Children's Literature in Action'. 

I know that if I'm doing this, so are hundreds of other poets. I don't want to steal their thunder so I can't write up what they've been doing. 

Now for the mystery: why has the Department for Education never thought to pick our brains, bring us together for conferences, to talk about what we do, show what we do, demonstrate what we do? 

Why are we are we marginal to the 'conversation' about writing in schools? We know that most of us are not classroom teachers - though some of us are and others have been - but we've been working alongside teachers. We are, if you like, analogous to peripatetic musicians and artists who come into schools to teach children singing, playing musical instruments or who do projects like making a mural.

What is it about poetry that is somehow so precious (?), or so much part of that hyper hyper hyper regulated section of the curriculum - writing English, that we who have this huge range of experience and knowledge are left outside of the discourse.

Please note, this isn't about picking monitors or experts, or hand-picked 'trusties'. This is about spreading the net much, much wider than that, grabbing the expertise of the huge diversity of voices and methods that we have. No one person, no one small group has the complete answer, for the simple reason that poetry is and has to be diverse! 

Think of the vast amounts of money that have been spent by the government on telling teachers how to teach writing. Right from the National Literacy Project (a largely anonymous, mysterious bit of top-down diktat, on how to make children write), through to the SATs and the ludicrous 'expected levels' of writing which are based on arbitrary and bogus notions of 'grammar', and are largely about enforcing and reinforcing ideas about why Standard Written English is the best and only proper way to express oneself, (even though that Standard is evolving under their noses, accepting non-Standard aspects more and more, every day!) 

So though 'poetry' or 'children writing poetry', seems like an utterly non-political area, what has happened is that by excluding this vast body of experience from the discourse, is clearly political. There is obviously suspicion, wariness, guardedness in relation to us. Why? What's the problem?

And what happens in our place? As I've written in the previous blog, I have recently been doing a poetry session with some student teachers (students doing primary school teacher-training). I did this as part of their PGCE at Goldsmiths University of London, where I'm a Professor of Children's Literature. 

I asked the students to say what kind of poetry lessons they had observed as part of their training. Quite a few of them reported that the schools where they had been based used worksheets and 'schemes' which seemed to them very formulaic, very limited, very much about 'filling in the blanks'. This was explained to the students is because children need 'scaffolds' and can't think of their own ways of writing and don't have enough language or 'vocabulary' to write their own.

I can't speak for my fellow-poets, but speaking from own experience, I can say that that this isn't true. Firstly, in the case of the quick one-off workshop, yes, I sometimes give triggers that involve working with some kind of 'shape' or 'pattern' for a poem eg a call and response form or a verse and chorus form. But primary teachers have a class for at least one year. If we think poetry is part of development - with language and with, social, personal, emotional and cognitive development that what my year long workshops have shown is that it's important to work much more deeply than that. This involves exploring a wide range of poems, a wide range of ways of working, a wide range of producing poems whether that be on screen, on paper, on posters, in powerpoints, in performance, with art, with dance, with drama, with music and so on. 

Some of us have done these longterm workshops across several weeks, a whole term or, if we're lucky, for a whole year. We can help with thinking this through. 

Interesting? 

Poetry teaching in primary schools. What's going on?

In a session with teacher trainee students on Friday, I asked them to talk about the poetry sessions they had observed in schools. Many of them reported schools buying 'courses' or 'activity sheets' which involve highly controlled, restricted exercises - filling in gaps etc.
The basis of these starts from 'cultural deficit theory' which assumes that children can't write poems unless you give them poems with gaps in. That's to say, they haven't 'got language' to write poems in. The second assumption is that you can't write poems unless you have 'knowledge' of poems which has an element of truth in it, but this has to be immediately qualified by what it is these courses and activity sheets are dishing up as the 'knowledge'...and how that 'knowledge' is transmitted.

The trainee students sounded quite unhappy by how restricted and controlled it all was.

I'm concerned by that, but also with the idea that educators should assume that the children don't have language and/or culture and that there should be any restriction on what poetry is, in terms of resources, books, collections and so on.

There are other ways of helping children write poems on the basis of eg the languages children bring to the class, the shapes and structures and themes and voices of a wide variety of poems, which we can introduce to children through regular classroom 'slams' or 'shows' put together in a matter of minutes. 

We can use freeze frame, hot seating as a way of encouraging children to improvise or write monologues from within characters they already know from the stories/books that teachers are reading with the children. There are many traditional forms like 'call and response' and techniques of repetition and choruses/refrains that can give shape to children's improvised lines 'in between'.

We can ask children to write in the way that adult writers write poems ie wondering if they could write a poem 'like that' ie like the poem they've just read. If we're open and flexible about this, 'like that' can refer to 'like the shape', 'like the pattern', 'like the theme', 'like the tone', 'like the pictures in the poem' or 'like' any other aspect that a child notices about the poem. In fact we can do 'noticing' sessions where we ask children to talk about anything they've 'noticed' about a poem and would they like to have a go. And when we ask that we don't all have to write the same kind of poem! The children can be encouraged to go off where they want or how they want based on what they've 'noticed'.

This takes us into the question of what poetry is for? Is it for exercises? Is it for 'filling in gaps'? Or is there some other purpose? 

Broadly speaking, let's remind ourselves poetry is to amuse, entertain, enlighten, intrigue and engage us.

It can do this in many different ways, using selective ways of using language through eg repetition of phrases, sounds, meanings, images (pictures): these include rhyme and rhythms which are of course forms of repetition; through patterns - and there are hundreds of these in terms of verses, rhyme schemes, changes in rhythms; another way is to create 'figurative' language where one 'thing' is like another 'thing' as with metaphor, simile and personification; another way is through 'movement' in which the sense of a poem changes - ie something 'develops' as with poetry about place, person, or feeling and a picture of the place, person and feeling 'grows'; another way is through a 'turn' (or more than one turn) when one part of the poem develops and then something is introduced that counters it with the sensation of 'but'....and many more.

The easiest way for children to discover and use these many different ways is through my 'secret strings' game, which I've described on this blog several times, and in my book: 'What is Poetry?'.  

I gather that one of the reasons justifying the use of these 'courses' and 'activity sheets' is that it takes the children through the 'expected levels' which I've written about many times before on account of the fact that they are based on bogus ideas of what grammar is, and that applying these bogus ideas to writing has next to nothing to do with children finding out what good writing is - that's to say, writing that can move us, entertain us, intrigue us and perhaps ultimately teach us things about ourselves or the world we live in. 

The Jewish Socialist Group have a Chanukah Party 'two days early'?

The Jewish Socialist Group (JSG) held a Chanukah party on Sunday Dec 23. People who don't like the JSG have objected to this, mainly on the grounds that it was allegedly several days early. In other words, the claim goes, Chanukah this year begins on Dec 25 but this party was before Dec 25. Quite learned people including a KC have voiced this objection on X (formerly Twitter).

What's strange about the objection is that Jews have held Chanukah parties 'early' or even 'late' for a long time. My parents couldn't find a way to square their political beliefs with what they saw as religious ceremonies, celebrations, Holy Days etc. though there were remnants at Chanukah in that my father insisted on cooking latkes. (I had to grate the potatoes, he said, a principle based, I think, on a reading of Marx which said that children could and should shell peas. He never showed us this bit of Marx but he often quoted it when saying that my brother and I had to wash the dishes.)

Anyway, back with the allegation that the JSG held a Chanukah party 'early'. It took me about ten seconds of googling to find very religious Jews holding Chanukah parties early - particularly in the States. This should come as no surprise. It doesn't matter what orthodoxies and conformities that people invent, there are always others who ignore them or invent others. One tiny example: the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols in the Christian tradition often/usually takes place on Christmas Eve. When I was at school (and because we broke up before Christmas Eve) the school did that Festival 'early'.

So why would these learned (and not-so-learned) people object to the JSG holding a Chanukah party 'early'? There's a principle here: 'any stick to beat a dog'. Once you've decided who is the dog, then any stick will do, even if it doesn't make sense, it's illogical, and the 'wrong' you've identified is committed by your side at the same time.

Meanwhile. the idea of demanding conformity in the 21st century is just a little bit on the sad side. As religions divide and change, as people invent new groups within religions or across religions, there are people standing in the middle demanding conformity to something. As people will know, the history of religions is dense with these pleas for this or that conformity at the very moment big divisions take place. The seventeenth century is one huge example for Christianity.

Further, I've seen in London alone that there are groups of Jews who have set up their own forms of meeting and celebrating the festivals and interpreting Judaism. There is no Jewish Pope to say they can't. Same goes for Christian groups I've heard about even though (of course) there is a Pope and the other established groups (Protestants, Evanglicals etc) have their religious leaders.

The JSG incidentally doesn't spring up out of nothing - not that that would be a bad thing in itself! It owes its roots and inspiration in part (perhaps mostly, as they can tell us better than I can) from the 'Jewish Labour Bund' commonly called the 'Bund'. There are brief summaries of them on wiki and many books. My mother's father, my father's father and my father's maternal grandfather were all involved with the Bund and its sister organisation the Workers' Circle or Workman's Circle or Arbeter Ring, though my parents' Communism (members of the Communist Party (1936-1957)) blotted out these traditions in our family (I mean the family of my parents, my brother and me). In fact, I think that my father's parents split over that kind of disagreement, and it's how my father ended up in England and his father stayed in the US...(!)

The histories of Jewish socialism and Jewish socialists hardly gets a hearing these days. There are several reasons for that, the main ones being the Holocaust, that wiped out many European Bundists and Jewish socialists. And the other is that the axis of Jewish identity and politics shifted once Israel was founded.

As I've recorded elsewhere but I'll tell it again. When I went to secondary school, I met non-Communist Jewish kids for the first time (!). (Our family circle and friends was full of Jewish Communists!) One of these non-Communist Jewish secondary school folks, was my friend Dave who told me that the good news that he had been on a kibbutz in Israel and that's how socialism was going to happen. I came home and told my father, who said, 'Who can be a member of these kibbutzim?' I went back and asked Dave. He explained to me that kibbutzim were Jewish (this is in about 1959/1960 when this conversation was taking place). I told my dad the news. The kibbutzim are for Jews. My father said, 'Socialism for one people? How does that work? Isn't socialism supposed to be for everyone?' (Apologies if you've heard/read me telling that story before.)

Anyway, in that little conversation (particularly the one (and others) that I had with Dave, are also reasons for how the conversation about Jewish socialism or socialism and Jews changed once Israel was founded.

Have a great holiday, Christmas, Chanukah, or any other festivity you fancy. 'Gut yontef (or yontov)' It means in Yiddish, literally, 'good holiday' and, as it happens, it was one of the bits of Yiddish that my father retained in spite of him not knowing what to do with the traditions. Enjoy!

Words versus Deeds - at times of great crisis, which is the more important?

Strange as it may seem, for someone like me to say it, but there are times when I think that words have very little or no importance. Start with Blair and Corbyn. Let's say, I think that Blair is great and Corbyn is terrible. Now let's put them each through the mincer which I'll call 'Words or deeds?' In terms of actions, Blair did a lot, Corbyn did very little (he was never in power). So for me to say, Blair is great and Corbyn is terrible, I'm in effect saying that what Blair did is great, what Corbyn said is terrible. In other words, I am in effect comparing the Iraq War with the fact that Corbyn opposed the Iraq War (one example of the Words or Deeds ledger).

Even as this supposedly enthusiastic Blair supporter (in this scenario), can I say that the two are really comparable? In terms of effect or consequences, one involves the deaths of tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people. The other involves speeches and articles.

Now let's widen this. In the world at the moment, governments are carrying out mass murders. Sitting here in the comfort of my house, nothing I say comes anywhere near the importance of those deaths. And if we widen that out to the mass of verbiage (of which I'm part), streaming out of our TVs, on the pages of newspapers, on the radio airwaves...from politicians, journalists, commentators, social media posters (in our millions)...surely again, none of it matters like the deaths of those civilians.

And, I suggest, our governments know this. They operate with a clear view that what they do is more important than what they or we, or anyone says. And the situation in Gaza is one example of this. The doing has happened, is happening, goes on.

In viewing the world and the fate of the human race, the doing is a million times more important than the saying.

A separate, ring-fenced, open-ended 'interpretation' time for schools?

I wish there could be a space for pupils of all ages called 'interpretation' in which it was accepted that there will be a variety of ways of responding to a book or text and it's not a matter of being right or wrong. All interpretation questions would be open-ended.

Comprehension would 'do' 'What is Humpty Dumpty sitting on?' ('Retrieval').
Interpretation would do 'Why did Humpty Dumpty fall?'

Comprehension could go on in comprehension sessions but there could be a separate, ring-fenced time for this 'Interpretation' time. Open-ended questions only. Interpretation to include comments (written or spoken), drawing, videos, photos, dance, creative writing or any kind, any form.