Going Up by Frederic Raphael

Author:Frederic Raphael [Frederic Raphael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849549554
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2015-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

Whatever the Reverend Harper Wood might have thought of my insolent sentiments, thanks to him I was seeing things in a way I never had before. Alone in my hotel bedroom, pen in hand, I was no one in particular, sure only that he was a writer.

In the starched streets of the ghetto, Maimonides’s house had been turned into a museum of tauromachy. The little synagogue where the great Rambam had prayed was clean and void of memories, a square, blanched, lifeless room; no black elders; no bewigged women looking down from the balcony; no light, no ark in the niche. The old guardian, who had but a single tooth, announced that it was a ‘Monumento Nacional. Antigua sinagoga Ebraica.’ He indicated where the Torah had been kept and how it was wrapped and I nodded as if to imply that what he was saying was familiar to me. Delusions of Sephardic origin prompted furtive aggression. I wrote in my notebook: ‘The Jews, we are still told, must learn to behave. Must they? How many people have we driven from their homes; burned, murdered, crucified? Before the walls of Jerusalem, Titus crucified seven thousand men who had defended their city. Eso no es lo peor, far from it.’ I cadged the phrase from the title of one of Goya’s Desastres de la Guerra.

Herb was a New York Democrat. He believed that the Rosenbergs were innocent. Certainly they had not deserved the death penalty. Greenglass, the chief witness against them, had everything to gain by saying whatever the FBI wanted. Even so, he said only that he had heard of a man called Julius who was some kind of a ‘leader’; the name Rosenberg was not mentioned. Did I know that Klaus Fuchs’s middle name was Julius? Surely he was the ‘Julius’ who was alleged to have memorised and passed on information about the mathematical formulae necessary for making an atomic bomb. Rosenberg had failed every mathematical grade in school.

Einstein and another physicist, Harold Urey of the University of Chicago, had said that it was inconceivable that such a man could remember abstruse information. The Supreme Court said that if the defence had been properly conducted, the case could, at one stage, have been thrown out; had it not been, they would have had grounds for allowing the appeal, but only if appropriate objections had been voiced during the trial. Even so, three Supreme Court justices dissented from the judgment, all Liberals. Herb maintained that the Rosenbergs would never have been convicted, on the evidence, by an impartial jury. America was on the way to Fascism: you had only to compare Judge Medina’s attitude to the trial of Communists to his conduct in the federal anti-trust case over which he presided at the same time.

Herb was neither loud nor heated. He had no intention of living anywhere except in the US. He was a keen advocate of the international style, all glass, steel and concrete of the kind celebrated in Siegfried

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