In Chekhov’s The Seagull Dr Dorn is asked which is his favourite foreign city. Genoa, he replies: in the evening the streets are full of strolling people and you became part of the crowd, body and soul. ‘You start to think there really might be a universal spirit,’ he says. I remembered Dr Dorn when I was discovering Genoa in October. Then it suddenly came to me that I had been to the city before. Genoa was where my family embarked for the Far East, when I was 18 months old, fleeing the Nazis.
I don’t know about the universal spirit, though. I’m reading Enemies and Neighbours: Arabs and Jews in Palestine and Israel, 1917-2017 by Ian Black. I had reached 1953 when at midnight a text pinged in from an old friend: ‘Who will cross the street when we pass? Who will hide us in the attic?’
Who, me? When did it come to this? I remember a hum about ‘anti-Semitism in the Labour party’ when I was writing my play about a Viennese Jewish family who perished in the Holocaust, but there was nothing ‘timely’ about Leopoldstadt when it opened in London nearly four years ago.
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