How quickly we neglect the lessons we
have all learned. Any book on child raising will tell you that kids learn by
example; that so much character development comes from watching and
imitating others. Children need role models to follow and to teach them
about life. The title of a book I possess sums it up:
How to Be a Hero to Your Kids.
So why do we so easily slip into the kind
of behaviour—little untruths, petty cheating, swearing—that we want our kids
to avoid?
I struggle to be a hero to my three sons,
always wondering if I’m giving them too much discipline, or not enough. Am I
trying too hard to be their friend, their mate? Should I perhaps follow the
advice of my Korean brother-in-law, who tells me it is important that
children fear their father?
Writing a book like this does not mean
that I have any magic formula for raising perfect kids. I surely make all
the typical parental blunders, as I am confronted with problems that more
often than not seem to fall into the cracks between the planks of guidance
provided by all the child-upbringing manuals.
I recall with embarrassment some slips in
my behaviour.
When we lived in Tokyo the law required
everyone with a television set to pay a licence fee. This fee was quite
high. The government relied on people’s honesty for payment of the fee, and,
in a very honest country, some 90% of television owners paid up.
The rest were not prosecuted. Instead,
inspectors regularly visited their homes, politely but persistently
requesting payment. For some foreigners this visit became a kind of a game,
as we pretended not to have a television set, or not to understand any
Japanese.
I remember one time the inspector came to
our door, asking (in Japanese) that I pay the fee. “TV, no! TV, no!” I
shouted at him in my best broken English, until he gave up and went away.
Grinning I turned back inside, and saw my young son watching me intently. I
knew he was too young to understand what I was saying. But still I blushed
with a deep sense of shame, knowing my son had been watching me lie so
blatantly.
On another occasion, after we had come to
live in Melbourne, I was with my second son in a store, when he tried to
hand me a five-cent coin he had just found lying on the floor. “Keep it,” I
whispered to him, knowing that no-one cared about a five-cent coin. But this
confused him. He had been brought up to hand to us or to another responsible
person any property, like money, that he found and which he knew did not
belong to him.
He tried again to give me the money. I
just smiled at him. And then, when I saw his renewed confusion I was
suddenly overcome with shame at having, effectively, told him to
steal—which, of course, was the exact opposite of everything my wife and I
normally try to teach him. Obviously I should have encouraged him to hand in
the money to the shopkeeper, who probably would have told him to keep it as
a fitting reward for his honesty.
But children need role models to provide
more than moral guidance. They need to learn how to develop their emotions
as well. As
Professor
William Damon wrote, in
The Moral Child:
Sharing emotional reactions means demonstrating them when appropriate,
describing them clearly, and answering children’s questions about them
candidly….The parent may not wish to expose the child to demonstrations of
the parent’s guilt, anger, fear or uncertainty. Such exposure, however, is
exactly what children need in order to learn ways of dealing with their own
moral emotions.
I marvel as my wife, Younju, freely
displays her emotions with our kids, and helps them learn what it really
means to be happy, to be sad. I wish I could display my emotions like her. I
wish I had more emotions to display, instead of too often being so bookishly
withdrawn. So shy and reserved. So fearful of confrontation. So much like my
father.
As a child I struggled to find heroism in
my father. He was a quiet person, and, to me, a reserved and distant figure
who seldom seemed to open up. And with so little communication and guidance
from him, the end result was that I was often left wondering if I was
meeting his expectations for me. It started me on a period of drift and
uncertainty, and was a big factor in my subsequent flitting from one
spiritual experience in Japan to another.
I was living in Tokyo when Mike Rutherford,
bass guitarist with the British pop group Genesis, recorded The Living
Years as Mike + The Mechanics. It told of a son’s struggles to
communicate with his father, and it felt like my own story.
It was not that mine was a bad father, he
just seemed unwilling to open up about himself, to share his thoughts, or to
take any interest in my own. I don’t recall ever really arguing badly with
him; we just ended up not talking much. I assumed he had his own traumas
that he was hiding.
He was born in Vienna in 1917 into a
well-off Jewish family. His father was an engineer, his mother a beautiful
young woman from Poland. But he shared with me so few scraps of information
about his childhood that I learned little more.
Of course I did know that the 1930s had
been a time of political ferment in Europe, with growing hostilities between
extreme-left and extreme-right factions, and some of my father’s relatives
became deeply involved with the Communist Party. One day a cousin from
Poland turned up at my father’s Vienna home, on the run from the secret
police and needing a hideout. After he left, my father—then aged about 16 or
17—found a wad of revolutionary tracts left behind, stuffed into the back of
a bookcase. He read them all in an evening and became an immediate convert
to the Communist cause.
(In 1975 my father made a trip back to
Europe and sought out this cousin, only to learn, to his amazement, that he
had become a Franciscan priest and was living in a monastery in Bordeaux. My
father visited him and tried to talk about their past, only to be rebuffed
with, “That was all a long time ago.”)
As the Nazi threat grew in Europe, my
father was active in various underground groups, first as a schoolboy, and
later as a chemistry student at Vienna University. Then, in 1938, the Nazis
took over Austria, closing all the borders, except that with Germany. Right
after the annexation my father apparently took a train into Germany, then
another to the Swiss border. In darkness he fled across the frontier.
He resumed his studies in France, but,
being an Austrian, was arrested there as an enemy alien once full-scale
hostilities broke out. His mother had fled Vienna for London, and had
already arranged to have my father’s young brother smuggled into Palestine
with other Jewish children. Now she arranged a visa for my father to travel
to New Zealand as a refugee.
He arrived in 1940, carrying little more
than some books, a pair of skis and a gloomy Kathe Kollwitz
print of starving peasants huddled together. (That powerful, depressing
print governed our living room, so much so that when my exuberant,
Russian-born aunt—an army psychologist—visited us once from Israel she felt
compelled to rush to the nearest furniture store to buy us a brilliantly
coloured lamp to brighten the room.)
My mother, though from solid New Zealand
Anglican stock, had also moved into left-wing politics, and this dominated
my upbringing. Politics was our religion. There wasn’t an anti-nuclear rally
we didn’t attend—and, frequently, organise as well. As a primary-school boy,
while other kids made model toys with their carpentry sets, I was hammering
together protest banners for the latest demonstration outside the American
ambassador’s residence.
Though a librarian, my father’s main
interest was trade union history, about which he wrote books and articles.
Bookshelves occupied most of the walls of our house, and these were crammed
with bulging files of newspaper clippings.
When we moved from Wellington to a new
house in Auckland and I at last got my own bedroom, my father built a
bookshelf across a whole wall of the room, and then, without consulting me,
filled it with a big part of his collection. Whenever I had school friends
visiting, it was with embarrassment that I explained that the collected
works of Lenin, the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital in
several languages, The Condition of the Working Class in England by
Friedrich Engels, and the letters of Rosa Luxemburg, among many others, were
not mine.
An overwhelming childhood memory is of my
father arriving home from work on the bus at the same time every evening,
eating dinner and then setting to work on his files, often clipping
newspapers and journals, sometimes banging away with two fingers on his
antique typewriter. He seldom explained what he was doing.
While other Dads came with their sons to
watch school sporting fixtures, my father was at home with his files. But he
did take me with him at weekends to the homes of retired trade union
leaders, where we spent hours in dusty attics and garages sorting through
bundles of decaying leaflets, strike posters, newspapers, and minutes of
union meetings.
I recall only one occasion when he
displayed much emotion. He was deputy librarian at
Auckland University, and when
his boss retired he assumed he would be promoted to the top job. Instead,
the university hired a much younger man, from Britain, for the post. I was
doing the dishes in the kitchen with my father when a friend phoned with the
news. My father took the call, then came back into the kitchen and went on
with the washing up, while I dried. I glanced up at him and saw, to my huge
discomfort, that he was quietly crying.
It is natural for kids to try to make
their parents into heroes, and my brother and I sometimes tried to find out
more from my father. We would ask, for example, for details of his escape
from Vienna, via Nazi Germany, into Switzerland. It sounded dramatic and
dangerous. But we quickly learned that virtually all areas of his past life
were off-limits, and that he did not care to talk about them.
There were colourful hints now and again.
Once, I got a map of Vienna from a library, and he showed me where his
family’s home had been, and the route he took to school, past the clinic of
Sigmund Freud. There was also his photograph album, which we sometimes
looked at. It was full of sepia-tinted pictures with crinkly edges, and
showed smiling, confident family groups at lakes and mountain resorts around
central Europe. Many of these people—my distant relatives—apparently
perished in the Holocaust. Others settled in Israel.
Once, I enquired about a particular photo
of an attractive young woman, and my father said that she had been his
girlfriend in Vienna. When I asked more about her, he said simply that she
had died, and refused to disclose more. The next time I looked at the album,
I found that the photo had been removed.
As I have said, he had little to say to
me about himself, and he showed little interest in anything I did. I moved
from home at the age of 20 to flat with other students. After I graduated,
with a law degree, I spent a year as a reporter on the Auckland Star,
then left New Zealand for work in Britain and, later, Asia, returning home
only infrequently on holiday.
I felt most comfortable communicating
with my father by letter, with the occasional meeting when he travelled
abroad. I tried a few times to reach out, to “say it loud, say it clear” (in
the words of The Living Years) that we didn’t see eye to eye. But he
didn’t know what I was talking about.
I even considered sending him a copy of
the recording of The Living Years, but I doubted that he would listen
to it. Once when I went back to New Zealand on holiday I had given him a
beautiful coffee-table book about Zen Buddhism, with which I was then
enamoured. He didn’t even open it, but just commented that he would try to
find a library that might want it.
I still do not know why he would not talk
about his past. Perhaps there was guilt over the fact that many of his
revolutionary colleagues ended up in Dachau, while he went on to a
comfortable life.
Certainly, there were family strains. His
father had died when he was 17. I spent six months working on kibbutzim in
Israel, and met for the first time my many distant relatives who live there.
One of them whispered to me that my father’s father was rumoured to have
committed suicide, perhaps because his beautiful young wife—my
grandmother—was taking lovers.
My grandmother was a domineering woman.
During the couple of years I spent as a journalist in Britain, before I
travelled to Asia, I spent a lot of time with her.
She lived in a large, dark apartment in
London’s West Hampstead with her second husband, a South African Jew. Layers
of Persian carpets covered the floors, shelves of books about art and
philosophy lined the walls, and display cases of European and Asian
ornaments were everywhere.
I marvelled at her cultured ways, and
admired her passion for learning and the manner in which she so easily made
friends with such interesting people. Even in her eighties, and still
startlingly handsome, she was working occasionally as a German tutor at a
prominent London language school. (She told me she had lied to them about
her age.)
She treated me and many others as
children. And she had a habit of dispensing great quantities of love to me,
and then abruptly withholding it. When I visited, she would sometimes lie on
the antique sofa in her living room and ask me to sit beside her while she
held my hand.
We had a big celebration for her 90th
birthday. I flew over from Tokyo, my father arrived from Auckland and my
uncle from Tel Aviv. The party was organised by a prominent member of the
London Jewish community who was later made a member of the House of Lords.
At the celebration I met many European Jews living in London who seemed to
know my family intimately, yet of whom I had no knowledge. Two weeks after
the party, my grandmother died peacefully in her sleep.
In any case, it seemed that my father
carried demons with him. Once, I took my wife and young sons from Tokyo to
New Zealand on holiday, and we stayed with him at his small flat in
Auckland. One night, my wife and children were sleeping, I was in the
kitchen reading a magazine, and my father was watching television in the
living room. Suddenly he came into the kitchen and stood looking at me, a
glass of wine in his hand. (When I was growing up he virtually never drank
alcohol, and just a glass or two of wine was enough to make him red-faced
and tipsy.)
“You know something?” he said in a hoarse
voice. “The Nazis taking over Austria was the best thing that could have
happened. What sort of future did I have there? I was studying chemistry.
But Austria was full of Jewish chemists. I wouldn’t have got a job. Instead
I came to New Zealand and made a really good life.”
I looked at my father in amazement. His
eyes were glazed and his voice slurred. I had never in my life seen him even
remotely drunk, or heard him talking like this.
He went on. “And what about a little
Jewboy like Hansi [his brother]? He didn’t have any skills. He would have
been nothing in Vienna. But he became an engineer in Israel, and a senior
officer in the Israeli army. He went to Singapore as a military adviser. And
when he retired from the army he got a top job with El-Al Airlines and
travelled the world. We should be grateful that the Nazis took Austria and
persecuted the Jews.”
Suddenly my father, who had seldom opened
up to me, was opening up far too much. I was stricken with embarrassment. I
smiled. Then I yawned and yawned, and rushed to bed.
I wasn’t there that
day in 1994 when my father passed away, and the fact that no one else was
there either did not ease my guilt. He died in his sleep, and it was several
days before someone broke into his flat and found the body.
To my surprise,
newspapers throughout New Zealand published generous obituaries. The New
Zealand Herald wrote:
Mr Roth, an
Austrian-born Jew who came to New Zealand in 1940, held what is believed to
be the country’s most comprehensive private collection of trade union and
labour archives. As well as being a compulsive gatherer of material at his
Mt Eden home, he published several books and was the official historian of
at least six trade unions….Not content with simply chronicling the life of
the labour movement, he took an active part in it and was among marchers in
the annual Auckland May Day parade last month. The chairman of the Trade
Union History Project…described Mr Roth last night as unquestionably New
Zealand’s leading historian of trade unions. The convener of the Auckland
Council of Trade Unions, Mr Bill Anderson, remembered him as a modest but
very powerful figure who would be a great loss to the labour movement.
Although Mr Roth took a clearly socialist approach, Mr Anderson and others
said he was unchallengeable on historical facts, on which he was widely
consulted.
Historian Kerry Taylor
wrote an obituary for the Sunday Star Times:
Bert Roth will be
remembered by most people as an historian, by others as a librarian, and by
a few of us as a warm and generous friend. He was also many other things in
his richly textured life. Bert was a lifelong socialist. His politics, and
Jewish ethnicity, made him take flight from fascism in Austria in 1938 and,
after a period in France, he arrived in Wellington during April 1940. Seeing
red flags hoisted, he assumed there was a working class demonstration, but
they were merely advertisements for the DIC store’s sale—an early lesson
that New Zealand was different from Austria….Bert was a collector of
gargantuan proportion. The “Roth Collection” of labour archives and
publications grew from early 1950s into a treasure trove for historians.
Unlike some collectors, Bert shared his treasures, responding positively to
the endless stream of inquiries for assistance. Invariably he found
something to help out. This unbounded generosity with his time and resources
is an important part of his legacy. Some of us, as historians, owe a huge
personal debt to Bert for encouraging and stimulating our work. Over recent
years I spent countless hours with him, not only reading the documents he
had collected, but also listening to the stories he told, gleaned from the
many activists he had befriended over the years. He had a brilliant memory
for detail and for amusing anecdotes. My experiences are not unique. Bert’s
generosity will be warmly remembered, as will his wit, wisdom and sheer
enthusiasm for New Zealand labour history. The message of so much of Bert’s
writing is that people, whether working collectively or individually, can
make a difference. His life served to make that argument even more
convincing.
Condolences arrived to
my mother from many people, including political leaders, with a hand-written
letter from the Governor-General. Helen Clark, later to become Prime
Minister, called him a “remarkable man….His commitment to economic and
social justice, and to peace, was a shining example for all of us”. The
leader of the New Zealand Alliance Party, Jim Anderton, described him as one
of the “unsung great New Zealanders”.
As the eldest child I
inherited the family photo albums and some of his papers. And as I was
sorting through these I found that at some point he had written a 21-page
memoir of his life as a teenager in Vienna, which he had titled “Work in the
Underground”. I read it in amazement, and with a swelling lump in my throat,
as I discovered a new, heroic father I had never known.
It told how as a
teenager he had worked actively in the Communist underground, fighting the
growing Nazi menace, and regularly harassed by the police. It told of his
work with various revolutionary groups, notably the underground youth
organisation Rote Falken (Red Falcons), a kind of Communist boy-scouts
organisation with a large membership.
The leaders of this
body were continually threatened by both the police and the powerful
Catholic Church, which used to denounce them with the words of Jesus in
Matthew’s gospel: “If anyone causes one of these youngsters who trusts in me
to lose faith, it would be better for that person to be thrown into the sea
with a large millstone tied around the neck.”
At the age of 19—far
younger than previous leaders—my father assumed national leadership of the
Red Falcons, before losing the position shortly after, in factional
fighting. The memoir hints at this being good fortune; for when the Nazis
took Austria the leaders of the underground Communist groups were among the
first to be rounded up and sent to the concentration camps.
Here are three short
excerpts from the memoir:
Every Sunday, weather
permitting, our group would go for a trip into the Vienna Woods. They were
outside the city boundaries and thus outside the jurisdiction of the police.
Gendarmes were few and far between and the Woods were always full of
underground groups, Communists, Socialists, Nazis and whatever. We had our
own regular spot, a little clearing, and first thing after arriving the food
was collected from those who could afford to bring some (many couldn’t) and
handed to the fatigue party for equal distribution at meal hours. Mornings
were usually taken up with political study, lectures and discussion.
Afternoons were devoted to sports and games, but even the games had a
political flavour—instead of “Der Kaiser schickt Soldaten aus” we played
“Der Lenin schickt Soldaten aus”. In the evening we sang and at the end of
the day we had a regular break-up ceremony when the whole group stood in a
circle and sang the Internationale, all three verses, finishing with a
shouted Rotfront that would have raised any roof. Then we marched back in
orderly ranks, still singing our fighting songs, “Die Arbeiter von Wien” or
“Roter Fliegermarsch”. As we marched singing towards the town, people on all
sides would cheer us and in the semi-darkness many joined our ranks and
joined our singing. We usually dispersed at the train terminus but
sometimes, forgetting caution, we would go on marching and singing right
into the suburbs.
At six in the morning
our doorbell rang. It was a detective. “Were you the leader of the
Hilfszentrale group in Dobling?” he asked. I said yes, and he then asked me
for the membership list. We had never kept any of course but I said he might
find it at the head office, which had long been closed. “Never mind,” he
said. “Get dressed. You can tell all this to the Commissioner.” The local
police station was only a few minutes’ walking distance but the detective
took me to the tram stop. “Where are we going?” I asked. “To the Ottakring
station,” he replied. This made it worse, because Ottakring had the
reputation of beating up left-wing political suspects….At last the
interrogation started. I was questioned by the notorious Amler, assistant to
the Commissioner. “You were a member of the VSM,” he started. It was not
true and I denied it. “Gretl Reuss has given evidence,” he pretended to read
from some paper, “that Herbert Roth was a member of the VSM.” Gretl was a
member of our group, daughter of the German actor Leo Reuss, but I now knew
that he was lying, for although Herbert was my first name, I was always
called by my second name Otto, and the name Herbert was not known to any of
my friends. I asked the inspector why he was trying to pin something on to
me which he knew was untrue, and he got annoyed and started shouting, and
then changed the subject….His final question was, “Why was the Hilfszentrale
banned?” Looking as innocent as possible, I replied, “I don’t know, I read
about it in the papers.” Whereupon he again lost his temper and told me to
get out and never show my face again.
Although I never again
worked for the GRSV [United Red Students’ League], I knew its members and
they usually gave me advance notice of their “actions” so that I could clear
my house of incriminating material in case the police made random arrests.
They had teams of chemical and technical students developing ideas and
manufacturing mechanical devices, and their “actions” were usually of a high
standard. I was present when the famous German physicist Nernst spoke at our
Institute and a shower of leaflets denouncing Nazism descended on the
audience. They fell out of a gadget with a time-mechanism which had been
fitted to the banister of the balcony seats. Another favourite device was to
write slogans with fluoric acid on glass windows. They generally remained
visible for a long time, but when “Long Live the Soviet Union” appeared on
the huge glass door of our Institute on 7 November 1937 the doors were
boarded up. Another time a red flag unrolled slowly during one of the
compulsory lectures on Catholic Doctrine of the State, which all students
had to attend. It had been rolled up in the neon lighting tube above the
blackboard and the time-mechanism consisted of an acid which slowly corroded
the supporting string. The professor called in the policeman who always
stood guard outside this lecture, to remove the flag. This he did, but as he
was not supposed to leave, he then stood outside until the end of the
lecture with a red flag in his hand, much to the amusement of students who
passed by. This “action” however caused an argument within the GRSV as the
flag had carried only the hammer and sickle and not the socialist three
arrows.
It is exciting and at
times heroic story-telling, and I still do not understand why my father
never shared it with me when I was growing up. They are just the kinds of
exploits that would rouse a kid’s excitement.
There is more. In
1998, Maurice Gee, one of New Zealand’s top writers (described once in the
Sunday Times in London as one of the finest writers in the
English-speaking world), published his latest novel,
Live Bodies, a work that went on to win the prize for best novel at
that year’s New Zealand literary awards. It is a moody, fictional account of
the life of a Vienna-born Jew in New Zealand named Josef Mandl, and Gee
acknowledged that early chapters owed much to my father’s papers, now in a
Wellington library.
Thus, Mandl was once a
leader of the Red Falcon youth movement and he is involved in much
underground Socialist activity. At times (as Gee acknowledged) Mandl is
quoting directly from my father’s memoir, with group meetings in the Vienna
Woods, a red flag hidden with a time mechanism in neon lighting during a
compulsory university lecture on Catholic Doctrine of the State, and
confrontations with the police. (Late in the novel, Mandl admits to
disappointment with his son, who is involved in dubious real estate
transactions.)
To ensure that readers
do not think Josef Mandl is really my father, Gee has actually made my
father into one of the characters in the book, in a brief appearance as a
daring young revolutionary in Vienna.
Meanwhile, I have been
left ruefully recalling a typically witty remark by former US Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger: “The nice thing about being famous is that you can
bore people and they think it’s all their fault.” I thought I had worked
through all the problems of my relationship with my father. But now,
occasionally, I can’t help imagining him musing: “The nice thing about being
famous is that you can be a distant dad and your son will think it’s all his
fault.”
There is still more.
After he arrived in New Zealand, in 1940, my father spent a couple of years
working in factories and on farms, and then joined the Royal New Zealand Air
Force, where he became a weather officer. Each morning, he released a
balloon with a transmitter attached, to monitor weather patterns. When the
balloon burst, a parachute opened and carried the transmitter to earth. A
label on the transmitter asked the person who found it to turn it in to the
nearest post office.
On a couple of
occasions, according to my father, short-sighted farmers saw the parachutes
drifting down on their acreage, and, assuming it was the start of the
much-feared Japanese invasion, grabbed shotguns and blasted the transmitters
to pieces.
On his discharge from
the military my father was entitled, like virtually every other serving New
Zealand soldier in World War II, to some medals. But as an idealistic
Communist, a believer in world peace and world government, he refused to
accept them. On a few occasions, as children, my brother and I urged him to
claim them. “Go and earn your own medals,” he snapped at us, and it became
another off-limits area of conversation.
After he died, I wrote
to the New Zealand Ministry of Defence and asked if the medals were still
available. By return of mail I received them—the New Zealand War Service
Medal, the War Medal 1939-45 and the Defence Medal.
Coin and medal dealers
have told me they are among the most common medals around, with minimal
value for collectors. My father once said the soldiers called them
EBMs—Every Bugger’s Medals.
Never mind. I keep
them in a drawer of my desk. My three boys sometimes ask to see them. They
ask questions about them; they pin them on; they take them to school for
show-and-tell. They are too young to understand the horror of war. They only
know that heroes get medals. They have a special hero. It is their
grandfather.
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