Most people are so determined to keep cheerful during these terrible times that many have invoked the mythical spirit of public goodwill displayed by British citizens during World War 2.
Give me a break!
As French Algerian novelist, Albert Camus suggests in ‘The Plague’, an escalating crisis like the Coronavirus pandemic produces the best and worst in us all.
Personally, I find notorious villains far more engaging than milk-and-water saints and such a man was Jewish Londoner Harry Dobkin, a delinquent who murdered, then dismembered his estranged wife and buried her remains on a bomb site in a vain attempt to make her look like a war casualty.
According to both Murderpedia and Steemit, when the charred, mummified remains of the former Miss Rachel Dubinski were almost coincidentally unearthed at the height of the London ‘Blitz’ in July 1942 they had been lying below the ruins of the Vauxhall Baptist Chapel for between 12 - 15 months.
I will leave you to read the full details at the links provided above as here I prefer to examine the clever, if now old-fashioned forensic techniques employed to identify the corpse and trace the murderer.
It was a superb piece of team sleuthing, led first by pathologist Dr Keith Simpson who discovered the deceased had died by strangulation; then the police, whose records showed she had been reported missing by her sister, Polly who in turn led them to Rachel’s dentist, Barnett Hopkin.
Finally, writes the author of the account on Murderpedia, “Miss Mary Newman, the head of the Photography Department at Guy's, superimposed a photograph of the skull on to a photograph of Rachel Dobkin, a technique first used six years earlier in the Buck Ruxton case. The fit was uncanny. The bones found in the crypt were the mortal remains of Mrs Rachel Dobkin”.
Most improbably, the Dobkins’ awful story became the stuff of a fictionalised short crime film, ‘The Drayton Case’, whose stars included John Le Mesurier, now best remembered for his role in the BBC TV situation comedy ‘Dad's Army’ and which in a roundabout way brings me back to base.
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Blood Libels, Then and Now
The feeling that succeeding generations fiercely sanctify and protect their forebears’ memory has been reinforced this week by social media chat about the early 20th century Beilis Affair.
The real story and character of Menachem Mendel Beilis and the ordeal he suffered at the hands of the Czarist Russian authorities on false accusations of ritual murder were used as the basis for the multi prizewinning novel ‘The Fixer’ by Bernard Malamud which in turn became a film. This was directed by John Frankenheimer and the screenplay was written by Dalton Trumbo, among the ‘Hollywood Ten’ imprisoned and then blacklisted for putative Communist sympathies.
I am sure that this was no coincidence as Beilis’s story will have resonated hugely with Trumbo for many reasons. Some years ago, the screenwriter’s life story was enshrined on film. It needs figures like his son, Christopher, also a film maker to explain to others like the descendants of Mendel Beilis why and how a factual documentary is quite different from a fictive piece of art. Certainly they won’t listen to me!
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The debate takes me to the monstrous artistic scandal of the week, the unveiling of the so-called ‘nouveau baroque’ painting, ‘The Martyrdom of Saint Simonino of Trento, for Jewish Ritual Murder’.
Whatever Italian artist, Giovanni Gasparro and his legion fans may say, the real power of the work is neither in its fine draughtsmanship and exquisite colouration, nor its astute pre-Easter and pre-Passover timing: It lies firmly in the evident glee with which he has depicted the anti-Jewish stereotypical characters in the false, hate-filled story.
The Italian episode was vastly worse than the Beilis Affair, involving Jews being forced to make false confessions to murder and then being burnt at the stake.
Gasparro, according to his online biography, enjoys the official patronage of UNESCO, the Italian state and many churches. Further, he boasts a huge social media following: At the last count, more than 2,000 people had reacted to the controversial work on his Facebook page, while it produced 6.2K comments and 1.4K shares.
I do hope that someone persuades Gasparro that if he wishes to honour his faith in paint, there are a million other ways to do so.
The current pandemic has also produced ‘mini’ libels: While a ‘New York Times’ op-ed compared the Corona quarantine to an IDF military curfew on Palestinians in 2002 without mentioning suicide bombings, the Palestinian Authority initially equated Israel with the virus and only after a long silence, did it admit to cooperating with Israel during the emergency. By then, of course, more damage had been done.
Corona as the Theatre of the Absurd
Try as I may, I cannot find any well-known recent commentators who have referred to Camus’s novel, ‘The Plague’. This is especially surprising in Israel where the great master of absurdist philosophy and art is said to be universally revered.
Professor David Ohana remarks in his work, ‘Israel and Its Mediterranean Identity’ that Camus experienced the Vichy regime’s treatment of its Jews “close at hand through the family of his wife Francine, his schoolmates, neighbors, and fellow intellectuals … Most of Camus’s friends at that period in Algeria were Jews”.
André Cohen, his family doctor became “a victim of the fascist plague that was spreading in Algeria: only two percent of the Jewish doctors were permitted to work in their profession, and there was a similar quota in governmental positions. When the decrees were imposed in Oran, Dr Cohen had to stop working as a doctor”.
Ohana muses “… was Dr Cohen, the enlightened Jewish doctor, Camus’s model for Dr Rieux, the fighting doctor in ‘La Peste (The Plague)’, the outlines of which he began to commit to writing at that time? …
“Camus, who was influenced by ‘Moby Dick’, needed a symbol that would embody the subject he wished to describe in his allegorical novel. The plague of typhus that was raging in the town of Tlemcen gave him his inspiration. In 1941, at the time of the plague, he wrote in the newspaper ’Paris- Soir’, for which he worked, a short story that sketched out the main outlines of the plot of ‘The Plague’, which were fully developed about six years later”.
The past three-four months have indeed seen our global and virtual village turn into a huge stage depicting a strange, absurdist universe that no-one can yet fully interpret or explain. It now remains to be seen if any leading Jewish writers, be they in Israel or the Diaspora, will return Camus’s compliment and write something worthy of his enduring legacy – and the plague that’s irrevocably changed modern times.
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