Paul Kleiman

Every menorah tells a story

This is one of our menorahs (more properly a chanukiah, a menorah has seven branches, but nearly everyone calls the eight branch version a menorah) ) that we light on Chanukah, the Jewish ‘Festival of Light’ that Jews around the world celebrate. The festival lasts for eight days, and you start lighting one candle on the first night, and end with lighting eight candles on the last night. The candles are lit by a candle known as the shamas.

Menorahs come in all shapes, sizes and materials: from the traditional eight branch candelabra plus the shamas candle made in brass or silver, to ultra-modern designs of great ingenuity and beauty. Essentially anything goes as long as the basics are met i.e. eight candles in some form of row plus the shamas candle, and many designers have taken up the challenge.

We have acquired several menorahs over the years. Some were gifts. Some we’ve inherited from parents and grandparents. A few we’ve bought.

(Here are some of the menorahs we’ve acquired, with their stories: Eight Days of Chanukah)

But this menorah, quite large and made of brass, which we call our ‘Irish menorah’ is my favourite one.

Several years ago, when our now adult children were really just children, we were on holiday in the far south west of Ireland. West Cork to be precise. We were staying on a very small island called Long Island in Roaringwater Bay and, as there were no shops, we had to cross over by boat to the small village of Schull on the mainland to get supplies. I say ‘we’, but I have to admit that it was my partner, Jo, who usually went off to do the shopping while I stayed and supervised – from a very relaxed distance – the children, as they played amongst the rock pools and went off with the small gang of other children also staying on the island.

Among the few shops in the village there an ‘antique shop’, which was actually more of a junk shop. Jo stopped one day, and looked into the shop. And there, amongst the usual bric-a-brac, was a brass menorah. She could see the label which said: ‘8 branch candelabra with extra candle holder’. Amazed, and knowing there were very few if any Jews in that part of Ireland, she asked the shop owner where it had come from. The woman didn’t know, and really didn’t know what it was, despite the Star of David in the centre of the menorah. So Jo bought it, for the ridiculous price of £8.00

When we got it back to our little holiday cottage and looked at it closely we realised that it was designed to come apart. By turning the Star of David, which was attached to a long, thin screw, we could unscrew it from the heavy base, and then everything came apart. It was, of course, designed to be taken apart, and the various parts placed in a case – which had obviously disappeared somewhere along the menorah’s long journey to a junk shop window in West Cork.

We reckoned, after a bit of googling, that it was c. 120 years old, had probably originated in Central Europe, and the chances were that it had belonged to one of the many thousands of families – like our own families – who came to the then British Isles and beyond to escape antisemitism, pogroms and persecution and to seek a new life.

Of course we’ll never really know the real story. But as I watch that old brass menorah glow as the candles burn and flicker, I feel a extraordinary link to the past: a link in a chain that remains – despite the tribulations and tragedies of history – unbroken.

Not a story I usually tell: the Yorkshire Ripper and me

This is not a story I usually tell, but the news of Peter Sutcliffe’s death takes me back to 1979-80 when the police regarded me as a potential suspect.

I had been living in Leeds and Bradford from 1977-79, working for a touring theatre company. In late August 1979 I moved to Peterborough to join another touring theatre company. That first weekend I borrowed the company van to drive up to Leeds to collect all my belongings and those of a Leeds friend who had also moved to Peterborough. I stayed with friends and parked the van in Chapeltown, which had a somewhat notorious reputation in those days, and had been the scene of some of Sutcliffe’s murders. I had also briefly lived in Chapeltown when I first arrived in Leeds in 1977, having lived in Hull from 1975.

That weekend Sutcliffe murdered Barbara Leach, a student, in Bradford.

In early 1980, in Peterborough, the police called the theatre company to ask who was driving the van that weekend in Leeds back in September. They had obviously and regularly been noting registration numbers in the areas connected to the murders.

I was asked to report to Peterborough Police station and was interviewed by two local CID officers. They asked all the obvious questions – What I did? Why was I in Leeds that weekend? Had I ever lived in Leeds/Bradford?

I answered their questions and I thought that was it. But no.

They were clearly thinking: worked in theatre, travelled around West Yorkshire late at night, my time living in Hull, Leeds and Bradford coincided with the period of the murders, etc. This was also the time when the police were still obsessed with the ‘Wearside Jack’ tape and letters. So perhaps they thought I could also do accents.

I was called in again a few weeks later for another interview, and this time it was rather more formal. It was the same two local CID officers. I was asked to provide examples of my handwriting and to speak into a voice recorder. They asked me my shoe size (Size 7….the same, as it turned out, as Sutcliffe’s!). If DNA testing had been available in those days (it was introduced in 1985) no doubt I would have been asked to provide a sample. They also asked me what I was doing on various dates over the past few years. That wasn’t easy, but I could check against touring dates. But even that still left me often driving home late at night from all over West Yorkshire.

I also, at that time, had dark bushy hair and a dark beard….which also matched the few descriptions of the killer.

For the third interview, the two detectives came to my house. I half-joked about being arrested. They half-joked back that if there was a fourth interview it WOULD be under arrest!

We went through virtually everything we’d been through before and they left saying that they’d be in touch.

I never heard from them again.

Sutcliffe was arrested in January 1981 for driving with false number plates. When interviewed in connection to the murders, he confessed.

We now know the police completely bungled their enquiry. They not only interviewed Sutcliffe several times, but were tipped off about him, but that tip-off disappeared into their dysfunctional indexing system. They were also told by a number of experts that the ‘Wearside Jack’ stuff was a hoax but ignored that advice. The perpetrator of the hoax – John Humble – was eventually caught in 2005, having been identified through the DNA left on the envelopes he used to send the letters.

The tracing of car and van registration numbers led to thousands of interviews. The vast majority of those contacted were eliminated right at the start. It just so happened that I wasn’t.

In all the focus on Sutcliffe it’s essential to remember his 22 victims and those close to them, and the fear that deeply affected those living in and around West Yorkshire and beyond.

And in a weird bit of tragic serendipity, I’ve just discovered that one of my regular cycle rides around my local area in Manchester takes me right past the small wasteland site where the body of Jean Jordan, Sutcliffe’s sixth victim, was found.

A stone for Rocky

On a visit to the cemetery and the kindness of strangers. Our story for Baby Loss Awareness Week.

The cemetery where our baby son is buried is a relatively new one, and for a number of years his grave lay alone in the children’s section, by the fence on the far side of the cemetery, well away from the small but slowly increasing number of adult graves.

If we decide to visit – which we do once or perhaps twice a year – then we’ll bring our thoughts, some cleaning materials, and four small stones. Our thoughts are our own, but we’ll use the cleaning stuff to clear away the debris and discolourations left by the seasons, the overhanging trees, and the local wildlife – both animal and human.

And when we’re ready to leave, and as flowers are not encouraged, we’ll follow Jewish custom and place the four stones on the grave: one each for my wife, myself and our two surviving children as a sign of respect and remembrance.

Some time ago, at the same cemetery, I attended the funeral of an elderly member of our community. At the end of the service, as people drifted away, I headed across the open expanse of grass towards the childrens’ section and our baby’s grave. We hadn’t visited for a long while, and I was expecting to see the usual untidiness. However, as I approached I noticed that the grave looked particularly clean and tidy. As I got nearer I saw that someone had left a single stone by our son’s name. This perplexed me as I knew that the stones we’d left ages before would have disappeared, and I knew of no one else who might wish to visit.

Standing there, lost in thought, I became aware of someone approaching. I turned to see an elderly lady who must have been at the funeral. She touched my arm and asked, in a precise English still tinged with the German of her youth “Are you the father?”.

Managing to suppress the urge – even in that situation – to make a smart-alec and totally inappropriate response, I answered simply that I was.

She smiled and said, “I’m so glad. I wasn’t sure if there was family, and I couldn’t bear the thought of this little chap all alone over here”.

It turned out that on her regular visits to her husband’s grave, she would come over to our baby’s grave, clean up what she could, say a little prayer, and leave a stone as a sign that someone had visited , that someone cared.

In a time of increasing fear for ourselves and for the world at large, it is all-too-easy to turn in on ourselves and focus on that which is ours. We forget at our peril that it is so often the kindness of strangers, the selfless reaching out to help others, that is a real force for good in the world. If, when doing nothing is by far the easier option, we each made that extra effort to help the stranger, to welcome the ‘other’ then we might go some way to mend at least some of the many wounds and sorrows of our age and our planet.

(We were wonderfully supported by and have supported Sands, the Stillbirth and Neo-Natal Death charity http://www.sands.org.uk)

Is it curtains for the arts, banished beyond the Debatable Hills?

Guildhall_Theatre-closed

After the UK government promised financial support to other sectors of the economy, and after intense pressure on the Culture Secretary Oliver “I won’t let you down” Dowden, the arts eventually received £1.5bn.

Despite the support, which looks like it is being targeted only at building-based companies, here is a growing feeling that the government is quite prepared to let whole sections of the creative sector ‘go to the wall’ despite the fact that the sector as whole contributes massively to the GDP. More disturbingly, it is not necessarily the whole of the creative sector, which now includes the important and profitable video and computer games industry, but those parts of the sector that are seen to be less ‘valuable’ in economic terms and which, coincidentally, voted in large part against Brexit and against the Tories at the last election. Boris Johnson and his chief adviser Dominic Cummings have a well-deserved (and well-evidenced) reputation for valuing loyalty to Brexit above all other considerations.

The future for the live arts looks very bleak indeed, and I’m reminded of a sentence from a 2015 book by the eminent producer and impresario Michael Kaiser titled ‘Curtains? The Future of the Performing Arts in America’. Examining all the current but pre-Covid trends, Kaiser describes a ‘doomsday scenario’ in which, across America, many theatres, arts centres and other performance venues, hit by the decline in audiences and/or funding, “sit vacant, reminders of a different era, not unlike the Colosseum in Rome and the Parthenon in Athens”. Kaiser was projecting some years into the future, but in the UK the Covid crisis has massively accelerated the onset of that doomsday scenario.

Thinking about all this I was reminded of a book I read years ago, which remains one of my favourite books (it’s also on Neil Gaiman’s list of all-time favourites, so I’m in good company). The book is called Lud-in-the-Mist, written in 1926 by Hope Mirrlees. Mirrlees was a classicist, and much of her work dealt with the contested boundaries of Art and Life.

In Lud-in-the-Mist there are two countries. There is the land of Dorimare, a nation of stolid burghers, merchants and artisans. A rather prim and very proper place, where everyone knows their place, where the motto is essentially ‘it’s the economy, stupid’, and where the arts are relegated to activities such as needlework and country dancing: pursuits for the refinement of gentlewomen and gentlemen.

On the border of Dorimare, however, on the other side of the Debatable Hills, lies the land of Faerie, a strange, dark land full of mysteries and wonders…not all of them pleasant. The upright citizens of Dorimare so fear the land that lies beyond those dread hills, that the word ‘Faerie’ is never to be uttered.

Dorimare’s main city of Lud-in-the-Mist lies at the confluence of two rivers: the Dapple and the Dawl. The Dawl is like any other commercial river, but the Dapple happens to flow out of the land of Faerie, and brings with it fairy fruit, that is smuggled into Dorimare. Eating fairy fruit has a terrible effect on the upright citizens of Lud-in-the-Mist: it causes people to start singing strange songs, to spout poetry, to dance with abandon. In other words, it turns them mad.

The plot revolves around the disappearance of a group of young ladies and the Mayor’s son who have been kidnapped and taken to the land of Faerie, and the attempt of the Mayor, a bumbling, self-important, rather fatuous man to rescue them. (Any resemblance to a real persons is entirely coincidental). As a consequence of that quest, fundamental changes are wrought – to the Mayor and to Dorimare itself.

In Lud-in-the-Mist, Mirrlees is dealing with the division of the world into Apollonian and Dionysian aspects: the homely and the wild. There is also the long battle between Classicism and Romanticism, and Freud’s theories of the conscious and unconscious mind, and the relationship between terror and beauty.

The actor Mark Rylance, in an interview, said that the arts are essentially ‘mysterious’ which is why they frighten politicians and policy-makers, because they can’t control them, they can’t measure them.

I imagine the educational curriculum in Dorimare’s schools is very much what like the one demanded by Gradgrind in Dickens’ Hard Times;

“Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the mind of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.“

And if you think that’s rather extreme, consider this – handed to parents at a primary school in London in 2015:

‘The new programme of study in English is knowledge-based, this means its focus is on knowing facts rather than developing skills and understanding. It is also characterised by an increased emphasis on the technical aspects of language and less on the creative aspects.”

I was once asked, by the then German Federal Minister of Education as it happens, as we stood together in the queue for coffee at a conference on the future of Arts Higher Education in Europe, what it was that had made the UK such a world leader in art, design, fashion, music , theatre, etc? He was comparing the UK with his own country and the fact that, with a few notable exceptions, Germany – with a relatively successful economy compared to the UK – had demonstrated nothing like that level of consistent creative output over the years.

I didn’t have a rigorously researched, evidence-based answer to give him, but I did say that I thought it had something to do with our long history and tradition of non-conformity, of sticking two fingers up to authority, and our high and genuine tolerance of mavericks and eccentrics. Neither of which, I suggested humbly, were common attributes in his own country.

The Minister said ‘Ah, that’s very interesting’…and moved on.

I was thinking about Lud-in-the-Mist because it seems to me we are increasingly living in a country which is becoming more Dorimare-like by the day, where the arts are increasingly banished to the equivalent of the land of Faerie, where creativity is associated with the creation of goods and wealth, where any hint of an artistic or genuinely creative spirit is dismissed as bad influence, and to be actively discouraged and eliminated.

In our education system there is now a very real danger, evidenced by the significant drop in the take-up of arts subjects, of subjects like art, dance, drama and music disappearing entirely from the formal curriculum (to be replaced by an ‘After School Club’?). That already was a flashing danger signal for the wider creative arts sector, cutting off the pipeline of interest, skills and talent on which the sector relies. Now we are faced with the spectre of a cultural wasteland, not unlike Kaiser’s ‘doomsday’ scenario.

A hundred years ago, in Lud-in-the-Mist, Hope Mirrless asked how might we truly embrace the arts in all their wondrous, dangerous, life-affirming glory along with the eccentrics and mavericks? Or are we fated to banish them, their works and deeds, to that strange, wonderful, forbidden land beyond the Debatable Hills?

The final, celebratory chapter of Lud-in-the-Mist, as the citizens of Dorimare throw open the gates of the city to allow those mysterious, dangerous, life-affirming Faeries to enter, provides the answer.

Learning at the Edge of Covid Chaos

We live in a time of chaos, as rich in the potential for disaster as for new possibilities.
Margaret Wheatley

It is perhaps an understatement to say that, in regard to higher education, we are living in interesting times. This piece is written (in June 2020) during a period of particularly momentous upheavals. We face a series of national and international crises. The impacts of these various crises, and the effects of the various actions taken to deal with them, are felt everywhere, and higher education systems are not immune. The shapes and forms of higher education are being severely shaken and stirred as the tectonic plates upon which they have been built shift dramatically beneath them.

In the UK, the challenges for higher education have been exacerbated by the paradigm shift from the long-standing acceptance of higher education as a public good, largely financed by public funds to regarding it as a lightly regulated market in which consumer demand, in the form of student choice, is sovereign in determining what is offered by service providers (i.e. universities).

So, what might we do, in higher education, to negotiate our way through what many find to be an unfamiliar, discomforting, increasingly complex landscape?

The use of the word ‘might’ in the question above is intentional. The eminent drama teacher and educationalist Dorothy Heathcote used to say that the most important word in education is the word ‘might’. Demand of a child ‘What is the answer to this question or problem?’ and it closes down the possibilities. But ask ‘What might be the answer?’ and it opens up those possibilities, and encourages curiosity, creativity and creative approaches to problem-solving.

One of the things we might usefully do, and which those who make and decide educational policy are frequently criticised for signally failing to do, is to strive to understand the complex and often chaotic nature of what confronts us. Managing complexity and the complex adaptive systems that are our higher education institutions, is now the greatest challenge for institutional leaders, and there are three factors that might provide them with the best opportunity to capitalise on that complexity: creativity, operational dexterity and reinventing the relationship with their students.

Complex adaptive systems are like eco-systems: they are constantly changing and evolving, and their complexity means that the ability of human agents to control them in any meaningful, purposeful way is virtually non-existent. Such systems are adaptive in that they are self-evolving, agile and, importantly, inherently unpredictable. Crucially they rely on disequilibrium and feedback in order to develop and grow. To stay viable, they need to keep themselves off-balance, maintaining themselves in a state of non-equilibrium. A successful complex adaptive system frequently creates or deliberately seeks out feedback and information in the form of perturbances or disturbances that might threaten its stability and knock it off balance, thus producing the disequilibrium that is necessary for growth.

Such systems tend to ‘self-organise’ around changes, and small changes can have big impacts: the well-known ‘butterfly effect’. So, in a time of crisis, when, with the best possible motives of course, we start changing the ways we operate, we may have little or no idea of the possible consequences.

The diagram below illustrates the ‘complexity continuum’ between stasis and chaos. Based on the work of Ralph Stacey and Paul Tosey it illustrates how a system’s search for, or need for, equilibrium in the form of certainty and agreement produces stasis. It also shows how the further one travels away from certainty and agreement, the nearer one approaches a state of chaos. Right at the ‘edge of chaos’ is the point at which a system is poised just before it moves into an actual chaotic state. It is where the components of a system are in a state of flux, never quite locking into place but, at the same time, never quite dissolving into turbulence.

It is there, right on the edge of chaos, where creativity is most potent. It is also an area where levels of energy and emotion are high, where risk-taking, excitement and exhaustion co-exist in a ferment of activity. It is characterised by encounters with uncertainty, anxiety, doubt, chance, error and ‘muddling through’. There is great potential for novel forms of relationships emerging, but there is also the possibility of disintegration.

The problem, for higher education systems (as in many other systems), is that there is a constant ‘gravitational pull’ towards certainty and agreement: towards stasis. That pull exists at all levels, from the macro level of educational policy to the micro level of module learning outcomes, and it requires and takes up a lot energy to resist it. Higher education institutions are also characterised by organised or ‘engrooved’ sets of social and cultural practices. These are long-established, often tacit, patterns of behaviour that are difficult to change and which often act as barriers to operational dexterity as changes often falter and practices ‘snap back’ to old models.

So in what, for many higher education institutions, is a time of existential crisis, survival depends on creativity and the need for individuals and groups who are able to adapt and operate successfully in a highly complex and rapidly changing environments. Those higher education institutions that are tied to models and paradigms of learning and teaching (and the systems that support them) that are designed for a far less complex, more stable, predictable world will, inevitably, struggle.

Fortunately, higher education is full of intelligent, creative people who understand all too well – through their own day-to-day experiences – that learning and teaching is complex and, sometimes, chaotic, and that the systems and processes that we create around that experience, or have created for us, are not always best suited to dealing with that complexity. It is also clear that the professional act of teaching with the still significant but also significantly decreasing autonomy attached to this role, provides fertile conditions for people to be creative in order to confront those complexities and to really enhance students’ learning.

Changes in higher education rarely manifest themselves with dramatic abruptness. More often than not, they creep up silently, diverting the flow of continuing traditions and practices stealthily but resolutely. The coronavirus crisis has fundamentally changed that ‘slow evolution’. It has swept as a tidal wave across and through our educational systems. But there is another wave sweeping through and across our systems: a relentless wave of digitisation and technological innovation, and it is vital to remember that while waves can drown you and currents can drag you away, you can also ride the waves and exploit the currents.

As wave after wave of new technologies have emerged and are still emerging, different ways to creatively interact and collaborate have arisen with them. In this context, play has become a persuasive and powerful tool. The invitation to play can bridge the gap from observation to participation. There is now extraordinary potential for cross-discipline conversations and projects around the vast wealth of possibilities presented by existing and emerging technologies. We will need to draw on our ability to tell stories, to create visually compelling messages and designs, to come up with new ways to organise and synthesise information. The key, however, is to ensure that these playful interactions are not about our relation to technology, but about creating new ways of experiencing education.