Auntie Fori wanted to learn the history of the people to whom she belonged, but from whom, sixty-seven years earlier she had moved away, to the heat and dust and challenges of India.
I told her that as soon as I was back in Britain I would write to her, setting out each week, in letter form, a segment of the Jewish story,
starting with Abraham, or perhaps with Adam.
Two and a half years later the last letter was put into the post.
Auntie Fori was then ninety-two.
Hear Sir Martin share
The Story of The Jewish People: Letters to Auntie Fori
Sir Martin's Blog
Hanukah, from The Story of the Jewish People
You may have noticed … different spellings for Hanukah. Gloria Donen Sosin, an American correspondent of mine, has just sent me an article in which she notes no less than eighteen different spellings – in English transliteration alone – of the five Hebrew letters that make up the name of the festival: Hh-N-V-K-H. Among the variant spellings.....Read More
“Sir Martin Gilbert’s Atlas of the Second World War is a work of extraordinary scholarship….
No university, library, historian – or anyone interested in World War II –
will want to be without it.” Henry Kissinger
Enter code MGA98 at checkout to receive 20% off this title until December 31st
From Esther Gilbert
At the Pearl Harbor Museum
In February 2004, Martin and I spent a day in Hawaii. We were on a cruise, the P & O liner Aurora, where Martin was lecturing on Churchill, and we had one day in Honolulu. Travelling with Martin did not entail soaking up sun and surf – even in Hawaii! Rather it was – as many days were – an opportunity to explore history, wherever we happened to find ourselves. Thus, our first stop in Honolulu was Pearl Harbor, the Museum, and the harbour, where the course of history and America's view of its invincibility changed.
It is a very moving exhibit, the harbour is very small considering its place in history. But my strongest memory was of seeing an Oriental gentleman also going through the museum. He could well have been a Japanese tourist; he could have been a Japanese-American whose family had been in the States for more generations than my own. I did not speak to him but I wondered what he thought, being there. But even more, I marvelled at how I had lived to see the day when I would be at that place where the course of history was changed, seeing it along with a man who also had some connection, either personally or historically.
Seeing it along with him gave me a great sense of peace, a sense that swords can be beaten into ploughshares, that we can go through agonizing upheavals and life goes on. And we can heal together.
