Tanya Gold
Tanya Gold Interviews Lord Daniel Finkelstein on his new book ‘Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad’
Summary
Lord Finkelstein’s parents were both refugees: his mother from Hitler’s Germany; his father from Stalin’s Russia. In his superb new memoir, Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad, he shares their incredible stories.
Tanya Gold
Tanya Gold is a freelance journalist. She writes for the Spectator, the New Statesman, Harper’s Magazine, the New York Times, and others. She won feature writer of the year at the 2009 British Press Awards and arts and culture story of the year at the 2015 Foreign Press Association Awards.
Lord Daniel Finkelstein
Lord Daniel Finkelstein OBE is a former politician and is currently associate rditor of the Times. He is also a lead writer and a weekly political columnist. Before joining the Times in 2001, he was adviser to both Prime Minister John Major and conservative leader William Hague. He is the chairman of Policy Exchange and was elevated to the House of Lords in August 2013.
It’s absolutely central to me. And the, one of the things that I’m proudest of in the book is this extraordinary passage in the book from my aunt, written immediately after the war about what Friday evenings meant for them in Belsen. And anybody who reads that and think, “I can’t really understand the point of religion,” you know, you can, I’d love Richard Dawkins to read that. It’s so moving. And so I’ve never been someone, so lots of people have said, “How can you believe in God, given all the things that happened to your parents and how did they believe in God?” And my mother said, she never believed in the sort of God that finds your cat, right? She did however believe there was a spirit that united us all that was about more than we were. And my father believed very deeply, and I inherited this too, in the importance of tradition and learning and that, you know, that with Jews, with the Jewish tradition, you had thousands of years of Jewish literature and history and you know, obviously it being Jews debate where moral issues are discussed and we learn something the whole time. And, you know, maybe someone who looks, who looks at us, I don’t know, holding up a lamb shank on Passover will wonder what earth we’re doing. And we may even wonder it ourselves. But the wonder is the whole point. There’s some wisdom in these traditions and rituals, which is so vital and you know, it’s quite a nice thing to spend the whole of one’s life trying to work out what the wisdom is. And so, you know, so my family, we’re liberal Jews, but our Judaism is central to who we are. And you know, I love to be part of the community, which is very important to me.