Stalin Ate My Homework

To Molly.

The rumour went round the
kids in the neighbourhood like a forest fire:
Bambi
would be coming to
the Gaumont cinema in Oakfield Road. It was a brilliant piece of marketing. Every
ten years or so the Disney organisation would relaunch their major cartoon
movies so that a whole new generation of children became hysterical with
anticipation. Whenever a group of us six-year-olds came together, in the
playground at break-time or running around the streets after school, we
imagined what the film would be like, conjecturing deliriously and inaccurately
on the possible storyline. More than anything else there was some collective
sense, some morphic resonance that told us all that seeing
Bambi
was
going to be a defining moment in our young lives.

Usually
I was at the centre of any wild speculation that was going on, dreaming up mad
theories about the half-understood world — the year before, I had successfully
convinced all the other kids that peas were a form of small insect. But on this
occasion there was something lacking in the quality of my guesswork, a
hesitation, an uncertainty which the others sensed, because for me, getting in
to see
Bambi
was going to be a huge challenge. The lives of other
children, when they were away from their families seemed to be entirely free
from adult interference —there was a range of activities such as purchasing
comics, seeing films, games of hide-and-seek and tag, buying and playing with
toys, that were regarded by both sides as ‘kids’ things’. For my friends, going
to see
Bambi
would simply mean their mum or dad buying them a ticket and
then crossing over Oakfield Road to the cinema in a big, noisy gang. My life
wasn’t like that. It was subject to all kinds of restrictions, caveats and
provisos, both physical and ideological. I was never entirely sure what was
going to be forbidden and what was going to be encouraged in our house, but I
suspected that something as incredible as
Bambi
was certain to be on the
prohibited list and I knew that if I was going to see this film it would be a
complex affair requiring a great deal of subtle negotiation, possibly with a
side order of screaming and crying.

It wasn’t
just seeing the film, fantastic as that was likely to be, that obsessed me — it
was that the whole event represented a dream not exactly of freedom but of
equality. I had begun to suspect that we weren’t like other families. There
were things we believed, things we did, that nobody else in the street did,
things that inevitably marked me out as different. What I really longed for
and what I thought going to the pictures to see
Bambi
would give me was
a chance, for once, to be just one of the crowd. I was convinced that, by
taking part in such a powerful cultural event as the first showing for a
decade of this animation masterpiece, everything that was confusing about other
people’s behaviour would become clear and all that was strange about my own
would somehow magically vanish. I would be exactly like everyone else.

My
parents needed to understand that they had to allow me to see
Bambi!
But
they didn’t. Whatever pleas I made, whatever tantrums I threw, they
steadfastly refused to let me go. They had two reasons. My parents disapproved
of most of the products of Hollywood but they had a particular dislike for
anything made by the Walt Disney company ‘Uncle Walt’ had been an enthusiastic
supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his anti-Communist witch-hunts of the
early 1950s, so they hated him for that. But even if he hadn’t been a
semi-fascist they would still have had an aversion to his gaudy cartoons and
sentimental wildlife films. More significantly in this case, my mother had the
idea that I was a sensitive, delicate, artistic boy and she was worried that I
would be distressed by the famously child-traumatising scene in which Bambi’s
mother is killed by hunters in the forest.

Yet
they didn’t wish to be cruel. They understood that I was missing out on seeing
an important and culturally significant film, so as a consolation the three of
us took the 26 bus into town to attend a screening of Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938
film
Alexander Nevsky
at Liverpool’s Unity Theatre. In
Alexander
Nevsky
there are several scenes of ritualistic child sacrifice and a famous
thirty-minute-long sequence set on a frozen lake beside the city of Novgorod in
which Teutonic knights in rippling white robes, mounted on huge snorting
metal-clad stallions, only their cruel eyes visible through the cross-shaped
slits in their sinister helmets, charge the defending Russian soldiers across
the icebound water. When they are halfway over, the weight of their armour
causes the ice to crack and the knights tumble one by one into the freezing
blackness. Desperately the men and their terrified, eye-rolling horses are
dragged beneath the deadly water, leaving not a trace behind them.

As I
sat in that smoky, beer-smelling room, stunned and disturbed by the flickering
black and white images on the screen, it began to dawn on me that all my
efforts to be one of the crowd, to be just like the other kids in the street,
were doomed to failure. That no matter how hard I tried, I was always going to
be the boy who saw Sergei Eisenstein’s
Alexander Nevsky
instead of Walt
Disney’s
Bambi.

My maternal grandfather,
Alexander Mendelson, the
shamas
— a combination of caretaker and
secretary — of the Crown Street Synagogue, died not knowing that his daughter
was married to a non-Jew, was expecting a child, had joined the Communist Party
and was living in a terraced house in Anfield at the opposite end of Liverpool.
My mother experienced a great deal of conflict over not telling her father
about her new life and her baby, but if a girl married out of the Jewish faith
the common practice amongst devout families was to ‘sit shiva’ for them, to
mount the week-long period of grief and mourning held for a dead relative and
then to treat the errant daughter as if she was in fact dead. She may have
wished to be open with her family, to tell them all about her new circle of
friends, this new faith she had found and her new husband, but she convinced
herself that it was safer to lie. My mother informed her parents that she was
leaving the family home, also in Crown Street, and moving across to the other
side of the city to, as she told them, ‘live in a flat’. Once the patriarch was
dead she felt able to tell her mother, brother and sisters her true situation.
It is a testament to their good nature, and perhaps a little to their fear of
my mother’s furious temper, that they didn’t then cut her off.

My
parents met in 1947 at a discussion group called the Liverpool Socialist Club
which assembled for talks, debates and lectures of a left-wing nature at the
Stork Hotel in Queen’s Square. Notions of social justice, equality and the
communal ownership of the means of production were so fashionable that the
owner of this smart city centre venue let them have the room for free, even
though they were planning, at some point in the future, to take his hotel off
him.

At the
time of their marriage my father, Joe Sayle, was forty-three years old and my
mother, Malka (also known as Molly) Mendelson, was thirty-two. Molly was the
oldest child in a family of nine who lived in the heart of Liverpool’s poor
Jewish quarter. Her mother had been born in the city, but her father was an
immigrant who had fled Latvia, then under Russian jurisdiction, as a teenager
fearing conscription into the tsarist army During the nineteenth century the
Russian authorities would sweep up any Jewish male, some as young as twelve,
and not release them from military service for twenty-five years, when they
would be dumped, worn out and confused and often thousands of miles away from
their home.

According
to Molly her father looked like a lot of the inhabitants of the Crown Street
ghetto — men and women who had brought their way of life intact from the old
country His face was covered by a flowing black beard, and winter or summer he
dressed in a long dusty coat and big black hat. Not one of my mother’s many
sisters or her brother ever deviated the tiniest bit from the path laid down
for them — they remained throughout their lives devout Jews, staying within the
faith, unquestioning and placid. That life was never for Molly. Until she was
eleven her father treated her, his first-born, like an equal, encouraging her
to learn and to read, chatting to her about his activities during the day,
Jewish law and life back in Russia. Once her brother was born, however, all the
attention suddenly stopped: now he had a son, her father was only interested
in talking to him. But by then her curiosity had been awakened.