And here's a first extract of what caught my attention about her grandfather:
Frank Goldsmith, fervently patriotic, joined his regiment and prepared to fight. The old photograph, my father’s sole memento, showed Frank ready to lead the men of his district to war against the enemy. They were unaware he had been born a German and there was no reason why his past should ever have become public. But in the first few weeks of war, a telegram addressed to Frank arrived at the local post office in Bury St Edmunds. It came from his brother-in-law, Ernst von Marx, who was by now a respected senior civil servant in Germany. It was sent by ordinary mail, not through diplomatic channels, and the contents were read by everyone at the post office. “How can you consider fighting for anyone other than your fatherland?” Ernst asked.
Within hours the news had spread throughout the constituency. Although Frank had never considered fighting for anyone other than Britain, and despite the fact that he had spent 10 years as a volunteer officer in his local regiment and was now a major, his constituents turned on him in a frenzy of spy mania. There were violent riots in Stowmarket. Protesters demanded that he be stripped of his commission and his parliamentary seat. In the villages around Cavenham, there were clashes between his supporters and his opponents. A bemused Frank found himself paying the hospital bills of the local men who had defended his house when protesters arrived with torches to burn it down.
In the sophisticated London clubs where he had spent so much time over the past decade, he was shunned, and old parliamentary colleagues turned their backs on him. Churchill and another old friend, Lord Bessborough, were two who remained loyal, and with their help he was able to keep his army commission.
Frank was devastated. The humiliation of being considered pro-German and the reaction from his constituents and old colleagues was too great to bear. The scrapbooks and albums came to an end. The days of country squiredom, of the Cavenham estate, of the aspiring politician, ended in an instant. Frank became an outcast in the country he loved and which he was about to risk his life for. He was still, however, resolved to fight. He requested the first posting abroad that the War Office could arrange. By all accounts he went on to fight bravely at Gallipoli and later in Palestine. But from his desert post at Dabaa he wrote to the chairman of the local Conservative party saying he would not be seeking re-election.
According to Teddy, his political ambition had died with the Stowmarket riots. By the time of the armistice in November 1918, Frank was 40 years old and preparing to leave England for good. Adolph had died in April that year and when his mother died a few years later, Cavenham Hall and South Street were sold, together with their contents and all Adolph’s pictures. All ties with England were severed.
Teddy told me that his father never recovered from the blow he suffered in 1914. He was a sensitive man. He was deeply hurt. Staying in England was impossible for him.
Frank, or Monsieur le Major, as he became known, moved to France and started a new life. He threw his energy into the hotel business and within 10 years had established himself as “probably the leading figure in the French hotel industry in the interwar years and certainly the most popular”, according to his obituary in The Times. The company he founded, Hôtels Réunis, controlled 48 of the finest hotels in France. He also managed the Hôtel de Paris and the Hermitage in Monte Carlo. In 1926 he had become director of the Savoy group of hotels, which included Claridge’s and the Berkeley. He was also one of the founders of the King David hotel in Jerusalem.
And what of the granddaughter?
Ah. It gets better:-
At 21, I married a Pakistani politician and I lived in Pakistan for almost a decade. Like my grandfather I reinvented myself: I wore a shalwar kameez, changed religion, learnt Urdu, lived in a traditional extended-family household, involved myself in all aspects of Pakistani life and extolled the virtues (ad nauseam) of a new and radically different culture. Part Jewish, with a recognisably Jewish maiden name, and British, like the former colonisers I was initially treated with suspicion. The Islamic Republic of Pakistan does not recognise Israel, and its people often fail to differentiate between Zionism and Jewishness. Six months after moving there, during the 1997 election campaign, I was accused of being part of a Zionist conspiracy. I received death threats, there were protests and there were calls for my citizenship to be revoked. I did what Frank had done a century before.
In my eagerness to be accepted (and to my regret), I resorted to playing down my Jewish background. I criticised British culture. And I over-conformed. What I’ve come to understand in retrospect is that belonging and acceptance are often as much, if not more, about what you deny as what you choose. Today my own children, half Pakistani, half British, Muslims with Jewish, Muslim and Christian grandparents, are growing up in secular Britain. They have cousins here who go to discos and cousins there who wear the hijab and live in purdah. Will they feel the need to negate or suppress an essential part of themselves? Will they eventually have to choose between being Muslim and being British in order to feel that they belong? I passionately hope not.
As for me, I'm Jewish all the way, through and through. No out-marrying.
I feel comfortable and proud, with no complexes.
I feel better that way, even without all the money I don't have.
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