I kept think of my father yesterday, I expect Nicky was thinking of her father too, during our son’s graduation. Of course it wasn’t the only reflection; but, amidst love for Mossy, respect for his achievements, gratitude to have been ‘kept alive and brought to this day’ as he received his degree in nomine De’i, the memory of my father kept returning to my mind.

I didn’t attend my own graduation. When my father asked me ‘When’s your graduation?’ and I told him that it had been and gone without my even informing him, I watched his face and spirits fall as he told me how deeply disappointed he was. No doubt I justified myself at the time, as one does when one is heartlessly convinced that one is right. But even before my own son was born I’d come to realise how correct he was, and how mistaken my own conduct had been. I felt that even more clearly yesterday. ‘Ure’eh vanim levanecha – you shall see your children’s children: peace upon Israel,’ runs the verse from the Psalms. He did live to see them, all his children’s children, and even one Bar Mitzvah; but not, by a few years, the graduation.

I remember how my father came into my room one night when I was sixteen or seventeen and asked if I was doing my homework. It was an easy question to answer; I loved the subjects I was studying for A level. ‘Because’, he added, ‘they can take everything away from you except what’s in your mind’.

His family fled their home when he was sixteen; my mother and her family did the same. My father might have looked forward to a steady progression through a good school, a degree from a quality German university, and probably time too at Yeshivah. Instead, by the age of seventeen he was the main earner for his family in a poverty stricken Palestine embroiled in two consecutive wars. I recently found letters from the 1940’s years written by my grandmother in Jerusalem to her brother in New York:
 

His sons’ graduations would have been proof that by dint of constant hard work and determination he and my mother had managed to give to their children what had been stolen from them and their sisters. That would have constituted a small, personal triumph over the evils of Nazism. The venerable halls of Oxbridge with their beautiful gardens would have represented a continuity of the ancient, disciplined culture of scholarship, both Jewish and secular, of respect for learning and its institutions, in which he had been brought up.

(My father’s experience cautions me against judging those labelled ‘economic migrants’ whose deep purpose is to seek a better future for their children.)

The Talmud teaches, ‘Parents are obliged to teach their children Torah…to teach them a livelihood, and, some say, to teach them to swim’ (Kiddushin 29a). The latter is no doubt a metaphor for ‘survival skills,’ managing the challenges and dangers of everyday life. ‘Torah’ embraces the entire Jewish way of life, wisdom, values, ethics, practices, rituals and the inner life of the spirit. But the word translated as ‘livelihood,’ umanut, means much more than the English term suggests. It derives from the same root as emunah, ‘faith,’ or ‘trust’. Also from the same root is aman, a person skilled in their craft; in my father’s and my son’s cases, the art of working with wood. To pass on the capacity for umanut is not simply to teach someone how to make money; it encompasses everything involved in guiding them to be loyal, trustworthy, painstaking and caring in the way they live their every day.

This is what my father wanted to achieve, together with my mother, by enabling his children to progress from school to university and on into the world. He himself finally obtained his degree in his late thirties by studying each night for seven years at the University of Strathclyde.

It was wonderful to have my mother with us. I hope my father was in some way present at his eldest grandchild’s graduation too, to know the measure of what he achieved.

I can’t remember exactly, but sometime in my teens my father said to me, ‘You’re lucky to have a passport’. Seeing I didn’t understand, he added, ‘You realise how much it matters when you haven’t got one’.
 
My father was correct; I did not understand. I still thought passports were a dull necessity when you wanted to travel, a bureaucratic detail, a thing you had to try not to forget where you’d put.
 
Later I learnt more. My father had had relatives who knew exactly what it meant to have no passport; I have the letter in which the Nazi state informed them that they, like all Jews, had ceased to be citizens. My father knew too the price for those to whom no one was willing to offer asylum, the rejected of the earth and sea. The boats with thirsty refugees which we see now, he saw then.
 
Tomorrow Refugee Tales* begins, ‘A walk in solidarity with refugees and detainees’; it follows ancient paths of pilgrimage on route from Dover, via Canterbury, to the detention centre at Crawley, by Gatwick Airport. Each day there are tales; the child’s tale; the lawyer’s tale. There are also the unspoken tales, the unheard cry of those who never became refugees, not because they didn’t try to flee the threats of death, persecution and hunger, but because they were killed, captured or drowned on the way.
 
Where should they go? ‘Not here’, comes the response from country after country. But is ‘let them die’ a human answer; are we human if that is our answer?  In July 1938 the United States convened a conference on the refugee problem in the French resort of Evian-les-Bains. Only the Dominican Republic increased the quota it was prepared to accept, allowing Goebbels to wonder why, if they didn’t want them either, the rest of the world could be so hypocritical as to condemn the Germans for their treatment of the Jews. What is needed now is an international discussion leading to policies which are compassionate, reasoned, practicable and humane.
 
Meanwhile people sleep, or try to, in streets, camps, wherever they can. When we meet them** they are not just ‘asylum-seekers’: they are parents, children, teachers, engineers; they are people longing for a future, for a way to live good lives and make a contribution. We can strive with them to transform their reality. Otherwise the grim verdict of one refugee artist may prove true for all: ‘The land which persecuted me stole my past; the land which would not receive me took away my future’.
 
I’ve learnt something else since that conversation with my father: ‘passports’ come on different levels. It is possible to rob a person of their internal passport, the right to feel that they deserve to exist, are worthy of respect and love. This is an offence at the deepest level, an almost incurable cruelty, committed most often against children, usually in the most vulnerable years of infancy, as the poet Olive Fraser wrote:
     Summoned, though unwanted,
     Hated though true…
     I was the wrong music
    The wrong gust for you

We are not entitled to make another person feel that he or she is the wrong music, unlovable, unworthy of existence.  In the most frightened and lonely corner of our own heart, do we ourselves not fear just such a fate, dread it more than death?