Le Potager du Roi

While we were in Paris last summer, we went over to Versailles to see 'Le Potager du Roi', the King's Kitchen Garden, built for Louis XIV in the 17th Century. It's a few hundred metres from the palace - they must have needed a good few wheelbarrows to get all the produce into the kitchen every day! Nowadays they sell most of it in the little shop by the entrance. Only a few photos this time, as it started raining and I decided I'd be better off keeping my phone dry.

Le Potager du Roi

You wanted to reach out and pick those pears, and eat them there and then!

Jan took some photos as well ... The Potager has a website, it looks like it's in French only. And once again, I was prompted to upload the photos by seeing the programme 'Gourmet Gardens' in Monty Don's French Gardens series on BBC2.

Jardin du Prieuré d'Orsan

A couple of years ago we visited the Jardins du Prieuré d'Orsan, in central France. As usual I took loads of photos, but I didn't get round to uploading them until today, prompted by Monty Don's French Gardens programme the other night on BBC2.

Les Jardins d'Orsan

A couple of years ago we visited the Jardins du Prieuré d'Orsan, in central France. As usual I took loads of photos, but I didn't get round to uploading them until today, prompted by Monty Don's French Gardens programme the other night on BBC2.

So here they are. I'm not writing anything about Orsan, because Jan wrote a lovely post that says more than I ever could and in far fewer words, so I'm leaving it to her. Jan's photos are here - you'll recognise some of them from mine, but as usual her eagle eye spots things that I miss.

Orsan's website has some lovely pictures, though you might want to turn off the annoying chirping birds, and a fascinating gardener's blog - Blog du Jardinier - for those that can read French.

You can watch the Gourmet Garden programme in the French Gardens series via BBC iPlayer  - UK only, and you'll have to be quick, it's only available until 22 February.

A pause for thought

A pause for thought, and more

by Davi Windholz

Nahariya, Israel

translated from the Portuguese original by Micalet

As an activist of the left in the areas of both politics and education, I am regularly in contact with Israeli Arabs and with Palestinians. As a Zionist activist I am regularly in contact with Olim - Jewish immigrants to Israel - whose stance is often opposed to mine. As a social activist I am regularly in contact with people from the lower levels of Israeli society, who are mostly Sephardic Jews originating from Arab countries.

We have had 100 years of conflict, and at the moment it does not matter who is the guilty party or why. Neither is it of any relevance whether this Land belongs to the Jewish people, who ruled over it for a thousand years and created two independent States, and were parted from it for two thousand years, or to the Palestinians who have lived here for the past 600 years. Two peoples, two narratives of history, of pain and of suffering, of definitions of ‘Good’ and of ‘Evil’. These two opposed narratives are in total conflict, the only things they have in common being their simplicity, their misrepresentation of facts, and their lack of profound analysis, all borne along by demagogy and propaganda.

A hundred years of War, two narratives, Israeli and Palestinian. Two narratives which only serve to teach people to hate more, which only provoke more alienation from reality, and allow the political, economic and religious elites to seize the opportunity to continue their dominance. Narratives of hatred and prejudice, with their own definitions of justice.

These two narratives give rise to two others - that of the Jewish Diaspora, blindly defending the Israeli narrative, and that of the Left, blindly defending the Palestinian and Arab narrative, and contaminated with a double dose of anti-semitism. How otherwise can we describe the attitude of Jewish communities in the face of the constant and murderous violence perpetrated by Israel through 45 years of domination over the Palestinian people? And how otherwise can we describe the attitude of the Left, who say nothing about the murder of more than 25000 civilains in Syria, or the attacks and assassinations carried out by Palestinians against civilians in Israel, or the prehistoric attitude of Hamas towards women?

We can continue with these four narratives, at local level and world-wide, and carry on generating hatred and destruction, and the murder of children, women, men and the elderly. We can swear on the Torah and on the Koran that this Land “belongs to us and only us”.

These vengeful and violent attitudes come from darkness, from the Middle Ages, from ignorance. We can stay in the darkness cast by the Holocaust and continue to justify our actions with “Never again”. We can stay in the darkness of the Nakba (the expulsion of the Palestinians in the War of 1948), and continue to justify our hatred of the Zionists. We can continue being victims of history and carry on in the darkness of the Middle Ages. We can continue in our ignorance, hating without knowing why.

After a hundred years we all need Peace, we are all in danger, not only physical but also emotional and spiritual, and only a critical consciousness, achieved by re-educating ourselves, can change this situation.

A hundred years of War, and we have never given a chance to Peace. Peace is an internal state of belief, of disconnecting yourself from anger and hatred. Now is the time to wake up and understand that we are all connected one with another, for all time. We are each a part of each other, and the soldiers of the future are our children. And the dead of the future are our children. But, our children are also our Peace.

The only solution is to persuade ourselves and those around us that there is no absolute ‘Good’ or ‘Evil’. There are no soldiers, no terrorists. Any soldier that dies, Israeli or Palestinian, is equally a child of someone, irrespective of who is his mother or father. The demonstration of grief and of false pride through ‘Shahid’ (‘martyrdom’ in Arabic), or via the heroes of Yad laBanim (association of the families of fallen Israeli soldiers) is simply a cultural way of dealing with, and glorifying, death, instead of living life.

The only way is to make a peace agreement, in which the first item would be 100 pages dedicated to re-educating ourselves to life, to critical consciousness and to the love of life.

We are in a new pause, a truce. We have to take advantage of it to reflect, to recover our physical, emotional and spiritual strength. I ask all of you, my friends, and those who receive this message as it is passed on, if we wish to influence what is going on here, in Israel, in Palestine, in the Middle East, we need to reflect, be critical, leave behind the stereotypical narrative. We should criticise the Israeli government, the Palestinian authorities, Hamas, Syria. We should demand a permanent cease-fire. We should cry out against barbarity, of all sides and against all sides. We should no longer accept one-sided narratives, we should not criticise “enemy” narratives just for the sake of criticising. Let us read, study, question, analyse, and open our eyes and see the cruel reality of both sides.

I ask all of you to open your hearts, to bring opposites together, against the tyranny of power, of hatred and of death. We have to put an end to this madness, before one more child is killed.

NB: Davi organised all the cultural events for our 'Merkavah' trip to Israel in 2009. You can read about the trip on our Merkavah site, and see the photos in this Collection. Davi is originally from Brazil, and has lived, studied and worked for many years in Israel; you can find him on Facebook.

An Dro The World

Some of Jeudi Matin - the Dansez Français house band - take part in 'An Dro The World 2012' - a mass simultaneous An Dro at the Festival Interceltique at Lorient, Brittany, and around the world, on Sunday 12 August. Everybody had to play, sing and/or dance to the same tune at precisely midnight, French time.

Note the soon-to-be traditional Breton instruments - concertina (Elizabeth and Charlotte) and ukelele (Éamonn), and the confident singing - Richard's the one in tune. Jan reckons it's too slow for dancing, so it's a good job we didn't have any dancers there on the night. Personally I reckon it's too fast for singing.

We only heard about An Dro The World a couple of days beforehand, and what with summer holidays, folk festivals and family commitments, we could only muster half-a-dozen people, but we registered anyway and went for it. A few minutes rehearsing the tune, and a couple of run-throughs for me and Richard to - almost - get our tongues round the words, and c'est parti!

It's not all Cycling

But it is this week!

It's been Olympic Cycling Week, and I've managed to get to three of the four major road events - the Men's Road Race on Saturday, and the Women's and Men's Time Trials yesterday. And what a wonderful week of sport it's been! The streets and parks have been packed - estimates say over 500,000 were at the Men's race on Saturday, and it must have been similar for the time-trials yesterday.

That's half-a-million happy smiling people, of all ages, shapes, sizes and nations, on their feet for hours, shouting encouragement to every competitor, with a special roar for their own favourites of course.

My companion on Saturday morning was 85, and she stood there with the rest of us waiting for an hour for the riders to come through. She lives round the corner, and came to watch because it was a historic event, and she thought it would be fun. As she said, "We won't see anything like this again in our lifetimes".

Cycle races on the road are always difficult to follow. You only see the cyclists pass once (except for Box Hill on Saturday, which they went up and down seven times because there aren't any mountains in this part of England), and they go by so quickly it's difficult to recognise more than two or three of them, especially in their helmets and wall-to-wall sunglasses. It's impossible to judge how the few seconds you are seeing fit into a day's racing that may last several hours.

But it's colourful and it moves, it's human, and it's free. And above all there's admiration for the immense effort and dedication shown by men and women relentlessly pushing their bodies - and their minds - to the limit.

It didn't work out for the British riders in the Men's Road Race. The team of five were set up to shepherd Mark Cavendish, the fastest and most feared sprinter in the world, through to the final half-kilometre, where it was hoped he would be able to unleash his devastating speed and go for gold. However Mark doesn't climb very well - you can't have everything - and when the attacks came on Box Hill his team-mates had to hold back to pace him along. There were repeated attempts to get away; eventually a group of twenty seized their chance and disappeared, and the British riders were unable to close the gap.

I was watching the latter part of the race in Putney, 9 or 10km from the end. I didn't realise it at the time, but as I was snapping away I caught a moment with Alexandre Vinokourov of Kazakhstan, the eventual winner, at the head of the leading group, looking over his shoulder to see who's with him, judging when would be the best time to break away. He apparently shot off 500m later, coming out of a sharp turn; only one rider was able to follow him, but Vino had too much power for him in the final metres. But you only find all this out afterwards.

By the time the first British riders reached us - Bradley Wiggins, Ian Stannard and Mark Cavendish - they clearly knew they had no chance of catching the leaders. An immense disappointment for Cavendish, but I'm sure he'll bounce back - he always does.

But never mind, we all had a great day out at a wonderful sporting event. And Bradley Wiggins, of course, was going to be coming back a few days later for the Time Trial . . .

You can see my photos from 8 km from the start (just over Putney Bridge), and from 10km from the end (along Upper Richmond Road). And Bradley Wiggins was kind enough to ride close up to the camera for us, in the morning, and then again in the afternoon (see above).

It's not all walking

Today is the 80th anniversary of the Kinder Scout Trespass, a mass action whose repercussions led to the formation of the Ramblers' Association, and the creation of the first National Park in the Peak District in 1949. We owe the 'right to roam', which we now take so much for granted, to actions like this.

There's a lovely little 'In Praise of . . . Benny Rothman' in today's Guardian - Benny, a keen rambler and cyclist, then aged 20, was the driving force and principal leader of the trespass. He died 10 years ago; you can read an obituary, or go for the full story from the Working Class Movement Library, which I highly recommend.

The Guardian's 'In praise of . . . ' piece says that Benny had "a rare combination of being able to imagine a different way of organising society and a willingness to fight for it." Not so rare, maybe - they bred them like that in the 1930s, my aunt Margaret Stanton, for example.

I went to Kinder Scout for the first time last year - on my birthday, which was nice. We walked for an couple of hours, but didn't have time - or energy - to go right up to the top; nevertheless it was wonderful just to breathe in the calm and timelessness of the hills. Thank you, Benny.

Auntie Margaret

My Auntie Margaret died two weeks ago, and we had the funeral on Tuesday. What a day! What a life!! She was 93, the last of her generation in our immediate family, and had spent the last 75 (seventy-five) years of her life deeply involved in local politics, trade union activity, and every international solidarity campaign you could donate a pound - or more importantly, an hour - to.

From support for the Republican Government during the Spanish Civil War as a teenager in the late 1930s, to trade union organisation in war-time factories; she was a Communist Party candidate in post-war elections, and met Paul Robeson in support of the American Civil Rights Movement before anyone knew it was a civil rights movement (1949). She organised for the Anti-Apartheid movement across several decades, for Justice for Zimbabwe against the white supremacists in the 1960s and 70s, against the Vietnam War, for the Chile Solidarity Campaign after the Pinochet coup in 1973, and more recently against the Iraq war. She played a leading role in defence of the Health Service in Birmingham and later Oxford, and was awarded the TUC Gold Medal in 1996 for a life-time of service to the trades union movement.

When we saw her a couple of years ago she apologised for no longer "being as active as I would like to be" - aged 91 - nevertheless every seat in the room was covered in the piles of loose papers and cuttings that had always served as her current filing cabinet. And throughout she was a wonderful, caring mother, and for this nephew at least, a lovely aunt. Apart from anything else, she gave me my first typewriter - a little portable, already hammered into the ground - and got me my first job.

David, Richard, Jenny, Katy and Rebecca conducted the service, as they had done for Uncle Mick 10 years ago. People said she was "an example to us all" and a "hard act to follow". We sang the Internationale, and Nkosi Sikelele Africa - well, we tried, I was too choked to get the words out. But I hope she heard us nevertheless.

Katy made a lovely little film with Margaret a few years back, called Lady in Red. It's on the BBC Oxford website, along with a radio interview with her.

The Murals of San Isidro

Over last weekend scores of artists were invited to cover the walls of houses in San Isidro, one of the poorest quarters of Orihuela (Spain), with the enthusiastic agreement of the people of the district. All the murals have a Miguel Hernández theme, to do with the man, his poems, or the times he lived through. The project was launched to mark the 70th anniversary of his death, in prison, at the age of 31.

The walls had been painted once before, in 1976, a few months after the death of the dictator General Franco, and before the end of censorship and the fascist police-state. The police had tried to prevent people reaching the town, but many managed to get in and get their work done quickly, quietly and in the dark.

As you can see, conditions this year were very different. Work started on Friday afternoon, and had to be finished by Sunday lunchtime; these pictures were mostly taken on Saturday afternoon, with work very much still in progress.

One of the most striking pictures is a version of Picasso's 'Guernica', originally painted in 1937 to represent the horrors of modern war. It has been painted by a team of artists, on the curved wall of a house at the entrance to the district, and will hopefully serve as an emblem of the city for years to come.

NB: there are 100 photos - you can view a slideshow, or navigate through the set

The World Turned Upside Down

Leon Rosselson sings 'The World Turned Upside Down', preceded by Robb Johnson's 'Red and Green', Tolpuddle, 2009. 'Upside Down' begins at 2:30. See the words.


This song has been in my head for a couple of days now - not that it's ever far away. I was doing a version of our family walk through the Jewish East End with cousin Helen, over from Australia for a brief visit. One of the first places we stopped at was a gap between two buildings in Whitechapel Road, which we think is the site of the house where Leon's grandmother first lived when she came to London with her young daughter, Leon's mother. Leon is a sort of a cousin of mine, so I know these things. 


A few minutes later we stopped outside the Freedom Press, looking at the panel of Anarchist heroes on the wall of the shop. Helen had said she was thinking of visiting Burford in Oxfordshire, and I'd mentioned that the town had connections with the English Revolution of the 1640s (Leveller soldiers were imprisoned in the church, and three of their leaders were shot there, in 1649). So I pointed out the figure of Gerrard Winstanley on the Anarchist wall, and explained briefly about the Diggers movement during the Revolution. As we were talking it struck me that Leon had a song about the Diggers . . .


And it's been in my head ever since.


You poor take courage
You rich take care
This earth was made a common treasury
For everyone to share


See Leon's website.

Doing the Census Centenary Celebration Walk

On Sunday a group of cousins got together to do a Census Centenary Celebration Walk, around the bits of the Jewish East End our parents were born and brought up in. Ten of us traced the homes and haunts of our grand and great-grand parents, as recorded in family lore and their 1911 Census returns. Brian and myself, Jenny and Katy, Ralph and Margaret all knew each other; Gerald, Margaret and Michael knew each other but none of the rest of us; Boris knew no-one. But we all come from the families of a brother and sister, Lewis and Michla Levin, who came to London from Russia over 100 years ago. Between us we represented three of Michla's four children - Shmuel, Sarah and Myer - and one of Lewis's five - Barnett, and within 5 minutes we all felt, and acted, like cousins. 

We set off to search for people long gone, and places that had been significant in their lives, armed with a handful of documents - census returns, marriage certificates, birth certificates, death and burial records, whatever we had been able to find - and heads full of family knowledge.

However, document and presumed knowledge collided in dramatic fashion before we had even left the Coffee House where we met to start the day. Everyone knew the mother of Barnett, Michael and Gerald's father, to be Annie. Everyone, especially her own sons, who put 'Annie' on her headstone. However, when Michael brought out Barnett's birth certificate, we saw that it named his mother as Mary. None of us could come up with an explanation, and we spent the day wondering how much more of what we thought we knew was going to be undermined or contradicted by discoveries yet to come.

Our route took us over the Regents Canal, which leads down to Limehouse Water and the other docks by Tower Bridge that were the point of entry for most of the thousands of East European Jews that came to London between 1880 and 1914. Just 200 yards further down Mile End Road is the site of the block - Drivers Building - where Lewis Levin and his five children (including Barnett) are recorded in the 1911 census, in four rooms. We wandered round to the yard at the back, and wondered whether the little Levins used to play there, away from the noise and bustle of the main road.

We then walked down White Horse Lane, where Barnett and his brother Nyman shared a flat while they went through college in the 1920s, and turned into Rectory Square to find the former East London Synagogue, now converted into flats. My grandparents Morris and Sarah, were married there in 1909, as were Ralph's, Myer and Marel, in 1915.

The next stop was at the site of the Poor Jews' Temporary Shelter in Leman Street, where Morris spent his first night off the boat, on 2 October 1905. We stood opposite and paused for reflection.

Ralph also had recollections of Alie Street, where Marel lived for many years after Myer died. We stopped to take in the Whitechapel Library, known as the "university of the ghetto", and then turned into Brick Lane. We noted Bloom's Corner, site of many an impassioned political discussion, and made our way up past the Brick Lane Synagogue (now a mosque), Katz's String Shop (now an art gallery), the massive brewery building (an indoor market), and the chess and carrom players, to buy lunch from the Beigel Bake.

Here, quite by chance, we bumped into living history. I'd noticed an old man having a salt-beef sandwich at the counter, and when he came out I asked if he'd enjoyed his lunch. Yes, he said, it was the only place you could get real meat nowadays. We got into conversation, and he said he'd been on the massive anti-cuts demonstration the day before, though the cuts didn't matter so much for him, as he "wouldn't be needing his pension for much longer". He asked the copper in the queue if his force was being cut.

It turned out he had been a proud Communist Party activist since the 1930s, taking part in the Battle of Cable Street and later becoming a well-known and popular local councillor. Max Levitas. I'll bet he spoke a few times at Bloom's Corner . . . So did he know my father, Dave Shreibman? "Yes, Shreibman, I remember him."

Our jaws dropped. We'd come looking for traces of our forebears, hoping to find a few physical reminders, a house or two, or at least a street. And here was Dad, in the memory of 95 year-old Max, who still gives evening classes at the new Whitechapel Library - on politics, of course: "I tell 'em how the Tories are destroying our country".

After lunch we located 3 North Place, where Morris and Sarah were living when they got married. At least we think we found it, it's part of Spitalfields City Farm now, maybe the little car park.

Two years later the census found them at 12 Hare Street, now part of Cheshire Street, in two rooms, with Sophie, aged 1. Brian listened out for the cry of a new-born baby - but Dad wasn't born until a week later. It's his centenary too, next week.

Morris and Sarah had eight children, and eventually moved round the corner to larger accommodation at 11 Grimsby Street, opposite the Shoreditch Viaduct arches. The arches have gone, as have the original houses, but this was the location for one of our iconic family photos from the early 1930s, so we tried to re-create it, incorporating Boris as an honorary Shreibman. He has potential, that boy.

Esther - Alice - Dave - Nat - Henry

Jenny - Katy - Michael - Boris - Brian

Then the eight cousins had our own group portrait taken:

Katy - Jenny - Gerald - Michael S - Ralph - Michael L - Brian - Boris

Our last port of call was Heneage Street, to see if we could find the house that Michla was living in at the time of the census, with her sons Myer and Harry, aged 21 and 20. All in one room. Again, the houses have gone, but the cobbles are still there, looking like they've been trodden by hundreds of feet over more than a hundred years. Including, we like to think, those of Michla, Myer and Harry.

Coming back up Brick Lane, I almost missed the drinking fountain outside the school. It certainly looks as though it could be a hundred years old. I bet they all drank from it.

We'll shortly be setting up a website - probably a blog - where we can collect together some of our family stories, and share some of the things we're finding in our ongoing hunt for documents. Family members can find more detail about individuals, and see how we all fit together, on our Geni site.

Ralph and myself, along with his brother Mark and our cousin Dan from Ohio, will be visiting Belarus in May to see if we can trace Lewis and his two mysterious wives, and Michla and her husband David (or was he Israel?) Iliatovitch (or was he Gitovitch?), and the families they came from.

And we'll quite probably be doing further East End walks in the future - we didn't do half of what we had planned on this one. And there's a Google Map with all the locations pinpointed, so you can plot your own walk if you want to.

NB: The slideshow above can be viewed full screen if you like, and you can pause or continue as you will; you can see the titles by clicking 'Show info' at top right of the photo. Or you could have a closer look via the PhotoSet.