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…FROM A LATTER-DAY “HELLENISTIC” JEW

As seasonal happenstance would have it, while thinking of a subject for this post I came upon slides of two Hanukkah-related pictures I made many years ago in my mid-teens. My original intention had been to create an epic account of the Hannukah story in the form of a heavily illustrated book-cum-comic, however, I soon found the task to be overwhelming and abandoned it after just a few weeks.

The unfinished project coincided with my growing interest in biblical and ancient history and this had a strong influence on the way I considered the story of the Maccabees and their war of liberation against the forces of the Seleucid Empire. This meant that I was passionate about executing not only an accurate visual portrayal of the Hebrews, their Macedonian foes, and the Judean backdrop, but also an historically objective account of the story itself.

As a little Jewish boy I had received the traditional, pious version of the story based on the first and second books of Maccabees, in which Judah Maccabee and his family are presented as flawless heroes, struggling against an evil foreign enemy and even wickeder “Hellenised” Jewish collaborators. Until I was about twelve, the Hasmoneans (Maccabees) were totally good and all those who opposed them, totally bad.

But as I grew older, and read more deeply into the history of the period I came to understand that the truth was – as it usually is in these sort of encounters – far more nuanced, and that if I’d been around at the time I might very well have seen the Hellenised Jews as enlightened and civilised, and the Maccabees as reactionary, intolerant and often cruel. Evidence for this probability lies in the fact that once the Maccabees were victorious and came to power, they too surrendered to many of the intellectual temptations of Greek culture and thought. Moreover, once the Hasmonean’s established their royal dynasty, the more powerful they became, the more they emulated their Seleucid and Ptolemaic imperial neighbours, including the hiring of large Greco-Macedonian mercenary armies – the very troops they had once fought against – to protect and expand their kingdom.

Thus, what I planned to do was to offer the first objective version of the epic struggle, which neither glossed over some the undoubted barbarities of the Macedonian occupiers, nor the fanatical fundamentalism of the Maccabee resistance fighters – and crucially, all wearing the correct gear, and inhabiting the genuine landscape. Looking at the two plates presented here, if I had completed the project, I might have created an early form of graphic novel. On the other hand, perhaps, my teen-self wasn’t yet ready to reveal myself as the “de-constructor” of a cherished myth and so risk the ire of many of my more traditional fellow Jews, something I did eventually manage to do thirty years later with my history of King Saul…

and how i nearly know judi dench

There’s nothing remarkable about spotting famous people in Hampstead and its environs; especially people famous in the performing arts, for whom it’s something of an English Beverly Hills. At one time or another, NW3 has been home for everyone from the Pythons and Peter Cook to Daniel Craig and Ridley Scott, and hundreds more. So, the fact I’ve had an unplanned beer with Robert Plant, and almost had my head removed from its shoulders (accidentally I hasten to add) by Ricky Gervais (whilst performing some kind of Capoeira-cum-Taekwondo / jogging exercise in the street) is hardly surprising.

In fact, it’s no exaggeration to state that I spot at least one notable each and every time I take a stroll down the High Street. However, in all these years of involuntary celebrity spotting there’s one such incident that stands out for the way it highlights both Karinthy’s hypothesis of six degrees of separation (more properly just two in this case) and perhaps also a classic “Jungian” synchronism…

The Holly Bush was and is Hampstead’s quaintest and most picturesque public house. Originally part of the home of the great portrait artist George Romney, it retains an 18th century charm and warmth irresistible to lovers of traditional English watering holes. And being just such a fan, I would often go there during my lunch-time break from my work in a nearby picture framery.

So it happened on one such occasion, when sat in the main saloon, I looked up from my newspaper and spotted a familiar face propping up the corner of the bar, who I instantly recognised as the actor Michael Williams. Although I knew him from his TV roles, he was more famous to me as being the husband of Judi Dench, already established as one of the greatest stage actresses of hers, or anybody else’s generation. Funnily enough, it wasn’t so much Michael Williams who caught my attention as it was his drinking partner – a gentleman in late middle-age with a strikingly luxuriant mop of silver hair.

Over the following weeks, during subsequent lunch-time visits to the pub, I was greeted by this same scene on a regular basis – Michael Williams, and the silver-haired gentleman, always at their allotted places, at the corner of the bar. All of which would have remained nothing more than several in a long list of similar such celebrity sightings during my time in Hampstead.

However, the following year I met my future-wife, Dido Nicholson, whose mother and younger sister it turned out had been at school, with none other than Judi Dench. The fact that Dido’s aunt remains close friends with Dame Judi to this very day is merely interesting of itself, but what is far more intriguing, was the fact that Michael William’s silver-haired drinking partner turned out to be none other than Dido’s paternal uncle John Leonard Nicholson (a noted professor of statistics who had worked for several British government administrations in the 60’s).

In other words, about a year before I met Dido or knew anything about her, I had regularly shared a pub bar with both her uncle, and her aunt’s best friend’s husband. And perhaps even more remarkably, Leonard’s friendship with Michael Williams, and Dido’s aunt’s friendship with Judi Dench were totally unrelated to each other – the former having met socially in Hampstead, while the latter met at school as explained above.

Despite this apparent synchronicity I remain separated from Dame Judi by those aforementioned two degrees, as I have yet to meet her in person…

About this time, two years ago I wrote a post related to the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashana) and the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur) from my perspective as an amateur biblical historian, and illustrated with dramatic images of the Negev Desert ( https://adamhalevi777.com/2016/09/29/the-wilderness-of-zin-yahwehs-kingdom/ ).

As made plain in that post, my interest in the origins of those and other Jewish / Hebrew / Israelite festivals is now purely of an academic nature – in the literal sense of the word. And in truth, I think it always has been, going all the way back to when, as a little boy, I sat and stood, dutifully at the side of my righteous Zaida (grandfather), in shul (synagogue) for hour-upon-hour in a state of abject boredom.

As I expressed in the introduction to my book on King Saul, I only survived the tedium by reading my Zaida’s Tanakh (Jewish Bible), which he permitted me to do rather than pray, as a kind of compromise, in the vain hope that I might one day see the light. Although, from a precocious age, I generally skipped through the supernatural stuff and miracles, which I always found unconvincing, I was excited by the narrative and the stories. By the time I was in my very early teens I became fascinated with the two books of Samuel in particular, sensing in them the grains of a history for the birth of the first nation of Israel.

My own writings on King Saul, and my novel about the Ark of the Covenant are my ultimate expressions of that continuing fascination and interest. So, in a way, I suppose I am indebted to those countless hours in synagogue and my forced intimacy with my Zaida’s Tanakh.

Despite my own acquired indifference to the many annual festivals of my people, I do sometimes miss the sense of the seasons they used to evoke. Pesach (Passover) for instance was always the herald of Spring, while Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur and the close-ensuing Succot (Tabernacles) resonated with the feeling of Autumn and the approaching dark days of winter. This somewhat rambling post is thus intended as a seasonally inspired salutation to all my readers and followers, whatever your beliefs or none…

THE dream commission WHICH went like a dream…

Checking back on posts dealing with my experiences as a commercial artist they nearly all describe dealings with dreadful and unscrupulous characters. They comprise a rogues gallery of capricious and lazy agents; self-adoring ad men and women; inarticulate, jargon-laden briefs; slow-paying and non-paying clients and, worst of all; copyright and ideas thieves.

However, there were some good and honourable people out there too, and small wonder that it was they who got the best results out of me. Significantly, ALL the latter worked in book publishing as art-directors and had a grounding in art, while ALL the former worked in advertising and publicity-related companies with little if any understanding of art processes.

I first crossed paths with George Sharp, the art-director at Pan Books in 1987* when he hired me to do the cover for The Fruit Palace (by Charles Nicholl). It was at the outset of my career as a professional illustrator and the process went so smoothly, from brief to payment, it lulled me into a false sense of security about my future in commercial art.

Sadly, as I was to find out during the course of my very next commission for the UK’s then-top advertising agency everything about working for George and Pan was atypical – from George’s clear and concise briefing to Pan’s prompt payment .

Especially during my time with artists’ agents, as a commercial artist I was exposed to a higher proportion of jobs from ad agencies than book publishers (something I endeavoured to rectify once a freelance), so when my agent called me early in the Spring of 1989 with the news that George Sharp wanted me for another job I was naturally delighted.

My excitement increased however, when I met up with George in Pan’s West End offices and he told me the nature of the commission – to illustrate the book cover for the UK edition of an American best-selling novel. The fact that the author was E. L.. Doctorow and the novel was Billy Bathgate (his take on the New York City gangster, Dutch Schultz) was virtual fantasy land for me. It was exactly the kind of illustration job I had dreamed of doing when I left fine art for commercial art. The £1000 fee was simply the icing on the cake.

Then, unbelievably, the job went even more smoothly than the Fruit Palace. George talked to me for no more than ten minutes as he must have sensed my innate feel for the brief, which I began working on the moment I arrived back at my house in West Hampstead. After about half-an-hour I was already faxing a sketch of my idea through to George, who immediately phoned me with a enthusiastic thumbs-up. A mere twenty minutes later I was waiting for my finished gouache painting to dry.

I was back in George’s office less than two hours after I had left it earlier that morning, and he was as thrilled with my image as I was. In fact, it remains the only illustration job I have ever done which did not require even the slightest of tweaks.

Within a month I had the pleasure and pride of seeing Billy Bathgate, plus my cover in the window of every book store I passed and my image on posters advertising the book throughout the Tube. Within six weeks (super fast relatively) I also received a cheque from Pan for £2500, far more than I had expected. Then my agent explained that I had earned an extra £1000 for the poster rights, plus another £500 syndication fee from a Danish company who wanted to turn my gangster image into some sort of comic strip (I never did find out what they eventually created…).

Although Billy Bathgate did not enjoy the same success in the UK which it had in the States, and that the movie of the novel two years later was a total flop (despite the best efforts of Dustin Hoffman and Bruce Willis), I was more than happy to console myself with the knowledge that it had seen me earn the quickest, easiest fee of my career. I think that even Dutch Schultz would have been impressed!

* Many of you may be familiar with George’s own book cover artwork…* https://www.tikit.net/Later%20PANs/George%20Sharp.htm

THREE ARCHITECTURAL ART déco and modernist GEMS IN FINLAND’S CAPITAL CITY…

One of the ironies of preparing many of my travel-related posts is that the process of the travel itself often leaves me little time to devote to writing my pieces for these pages. Right now for example we are in Jönköping having returned from a week in Finland, and preparing for a flight this evening to London, to then catch a plane on Friday for Malaga. And that’s nothing compared to what we have coming up over the next two months (many trees have been and will be planted!).

In other words, the next several posts will return to being more picture based and less wordy (a good thing many might feel) and fortunately, our recent stay in Helsinki provided me with some excellent visual material.

In this post I wanted to show off some of the Finish capital’s superb examples of early 20th century architecture, which were something of a surprise, to me at least. While I had a preconception of elegant 19th century waterfront facades, spectacular cake-icing churches blended with hard-edged, glistening glass and steel temples of contemporary Nordic minimalism, for some reason I had arrived ignorant of Helsinki’s handful of Déco and Modernist jewels.

My being so uninformed is especially damning when one discovers that the Finish parliament house ( Eduskuntatalo in the native idiom) is itself as bold a statement of Neo-Classical lines as one is likely to see anywhere this side of the Atlantic Ocean. And while that building might prove a tad brutal for some (not for me though as I’m a sucker for “power architecture” of all eras and styles), the two other examples I highlight here should prove charming enough for most tastes…

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