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paulinedorchester · 2 years ago

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We Followed Our Stars, by Ida Cook. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1950; rev. ed., Toronto: Harlequin, 1976. Reprinted, as Safe Passage: The Remarkable Story of Two Sisters Who Rescued Jews from the Nazis, with a new foreword by Anne Sebba, Toronto: Harlequin, 2008; reprinted again, as The Bravest Voices: A Memoir of Two Sisters’ Heroism During the Nazi Era, Don Mills, Ont.: Park Row Books, 2021.

Overture of Hope: Two Sisters’ Daring Plan That Saved Opera’s Jewish Stars from the Third Reich, by Isabel Vincent. Washington, D.C.: Regnery History, 2022.

As soon as I learned of Isabel Vincent’s book, I knew that it would need to be read with great caution. That feeling was reinforced when I read the “about the author” blurb on the book’s dust jacket. Then I looked at the bibliography, and wondered if I really needed to read it at all. (Here I must stop and thank the collection development, acquisitions, and cataloguing staffs of the Chicago Public Library. This is the second time in less than three years that they’ve purchased a book at my request, and in both cases they’ve managed to put it into my hands in less than a month.)

Why the unease? To begin with, Regnery Publishing’s stable of authors includes Ann Coulter, Ted Cruz, Newt Gingrich, David Horowitz, Sarah Palin, and similar types.

Second, it turns out that Isabel Vincent isn’t a historian: like Lynne Olson, she’s a journalist writing about history. Not only that: Vincent is an investigative reporter for the New York Post! One has to wonder what the phrase “investigative reporter” actually means in the context of that truly filthy tabloid, a jewel in the crown of Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp. On the other hand, I must say that Vincent seems far more comfortable using primary sources than Olson does — her research for Overture of Hope included examining 33 archival collections in seven countries. As well, the book carries an endorsement from the historian Blanche Wiesen Cook, who is not exactly a darling of the right.

Finally, the Cook sisters’ story is far from untold. I’ve known of them for at least the past several years, although I’m no longer sure how I learned: I could swear that there was an article about them in Opera News four or five years ago, but I can’t locate it. In any case, as early as 1950 Ida Cook wrote a memoir of their exploits (revising it in 1976), which is why this is a review of two books, not just one. She was the subject of a 1956 episode of This is Your Life. In 1964 Yad Vashem honored the Cook sisters as Righteous Among the Nations. They were interviewed in McCall’s in 1966 (the article was reprinted the same year in The Australian Women’s Weekly). They also inspired an essay in Granta in 2007, and I found a goodly number of other newspaper and magazine articles about them while searching for image files to use in this post.

Ida (at left; 1904-1986) and Louise (1901-1991) Cook seem to me slightly too young to be classed with the hundreds of thousands of British women for whom marriage became, if nothing else, a simple numerical impossibility in the wake of the First World War and the influenza pandemic that overlapped it. Nevertheless, that’s where Vincent situates them. The daughters of a Customs and Excise officer, they had both entered civil service themselves by the end of 1920, as typists. They were then living with their parents and younger brothers in Wandsworth, London, but the family had moved several times while they were growing up. During a stint in Alnwick, Northumberland, they attended The Duchess’ School, where music was one of their exam subjects: Louise was a pianist and Ida was a violinist.

Their passion for opera seems to have come about more or less by accident. One day in 1923 Louise, who worked for the Board of Education, wandered into a lunchtime lecture on music being given on the premises, returned home in a daze, and announced that she simply had to have a gramophone. She proceeded to buy one on an installment plan, along with ten records. (These would have been 78rpm discs, with a single track, three or four minutes long, on each side.) They were mostly of instrumental works, but also included recordings by two sopranos, Amelita Galli-Curci and Alma Gluck.

These quickly eclipsed everything else for the Cook sisters, who pooled their savings to buy the cheapest available tickets to three performances at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden: they saw Tosca, Rigoletto, and La Traviata, all excellent ways to get started with opera. I was startled to learn that the Covent Garden opera season was only two months long in those days; apparently, the opera house was used as a dance hall during the rest of the year.

When the Cooks learned that Galli-Curci was to give five concerts in London in late 1924 (her first appearances in the U.K.), they bought tickets to all of them. After the first one they wrote her a fan letter, enclosing a handkerchief that Ida had embroidered, and received a letter back by return post, inviting them to come back stage and say hello after the last, which they did.

Having learned in the meantime that Galli-Curci confined her operatic engagements to the Metropolitan Opera, in New York, the Cooks decided that they would travel there to see her perform — and figured out it would take them two years to save up the money that they would need in order to do so. They wrote to Galli-Curci about their plans, and she urged them to contact her when they had an itinerary. She would reserve seats for them, she said. (Galli-Curci's behavior wasn't unusual at the time, at least for singers who could pick and choose their engagements. As late as the 1970s, Dame Janet Baker was appearing in opera only in England, while continuing to tour all over the world as a concert artist.)

And that’s exactly what happened. Their arrival in New York, on January 4th, 1927, attracted the attention of The New York Times; and when they went, as instructed, to Galli-Curci’s agent’s office they found main-floor tickets to several performances waiting for them, along with Galli-Curci’s husband, Homer Samuels (a composer and pianist who was her recital accompanist), who invited them to dinner at their apartment a couple of nights later. They asked the Cook sisters to visit them in Autumn at their home in the Catskills, north of New York City — and that happened as well, though it took another two years of saving to bring it about. Ida’s account of this visit in We Followed Our Stars is not to be missed. She makes it sound like Downton Abbey on a smaller scale. (I feel compelled to add, however, that her description of Catskills social life has absolutely nothing to do with my understanding of what went on there, as recounted by my mother, who spent many summers at Catskills resorts during the 1930s and 40s. See also the films Dirty Dancing and A Walk on the Moon.)

They paid for all of this fun by scrimping and saving, skipping many lunches, and getting up before dawn to join the queue to buy cheap tickets at the Royal Opera House, where they made many like-minded friends and had the opportunity to meet world-class artists arriving for rehearsals. As we’ve seen, they were very outgoing — or at any rate Ida was outgoing and Louise was nearly always willing to follow where her sister led — and by 1934 they had befriended, and been befriended by, Galli-Curci, Ezio Pinza, Rosa Ponselle, Elisabeth Rethberg and — most crucially, in view of what was to come — Viorica Ursuleac and her husband, the conductor Clemens Krauss.

As the years went on, however, a new source of income emerged. Ida Cook was clearly a born storyteller. She had written articles for The Duchess’ School Magazine as a student; in 1928, as an old girl, she sent in an account of her and Louise’s trip to America, which was published, along with an article in the Daily Mail. After the Catskills visit, she sent an article on that experience to Mabs Fashions, a magazine that published sewing patterns, romantic fiction, and non-fiction on whatever topics seemed likely to interest their audience, including travel. This, too, was published, and the editor, a Miss Taft, invited Cook to lunch. (Vincent refers to the Mabs Fashions article, but doesn’t quote from it, as she does from the Duchess’ article, or even supply its title. From this I surmised that Mabs Fashions is poorly documented, and sure enough, WorldCat shows only scattered holdings in fewer than half a dozen libraries in the U.K. I can tell you that it was a monthly, and that it seems to have run from 1924 until some point in the mid-1930s, but much of its contents appear to have been lost to history. That’s a real pity, as it sounds very interesting.) Miss Taft asked Cook to write additional travel articles for the magazine. “Apart from the American journeys, a very short trip to Brussels was the full extent of our foreign travels,” Cook recalled. “But I said, ‘Yes, certainly,’ bought a series of guidebooks and set to work.”

A year or so later Miss Taft offered her a job at Mabs Fashions, as fiction sub-editress. This was a big leap — Cook had a responsible job in the Law Courts, with an assured pension when she turned 60, and in fact had just been promoted — but she decided to take the offer, even though she didn’t know what the position entailed. Her account of this experience is very funny, and I won’t spoil it for you, except to quote her about one part of it: “On press day I was faced with ... adding perhaps five hundred words to a story, without altering its sense, and so that no one could detect the ‘joins’. This was the only part of my work at which I became adept.”

Indeed, she became so adept that after several months the long-suffering Miss Taft asked her to write a story of her own. And then another, and so on. One of them grew into a novel, Wife to Christopher, which appeared in 1936 and was the first of Ida Cook’s more than 120 romantic novels, written over the course of 50 years, all under the name Mary Burchell.

In short order, she was earning as much as £1,000 per year. That money was going to prove very useful. (All of her novels were published by Mills & Boon, which later became an imprint of the romance giant Harlequin, thus explaining We Followed Our Stars’ reprint history.)

“I realize now that, even though we were in our late twenties, we were not entirely grown up,” Cook wrote of the plans she and her sister had been making during the first half of the 1930s. Indeed, when Englebert Dollfuss, the Austrian chancellor, was assassinated on July 25th, 1934, their main concern was that this might disrupt their planned first visit to the Salzburg Festival. (It didn’t.) They were no more politically aware when, during a visit to Amsterdam near the end of that year, Ursuleac asked them to “look after” a friend of hers: Mitia Mayer-Lismann, a German pianist and educator, who was soon to visit London to give a series of lectures. The Cooks assumed that this meant showing her the sights, which they did. When she asked whether St. Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey were Protestant or Catholic, they wondered if she was a Catholic and shouldn’t have been taken to see a Protestant church — so they asked.

What they learned was that Mayer-Lismann was Jewish, and it was she who explained the Nuremberg laws to them. Her other purpose in visiting the U.K. was to see if there was any way of moving there with her family. The Cook sisters offered to do what they could to help. The U.K. wasn’t making things easy for would-be refugees from the Nazis (nor was any other country), and half of the Cooks’ work as the decade went on would consist of cutting through reams of red tape. Word of their willingness to do this spread through the Jewish communities of Germany and, later, Austria, keeping the sisters active until just days before war was declared.

The other half of the task was helping those for whom they were able to secure visas to smuggle out whatever portion of their assets hadn’t been seized by the authorities, which by this time consisted mostly of furs and jewelry. This was a genuine cloak-and-dagger operation, if only because it involved making repeated visits to the countries in question at a time when the authorities there were beginning to view British visitors with suspicion. It was at this point that Clemens Krauss got involved: he kept the Cooks informed about when and where he was conducting what, so that when they were questioned at the border they could say that they were going to hear Krauss conduct this opera in that city on that date.

As a side note, Ida’s new prosperity allowed the Cooks to buy a long lease a one-bedroom apartment in Dolphin Square, which had just been built (and where their neighbors included politicians, spies, and Oswald Mosely). Ostensibly, this was so that they would have a crash pad in central London after late nights at the opera. In reality, it served as a dormitory for newly-arrived refugees. Ida recalled that at one point there were twelve people sleeping there.

While Ida seems to have been the family dynamo, Louise’s contributions shouldn’t be overlooked. One of her hobbies was teaching herself languages; she learned German at top speed in 1937 in order to facilitate the sisters’ work. She also put all of her (apparently quite generous) allowance of vacation time during that period into the rescue effort, and also seems to have been the uncredited co-author of, or at least an essential consultant on, Louise’s novels.

At this point I’m going to stop summarizing the Cooks’ story and tell you that if you’re going to read either or both of these books, you should begin with Ida Cook’s memoir, if only because it’s a primary source. It’s also a very useful insight into how an opera buff’s mind works.

Both authors provide their readers with excellent summaries of political events in Germany and Austria between 1933 and 1939 — and both do so without ever talking down to their readers or implying that they shouldn’t need to provide them with this information, which is quite an accomplishment. Cook can be vague about the dates and chronology of personal events, while Vincent simply is vague on music in general and opera in particular, subjects in which she clearly has no genuine interest. (As Fred Cohn points out in his review of Vincent’s book in Opera News — which is how I learned of it; here’s a link, but I’m not sure that it will work for non-subscribers — her subtitle is a complete howler: there were no “stars” among the Cooks’ refugees; in fact, many of the people they helped weren’t involved with music at all. In spite of this, the Library of Congress has classed Overture of Hope as ML (Literature on Music).) As well, Vincent gives short shrift to the war years. (Louise was evacuated to Wales with her office; Ida was an assistant warden in a Bermondsey air-raid shelter, while continuing to write; the Royal Opera House became a dance hall year-round.) On the other hand, she provides us with a firm chronology of the Cooks sisters’ pre-war lives, and she also reveals the hard facts of how the people whose escapes they facilitated fared, which are not happy stories in all cases.

It is also Vincent who relates that Clemens Krauss fared badly in denazification proceedings. Despite his efforts on behalf of his Jewish associates and their families (as well as many complete strangers), he was widely denounced in 1945, and it’s undeniably true that he displayed a Machiavellian streak that led him to consolidate his artistic influence by securing the directorships of both the Vienna and Munich State Operas under the Third Reich. He ended up being banned from conducting for two years, but Vincent documents that just about all of his denouncers were his professional rivals. (The same thing frequently happened in France during the search for collaborators.)

Finally, Vincent quotes extensively from a film treatment that Ida Cook wrote, based on We Followed Our Stars, that is languishing in Joshua Logan’s papers at the Library of Congress. That document needs to be plucked out of purgatory and produced. Right now!

#world war ii #the holocaust #righteous among the nations #first-hand accounts #retrospective accounts #a long post for sunday #lots of history #lots of links #and even some footnotes #oh and this is also about #opera #also #yom hashoah #begins monday evening

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inkskinned · 1 year ago

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you're in the habit of denying yourself things.

if someone asked you directly, you would say that you love a little treat. you like iced coffee and getting the cookie. you drink juice out of a fancy cup sometimes, and often do use your candles until they gutter out helplessly.

but you hesitate about buying the 20 dollar hand mixer because, like. you could just use your arms. you weren't raised rich. you don't get to just spend the 20 dollars (remember when that could cover lunch?), at least - you don't spend that without agonizing over it first, trying to figure out the cost-benefits like you are defending yourself in front of a jury. yes, this rice cooker could seriously help you. but you do know how to make stovetop rice and it really isn't that hard. how many pies or brownies would you actually make, in order to make that hand mixer worthwhile?

what's wild is that if the money was for a friend, it would already be spent. you'd fork over 40 without blinking an eye, just to make them happy. the difference is that it's for you, so you need to justify it.

and it sneaks in. you ration yourself without meaning to - you don't finish the pint of ice cream, even though you want to. the next time you go to the store, you say ah, i really shouldn't, and then you walk away. you save little bits of your precious things - just in case. sometimes you even go so far as putting that one thing in your shopping cart. and then just leaving it there, because maybe-one-day, but not right now, there's other stuff going on.

you do self-care, of course. but you don't do it more than like, 3 days in a row. after that it just feels a little bit over-the-edge. like. you can't live in decadence, the economy is so bad right now, kid.

so you don't buy the rice cooker. you can-and-will spend the time over the stove. you can withstand the little sorrows. denial and discipline are practically synonyms. and you're not spoiled.

it's just - it's not always a rice cooker. sometimes it is a person or a job or a hug. sometimes it is asking for help. sometimes it is the summer and your college degree. sometimes it is looking down at scabbed knees and feeling a strange kind of falling, like you can't even recognize the girl you used to be. sometimes it is your handprint looking unsteady.

sometimes it is tuesday, and you didn't get fired, and you want to celebrate. but what is it you like, even? you search around your little heart and come up empty. you're so used to denying that all your desires draw a blank.

oh fuck. see, this is the perfect opportunity. if you had a mixer, you'd make a cake.

#warm up #this isn't good #writeblr #this is complicated by the fact i can't stand up too long or i fuckken pass out and <3 hit my damn head <3 #but i did take a deep breath and buy myself the stupid rice cooker #and!!! a very cheap sushi kit!!! i have been wanting to try making sushi for literally YEARS #the kit was only like 15 dollars!!!! and i haven't purchased it bc?!!??!?!?!?!!?#..... i didn't get the mixer tho that felt. like a lot. like too much.#on my list is a kitchenaid. one day when i get a check and i have paid off my student debt #and medical debt #i will put that first little bit of cash #into a kitchenaid 5qt stand mixer (with attachments)#i really do just go into their refurbished section and stare lustily at each option #but yeah i feel guilty about the rice cooker even tho i know for a fact this damn thing is gonna be a lifesaver #oh shit also fuck i forgot to mention . poached eggs

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