r Page Ten THE JEWISH NEWS Friday, 044Zer T, 1943 Do you remember Magnolia Street and the fascinating Jewish characters inhabiting the community that was made famous in Louis Golding's great book of a decade ago? This street has been brought to life again in a description of its characters who are actively engaged in helping win the war, in this splendid article which The Jewish News is privi- leged to publish by special arrangement with Britain, published by British Information Services in New York. - Magnolia Street Goes to War By LOUIS GOLDING. Magnolia Street has gone to the war, for the second time in one generation. But this time something more has happened. The war has come to Magnolia Street: I mean that literally, of course. I mean that a bomb fell directly on the Pompeian Hair- dressing Salon at the corner of Magnolia Street and Aubrey Street and reduced it to rubble .. . except- ing for one wax lady who used to display her smooth bosom and permanent wave in the window. She astoundingly survived among the debris of brick and glass splinters. How incredulous she looked, how shocked! Poor dear lady, more infamous outrage has been performed by Britain's enem- ies on women and old people and small children even more sensi- tive than you—and just as in- nocent. Magnolia Street has gone to the war. The war has come to Mag- nolia Street. But there is a real sense in which Magnolia Street is the war itself, that Magnolia Street is what we are all fighting about, all the hundreds of millions of us. Working-Class Street and in air force blue. They have given a good account of themselves already, as their folk did in the earlier war. There are some who will not come back again. There was young Herbert Derricks, for instance, the nephew of Wilfred, the Long- ton Nightingale (in case you remember him). He was with the Lancashires in the Malayan fighting. He was cut off in a loop up the Muar RiNer. (I heard about him from a mate who managed to get away.) A Jap sniper got our Herbert. Ping! And there was young Herbert, with his hand up to his collar-bone. Then, very slowly, with an odd sort of grace, like a dancer almost, he leaned over and glided to the ground. Beckie Cohen at Gun-Battery He was going in for the stage like his uncle. A ball-room dancer he was going to be. He had a nice little partner, Beckie Cohen, from the other side of the street. But she's manning a gun-battery now, on the northeast coast, and Her- bert will not come back again to dance rumbas with her at the Doomington Hippodrome. And there was Hymie Edel- man, whose father, Benny, lost a leg in the last war.. (Hymie was a radio operator in the Merchant Navy. He used to do a good thing for himself before the war, doctor- ing all the street's radios.) He'd been torpedoed three times before they finally got him, out in the Caribbean it was, with the sky blue and innocent like a sheet of cornflowers, and the sea an agony of blazing oil. I must not flatter myself that more than a handful of my readers will know what Magnolia Street means, and where . it is. Let me state it briefly. I wrote a book by that name some ten years ago, and certain books have followed it. In those books I tried to record the chronicles of a typical working- class street in an English provincial town across a whole generation. On one side of the street lived Gentile families, on the other side Jewish families. It happened to be Eng- land, which is my native land and the land I love most. But it could have been Belfast, in Ireland, or Boston, in U. S. A., with Catholics on one side of the street and Protestants on the other. It could have been Danzig, with Germans on one side, Poles on the other .. it could have been anywhere. Magnolia Street was a symbol, of a world where people preserve their differences in the degree to which it pleases them, but rub shoulders with each other, like each other, love and marry each other, if that is the way they feel about it. For people are primarily . people, God's equal children. Mag- nolia Street, in fact, is the demo- cratic world, the world of the United Nations, the world we are fighting for. It is the world which is anathema to the Nazi and the Fascist, the world of equality and democracy they have sought to ex- tirpate. I ought to mention young Harry Briggs, too. He'd joined the Navy as a kid. So when the war came, he was in a cruiser that went everywhere and did everything. He was at Dunkirk and Narvik, he was in at the finish of the Graf Spee, at the evacuation of Greece and Crete, and, finally, he lost an eye during a Malta convoy. It's not so much his eye young Harry minds. It's the fact that an Italian shell did it, the only shell in the whole action that hit anything at all. Tough luck, young Harry! There was one very famous sailor who lost an eye, too. You are in good company! Fight Against Nazi Scheme Medal From King But Magnolia Street would not be extirpated. It did not like the Nazi scheme of things at all. When about a year before the war, a dim tow-haired lout chalked a swastika on the much-loved Mr. Emmanuel's front door,. there was an awful to-do about it, not only in Mrs. Poyser's grocery-shop, but in the Tawnie's Lamb and Lion, at the corner of the Gentile pavement. How they roared, those leonine Tawnies! What a bleating lamb the little blackshirt was, by the time those Tawnies had finished with him! And then the war came. And young Magnolia Street went off to war, apart from the few who were already there, in navy and in khaki And what a Magnolia Street to- do there was, the day you went up to Buckingham Palace to get that medal from King George! There were repercussions of it all the way across the Atlantic to Brook, lyn Avenue, Brooklyn, where the Seipel family lives these days. And of the young Seipels, one has be- come an artillery officer in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and an- other was in the fighting on Attu Island. And the young Hawkins from number six managed to get away from an Italian prison-camp near Florence, and a Poyser grandson had a seat in the front-row of the orchestra stalls at Tunis. Quite a Magnolia Street war, in a way of r speaking. And in more than one way of speaking. And if you believe that the older folk have let the younger folk beat them to it, you're mista- ken. The beer-cellars of the Lamb and Lion became the lo- cal Warden's Post, and a tough time they had of it during the Doomington blit- zes! And Mrs. Wine- stone, who always was of a literary turn of mind, was ac- knowledged queen of salvage operations. She made up terse little poems: Bring up your scrap And beat the lap Your kettles and saucepans are ten times more fun When made up into bullets to beat the old Hun. The consequence was she got her little front-garden stacked roof-high and had a special letter of praise from the Lord Mayor or the Lord Lieutenant or somebody. The other little gardens grow lettuce and tomatoes and onions. (In the old days they used to grow broken bricks and sardine cans.) You'd be surprised what a rural air Magnolia Street has these days. Graybeards at Work Of course it's hard to keep the front parlors as spick and span as they used to be. Everybody, even the oldest graybeards • from the synagogue -have some sort of war job. The old men know what has happened to the graybeards of Cracow and Warsaw, and they know, oh yes they know, it is ex- actly as much their war as it is the war of the lads who go march- ing off to the 'batteries and the gun- turrets, and the lasses bent over their lathes in the munition-shops. And from their old lips before the opened Ark of the Covenant, a prayer goes up to the Lord. And from the lips of the Gentile folk gathered of a Sunday morning in the church round the corner up the Blenheim Road, a prayer goes up to the Lord. An incendiary burnt out the roof of the syna- gogue, and the blast from a shell brought down the church-tower. But, somehow, it seems to the folk in Magnolia Street—more and more as the months go by—that the Lord has not been deaf to those entreaties. 10 Reasons for Increased Giving to United Jewish Appeal During 1943 Critical war needs in 1943 will require greater funds for the programs supported through the United Jewish Appeal. J. D. C. must provide funds to meet increased demands for assistance for refugees in Soviet Russia, Spain and Swit- zerland. U. P. A. must speed up industry, agriculture, colonization in Palestine to aid Allied war efort and provide homes for many thousands of refu- gees. Growing United Na- tions offensive will open up many new areas for increased rescue activi- ties and greatly enlarge demands upon United Jewish Appeal agencies. Per capita giving must be raised substantially to make up loss of contri- butions from members of Jewish communities who have joined the armed forces. Cost of relief and other family services provided by N. A. S. for refugees in U. S. • on a minimum basis has risen in keep- ing with general price _ rise. Program sanctioned by Allied governments for large-scale emigration of many thousands of refu- gee children to Palestine and Western Hemisphere will severely tax resources of U. J. A. agencies. Refugees in Palestine, Latin America and the United States must be speedily integrated to keep doors open for post- war immigration. U. J. A. agencies must provide essential services not undertaken by inter- Allied organizations in liberated areas such as North Africa. Tax considerations fa- vor individual and corp- orate giving. The net cost to contributors of ..glftS to-the U. J. A. is loWer - thiS • year than . ever. :•-•• _.,•- y. • As the single, fund-raising agency for the Joint Distribution CoMmit- tee, United Palestine Appeal and National Refugee -Service; the tnited Jewish. Appeal for Refugees, Overseas Needs and Palestine must raise the sum of $25,000,000 in the current year for war relief, rehabilit4tion and emigration assistance overseas, for the upbuilding and defense of the Jew- ish homeland in Palestine, and for adjustment aid to newcomers in the United States. The Jewish reconstruction and relief causes included in the United Jewish Appeal are supported in Detroit by the Allied Jewish Campaign, through the War Chest. The 1944 War Chest campaign will be conducted from Nov. 1 to 16 for a quota of $8,250,000.