ABSTRACT

This chapter provides the early experiences of the author. Railways and Anglophilia may have been his private and also professional passions, but his father's public ones were political: Zionism and Polish nationalism. As for his Zionism, he was the kind of Zionist of whom the old joke said that he was a Jew who takes the money of a second Jew to send a third Jew to Palestine. Except that in his father's case, it was his own money that sent other Jews there; he himself certainly had no immediate plans to emigrate, though his quixotic aim during the early 1930s was the reunion of the divided Zionist movements. Like all emigres – or, at any rate, landless – political groups, Zionism had, since its late nineteenth-century beginnings, been perennially fractious. His father took it on himself to heal the breach and bring Jabotinsky back into the Zionist fold.