TEA WITH EINSTEIN IN THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

Life lived in the company of the great and good
by Judith Flanders

Sunday 5 March 2006
The Sunday Telegraph


Judith Flanders reviews Tea with Einstein and Other Memories by William Frankel.

It is hard to think of a life less likely than William Frankel's. Born in 1917 in an East London that was still a Jewish ghetto, the son of an unsuccessful stallholder in Petticoat Lane, he waltzed through the century, a friend to various Rothschilds, to Yehudi Menuhin, Isaiah Berlin and R. B. Kitaj. In between there were chats with Indira Gandhi, Albert Einstein, and a sackful of Israeli prime ministers and presidents: Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Chaim Herzog among them.

Frankel's childhood was spent physically in a Victorian world of alleys and lanes, and mentally in a pre-Victorian world centred on the mystical, religious influence of East European rebbes and their followers, unchanged since the Middle Ages.

Young William, however, quickly discovered the 20th century: a teacher took him to the West End. Even more importantly, she invited him home; he discovered that some houses have separate rooms for dining, sitting and sleeping, as well as indoor lavatories. The Regent Street Poly showed him more, and during the war - he was rejected for health reasons - he studied for the Bar at the LSE.

A series of chance encounters brought him to the heart of Anglo-Jewish life, where he remained for half a century, ultimately as editor of The Jewish Chronicle, the oldest Jewish newspaper in the world. While his work was absorbing, Frankel's book will be enjoyed for the private pictures it gives of many public men (and a few women): Chaim Herzog as babe-magnet (Frankel phrases this more elegantly); Einstein lost and unable to call his secretary to rescue him because he has forgotten his own phone number; Diana Mosley accepting, amid wartime rationing, the gift of a kosher salami.

His picture of Oswald Mosley is resolutely unforgiving, but most of his meetings are tinged with warmth, generosity, and a sly good-humour, whether it is President Truman, given a miniature Bible scroll at a theological seminary, intoning, 'It's just what I wanted', or Menuhin's sister-in-law apostrophising her saintly brother-in-law: 'The realisation of canonisation/ is well within my scope (I've had a word with the Pope)./ My ego would be gratified/ were I to be beatified…'

Frankel's life must have had more hardship in it than he is willing to concede, but his charm makes it easy to see why the great and the good responded to him. In Tea with Einstein he welcomes the reader into his magic circle, happy to share his pleasures.

© Telegraph Group Limited 2006


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