FANTAZJE w The Times

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/giles_coren/article43996
69.ece

Two waves of immigration, Poles apart
My great-grandfather didn't leave his home in the hope of finding a better
life - just a life
Giles Coren

On Tuesday we buried my great-uncle Gus. Most of the service was in Hebrew
and I spent it, as I always do at these occasions, glancing at the
prayerbooks of the men around me, trying to guess, from the shapes of the
separate masses of indecipherable script in their hands, which page I was
supposed to be on.

Fortunately, the bit about what a kind, successful and funny chap Gus was
(which he absolutely was - he was a Coren, after all) was in English, and I
was able to liven up and pay attention. And then the rabbi started talking
about "Gus's father, Harry, who came here from central Poland as a
teenager..."

I remember my great-grandpa Harry very well. The patriarch. The first Coren.
I am the only son of the only son of his first son, and I have always
considered that, in my solipsistic way, to be a very big deal.

I remember his 90th birthday party in 1975, sitting on his knee, kissing his
face and feeling the coarse whiskers against my lips. I remember being
pleased that he was exactly the same age as my favourite football team, QPR,
which was founded in 1885.
Background

* Home Office says there are 300,000 Poles in Britain. I say take that
number and double it

* Lithuania sends envoy to race rage town in Ulster

* Polish builders do up flat, then stay as squatters

* Britain taking in 1,500 immigrants a day

Twenty-three years later, standing at the funeral of his last surviving son,
the women on one side, men on the other, Gus in a box in front of us with a
cloth over it bearing the Star of David, I thought how interesting it was,
at a time when many of the current generation of Polish immigrants are said
to be returning home because the construction work is drying up, that we
were all still here - dozens of us descended from a single Pole who came in
1903 - more than 100 years later. Not one of us has gone back. Even to
visit.

That is the difference between the two kinds of migration, you see. The
economic and the humanitarian. We Corens are here, now, because the
ancestors of these Poles now going home used to amuse themselves at Easter
by locking Jews in the synagogue and setting fire to it. Harry didn't leave
in the hope of finding a better life. Just a life. The option to return was
not there for him, for obvious reasons, and by 1945 the Poland he had left
did not exist anymore. My sympathy for the plight of the modern Polack is
thus limited, and if England is not the land of milk and honey it appeared
to them three or four years ago, then, frankly, they can clear off out of
it.

When I got home from the funeral I read about the capture of Radovan
Karadzic, and saw footage of some of the genocide that he himself instigated
so recently, so near to Poland. Serbia has hunted him down, it is said,
because it wants to join the EU. But the European Union is not so fussy as
it once was. Virulently racist populist politicians hold significant power
now in Central and Eastern Europe, and the modern, expand-at-all-costs EU is
not bothered by that at all.

Only this week a Radio 4 programme revealed plans by the Lithuanian state
prosecutor (with the full support of Lithuania's Deputy Foreign Minister,
Jaroslavas Neverovicas) to charge former members of the Jewish resistance in
Lithuania - escapees from the ghetto, who were fighting for their lives -
with war crimes. As state-sponsored anti-Semitism, it makes Jörg Haider
(remember him?), with his mild nostalgia for shiny leather boots and
concentration camps, seem terribly innocuous.

Lithuania - which was part of the same state as Poland until 1795 and, like
Poland, but unlike Germany, has never gone through any process of
recrimination for, or even fully acknowledged, its role in the Holocaust -
had an impressive war record, wiping out 95 per cent of its Jewish
population, 200,000 people, with very little help from the invaders.

Since then it has shown no interest in prosecuting its own war criminals.
And now it's decided that it was all the Jews' fault - again. Don't expect
Poland not to follow suit.

Every year I have to write about this, and as nobody seems to be paying
attention I guess I'm going to have to do it again. How stupid do the sports
picture editors think we are? Every time the England team fall into disarray
(which is quite frequently) they run a back-page photograph of the England
captain, Michael Vaughan, appearing to rub his head in dismay and confusion.

But he isn't. He is mussing his hair out of vanity. He has been wearing a
batting helmet for, well, in his case not very long, but long enough to have
developed "hat hair". He has been bowled out. He now has to walk back to the
pavilion, tracked all the way by a steadycam, and, even in his adversity, he
wants to spike up his hair and look nice on the telly. They all do it. And
whenever a famous batsman who is having a run of bad form gets out cheaply
the hair-mussing shot is dug out, and captioned "devastated" or "baffled".

It's such an insult to our intelligence. It's like the shots of celebrities
caught in the middle of a blink that are used to suggest that they are
drunk. Except that, while drunk people do sometimes appear heavy-lidded,
people who are baffled and confused and depressed DO NOT rub their heads!
Any more than surprised people slap their foreheads. Or people lost in
thought touch their chin with their finger.

Domino's Pizza gleefully reports an upsurge in custom as middle-class
families cut back on eating in restaurants and take to dialling yucky fast
food instead, and is claiming, rather boldly, that "staying in is the new
going out".

So, what, is obese the new healthy? Is heart disease the new cool? Is
processed fatty rubbish in a box the new five portions a day? Is some spotty
groik haring up and down your road at all hours of the night and morning on
a screechy little scooter the new dawn chorus?

Have you noticed how women smoking outside office buildings all do it with
the non-***-holding forearm folded across their midriff and the ciggy-toting
arm propped on it at the elbow, so that they only have to lever the forearm
backwards and forwards to bring the hot little stub to their mouths?

Why do they do that? In winter I thought that maybe it was because they were
cold and it was a way of keeping warm when they'd hustled out coatless in
their rush to dilate those ventricles. But they're still doing it now in
high summer. Is it modest protection of the bosom? Or are they so wheezy and
degenerate from the years of self-abuse that they are too weak to hold a ***
properly?

And why is it only women? Men seem to be able to smoke perfectly normally,
chugging it down pinched between forefinger and thumb and then punching the
*** out into the road for some poor immigrant to sweep up later. But girls
all do this very defensive "don't-mind-me-I'm-just-snarfing-a-wee-***"
thing.

Are they hugging themselves as a consolation for the fact that, while they
are outside, some ruddy-faced non-smoker who doesn't have to leave her desk
every 20 minutes is being promoted above them? Or is it, perhaps, because
they think it looks cute? Any ideas?


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