October Fests
Gerald Jacobs tells a tale about two women at the heart of Jewish reading
IYou can benefit at both ends of this bookish month
T WOULD be very difficult to find two more dedicated bibliophiles than Claudia Rubenstein and Natalie Livingstone. They love books. They read them. They write them. And they are committed to spreading the word — and the words. They don’t work together. They are not a team. Neither are they rivals — indeed, they hold each other in high regard.
Rubenstein’s latest book is King of the North Wind: a Biography of Henry II in Five Acts, which is currently in development as a drama series on the life of Henry’s wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Livingstone’s brand-new offering is Women of Rothschild, which is seductively sub-titled
The Untold Story of the World’s Most Famous Dynasty.
At this point, you may feel that you are unfamiliar with the work of either one of these two British Jewish women. If, however, you too are a book lover, you will almost certainly be a beneficiary of the activities of at least one and possibly both. And you have the chance to continue to be so at the beginning and towards the end of this new, bookish month of October.
Claudia Rubenstein is the director of Jewish Book Week, which was established in 1952 by George Webber, a law lecturer at UCL, and has since grown into one of London’s major cultural events. Under a string of subsequent directors, almost all of them women, it has expanded in an impressive number of imaginative ways, right up to the “Jewish Book Weekend”, which starts after Shabbat tomorrow and continues into Sunday, heralding Jewish Book Week’s 70th birthday bash next March.
Natalie Livingstone is the director, and founder, of the much younger Cliveden annual literary festival, which takes place in autumn in the grounds of the most historically glamorous of settings — matched by the grandeur of the literary and other luminaries Livingstone seems always able to bring to speak at Cliveden.
Both women are relieved and delighted that they are able to put on live shows this year and hopefully next. Natalie Livingstone laments the “lack of culture” created by the virus and the lockdowns. But already in October, the exciting array of names she has lined up for three weeks’ time on the weekend of the 23rd and 24th will more than compensate. Especially as she has achieved the spectacular coup of landing the Israeli actor and writer Lior Raz — “Doron” from the explosive TV thriller series, Fauda .
Claudia Rubenstein is hoping she will once again see packed audiences at Kings Place, Jewish Book Week’s home venue a mere novella’s throw from King’s Cross stations, and it is at Kings Place that the festival’s 70th anniversary will be celebrated on the verge of spring in 2022.
Not that the public support for Book Week fell during the pandemic: “We were blown away by the response to our online festival,” Rubenstein says, “passing the 25,000-ticket mark for the first time and reaching thousands of households across the UK as well as internationally.
“The one aspect both the team and our audience did miss was that festival buzz and shared experience” she adds. “So as we approach the 70th edition of what is London’s oldest literary festival, we wanted to bridge that gap with a bite-sized version; so was born the first Jewish Book Weekend”— which kicks off tomorrow night with Dr Schnitzler’s Casebook,a one-off performance starring Toby Jones as Arthur Schnitzler.
And, in a typical mix of entertainment and enlightenment, Sunday’s menu includes sessions on Billy Wilder and Mel Brooks; biographer Anne Sebba talking about her powerful portrayal of Ethel Rosenberg; and Joshua Cohen talking about his uproarious novel, The Netanyahus. Among other events, an interview by Zoe Strimpel of prize-winning novelist Dara Horn talking from America about her new book, People Love Dead Jews, can be watched on a screen at Kings Place or online. Turkish writer Elif Shafak will feature both at this weekend’s mini-festival and 20 days later at Cliveden.
That “festival buzz,” also strongly characterises the 17th-century Cliveden countryhouse experience on the cusp of Berks and Bucks. History, noble and scandalous, resonates from the imposing buildings across the wide-open grounds where festival-goers can stroll and chat. The very air is stimulating.
But the main festival business — the talks and discussions (and eating and drinking) — takes place under varied cover from a giant marquee to a grand hall where, by the fireplace, hangs a portrait of one-time chatelaine of Cliveden, Nancy Astor, who, as described by Natalie Livingstone, was a “famous hostess and antisemite”.
Most people nowadays associate Cliveden with the Profumo affair in the early 1960s but Natalie Livingstone has put it on the British literary map — or, as she would say, restored it to that status. After her property-developer husband Ian Livingstone’s company acquired Cliveden in 2012, she “fell in love” with the place and did some research, which resulted in her writing the book, The Mistresses of Cliveden.
“I discovered there was a great literary history of Cliveden,” she recalls, “Alexander Pope came to Cliveden, Jonathan Swift came to Cliveden; Tennyson, George Bernard Shaw, Kipling, H.G. Wells. And I thought, ‘wow! wouldn’t it be amazing to continue this.’ And she did, setting up the first festival in 2017. This month’s event will be the fourth and more than confirm this relatively recent festival’s phenomenal status.
The list of participants is too long to reveal here but if Oscar winner Emerald Fennell, of The Crown; General David Petraeus talking about “Catastrophe in Kabul”; Lionel Shriver; Antonia Fraser; Kate Mosse; David Baddiel; Barbara Amiel, aka Lady Black, her husband Conrad Black; A.N. Wilson; Simon Sebag Montefiore; John Preston; Andrew Roberts and Sebastian Faulks (not forgetting Doron from Fauda!) whet your appetite, there is, believe me, a lot more.
Arthur Schnitzler, whom Toby Jones will be incarnating in tomorrow evening’s Jewish Book Weekend opener, once wrote: “To seize the right moment is everything”.
Good advice for booking festival tickets.