The death this week of Dannie Abse made me reflect not only on the silencing of an engaging poetic voice but how spending a childhood in a domestic intellectual hothouse must help to spark and then nurture a natural talent.
Even as the three Nottingham-bred Attenborough brothers went on to top their respective professions, so their exact contemporaries, the Welsh-Jewish Abse lads, Leo, Wilfred and Dannie shone variously in politics, psychiatry and a combination of medicine and writing.
I have not discovered anything about their sister, Huldah save that she lived in France until her 
No wonder Dannie told Phil Morris of the Wales Arts Review:
“If somebody is talking about Israel, I certainly feel more Jewish at that moment. There are certain occasions, of course there are, when someone is being antisemitic – then I feel yes I am a Jew. And I have said before, I think quoting somebody else, ‘I’m a Jew as long as there’s one antisemite alive”.
He added later that as fellow Welsh poet Dylan Thomas had already become famous when he was writing his early autobiographical novel, Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve, he emphasised his Jewish background and politics, to contrast as much as possible with Thomas’s own autobiography, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.
I conclude here with the opening two verses of Abse’s White Balloon:
“Dear love, Auschwitz made me
more of a Jew than Moses did.
But the world’s not always with us.
Happiness enters here again tonight
like an unexpected guest
with no memory of the future either;
“enters with such an italic emphasis,
jubilant, announcing triumphantly
hey presto and here I am and opening
the June night into our night living room
where, under the lampshade’s ciliate,
an armchair’s occupied by a white balloon.
As if there’d been a party” …...
© Natalie Wood (01 October 2014)
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