There’s an old joke about a Jewish passenger on a cruise ship that sinks. The passenger, let’s call him Mr Cohen, manages to swim to a nearby desert island, where he sets up home and waits to be rescued. Life is not too bad; there is a plentiful supply of food and water. Several years later another ship finally arrives. The captain asks what the two buildings on the island are.

‘Synagogues’, replies Mr Cohen.

‘But you are alone. Why do you need two synagogues when there is only one of you?’

‘The one on the right is the synagogue that I pray in’, says Mr Cohen. ‘And the other one, I’ll never step inside.’

Sadly for the last Jews of Kerala, the joke,

Literary Review

Jul 2008

Categories

Adam LeBor

The Decline and Fall of a Friendship

A Nice Little Earner

Blood Lines

Not All it Seems

The Swedish Schindler

Seeds of Discord

The Dark Side

Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction

Hunting the Stern Group

Aftershocks of the Risorgimento

The Other Naqba

Divided City

Ottoman Atrocity

Touching the Void

Change by the Sea

Atrocity in Europe

Drunk Again, Khayyam?

The Ottoman Question

1967 & All That

The Battle for Budapest

A Gigantic ‘Balagan’

Report from Sarajevo

If These Pages Could Talk

What a State to Be In