Summary of Tony Judt's Thinking the Twentieth Century

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#1 My full name is Tony Robert Judt. I have two perspectives on my childhood. From one perspective, it was an utterly conventional, somewhat lonely, and very lower-middle-class London childhood of the 1950s. From another perspective, it was an exotic, distinctive, and therefore privileged, expression of mid-twentieth-century history as it happened to immigrant Jews from East Central Europe.

#2 My father’s father, Enoch Yudt, was a Jewish economic marginal in a state of permanent migration. He had no particular skill except selling, and not much of that. He got by on the black market between Belgium, Holland, and Germany in the 1920s. But things must have gotten a bit warm for him around 1930, because he had to move on.

#3 My father, who was from Belgium, had come to Ireland with his family in 1936. In 1936, his brother in London invited him to England. He left school at fourteen to work odd jobs. While my mother spent her late teens in London, she was far more English in her soul than my father, who had been born there.

#4 I was born in 1948 in East London. The first thing I remember is walking along Tottenham High Road. I have other memories of North London life, including looking at trucks and buses out of my parents’ bedroom window.

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Rafbók: 28 april 2022