Though I've already said all there is to say about the World Cup itself, I'm interested in some of ways it offers to assert national identity, or even to identify with someone else's identity.
I wish I'd had my camera with me on Friday afternoon. I saw a very desirable BMW sports coupe in the heart of the Jewish area of Finchley with a flag pennant with IRAN blazoned across the Iranian national colours. Half an hour later, in the same area, I saw another car with two pennants. One was another of the same IRAN pennants; the other was a cross of St George pennant, such as are now fluttering from a high proportion of the cars out on the roads.
That bit of Finchley has a large Iranian Jewish expat community; they have a synagogue within one of the local synagogues. But there's also a sizeable non-Jewish Iranian community there too; there are two excellent Iranian stores just down the road, in Temple Fortune. One of them is a fruit and grocery store full of Iranian patisserie and food ingredients I've never seen anywhere else.
Next door, there's a bookstore and fancy goods seller. They seem to be monarchists, judging from the prominent position in the shop window of biographies of Queen Farah. But they also display Freud in Farsi, some post modernist texts, and a jumble of Iranian paraphernalia from traditional musical instruments to Farsi Windows keyboards.
I'm intrigued to know whether the pennant flyers were Jewish or non-Jewish Iranians. Jewlicious tonight is featuring a display of the Israeli flag at the Mexico-Iran World Cup match, and concludes they were there to support the Mexicans. I'm not so sure.
We have an Iranian expat contingent in our shul, too. One of the men has an awesome story of being taken prisoner by a Revolutionary Guards militia at the time of the Khomeini revolution. They told him that if he did not convert to Islam, they would shoot him. He tore open his shirt and said, "Shoot!". They didn't.
What happens when you get to choose your nationality? Like, choose any one from three?
There's an interesting discussion started up on the subscription email list for people researching the family histories of Jews from Galicia, which used to be part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, but these days is split between Poland and the Ukraine.
It was started up by a researcher who'd asked if anyone knew what had determined the nationality choices that were available to Galician Jews through the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles after World War I. For they were offered a choice, for a year after the signing of the Treaty, of choosing between Polish and Austrian nationality. Very few did choose Austrian nationality, although historically, many Jews had identified with the Austro-Hungarian empire because of the relative liberalism of Emperor Franz Josef, who granted far more rights to Jews than most of the surrounding European monarchies.
The individual choices of citizenship members of my mother’s family made ultimately determined whether they lived or died in the Nazi era.
My grandparents emigrated to Berlin in the first decade of the twentieth century. My grandfather and oldest uncle served in the Austro-Hungarian army during WWI.
After WWI, my oldest uncle chose German nationality.
He had by then gained his PhD in Berlin and was a fervently would-be Yekke. In later years, he denied that he had ever spoken Yiddish; he referred to his experience of coming to Germany as a five year old as involving having to learn to "speak German properly", even though his parents continued to speak Yiddish at home.
My next oldest uncle chose Austrian nationality. I don’t really know why he did this, but he was certainly assimilationist, and an admirer of the modernism that he associated with both Germany and post war Austria. He was much more into style than his oldest brother. It’s possible he regarded Austria as a more stylish and elegant country than Germany.
My youngest uncle and my mother were still under age at the time, so my grandfather chose Polish nationality for them and himself and my grandmother. He does not seem to have been an admirer of Polish nationalism, but he was a wholesale egg importer, who brought trainloads of eggs from Poland and Hungary for sale in the Berlin metropolis. So I think the choice of Polish nationality was probably for business reasons. It’s possible that there were also taxation advantages.
When the Nazi era came, it was much easier for my two oldest uncles to get onto the US emigration visa quotas, which were much larger for German and Austrian citizens than Poles, reflecting the particular racisms of then US immigration policies, which regarded Poles as beings of "poorer stock". Once they were on the quota waiting lists, they were able to get transit visas into England, where they remained.
So my grandparents, my mother and her youngest brother had great difficulty in getting their visas. And they were still in Berlin at the time of the great round-up and expulsion of Polish Jews of October 1938, which the Nazis did in order to forestall the anti-semitic action of the then Polish government which was due to strip long-term expatriate Polish citizens like them of their nationality. My grandfather and youngest uncle were rounded up and dumped at the no-man’s land between the two countries, from where they were rescued and taken in by cousins in Krakow.
The family was able to get my grandfather out to join his sons and daughter in London just a couple of months before the war started, but sadly and ironically, he was killed in a bombing raid the day after Yom Kippur 1940.
My youngest uncle was unable to get out of Poland because the Polish authorities, who months earlier had been proposing to strip him of his nationality, now refused to grant exit visas to men of military age as the threat of a German invasion grew higher. He was rounded up for "forced labour" some time in 1940 with other young Jewish men in Krakow; they were made to dig a collective grave before being shot into it.
UPDATE:
Yesterday I saw three more cars bearing Iranian pennants in my area, which is astonishing, considering that the only other pennants I've seen since the start of the current World Cup frenzy in England on cars are English Cross of St George ones. One of the three was sporting both Iranian and British pennants.
Thanks to Steve M's helpful pointer to Azarmehr's blog, I can now see that the Sun and Lion variants of the Iranian flag like the one above are key indicators that the pennant-flyers are Iranian oppositionists. But three of the Iranian flags on the cars that I've seen so far don't have a sun and lion, and neither do they have the Islamic motif and inscriptions that mark the flag of the Islamic Republic regime. They just have the word IRAN emablazoned across the Iranian colours.
My speculative explanation for this is that it denotes oppositionists to the Islamist regime who are also socialists/marxists, who don't want to be associated with the flag of the monarchy. Perhaps some knowledgeable Iranian will enlighten us about whether I'm right.
It's still really fascinating that there are clearly fervent supporters of the Iranian football team who see supporting the team as a way to flaunt their opposition to the regime. It shows how deep their love of Iran is. I can't really imagine fervent oppositionists of any other regime doing a parallel thing at the World Cup or any similar sporting event.
Azarmehr comments on a different Iranian flag conflict. He is concerned about which Iranian flag their supporters carry. Most waved the 'Sun and Lion' flag although a few displayed the 'Islamic Republic' flag.
Something to look out for when watching Iran's next game.
Azarmehr's Blog - For a democratic secular Iran
Posted by: Steve M | June 12, 2006 at 09:56 AM
The flags I saw were definitely not Islamic Republic of Iran flags.
Posted by: Judy | June 12, 2006 at 10:22 AM
Judy
I also noticed these and a further Iranian flag (or poss. football shirt) - at the David Lloyd Gym in Finchley - well patronisd by the Jewish community - myself included. It was one of only three - I think Italy and England being the others.
Posted by: mark | June 12, 2006 at 11:27 AM
Funny. I live in Germany, and being close to Frankfurt, the contigent of foreign football supporters has amazed with with its diversity. "Hooligans of the World," they might call it.
Posted by: Freeman | June 12, 2006 at 03:00 PM
Judy:
FYI, there's a sizable expat Iranian community in Vancouver. Much earlier this year (or late last year), some Muslim members of that community decided to respond to Ahmadinejad's ravings of the week by mounting an art show that honoured 2,500 years of Jewish life in Iran.
I suspect that the vast majority of ex-pat Iranians around the world are not fans of the Islamic Republic as most are probably refugees from the Khomeinist regime, whatever their religious and political orientation, from the Communists who discovered that their former allies against the Shah were not their friends to those who were allied with the Shah and lost everything in the revolution. Indeed one secular Muslim I know, who falls in the latter camp, says that the Islamic conquest of Persia was the worst thing that happened to his culture.
Posted by: Lynne | June 12, 2006 at 03:03 PM
My grandparents were all Polish. My mother's father was killed in WWI serving in the Austro-Hungarian army, her mother moved to Vienna and that's where my mom was born and grew up. she and her mother got work visas to England in 1939 and spent the war as servants for English aristocrats.
My father's parents came to Berlin where my father was born. His father was a poultry wholesaler. They left for Paris in 1936 and were able to get sponsored for American citizenship and I think got their papers in '41? Anyway they walked from Paris to Marseilles and the ship to America stopped in Casablanca..... My parents could have fit into half the movies about WWII....
So maybe your grandfather knew my grandfather in the poultry biz!
Posted by: Yehudit | June 13, 2006 at 05:30 AM
Iran flag spotted on car parked in Mill Hill High Street- the kind with Iran written below the colours. Is this the new Eddie Stobart v Norbert Dentressangle spotting game?
Posted by: ami | June 14, 2006 at 10:35 AM
Oh, Hormuz (the Iranian shop in Temple Fortune) is great, and run by lovely people, too. They were always giving extra sweet things for free to my flatmate when we lived upstairs a few flats along from there. (They are almost certainly monarchists - I've seen them flying the Lion and Sun version of the Iranian flag before - even on non-football-related occasions.)
With that and Joseph's Bookstore (not to mention the attached restaurant), that parade of shops must be one of the most exceptional in London.
Posted by: Venichka | June 14, 2006 at 02:52 PM
Ami-- that figures. One of those cars I saw was on the road that leads up to Mill Hill...And it's more fun than Eddie Stobart tracks, which are relatively rare in Finchley, though I'm sure that they go great guns up the A1 and M1 through Mill Hill.
Venichka, respec'... you are as cool in your evaluation of Temple Fortune shopping heaven as you are in your Harry's Place comments on boring old politics. Have you checked out the selection of cheeses in Kosher Paradise? Tasted the incomparable Daniel's challah? Sunk your teeth into the qwiches from Platters?
Posted by: Judy | June 14, 2006 at 11:09 PM
Judy,
Thanks for your kind words.
Daniel's challah - oh yes, very good indeed. (I might dare to suggest that those of Roni's in West Hampstead are of a similar standard, though...)
And, alas, I'm unable to eat cheese - though I have sampled many other products from Kosher Paradise. They were, after all, my next door neighbours for two years. The people there were generally cheery, too.
I was VERY bemused to see a child's musical mobile in another shop along that parade, which would play a selection of three tunes, the swich for each being labelled by the name of the (European classical) composer of each tune. Quite impressed (although I didn't hear the tunes). Get the cultural education going young!
Posted by: Venichka | June 28, 2006 at 01:09 PM
Prior the 2006 World Cup, the last time it was in Europe (France 1998) each Iranian game saw large demonstrations by exiles opposed to the Islamic regime.
Indeed I wonder if the threat of counter-demonstrations was why the Iranian President changed his mind about coming to Germany to see his team.....
Posted by: Dr Paul Stott | July 25, 2006 at 10:33 AM