Michael Elkins

Speaker 10:00

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Disc's Archive. For rights' reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty five, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:31

Our castaway this week has lived for thirty five years in Jerusalem, and for half of that time has been the B B C's correspondent there. It's Michael Elkins, a very familiar voice.

Presenter0:42

How much does music mean to you, Michael? It means a great deal. It means even more than it used to mean now that I've retired from daily broadcasting and I have leisure to listen to music. Do you have any skill at it? Do you play an instrument?

Presenter0:59

No, but I sing off key. Do you have a lot of discs? Do you play records? In Israel we're quite lucky. For one thing, the Israeli Broadcasting Service gives us many hours of uh classical music or of all kinds of music. each day, a particular programme, The Voice of Music, you know. And of course I've collected records since well, since I was about eighteen, and I'm considerably more than that now.

Presenter1:31

Right. Now, the first of this miserable allowance of eight records we've given you, what is it?

Presenter1:37

It's a crutch to help me over the first lonely moments. It's the Vivaldi Four Seasons.

Presenter1:44

and I think the opening part spring.

Presenter1:47

Lively.

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Happy.

Presenter1:50

And that's encouraging music.

Presenter2:54

Spring from Viveldi's The Four Seasons The Soloists of Zagreb conducted by Antonio Yanigro.

Presenter3:02

Michael, you were born in the United States. In New York? In New York. Do you look back on your childhood as a deprived?

Michael Elkins3:10

One

Presenter3:10

Well

Presenter3:12

We were deprived of material possessions. I knew I was poor and I think it made me aggressive, but I had no real basis for comparison. Everyone I knew was poor. When you left primary school, what did you do? We were all what you would call young hoodlums. We ran around in the streets, you see, and we were all fairly tough, or thought of ourselves as fairly tough. This was a time when there was a great deal of gangsterism in the old movie sense in New York. And I think our ambitions were to be real top gangsters. Well, many of us never made it, but I must say some of my friends made it. And

Presenter4:00

One was electrocuted.

Presenter4:02

What I did was I made a kind of raffish living.

Presenter4:07

As a sort of handball professional. That's handball in the American sense, which is very much like squash.

Speaker 14:10

That's

Presenter4:15

And I would travel around betting on myself, and often won, and when I lost I had a fast pair of feet.

Presenter4:23

And I also was a pool room hustler, played pocket billiards for money. I was pretty good.

Presenter4:30

Who helped you, Michael? Who got you on your feet? Educated you?

Presenter4:36

Well

Presenter4:37

The woman was a teacher in DeWitt Clinton High School named Ina Newman. I wouldn't say she got me on my feet. I was on my feet in terms of the real world. I think what she did was let me be aware that I had an imagination and that it could flow or fly.

Presenter4:57

She taught me a love of the English language. She was an English literature teacher in what you would call secondary school. And um

Presenter5:07

She taught me pride. You went off to California. How did that come about?

Presenter5:14

Well, I like to think that it came about solely because I wrote a few short stories and articles when I was a kid in secondary school, and they came to the attention of film producers who then had a program called the Junior Writers Program. They brought young kids, teenagers, to Hollywood on short-term contracts and for low salaries, hoping to develop them into film writers. And what you did was you signed a seven-year contract, you see, so you would be bound. And mostly we all fell by the wayside because when we were apprenticed, as it were, to experienced writers to learn the craft, they would say, sit in the corner, kid, and don't bother me. And at the end of six months, you were out on your ear. I was more fortunate. I was apprenticed to a woman named Frances Highland, who taught me whatever I learned about screenwriting. So I would like to say that it happened out of my own merits and very considerable talents. But I must mention that, by the way, that at the time my brother Saul, my older brother, was a producer in Hollywood. And that is kind of helpful. That's it. Let's have your second record. What's that, Michael? Well, the second record is the Foray Requiem, the finale.

Presenter6:43

I like requiems you know they speak of the majesty of God, the universe, the earth, and so on but they speak in for the most part, if you take the Verdi or the Brahms or any of them, except perhaps Benjamin Britton's war requiem

Presenter7:02

They speak always in terms of the fate that awaits one and the fear involved. The days are awful they are days of awe.

Presenter7:14

and the Foray Requiem for me

Presenter7:18

ends on a more optimistic note and speaks of redemption when we come, and this is what was irresistible to me, when we come at last to Jerusalem, where I've spent half my life.

Presenter8:39

The opening of In Paradisum from the Foray Requiem

Presenter8:44

The Roger Wagner Chorale and the Concert Arts Orchestra conducted by Roger Wagner.

Presenter8:49

So you were in Hollywood, Michael, writing movies. Were you given screen credit yourself? Were you writing some good ones? No, I got some screen credit and I was writing bad ones. What sort? Well, I was writing low grade

Speaker 19:00

What

Presenter9:03

B pictures, as they were called, the Jones family, some of the Charlie Chan movies. Some of the Charlie Chan movies I seem to remember as very good, very exciting. Well, not any that I wrote. Full of Chinese philosophy. Not any that I wrote. They were full of Yiddish philosophy.

Presenter9:27

How long did you stay in Hollywood? From um nineteen thirty-six until the um Second World War.

Presenter9:36

Then I went back briefly, but then I went to San Francisco. But in that time I wasn't always a screenwriter.

Presenter9:44

What I was doing was I was discovering

Presenter9:48

bit belatedly, perhaps, and not alone, I was discovering the joy and excitement of struggling for a brave new world. Struggling may not be the word. I became a socialist, a leftist interested in anti-fascist causes, and that was the most exciting time.

Presenter10:10

You also had an adventurous time in the United States Army. I know you don't like talking about that, but you can't stop me. I know that you led a band of partisans in in Yugoslavia, and uh

Presenter10:23

You want one of the first to visit.

Presenter10:25

the hell of Dachau after the liberation of it.

Presenter10:29

Well, let's pass over those.

Presenter10:31

Moments and get on to your next record. What's the third? The next record is The Lonesome Train.

Presenter10:37

The Lonesome Train was written in about nineteen thirty eight by Earl Robinson. He wrote the music, and Millard Lampell, a fine radio writer, wrote the words. And what it is, it's a cantata about the death of Lincoln. After Lincoln was assassinated, his coffin was put on a special train, seven coaches painted black.

Presenter11:02

and the train went across the United States from Washington to Springfield, Illinois, where he had been born.

Presenter11:09

And along the way for that thousand miles,

Presenter11:14

At every way station, every road junction, thousands of people gather just to stand quietly to watch this dark, bleak

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Train go

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and the cantata

Presenter11:27

is a combination of folk song, folk music, and gives the character and meaning of Lincoln and has this marvelous phrasing that freedom's a thing that has no ending, it needs to be fought for, it needs defending. Mind you, then, you see, I was twenty-one and I had just discovered the joy of working for progressive causes.

Michael Elkins11:53

News from Washington That Abraham Lincoln's time had come. John Wilkes Bull shot Lincoln dead with a pistol bullet through the head.

Michael Elkins12:13

The slaves were free, the war was won, But the fight for freedom was just begun.

Michael Elkins12:21

There were still slaves, the hungry and poor, men who were not free.

Presenter12:28

An excerpt from The Lonesome Train, a musical legend.

Presenter12:32

Now, you want to couple that with your fourth record, Michael. What's that? The fourth record is Talking Union. It came at about the same time, and it was sung by the Almanac singers led by the great Pete Seeger, one of the greatest of America's folk singers. And it marks a period when I began working for the organization of trade unions, specifically of the agricultural workers, the Okies, the migratory workers, in the farms in California.

Presenter13:06

And it's a song about building a union. If you want higher wages, you've got to organize a union.

Presenter13:14

And this was a very important part of my life because later on I helped in organizing the Yucca Power, the United Cannery Agricultural Packing House Workers of America.

Presenter13:26

that is, the Farm Hands Union and then I went on, some years later, to represent thirty five local unions in negotiations with employers, and it was direct work, the results of which you could feel, you could hold in your hands, and I loved it.

Speaker 213:45

Now if you want higher wages, let me tell you what to do. You got to talk to the workers in the shop with you. You got to build you a union, got to make it strong. But if you all stick together, boys, it won't be long. You get shorter hours.

Speaker 213:57

Better working conditions.

Speaker 213:59

Vacations with pay, take a kid to the seashore.

Speaker 214:03

It ain't quite this simple, so I better explain Just why you got to ride on the Union train'cause if you wait for the boss to raise your pay, We'll all be awaiting till Judgment Day, we'll all be buried.

Presenter14:14

Pete Seeger, Talking Union.

Presenter14:17

You were in San Francisco working as a a trade union official, and you had a rather cloak and dagger visitor one day with a proposition.

Presenter14:28

I know. Yeah, yeah.

Presenter14:30

I was approached by representatives of Haganah, the defense unit of the Jews of what was then the emerging Jewish state of Israel. And what they wanted was they expected the war that did eventuate, and the Israelis or the Jewish Palestinians were essentially outnumbered and certainly outequipped, as you might say, by the Arab armies. And they were recruiting people to organize smuggling operations, to smuggle arms and technicians to fight in the 48 war.

Presenter15:09

And that's what I got involved in, not because I was a Zionist or even a very conscious Jew. I was an anti-fascist, and if Jewish people would be redeemed, as would all people, in the humanist socialism that I and others, in our optimistic mood, felt we were creating or helping to create. But I felt there ought to be a Jewish state, there had to be a Jewish state, and the Jewish nation had to be reborn out of the ashes of the Holocaust. How did you set about this task of smuggling arms? I mean, you were on the other side of the world. You were in San Francisco. Well, first of all, there was a huge quantity of surplus weaponry.

Speaker 115:47

San Francisco.

Presenter15:53

left in the United States after the World War, and this was in the hands either of junk dealers or arms merchants. And there happened to be a law against exporting these without a federal license. And so we engaged in a lot of sort of cops and robbers stuff in evading this. Jews from all over the world were moving into Israel on virtually everything that would float in vast numbers. Were they being looked after? Oh, yes, they were being looked after all right. Sitting behind me in the studio, my lady Ruth, was one of the people who looked after them. All of the Jews of Palestine were organized in what was then, in the first days, illegal immigration of Jews from Europe, from the DP camps, smuggling them into the country, protecting them, settling them. Were you helping in that work as well as smuggling in arms? Well, I came to Israel toward the end of the 48 war, and I didn't know whether I was going to settle or not. I can't say that I helped in that. What I did is I did documentary films and I depicted some of this for history.

Presenter17:10

But I had no active role.

Presenter17:13

No, I never did any fundraising. I thought the films were mainly for fundraising. They were, but I was a professional. Uh what I was interested in was recording this for history. Certainly they were used for fundraising. I also wrote pamphlets which were used for fundraising. I thought you meant did I go out and raise money with my own mellifluous voice? No, I didn't.

Presenter17:37

We got your fifth record. What's that to be?

Presenter17:40

The fifth record is the Apassionata, Beethoven's Appassionata, and I've chosen it as played by Sirkin, whom I don't know but who projects a gentleness and a brilliance that is remarkable when combined in this fashion. And I chose it because in the midst of all this bursting energy, when I was doing everything that I thought a human being could do,

Presenter18:06

Back in the thirties, the Upashanata was one of the first.

Presenter18:11

records of classical music that I really listened to, and as I recall, it was the first such that I ever bought with my own hard earned money.

Presenter18:22

I love it, it's very beautiful.

Presenter19:26

Rudolf Serkin playing part of Beethoven's Hapacionata sonata, number twenty three in F minor.

Presenter19:34

So you started your long residence in in Jerusalem. There must have been many problems with all these millions of people flowing into the country.

Presenter19:44

Was there housing for them? Yes. The first couple of hundred thousand were housed in what were called marbarat, that is, tenth cities, and shacks built of corrugated iron sheeting with uh no plumbing, and there weren't jobs enough, and so on. It was a miserable time for them. But you have to understand how fine the country was then, because everyone was doing some part of a national task, and everyone felt that the redemption of the Jewish people rested in their own hands. We were building a nation, you know. Yes, under enormous difficulties, and part of the time in a state of war.

Presenter20:27

You became a war correspondent for Columbia Broadcasting. How how did that come about?

Presenter20:33

I didn't know I was becoming a war correspondent. I probably would have been terrified of that. That just happened to me. I was in Paris and I was completing a film and uh CBS, the Columbia Broadcasting System's chief European correspondent, whom I didn't know and I never knew how he knew me, called me and asked was I coming back to Israel? and I said yes. And he said, How would you like to be a CBS Stringer, that is part time correspondent in Israel? I said fine, on the theory that if you've never done it, there's no evidence that you cannot do it.

Presenter21:10

And when I got to Israel, I announced to the government people responsible for the press that I was the new correspondent. And they said, why don't you go in the next room and inform the old correspondent who's still there and knew nothing of it. And he threw me out. And some months later, he left the country and the job fell to me. And that was just before what you Brits call the Suez Campaign and what we know of as the Sinai Campaign of 1956.

Presenter21:42

Now, also the the BBC picked you up as a correspondent. That was a little bit later. Uh yes, they did that ten years later. The man who was stringing for the BBC quit and was a friend and asked me would I like to do it and I said sure. By that time I'd had ten years' experience. I felt a bit more confident and that's how I became an assimilated Brit.

Presenter22:07

Yes. Well, it showed that they had great confidence in you as a Jew and if not an outright Zionist, someone with Zionist leadings, and they knew that you would give an impartial observation as a correspondent, which of course was the most important thing.

Presenter22:24

I would never claim

Presenter22:26

Impartiality. I would argue that I believe the record shows that I always gave a fair report. At least, uh although I've often been under challenge, I've been challenged on the basis that I am a Jew and a Zionist that is, I believe in the Jewish state to that extent. I am a classical Zionist, I suppose. And it was on that basis that they considered it unfair and unfortunate that a Jew and a Zionist should be BBC's correspondent. My argument was, and the BBC's argument was, that what I was personally didn't count. What counted was what I put on the air.

Presenter23:09

We've got now to record six. Number six is Bach's Brandenburg Concerti.

Presenter23:16

I like all the monumental music. You are this thundering, universal gut music that shakes the walls and shakes your emotions.

Presenter23:27

But if I was sitting, cast adrift on a desert island,

Presenter23:32

I feel that I would be well aware of the immensity of the universe and sufficiently frightened by it, and I would need something a bit more comforting and sprightly, and something I could live with easier, and so I chose this.

Presenter24:50

The opening of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. Five in D Major, the Londonborough Ensemble conducted by Karl Haas.

Presenter24:58

What are your plans now, Michael, now that you no longer have deadlines? Well, I'm consultant to the news and current affairs department of the BBC, and I write regular reports to the BBC, not for broadcast, but background reports.

Presenter25:18

What I'm doing is I'm preparing to write a book that I have contracted for. Not your first book. You have written books in the past. Well, I've written a book in the past. I wrote a book called Forged in Fury.

Speaker 125:22

Not

Speaker 225:23

Yeah.

Speaker 125:23

Both

Presenter25:30

which was an examination of the Jewish resistance in Eastern Europe in World War Two, the anti Nazi resistance. What is the new book to be?

Presenter25:42

Originally it was going to be a lazy man's book. I was going to collect my favorite programmes that I had done for the BBC, most of them from the programme called From Our Own Correspondent, and revisit them. What has happened to the people, what has happened to my view of the situation as it was then. But I've now expanded it, and it's going to have a bit more of personal autobiographical memoirs, not an autobiography, but a selected memoirs in relation to myself and the encounter with Israel. Well, what about an autobiography? Isn't that going to come?

Presenter26:25

I'm scared spitless of that, as is any intelligent human being. You do an autobiography and you're naked and alone before the world if you tell the truth, or you're a cheat if you don't. So I'd prefer to start with a carefully selected group of memoirs.

Speaker 126:27

Okay, so

Presenter26:44

We've got to record number seven.

Presenter26:46

Record number seven is Benny Goodman's big band playing Loch Lomond, sung by Martha Tilton with Harry James on the trumpet.

Presenter26:57

Nineteen thirty-eight was a time when I was.

Presenter27:01

You could say swinging, and everyone I knew was swinging, not just musically, but we were living at the peak of our abilities, and we had the whole world in our hands, or so we felt, and we were going to change it, shape it, we were going to build it anew with the face of a kind of humanist socialism. And we were alive, and the music burst out of these big bands, and I learned to dance then, and I could get out here on the floor and dance to Loch Loman for you, if this were T V.

Michael Elkins27:39

You take the high road and I'll take the low road, but I'll be in Scotland afore ya.

Michael Elkins27:47

For me and my true love may never meet again On the bonny, bonny banks of Larglo Mar

Michael Elkins27:59

Bye on

Michael Elkins28:00

Funny face

Michael Elkins28:02

And by young

Michael Elkins28:04

Bonnie Fray, where the sun shines bright on La Bloom.

Michael Elkins28:14

Where me and my true love.

Michael Elkins28:19

Wherever on the gate

Michael Elkins28:23

On the bonny, bonny base of La Flow.

Michael Elkins28:30

Now you take the high road and I'll take the low.

Michael Elkins28:36

But I'll be in Scotland before ya.

Presenter28:40

Locke Lohman, the Benny Goodman band in a nineteen thirty eight Carnegie Hall jazz concert.

Presenter28:46

Michael, could you look after yourself on a desert island?

Presenter28:49

Could you rig up a shelter of some kind? Are you good with your hands? Well, I once was good with my hands, but I have an unfortunate tendency of losing every skill that I'm no longer using at the time. I would learn. Out of practice, in other words. Yes, I'm out of practice. I would learn. I would learn because I have to learn, and one does what one has to do. And you've got to find some food. Have you ever done any fishing? No. I once did one peculiar kind of fishing, though. In the first years that I was in Israel, I took time off. This was 48, 49, something like that. I took time off and went down to Elat on the Gulf of Aqaba, and there some character introduced me to the fishing where you catch baby sharks with your hands. Have you ever heard of that? I haven't. You catch them in shallow water when they come in, and you what you have is a pair of gloves with fish hooks on, and you just grab them. So I have a picture of myself holding a baby shark. Perhaps I could do it again. You wait till somebody sends you the gloves. Would you try to escape? I would like to say yes, but I tell you I am afraid of water. I really am. I am among these unfortunate people who were thrown in a river, you know, to sink or swim, and I sometimes think I just sank.

Presenter30:14

Uh I don't know. What's your last record?

Presenter30:18

The last one is Benjamin Britton's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, sung by Peter Pears with Dennis Brain on the horn. Fine record.

Presenter30:30

And the section that I have chosen is a section that speaks of one

Presenter30:37

Well, what might be described as getting one's just deserts when you're dead and facing purgatory and whether you go to hell or heaven.

Presenter30:47

And I like to think that on balance I can't prove this, and I'm not certain of it but I like to think that on balance well, if I got my just desserts I wouldn't go to hell.

Michael Elkins31:40

Great we're the rain.

Michael Elkins31:45

Labor and I know The fire shall never make me shrink

Speaker 131:45

Yeah.

Michael Elkins31:54

And Christ received thy soul.

Presenter32:01

Benjamin Britton's Serenade Opus Thirty One for Tenor, Horn and Strings, featuring Peter Pears and Dennis Braine.

Presenter32:10

If you would only have one of the eight discs you've played us, Michael, which would it be? I would take the Vivaldi. The Vivaldi Four Seasons. And one luxury to have with you on the island, one object to look at, to give you pleasure. Could I have a typewriter? Yes, an electric typewriter. An electric typewriter, yes, solar batteries.

Speaker 132:24

Yeah, like that.

Presenter32:28

Yeah, and you know why? This is going to be the autobiography, is it? Well, yes and no. I would like to think that in the loneliness of a a desert island

Presenter32:39

Being then the smallest part of the universe, I would like to think that somewhere great thoughts would come and it would be a shame for posterity to be robbed of them. And I would also do the autobiography because I would already be naked and alone. What can happen? Right, and plenty of paper and carbons.

Speaker 132:50

And I would all

Presenter32:59

And one book. We already give you the authorized King James Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. Now one other volume. That's easy. Ruth suggested it. I I've mentioned, my lady, Ruth suggested it immediately, and there was no other book in the world that I would choose for that one book. And I would choose The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. Right.

Presenter33:23

The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. And thank you, Michael Elkins, for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. It's been a joy. Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 133:39

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio forward.