England -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction; Families -- Fiction; Journalists -- Fiction
Juke's book on modern thought in the Church was a success. It was
brilliantly written, and reviewed in lay as well as in church papers.
Juke, to his own detriment, became popular. Canon Streeter and others
asked him to collaborate in joint books on the Church. Modernist
liberal-catholic vicars asked him to preach. When he preached, people
came in hundreds to hear him, because he was an attractive, stimulating,
and entertaining preacher. (I have never had this experience, but I
assume that it is morally unwholesome.) He had to take missions, and
retreats, and quiet days, and give lectures on the Church to cultivated
audiences. Then he was offered the living of St. Anne's, Piccadilly,
which is one of those incumbencies with what is known as scope, which
meant that there were no poor in the parish, and the incumbent's gifts as
preacher, lecturer, writer, and social success could be used to the best
advantage. He was given three weeks to decide.
4
Gideon wrote long letters to Jane from the Russian towns and villages in
which he sojourned. But none of them were suitable for propaganda
purposes; they were critical but dispassionate. He had found some cousins
of his father's, fur merchants living in a small town on the edge of a
forest. 'Clever, cringing, nerve-ridden people,' he said. The older
generation remembered his grandparents, and his father as a bright-eyed
infant. They remembered that pogrom fifty years ago, and described it.
'They'll describe anything,' wrote Gideon. 'The more horrible it is, the
more they'll talk. That's Russian, not Jewish specially. Or is it just
human?'... Gideon didn't repeat to Jane the details he heard of his
grandparents' murder by Russian police--details which his father, in
whose memory they burned like a disease, had never told him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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