Michael pinto-duschinsky biography

Then there were mother-daughter skiing trips in the Tatra Mountains and visits to Venice and Rome. Her brother Moishe left Munkacs, reportedly because he wanted the chance to be less religious without offending his parents. Vali Mermelstein, who survived the Holocaust hiding in Budapest, as did my mother, was one of eight daughters of a Jewish family which operated a plant for bottling spring water.

Vali attended the Zionist gymnasium and remained religious throughout her later life in London. One of her sisters married a rabbi; they died with their children in Auschwitz. The novelist Charlotte Mendelson is the granddaughter of one of them. The mixture of traditionalism and modernising trends in s Munkacs emerges from an academic thesis on prewar Jewish Munkacs Munkacs: A Jewish world that wasby Anna Berger, University of Sydney, Most of her research cannot now be reproduced since many of her 20 interviewees are no longer alive.

The importance of her work is becoming ever more evident. She describes a number of social venues usually avoided by Hasidim but popular with many Jews of different levels of religiosity. There were a number of kosher restaurants as well as kosher and non-kosher coffee shops including the non-kosher Homdi cafe on the upmarket Corso. Men, many of them Jews, often young and unmarried, met there to play cards or billiards for money and drink.

They would carry books in order to give boys also doing the Corso walk the pretext to approach and ask them what they were reading. For her, the Corso beat anything Budapest had to offer. We just walked and looked at each other. In the same photograph is a youth she identified as Weiss who had wanted to marry her. By contrast, many marriages, especially among the ultra-orthodox, were arranged through professional matchmakers.

The negotiation of dowries was part of this traditional process. As Anna Berger found during her interviews, those to whom she spoke kept returning to their experiences during the Holocaust despite her focus on prewar life in the town.

Michael pinto-duschinsky biography: Michael Pinto-Duschinsky (born June

While my mother was living, I must admit that the attempt to reconstruct the fateful weeks between March and Julywhen someJews in Hungarian-ruled territory were deported to Auschwitz, dominated our conversations. It was only when her health was declining that I went through her photographs with her to ask the stories behind them and began to explore her life before the Holocaust.

I wish I had urged her to describe her childhood and teenage experience in far greater detail. Yet, there is more than enough evidence — including photographic evidence — to establish a basic conclusion. Munkacs had not been a place of gloom. The strong friendships that survivors maintained with each other after the Second World War, despite being scattered around the globe, and the care they gave each other in their declining years, must have been rooted in notably generative family and social life during their growing years.

With the Soviet takeover of Munkacs infew of its 2, Jews, who escaped the gas chambers in Auschwitz in May and coped with the rigours of the concentration camps, chose to remake their lives there. The loving attachment to Munkacs which so many of them retained suggests that the town had brought together diverse, albeit frequently discordant, Jewish michaels pinto-duschinsky biography with an unusual chemistry.

A group of young people skating, February image courtesy the author The Zionists were bitterly divided among themselves. Tagged with: no tags. Soros George Schopflin. The musician and her husband secretly eloped. They had been used by dockers of the time. The senior history master J W Hunt had an exceptional intellect. Le Mansois Field, who had been a teacher since used pronunciation boards surrounding the walls of his classroom to stretch our mouths so that we pretty well imitated French natives.

The most important for me was the headmaster A. Doc Barton was rather humourless and unpopular among boys and staff, but he did a great deal for me in helping to resolve family problems and in guiding me toward scholarship competitions. Being raised by an elderly single aunt, relief of fees became important. After gaining a Sassoon Scholarship and then a Corporation Exhibition [providing half of the fees], it was a huge relief to receive most of the fees through a new scholarship, the Elliott Scholarship, provided by a couple living in Rhodesia.

Then there was School Society, the debating club which held its meetings under the portrait of HH Asquith, the Old Citizen who became prime minister.

Michael pinto-duschinsky biography: Michael PINTO-DUSCHINSKY, senior research

I remember, in the sixth form, being disqualified from a debate because I accidentally gave a speech in favour of a motion I was meant to be opposing! How to recover? In my early years at the school, a special pleasure was attending debates on a Wednesday afternoon [the half day for sports] at the House of Commons. Lifelong close friends.

A grandstand view of the great public institutions of our country, especially the Houses of Parliament and the nearby law courts. A mix of religions. Intellectual rigour. The grounding in debate at the School Society. What happened was a seamless and rather thoughtless procession from an undergraduate degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford, to post-graduate degrees in the United States and then back in Oxford followed by Oxford fellowships and election to the Oxford City Council.

Michael pinto-duschinsky biography: Michael Pinto-Duschinsky is a Hungarian-born

The university teaching parts of my career are in the past. The research, writing and advising parts continue. The common thread in my work is involvement in elections and democratic processes. My doctoral thesis was on the organisation of political parties. When my doctoral supervisor at Nuffield College asked me to co-author his next general election study, we held interviews with at least half of the cabinet and most of the other leading political figures of the day.

What was most striking was the brutal majesty of the democratic process as it operated in the UK. A michael pinto-duschinsky biography before the election, we spoke with the supremely confident premier, Harold Wilson, in his study in Downing Street. So confident was he of victory and smoking a cigar — not the more proletarian pipe he smoked in public — that he had nowhere to live in the event the removal vans came to take his possession in the event of his defeat.

This is not a popular view among my fellow political scientists many of whom prefer proportional representation. While certainly not the most lucrative of callings, scholarly life has given fascinating opportunities to test theories in the real world of politics. In two general election campaigns in the 80s, I entered one of the party headquarters to advise on private opinion polls.

I discovered a world of high level nerves, personal rivalries, and dysfunctional secrets held by one department from another and, in particular, from the party leader. Retrieved 11 August Archived from the original on 30 October Retrieved 28 October Michael Pinto- Duschinsky". Archived from the original on 12 February Retrieved 12 February Archived from the original on 13 February The Daily Telegraph.

Archived from the original on 5 January Retrieved 9 January Archived from the original on 25 September Retrieved 5 January London : Constitutional Reform Centre.

Michael pinto-duschinsky biography: Michael Pinto-Duschinsky was senior consultant

Archived from the original on 28 October Retrieved 28 October — via Trove. Jewish Chronicle. Retrieved 5 July Electoral Calculus. Archived from the original on 17 October Retrieved 17 October By Michael Pinto-Duschinsky. Washington, D. American Political Science Review.