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By Huw Spink

"They smash down your doors, they don't bother to knock / They've done this before, so why all the shock?"

One of the constant joys of Phil’s songs is the amount of historical detail they include. Even a relatively simple song such as ‘I Ain’t Marching Anymore’ takes us from the Battle of New Orleans through the trenches of the First World War to give some context to the horrors of the battles raging in Vietnam.

The weight of history unpinning so many of his songs is echoed in even a brief investigation into the the experiences of his family and their contemporaries and perhaps helps to explain why fighting against war and injustice became so important to him.

Phil’s father Jacob’s parents’ families both left the  northern Polish town of Mława and settled in New York City’s Lower East Side.  The long Jewish history of Mława is riddled with persecution, documented beautifully in 1949 by Dr. Ze’ev Jonis in his work Jewish Mława; It’s History, Development, Destruction. He tells of a segregated existence between Jews and Gentiles, interspersed with periods of hostility. He tells of early Jewish communities having no say at all in the running of the town, before slowly gaining influence. The Russian rule from 1795 became ever more anti-Semitic, the anti-Semitism which must have been a major factor in Jacob Ochs’ parents migration to the USA.  Jewish life in Mława continued, problematically in the Ochs’s absence. Ironically, given the events that would follow, the entry of German troops into Mława in 1914, in pursuit of fleeing Russian troops, brought greater freedoms to the people of the town, with the Germans welcomed as liberators, especially by the one-third of the town who were Jewish. One consequence of these freedoms however was an upsurge in Polish (Gentile) run shops, resulting in a boycott of the once-thriving Jewish-run shops. This anti-Jewish prejudice would pale against the events later in the century. The website jewishgen.org, in its pages documenting the Jewish people of Mława, contains a photograph of the staff and editorial board of the Agudat Yisrael (the political party representing orthodox Jews) newspaper Undzer Tribune, undated but presumably from the early part of the Twentieth century. Each man on the photo is numbered 1-13, each identified by Moshe Peles, Chairman of the Mława Organisation in Israel in April 1999. Of the thirteen one man remains unidentified, one was living in Los Angeles, one died in the USA, three died in Israel and the other six perished in the Holocaust.  According to the Mława Remembrance Initiative over 7000 Jews from Mława were murdered during the Holocaust. 

Events in Mława in 1991 made it onto the pages of Adolph Ochs’ (another who’s family fled religious persecution before settling in the United States) paper The New York Times. The issue dated July 25th 1991 featured a story headlined “Poles Vent Their Economic Rage on Gypsies”;

…Maria Packowska shuffled forlornly around the scratched wooden floor of her living room, destroyed in a recent ransacking of gypsy property in this northern Polish town.

“I can’t sleep, I can’t eat,” she said. “All I keep hearing is what they scream : ‘Death to the gypsies!”

“Who knows what will come next?”...

The relative safety of New York City however brought with it its own travails. Jacob’s father ran a grocery store, not dissimilar, one would imagine, to the one run by Morris Bober in Bernard Malamud’s novel The Assistant. In Malamud’s book there is a conflict between the necessities of business and the Bober family’s struggle to maintain their Jewish identity. By the time Phil was growing up, as Marc Eliot notes in his book Death Of A Rebel, “being Jewish meant nothing to [the Ochs children], other than getting off school for the Jewish holidays”.  What the Ochs’s and the Bober’s lacked in prosperity, they made up for in a kind of stoic dignity borne of strong will and self-preservation.

It wasn’t a will to travel nor any kind of romantic notion of the beauty of Scotland that led Jacob Ochs to study medicine abroad. In 1933 some 2052 American medical students were studying abroad, mostly in Scotland and Switzerland. Of these, 90% were Jewish; a direct consequence of the Jewish quota at work in American medical colleges, known as ‘Numerus Clausus’, for the sake of wrapping prejudice in fancy language. According to Leon Sokoloff’s study the quota system, unofficial of course, derived from a “wide perception that the country had too many Jewish medical students and that the ‘racial imbalance’ should be controlled”. In 1934, for example, The Association of American Colleges reported that more than 60% of applicants to American medical colleges were Jewish. Between 1920 and 1940 at least half of medical students at New York University and the Long Island College of Medicine, the most likely places for Jack Ochs to have applied, were Jewish. Sokoloff states that “the administration of the city colleges literally discouraged prospective candidates from applying to medical school”.

Between 1902 and 1931, as the standards for the teaching of medicine in American universities were tightened, the numbers of medical schools in the U.S. dropped from 162 to 76. Colleges were forced into limiting the number of successful applicants, regardless of ability. College application forms began asking for information regarding religion or ‘racial origin’ and when these proved controversial, ‘mother’s maiden name’. W.S Ladd, the Dean of Cornell University Medical College admitted in April 1940 that “we limit the numbers of Jews admitted to each class to roughly the proportion of Jews in the population of the state”.

According to Sokoloff, “Scottish [medical] schools had advantages beyond their historical religious tolerance: they did not require learning a new language. They were relatively inexpensive. The academic quality was high”. So it was, that to escape prejudice, Jacob Ochs went in the opposite direction to his grandparents, and headed east, to Edinburgh.

Upon his return to New York City, with his young wife and child in tow, Jacob struggled to find work. They lived in New York City, then Columbus, New Mexico (where they were living when Phil, named after his mother’s grandfather, was born) then onto San Antonio and Austin, Texas. When Jack was called up to the army he moved the family back to New York City, and was then shipped out to Europe. His family’s struggle in his absence (now including another son, Michael) pale in comparison with what Jack was to endure. He was posted to Belgium and served a medical officer during the Ardennes Offensive, the so-called Battle of the Bulge, the largest battle fought by American troops during the Second World War. Fought during the winter months on 1944 and 1945 it was also the Nazi’s final, desperate, major offensive of the war, an attempt to destabilise the Allied forces unity and capture the city port of Antwerp, a major Allied supply route. During fierce battles during the bitterly cold winter months, some 10,000 Allied troops, mostly American, and some 12,000 Nazi troops, lost their lives. However, by 1945 the Nazi’s could no longer withstand such losses. Victory at the Battle of the Bulge ensured that the Allies could finally believe that the Nazi war effort was coming to an end.

Behind the scenes of the battle were extreme tensions between British and American troops, characterised by a falling out between General George Patten and Field Marshall Montgomery, who Patten called “that cocky little limey fart”. It is somewhat ironic that Patten, a great hero of the Second World War and of the Battle of the Bulge in particular, should be such turn out to be an anti-Semite. The kind of anti-Semite who wrote in his diaries that Holocaust surviving displaced Jews were “lower than animals”.  
As a medical officer Jack was at the heart of The Battle of the Bulge. He left the army with an honourable discharge, but a shadow of his former self. Soon after returning to his family he left them again, spending the best part of two years at a mental hospital in Long Island and would forever suffer bouts of serious mental ill-health.

Whether or not Phil was made aware of his father’s experiences (by all accounts they were not close) or knew much of his family history is perhaps beside the point. Such experiences were far from particular to the Ochs’s. Phil’s America, as much as it pained him to admit, was rife with intolerance, prejudice and violence. That such themes would find their way into so much of his song writing is evidence enough of his awareness that what his family struggled through, in the distant and not so distant past, wasn’t dead history, but something that continued to affect the lives of so many people. That so many of Phil’s songs still resonate today should therefore some as absolutely no surprise.