You OK With This?

Refugees

They have no need of our help
So do not tell me
These haggard faces could belong to you or I
Should life have dealt a different hand
We need to see them for who they really are
Chancers and scroungers
Layabouts and loungers
With bombs up their sleeves
Cut-throats and thieves
They are not
Welcome here
We should make them
Go back to where they came from
They cannot
Share our food
Share our homes
Share our countries
Instead let us
Build a wall to keep them out
It is not okay to say
These are people just like us
A place should only belong to those who are born there
Do not be so stupid to think that
The world can be looked at another way.

–  Brian Bilston

If you are OK with that then go no further. If you are not, then read 
it read from bottom to top. Is that better?

Fermin Rocker’s The Refugees shows Basque refugees fleeing Spain and heading for the French border. 

“…one day he (Mick Jagger )showed up at my door. He turned out to be a connoisseur. I had just painted a picture of refugees. I thought it wouldn’t be of interest to private buyers, but he bought it and paid a decent price: 4,000 pounds.” https://taz.de/Die-Vorsehung-war-gnaedig-mit-mir/!798003/ 

I don’t know whether this was the painting Mick jagger bought or a similar one. 

Hilda Goldwag was a refugee who escaped from Vienna in 1939, the year after the Anschluss. She initially worked in domestic service near Edinburgh before settling in Glasgow, where she lived for the rest of her long life. Her family had planned to follow, but they perished in the Holocaust; the documents that might have enabled their escape arrived on the day war was declared.

In 1940, Goldwag met fellow refugee and lifelong companion Cecile Schwarzchild with whom she lived until Cecile’s death in 1908.

These artists – Josef Herman, Fermin Rocker, and Hilda Goldwag have such interesting stories. And work.

Putting this post together points me in three directions:

• to have fun with the work of the always clever and and engaging Brian Bilston.
• to read more about anarchist Fermin Rocker’s life and read his memoir The East End Years: A Stepney Childhood.
• take a closer look at the life and art of Hilda Goldwag
• ditto Josef Herman 

Choices, choices.

Meanwhile I am now in possession of “Poets’ Excursion” by the very fishy Joseph Gurnard. “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”  Let the literary sleuthing begin.

The featured image is: ‘Mother and Child Fleeing,’ 1942, oil on canvas, by Josef Herman.