Michael Moritz on Origin Stories, Exile, and Obsessive Curiosity

Thank you for that very kind and flattering introduction.

I’m not sure that that actually was the case. I think that the principal reason that Jews, particularly the ones of my parents’ generation, settled in Wales were that those with entrepreneurial attributes were encouraged to settle in South Wales and in some other parts of Britain to set up businesses, to encourage local employment, and stimulate job growth. I don’t think that any aspect, probably of the established church or churches made the new immigrants to Wales feel any more comfortable.

Well, first of all, I want to be really careful here because Britain opened its doors to my parents. My parents were refugees from Nazi Germany. They both were permitted to come into Britain as children, as teenagers. Both of them were around 14 years old when they were fortunate enough to land in Britain. Britain was one of the few countries, albeit with quotas, that opened the doors to Jews desperately trying to flee the Nazi stain that was spreading all over Europe. Britain, back in the late 1930s and certainly during the time that I was growing up there, which was predominantly in the 1950s, ’60s, and early ’70s, was far less a multicultural country than it is today. Anybody from abroad, they could have been Italian waiters in Soho—there were very few blacks or anybody from Asia in Britain at the time that I was growing up—anybody who looked out of the ordinary was considered by the majority of the people, as always happens, a bit of an outsider. That was displayed in a whole variety of ways. Nonetheless, whether it was in Wales or, to answer your question, in England, I’m not sure that it differed all that much.

I don’t think it declined that rapidly. I think there were, I don’t know how many in the ’60s when I was growing up, maybe there were 600 families around Wales that were Jewish out of a population of around, probably back then, about 2.5 million. I think the younger people tended to leave for opportunity. Small countries or Wales and other parts of the United Kingdom that presented limited opportunity for people with ambition meant that the younger people in particular tended to leave, and they tended on the whole to head toward London.

Yes, 18, 19.

No, it was far more conventional than that. I left Wales after I finished high school and I went to university. That was the first time I’d lived in England. Then outside of vacations, I never really went back to Wales. Since 1973, my life has been really spent outside of Wales.

Funnily enough, I was in both. Take the art first. I think I owe this to my mother, whom otherwise I had a fairly strained relationship with, but bless her heart. She was the victim of this age-old prejudice against women and left school at the age of 15 and always felt a little inferior to people with college and university educations. She had a really—and I don’t know, I never talked to her about it—I don’t know where it came from. She had a lifelong affection for the visual arts and for music. At home, the radio was always on with her listening to music. When she took me and my sister to the museum in Wales, the National Museum of Wales, which actually has a pretty good collection, some really interesting impressionist pictures and, oddly, some Francis Bacon. I think that’s what woke my interest in art. I bought my first picture, which I gave as a gift to my parents when I was 13. I did so in Cardiff. It was a little watercolor and pencil drawing of a winding mechanism at a pit head, these big winding mechanisms that used to sit astride the places in coal mines in Wales where the coal came up from below. I still have that picture. After my mother died, I got it, and it hangs in my office at home, right by my desk.

Yes, for Harriet and me it is. I think the tougher, more strenuous, grueling works of art that other people would have difficulty living with have many layers to them. You explore them, and they’re difficult pictures, and they’re not easy at first sight. Unlike easier pictures that may be a bit more decorative, they leave room for plenty of exploration, as the years go by. Then they’re redolent, they tell stories. They’re redolent of history. They’re images of a different epoch. I think most of the paintings that we’ve been lucky enough to find over the years, they are tough paintings.

Yes.

The earlier Chagalls I’ve been drawn to, but neither of us have felt the urge or the need to go out in pursuit of Chagall.

Oh, exasperating.

No, I don’t know if you’ve ever tried painting or drawing. I didn’t take it up until I was in my mid 40s. I’d never picked up a crayon or outside of the obligatory, abbreviated art lessons that always seem to be held later on Thursday afternoon, with everybody waiting for the bell to ring to end school. I’d never taken up a crayon or drew, or let alone painted. If I look back today at what I did early on, it’s a lot better. Then if I look at the paintings that I try to make, my goodness, it is an extremely humbling experience, but I enjoy it. I really enjoy it. There’s nothing like getting lost in making a painting, and before you know it, two hours have gone, and you have no idea where the time went.

I’m not sure that it’s had any influence whatsoever on investments.

I understand the argument, but I began my life as a journalist and maybe subliminally, because I look fairly intently and always look fairly intently at works of art that have caught my eye, I think I’ve always looked carefully at whatever it is in front of me. It could be a landscape, could be a building, could be a person, and have been pretty watchful and have listened carefully. I think all three are connected when you are trying to take the measure of somebody when you’re thinking about forming a business relationship with them.

I was not. I suppose, like a lot of sons, I tried to get as far away from the classics as possible. My Latin teacher at school was sure that he had a little Latin genius on his hands since I was the son of a classics professor, and then I proceeded to severely disappoint him for the next three years.

Well, when I was growing up, I devoured the works of the American Jewish authors who really made their mark during the 1950s and 1960s, and predominantly Philip Roth and Norman Mailer, although there is obviously a string of others as well. Those were the two that, as soon as they published a new book, I immediately went out to buy the book.

I was very lucky when I went to university in America, I went to the University of Pennsylvania, and here he was, one of the heroes of modern literature. He was teaching a small seminar class at the University of Pennsylvania and I enrolled in it. And as a teacher, he had edited a Penguin series on Eastern European authors, so he taught from that canon. And one of his abiding virtues as a teacher or as a professor, was he prescribed short books to read, so he didn’t ask his students to read 600-page tomes. Most of the books that I remember him asking us to read were fairly short, so you could really read them without feeling out of breath and then have time to ingest them. And he listened very carefully and was very polite and courteous toward all of his students. Then he very, very kindly wrote me a reference when I applied for a job at Time Magazine. I’m not sure that many people who applied at Time had a reference from Philip Roth. Then later in life, way later in life, our paths crossed again through a mutual friend and for several years, when our family was in the habit of going to New York to celebrate Thanksgiving with friends, Philip was a mutual friend of the hostess and so for, I don’t know, half a dozen years, we always had Thanksgiving dinner and among the guests was Philip Roth. And unless he was in a deep funk, he was always wry and amusing and sardonic.

More distant than removed. I am not an observant Jew and haven’t been. I obviously identify very proudly as a Jew. My father was what in America would be called a conservative Jew, and he was deeply educated in the Jewish Bible and interpretations of the Jewish Bible. I think maybe his fascination with it, just like his devotion to Latin, I think drove me away from it. But he had also grown up in an era in Germany where there weren’t very many distractions, and I think the main entertainment of the week, best as I could tell, was going to the synagogue.

They’re too self-absorbed. They aren’t curious. They don’t understand that every individual has a story, and on the whole, with every individual, the more that you dig, the more interesting it becomes. They don’t know how to ask questions, and they don’t know how to listen.

It wouldn’t be one question. Because I obviously have written this book that’s a family memoir about what happened to my parents’ generation, and how that shaped me. It wouldn’t be one question, Tyler. It would be hundreds of questions. And you know better than I do from all the interviews that you’ve done, it’s the answer to a question that then prompts another question. I probably can’t imagine running out of questions for either of them, but these are for people who’ve been through extraordinarily traumatic times. People also suppress memories. It’s sometimes difficult to, even though their spirit may be willing, it’s very difficult to excavate an answer.

I think I’d probably start where I do, oddly enough, with founders at the beginning, because right or wrong—and different people will have different opinions—I just think the first 10, 15 years of life that anybody experiences shapes the individual in profound and deep fashions that then whatever happens to them, subsequently, echo through their life. It’s really the details of the circumstances. Imagine being a 10-year-old boy in 1890 or 1891, and you’re in a little village beside a river in the middle of Germany. Well, what was life really like? Who woke you up in the morning? Did you have somebody else sleeping in the same bedroom or in the same bed? Do you remember what you had for breakfast? What were the clothes that you wore to school? I mean, you can just think of hundreds and hundreds of questions. Obviously, my grandfather, the gentleman that you alluded to, Max, he joined the German army, and he served in World War I and was one of the survivors of the most gruesome, brutal battle in the history of mankind, which was Verdun. He survived it. You can just imagine the number of questions you’d want to ask about that. That’s just one experience and obviously an enormously dramatic experience, but you can just imagine the number of questions you’d want to ask about that.

I don’t know that it was in the 19th century, Tyler. I think it was much more in the early 20th century after the end of World War I. I think antisemitism in the late 19th century, with the Dreyfus Affair, in Western Europe, was far more prevalent in France than it was in Germany, but I think probably the influx of refugees from the East, from Russia, from Ukraine, who fled West because of the pogroms, probably didn’t help matters in late 19th- and early 20th-century Germany. Until Bismarck, Germany had always had very strict—like every other country under the aegis of the Roman Catholic Church—they’d had very strict prohibitions against assimilating Jews. They were only permitted in Germany—and this dates back hundreds of years. It wasn’t anything to do with the late 19th century—in some places, they were only permitted to live in particular places, but there were a whole bunch of professions that weren’t available to them. They were tolerated as itinerants, as peddlers, as cattle dealers, as merchants. Then, obviously, there were a few who became the favorite so-called court Jews, who helped the various monarchs throughout Germany with their military undertakings, and helped finance various other exploits, but they were in a very, very small minority, but Jews in Germany as for Jews elsewhere, had always lived on the outside. It was Otto Bismarck who made life considerably easier for them. Even after that, they clearly weren’t in the mainstream.

Antisemitism has a very long history. It’s 2,000 years old. I think it’s in the atmosphere of humanity, always has been, always will be. I’m not complaining about it. I’ve benefited vastly from being a Jew, so don’t get me wrong, I’m not whining about it or anything like that. I just think it’s a condition of the human race, and I think it flares up in societies where people feel left behind. They’ve felt that they’ve got a rough deal. Maybe it flares up too amongst people who are less well educated and for whom rabble rousers, who want to point accusatory fingers at particular people, whether they’re Haitians or Jews or Somalis, and can stir the pot by doing so. Clearly, social media has made it easier to spread these sorts of accusations and rumors. I think the situation in Israel clearly has not helped. This is obviously well known, and there’s this obviously amorphous border between not agreeing with the policies of the Netanyahu government, which many Jews both in Israel and outside Israel don’t agree with, and antisemitism. That, at the moment, I think inflames things further. It doesn’t help when you have the mayor of New York say he would arrest Netanyahu would Netanyahu ever set foot in Manhattan.

I don’t know that. I just don’t know. First of all, I don’t know whether it’s true. I don’t know the stats. I don’t know the data. I would point out that the only connection between Ireland and Judaism or Israel that I know about is that the current president of Israel, his grandfather was the chief rabbi of Ireland.

There is, yes.

I hadn’t been to Germany for a long time. I went last summer. Oddly, I’d never been to Munich, which is where my father grew up and from which my grandparents were deported and eventually met their death and other relatives too. Munich today is, on the surface, like a charming city, very beguiling, the sort of place one might want to live. Then, obviously, every corner has a particular history in Munich, as it does in many European cities. Last summer I went to—I don’t know who the architect was, I forget—the extremely moving building that is the new synagogue in Munich. I actually never go into a synagogue but I had been curious about attending a service there. I tried to get into the synagogue, but because I hadn’t filled out application forms, because the security was so tight, because the police were all around it, and because I didn’t have the documentation to really prove who I was and hadn’t had authorization to be admitted, I couldn’t get into the synagogue. Then I went to Dachau, which is not very far from the center of Munich, which is where several relatives of mine had been sent. I did what tourists do and went around it. Beyond obviously being very aware of the history of it, the one emotion it stirred up was when I was standing in a gas chamber. It was a gas chamber with multiple ovens, and it was spotless, really, really clean. Everything was spotless. There were these high school students who were obviously bored out of their minds on their iPhones in there and with their AirPod earplugs in. I just stood there for a moment, shutting my eyes, wondering what the heat was like, what the smell was like, what the screams were like, what the work was like, what the stench was like. That could have been a million years ago, but that was the one place that really struck me, the vast difference between the scene that I visited and the scene as it was in the early 1940s.

I actually have it. I’ve received it.

I’m not sure that I feel at home in Germany. People have asked, why did I apply for German citizenship? Do I expect to be driven out of the United States? I have British nationality as well. No, I don’t. Do I expect to be made to feel extraordinarily unwelcome and threatened and terribly frightened in San Francisco? Absolutely not. Do I envisage a time where I would be living in Munich? No. The one lesson that I took from working on my book was you can never have enough passports. The reason that I applied was, both in Western Europe and also including the United States, the one place where the history of the ’20s and ’30s and the Holocaust is really drummed into a population is in Germany. Doesn’t happen in France, doesn’t happen in England or Wales, doesn’t happen in the United States.

Oh, one more. Yes, on a philosophical level, I’m not a philosopher, so I don’t really know what you mean.

Oh, I see. Why is that?