Michael Moynihan: A portrait of a father and a history of Cork’s faded Jewish community

Now he pops up again with the publication of a book by his son, David, which chronicles the lives of Gerald and his wife, Sheila.

One of the other hats worn by your columnist is books editor, so you might legitimately ask if this piece belongs in that section. All I can tell you is that sometimes the beams cross: This volume is so Cork-oriented it might as well be eating tripe and drisheen while complaining about the inferiority of Guinness.

One thing that struck me about the book was the way the son dissects the apocrypha surrounding his own father.

Take the story, well-known in Cork, of Gerald the law student encountering very real prejudice when attending University College Cork debates during the 1930s.

“On one occasion, when he rose to speak,” writes David, “The auditor (of the debating society) told him to sit down, saying he was an alien and could not speak. Gerald remained standing and speaking.

“Then, he said, he met Tomás Óg MacCurtain, of the IRA, and told him about this treatment. On the next occasion when Gerald rose to speak and was told to sit down, MacCurtain interjected and said: ‘No, Mr Auditor, the next speaker is Mr Goldberg.’”

Yet David Goldberg teases out the chronology, realising that Tomas Óg MacCurtain was only 15 when Gerald Goldberg was a student and could not have intervened.

In one way, it’s a pity that the story doesn’t hold up, because it would be a neat bookend to another experience Goldberg Sr went through in his youth.

Sent to boarding school in England in the early 1920s, Gerald and his brother, Ernie, stood up for their Cork roots: The school was celebrating Armistice Day and a German student went to the headmaster to complain that it would be inappropriate for him to salute the British flag, and he should, therefore, be exempted from any ceremonies. The headmaster agreed.

When Gerald and Ernie heard this, they felt they should also be exempt and went to the headmaster to plead their case: They said they should be excused on the grounds that the British had murdered two lords mayor of Cork, Tomás Mac Curtain and Terence MacSwiney.

(The headmaster “went through the bloody roof”, said Gerald, and the two brothers got lashed with the cane for making the suggestion.)

In time, of course, Gerald Goldberg joined the long line of mayors, which includes Mac Curtain and MacSwiney.

Another yarn that bites the dust is the long-held belief that many of the Jewish emigres who left Russia, and other eastern parts, ended up settling in Cork, and other parts of Ireland, because they were hoodwinked into believing they were on their way to the US.

The story was irresistible: Supposedly an unscrupulous ship’s captain promised them New York, but after a few days at sea put them ashore at Cobh, pointed at the buildings nearby, and declared St Colman’s Cathedral, et al, to be the Manhattan skyline.

David Goldberg drilled into the detail and a historian confirmed that no ships ever left Russia for Cork — that, in fact, it was far more likely that those who ended up on Leeside had sailed to Britain first, with Leith or Hull likely landing spots before they continued on their way to Ireland.

The book gives a striking portrait of an entire culture now vanished from Cork — the Jewish community that centred on the Albert Road area, still referred to as Jewtown, and the synagogue on South Terrace, though the Goldbergs were based early on in nearby Anglesea St.

Gerald’s father, Laban, was, for a time, a peddler, a calling that conjures up a whole way of life, walking the highways and byways of Ireland even if there were more byways than highways: “Walking would not have been a hardship. As a peddler, he (Laban) would have walked from one village to the next in Lithuania selling his wares. He would have had decent boots, and possibly a second pair, which he might have worn around his neck.

“If the boots broke, they could be repaired by almost any man on the way, as they all had the materials and tools to do that.

“There were only roads between major towns, and these were unmade. Mostly, people walked through tracks, and one followed the crowd.”

A highlight of this book is learning the extent of Sheila Goldberg’s contribution to the life of the city. Her energy and commitment were deployed in a variety of causes — in the 1960s she was involved in founding Meals On Wheels, and, later, in fundraising and organising projects as disparate as the Lavanagh Centre, Abode, and Co-Operation North; this is not to mention her work in bringing top quality musicians to Cork over the course of decades. Little wonder that a tribute to her stated that when the roll call of great people in Cork was published, her name would lead all the rest.

There’s also a strong sense in the book of how much Cork has changed, going back through the decades.

Gerald Goldberg was a solicitor with a practice in the centre of the city, for instance, yet he was able to get back out to his home, up by Maryborough House, for lunch. (If he left now at lunchtime, he might make it up there for teatime.) Rearden’s on Washington Street in the 1950s was more of a grocer’s shop with large tins of biscuits than the vast dancehall it is now. Gerald himself unveiled the new Trinity Bridge while mayor, now of course known as the Passover.

Later in life, he told the Echo the truth, plain and simple: “I am essentially a Corkman. As a Jew who is both, I realised that I owe everything I am and what I have to the people of Cork ... I have an affinity with the people of Cork. I love them dearly.

“I love their culture, their traditions, and way of life. To live somewhere other than Cork would be my end, and I’m going to stay.”

Hard to argue with that when he commissioned Seamus Murphy to cut these words by Seán O Faolain for the outside wall of his house: I looked at the climbing stairways of roofs upon roofs up to the great bell tower of Shandon. The clouds fell down into the water’s stillness; the bells sank into the water and were drowned.

David Goldberg finishes by asking who remembers his parents.

Many people remember them. In Cork, we never forget our own.

Gerald & Sheila Goldberg of Cork: A Son’s Perspective, by David Goldberg (Oak Tree Press)