# Interview with Judith Mok

Clíona Ní Ríordáin

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OpenEdition
Journals

**Electronic version**

URL: https://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/14941

DOI: 10.4000/etudesirlandaises.14941

ISSN: 2259-8863

**Publisher**

Presses universitaires de Caen

**Printed version**

Date of publication: May 25, 2023

Number of pages: 103-109

ISBN: 978-2-38185-200-3

ISSN: 0183-973X

**Electronic reference**

Clíona Ní Ríordáin, "Interview with Judith Mok", *Études irlandaises* [Online], 48-1 | 2023, Online since 20 April 2023, connection on 10 October 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/14941; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/etudesirlandaises.14941

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are "All rights reserved", unless otherwise stated.
Interview with Judith Mok

Judith Mok was born in Bergen aan Zee, Holland. Today she lives in Portobello, Dublin, once a thriving Jewish quarter of Dublin, with her husband, the poet and writer Michael O'Loughlin. Mok and O'Loughlin moved to Dublin from Amsterdam in 2002. Judith Mok is the author of four novels and four collections of poetry. Her fifth, Playgrounds, from which the poem that figures in this number of Études irlandaises appears, is due in 2023. In this interview, Judith Mok talks about her upbringing in France and the Netherlands, her family's experience of the Shoah, her career as a singer, and her life as an artist in Ireland.

**Clíona Ní Ríordáin:** Can you introduce yourself?

**Judith Mok:** My name is Judith Mok and I was born in Bergen in the North of Holland, on a sand dune; well, our house was built on a sand dune 50 metres from the sea. So I could always hear the sea. I like that sound and I'm always looking for the sound of the sea, especially when I go to sleep. And then, when I was two years old, we moved to the South of France to Castellar, a little village, about 6 miles from the Italian border in the Alpes-Maritimes.

**CNR:** Why did you move there? And can you tell me a little about your parents?

**JM:** My father was a very prolific poet, prose writer, children's writer, and the most prominent Dutch translator of philosophy. He translated Hegel, Kant, Sartre, Teilhard de Chardin, and Adorno, etc. etc. My mother wrote columns for Dutch newspapers and was an excellent singer, but before the Second World War. She came from the kind of background where she wasn't allowed to be on stage and after the war, she never recovered enough from her experiences and her illness to be able to make a career as a musician.

**CNR:** What were their names?

**JM:** My mother was called Riemke, which is a Friesian name, Riemke Timmermans, which is originally Tsimmerman, which is the same name. And my father was called Moses Mok, which he changed to Maurits (Maurice) but officially it only changed in the 1960s on his passport. So his official name was Moses Mok but he didn't like that name, maybe because there was too much alliteration, so he changed it to Maurits. He wrote 84 books in total.

**CNR:** 84 books, wow! Had their families been in the Netherlands for a long time?

**JM:** My father's family fled Cordoba in Andalusia in Spain. Originally they came from Tunisia and then they crossed over to Spain like so many Jewish people and
that's why they were called Sepharade, the Jews from Spain in Hebrew. And then in 1492, Isabel of Castille demanded as a dowry that the Jews would either convert to Catholicism or leave the country. So his family left the country and fled to France. Most of them went from France to England and some of them went from France to Holland. So they were in Holland since, let's say, the 16th century.

**CNR:** And your mother's family?

**JM:** Her mother came from Odessa (which was at that stage in Russia) and they went from Odessa to Brussels and from Brussels to Holland; my grandmother was first-generation Dutch. My maternal grandfather was in Friesland. There are a lot of Jews in Friesland. It's up North in Holland, close to the German border. They had been in Holland since the 17th century.

**CNR:** So a long connection and tradition connecting you to the Netherlands. But why did they move to France? Why did they up sticks and move you to France when you were two?

**JM:** Oh well, I think they wanted us (my sister is four years older than me) to become familiar with a different country and a different language, and I think they also liked the climate. They were free as freelancers; they just wanted to be in the mountains and near the sea and to swim. They were near the sea in Holland but it was cold of course. There were a lot of artists living in Menton-Castellar. It was five kilometres away from Menton, which was on the sea: we lived there later. There was a big artists' colony, where Yeats and Katherine Mansfield used to live, nearby in Roquebrune. Although that was earlier. It was a very healthy climate and I suppose that was why they went to France.

**CNR:** And how long did you live there with them?

**JM:** A year and a half. And then they came back to the house in Bergen where I was born. I was born at home. And then I went to school in Bergen. We lived in Bergen aan Zee, which means Bergen on the sea, but it wasn't a separate community which was also an artist's colony, all the very well-known painters, writers, and composers had gathered there and all lived in this extremely beautiful village. I think my father moved there with another poet, Adriaan Roland Holst, a very famous poet. He was actually a friend of Yeats's; he said he was a cardinal in the church of Yeats. He was a very good poet from an extremely wealthy family. His aunt, Henriette Roland Holst, was a big patron of the arts and actually, she sponsored and helped my father when he was very young. Her nephew, Adriaan Roland Holst, became the official poet laureate later and was very friendly with the Dutch royal family. He convinced my father to come to Bergen and build a house there. It was built by a pupil of Rietveld, of the Amsterdam School of architecture, who became world famous. He asked one of his pupils to build a bungalow for my parents. And of course, my parents were completely destitute, because the Nazis had confiscated all the bank accounts and everything, so when the house was finished Rietveld asked my father "Maurits, how are you going to pay for this bungalow?". It was a very nice bungalow and my
father emptied his pockets and took out ten cents and said “this is what I have”. And Rietveld said, “that’s all right then”. And they actually gave him the house.

**CNR:** Amazing, this was in the wake of the Second World War?

**JM:** It was in 1951.

**CNR:** Recently, you published your memoir, *The State of Dark* (Dublin, Lilliput, 2022), where you go back to that history, the history of your family during the Second World War and the Shoah. What brought that about?

**JM:** The going back? Well, the experiences I had and I remembered when I went to school in Holland and the other pupils were asking me about my grandparents. We had no family. There were a lot of friends and artists around us but my parents' families had been erased in a number of camps. But my parents didn't talk about that very much because they wanted to protect us and I have a half-sister who is much older than me, my father's daughter who lived through the Second World War and who was present when my paternal grandparents were arrested by the Gestapo when they were in hiding. My half-sister is very old and sick and she rang me and said she felt ashamed, she never wanted to tell us. She had actually been pushed in between two walls and she heard our grandparents being arrested and leaving. She must have been nine or ten. She asked me if I wanted to call the transit camp Westerbork, which was built by the Dutch, where German and Dutch Jews were held until 1939 when Holland closed its borders. So it was only for Dutch Jews. It still has official archives and offices and all the timetables for the trains that left the barracks. They know everything. So she asked me to call the camp. Which I did. Which was a very painful and strange experience because it was all so normal. You ask for a time that a train that your family left at. In the case of my grandparents, I knew they never had a tattoo, they never had a number but I then realised that on 7 April they went straight to Auschwitz and straight to the gas chambers. They were killed, they were both 64 and they were both assassinated. That made me decide to explore more about the protective silence that my parents always maintained. They only allowed us to read books about the Nazi regime and the camps and so on when we were in our teens. So I had written a number of books, a book in Dutch about one of my singing teachers, the very famous Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, who, I discovered later, was a fervent Nazi. So I was aware of the fact that this was shaping up in my head that I needed to write about this stuff. The phone call triggered the start of the book. And that's how I started writing it.

**CNR:** And this is a book that you have written in English?

**JM:** Yes, I've been writing in English for twenty-five years at least. I don't write in Dutch at all anymore.

**CNR:** But you also wrote in French?

**JM:** I wrote one unpublished manuscript, it got the Prix des Ambassadeurs. We moved back to France when I was eight years old. We moved back to Menton and
then I spent years in Paris. I always considered French as my second first language. Obviously, I suppose I could speech French when I was two and a half years old. I was just planted in a French school and I just started speaking French. And by the time we went back to Holland in my teens I had a French accent in Dutch. When this prize came up, I wrote a novel in French. I was invited to the Académie Française where I spent three fantastic days meeting all my heroes. Marguerite Yourcenar was the first woman admitted and I admire her very much. Unfortunately, I didn't meet her. I met Claude Lévi-Strauss and a lot of people. But the book was never published. It must have been in 1985-86.

**CNR:** You have people who move between one language and another, but moving between three languages and writing a novel and other publications in all three of them is quite remarkable.

**JM:** I was influenced by René Char. I have a bit of the manuscript here. It was very much about a lack of communication. I used the line, *La douleur est le dernier fruit immortel de la jeunesse*. It's from a poem by René Char. I love René Char. It's funny because he is in the memoir, but I don't mention him by name. My aunt, who had a terrible experience, was married to a Bulgarian doctor who was shot in front of her; they met some resistance fighters because they were hiding in Switzerland before they went to France. And one of the fighters was actually René Char.

**CNR:** All these circles, interconnected and going round.

**JM:** Yes, I'm reading a book at the moment by Phillipe Sands, *East West Street*, and it's literally the case. I talk about Hans Frank because he was the lover of Elizabeth Schwarzkopf. The book I wrote about her is called *The Executioner* and it's about the painting, "The Lady with an Ermine" by Da Vinci. He stole that painting. Sands said that for five years Frank was the king of occupied Poland with a collection of paintings that included a portrait by Leonardo Da Vinci. He had even brought the "Lady with an Ermine" home. Which makes me feel as if everything again fits together. I'm well aware of this. I went to Cracow. As you know I'm an opera singer and a classical singer and I was invited to sing at the Philharmonie in Cracow which is a remarkably beautiful building and I only wanted to go to Cracow because I wanted to see this painting. I saw the painting in The Czartoryski Museum in Cracow, they have a lot of information about it and that's where I discovered Hans Frank had confiscated it. The person in the painting is a singer called Ermelina. Her lover asked Da Vinci to paint her. There you go.

**CNR:** You mentioned that you are an opera singer, how does the writing fit into a career as an artist, a musician and a singer?

**JM:** I try to serve the high masters of classical music as best I can. I don't think the interpretation of music comes from a different pool or a different source to my writing. I think that it all comes from the same building stone and material and the same kind of discipline in my writing when I study an opera role or a piece. Because I have done a lot of work for soprano and orchestra just solo work. You
have to structure and study and you have a deadline. I like deadlines and I like structure. That all comes from the same source, my writing language. Language is melody or sound and it has a different abstract sound but you do interpret in your head the sounds. I do think whether you name it Bach, Mozart or Stravinsky, they definitely have a language. So I think I approached the language of the composers that I try to serve in the same way I approached my writing. Does that make sense?

CNR: Yes, perfect sense.

JM: So it wasn't a teenage thing. I started to write when I was 19 or 20 and I published my first short stories then. It wasn't a teenage-romantic thing. It was something that seemed to be part of my interpretation of life and what I wanted to express. I never really considered it as a different thing. Obviously, singing is a very physical thing which attracts me, but that's a different side. I felt the need to develop the physical side of me and the exhibitionist side of me. I'm a performer, I like to perform. A performer can be a terribly introverted person as well but I seem to happen to have the urge to do both things as a performer and as a writer. I never separated the two.

CNR: The Shoah and what happened to the Jews of Europe during the Second World War is something people are anxious to talk about because the witnesses are disappearing. And I wondered if the publication of the book in Ireland had elicited a particular response.

JM: Well, I mean the book has been very well received up until now. What do you mean?

CNR: Well, Ireland was neutral during the war and as a result didn't engage with history as other places did.

JM: Yes, well I wrote the book about the destruction of a particular culture and the best-ever genocide that occurred in history. I try to talk about that. But no there hasn't been any particular response.

CNR: Well in Ireland there were important Jewish communities in Dublin and Cork with important figures.

JM: Like Briscoe, or Solomons? No, I haven't any particular questions or reactions about that. Or about the communities. To be honest, no.

CNR: It hasn't had any resonance?

JM: No, absolutely not. It's been very personal. It's very hard and it's a lot of suffering and it's a very hard truth to face. But definitely, nothing from the communities in Cork and Dublin. They are tiny. And the fact that they didn't let in Jewish children before the war who needed care. Or after the war. The children who came from the camps: they still turned them down. The Minister said we don't want these children, we have never had a Jewish problem and we don't want these children. They took in German children instead who had suffered during the Second World War.
Children are children and if they need to be taken care of I am totally in favour of that. But it wasn't exactly the most charming page in Irish history and de Valera signing the book of condolences when Hitler had committed suicide wasn't very admirable either. But nobody has talked about that, not yet.

CNR: Can we go back to your poetry? Again it's something you have written in several languages.

JM: Yes, I've written five books. Four are in Dutch and one is in English. I have a new book and all of the poems in it have been published mainly in the United States mainly in magazines. These poems are written in English. I've always been working in music as well so I don't produce that much. This will be my ninth book.

CNR: Nine books are still a great number.

JM: Yes, but not compared with my father. But I think he worked incessantly as well just to keep a certain amount of miserable thoughts and suffering away, to distract himself from painful memories and thoughts. So yes, that's my fifth book of poetry coming up.

CNR: What are the inspirations for your poems?

JM: Some of the material for *The State of Dark* in the book.

CNR: I'm just thinking of the relationship in form between the compressed form of poetry and the longer form of the memoir.

JM: I like to think that I did use the same material because I was working on the two things at the one time.

CNR: I'm thinking about how you handle material for poetry and prose in different ways. Did the prose help form the poetry, or was it the other way around?

JM: I think it was the other way around. Yes. Because with poetry I write down things all the time, and I keep notes. With prose it's different. I can travel around and write bits of poems. But with prose, you just have to sit down at your table and write if you know what I mean. There's a poem about my grandfather, war. There're a few poems about the same material.

CNR: Your father was a celebrated Dutch poet who lived in an artistic community. You and your husband, Michael O'Loughlin, are writers and artists, living in Dublin. Could you say something about the artistic community in Ireland and in the Netherlands and the role of the poet in both?

JM: Yes, I have to say the Irish poets and writers' community is Valhalla, it's paradise. I couldn't believe how much interest and support there was among Irish poets and support for each other's work. People going to listen to each other's work. Obviously, Ireland is a culture of literature, language and storytellers and has forever been so. Holland is a very visual culture. Holland is big in the visual arts. When I was little, my father was surrounded by poets and there was much more
support, but that completely faded. I lived in Amsterdam for fourteen years and there was very little interest in each other's work and there was very little support for writers. Whereas in Ireland, like I said, it's been incredible. There are so many really interesting prose writers, and poets that you can exchange ideas with and you can talk to and they deal much better with eccentricity. And I will not deny that I am slightly eccentric. They have no problem with that. Holland is a very different society. It's a country of merchants and they colonised and they're interested in merchandise and money. There was the Golden Age but we're not allowed to call it that anymore because the money all came from colonies. It's completely different in Ireland. It's a big relief to be amongst and to live in the Irish literary world. I was incredibly chuffed when John Banville, whom I consider to be one of the best prose writers in English, launched my last book, *The State of Dark*, and has been very supportive of my work. And that's fantastic.

**CNR:** So what's your next project?

**JM:** I have a couple of things. I've been pushed to write more personal things but at the moment I'm actually working on Molly Bloom's mother, Lunita Laredo, she was Jewish and a foreigner in Ireland. I actually have a Molly Bloom show that I have sung and performed all over the world. So I'm working on her story, which strangely enough nobody has ever done. So she's a foreigner in Ireland and a singer so I'm very familiar with her wishes of what she would like to sing and what she has to sing, which she doesn't like. And although she is completely integrated into Irish society, which I slightly am, I connect with her and she is a fascinating figure. So I've started working on that.

**CNR:** Thank you very much, Judith Mok.

Interview conducted over Zoom in November 2022.

Clíona Ní Ríordáin

Université Sorbonne Nouvelle