Down by the river

Danny Kerman has combined two of his passions – England and literature – in a lecture and literary tour.

By BARRY DAVIS
The River Thames (photo credit: Reuters)
The River Thames
(photo credit: Reuters)
To paraphrase a well-known saying by fourthcentury Italian bishop Aurelius Ambrosius, later to be known as St. Ambrose, when in England do as your Israeli guide does. This is a particularly good rule of thumb when the group leader in question is a certain Danny Kerman.
Kerman is a self-confessed anglophile and probably knows more about England than the vast majority of the English do. The man is a walking, talking and laughing compendium of the best pubs, the prettiest villages and most colorful, picturesque routes to take in many parts of the country, particularly in London and along various stretches of the River Thames.
This Tuesday, Kerman will combine two of his passions – England and literature – when he presents a talk entitled “Along the Thames in the Footsteps of English Literature” in Tel Aviv. The lecture prefaces a tour, which will be held at the end of August, of that green and pleasant part of the Sceptered Isle, led by Kerman and Tali Yaron in conjunction with the Society for Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI) and Masa Acher Online.
For Kerman, everything starts from the written word, and he tends to embellish the text with some appealing aesthetics. The 72-year-old has been one of the country’s leading illustrators for over half a century and has picked up a clutch of prestigious awards in the process. But there are also some literary efforts in his CV, including a Hebrew translation of Jerome K. Jerome’s ever-popular late 19thcentury humorous account of a boat trip along the Thames, Three Men in A Boat, with plenty of illuminating addenda written by Kerman for the Israeli reader, several children’s books and his latest work, Three Men in Berlin.
Surprisingly, anglophile or no, Kerman says his command of English isn’t all that great. “I don’t really know English very well,” he says. “I am bluffing my way.” So how did he manage, for example, to translate Three Men in a Boat? “I knew the book in the original Hebrew translation very well, and I have Victorian friends – I mean experts on the Victorian era – in England who know everything about the history of that time. When I tell people I know London so well, they don’t believe me, and then when I tell them I don’t know English they also don’t believe me. But it’s all true.”
Kerman produced his first book, Holech Itcha B’London – Madrich Ishi Lemitkadmim (With You in London – A Personal Guide for the Advanced), around 15 years ago. It was, he says, a way of getting people off his back. “I had all sorts of friends and other people who heard I knew London well and they’d constantly ask for tips,” he recalls. “I got fed up with it so I wrote the book so I could just refer them to it and get a bit of peace and quiet.”
But he’s not just resting on his laurels. “I am now working on a new edition,” he says. “London is not like here – in Israel everything is in a constant state of flux – but there have still been lots of changes in London since the book first came out, even though I relate more to the historic things, the things that tend to change less.”
Not all the transformations are to his liking. “I have an Irish friend in London, he’s married to an Israeli, who owns a pub in Fulham and he says the pub is in a really bad way,” says Kerman who confesses to enjoying a pint or two.
It seems that Londoners are replacing Guinness with espresso. “There are loads of cafés all over London now, not just in the traditional areas like Soho, all sorts of fancy schmancy places. It’s so sad.”
Listening to Kerman’s stories, peppered with colorful anecdotes, one might get the impression that he was practically born on a plane. In fact it took him quite a while to pack his bags and start traveling. “I didn’t go abroad until I was 30,” he says. “I had lots of friends who’d traveled all over but I didn’t know any English.”
When he eventually got his skates on, Britain was his first port of call and became his first offshore love.
“When I saw London for the first time, I was smitten.”
He also knew a thing or two about the British capital, again thanks to his love of literature. “When I was growing up in Israel we were lucky to have wonderful translations of books written in other languages,” he explains.
“For example, I read everything by Dickens which came out in Hebrew. I call it ‘homo eclecticus’ – we read everything we could get our hands on,” he laughs.
Mind you, his less-than-perfect English meant there were some gaps in his impressive literary spread. “I have friends in England who challenge me on, say, [Dickens’s first novel] The Pickwick Papers; no one can beat me on that. But then they say ‘what about [later Dickens novel] Bleak House,’ and I say ‘I don’t know it because it never came out in Hebrew.’ The truth is I can read books in English, but only after I have got to know them well in Hebrew.”
Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales of intrepid sleuth Sherlock Holmes are also up there in Kerman’s Victorian literary hit parade.
Unsurprisingly, his Tel Aviv apartment is packed with hundreds of books in Hebrew and English. One weighty, blue-backed tome catches my eye. “That’s a hard-backed edition of Punch [satirical] magazine from the 19th century,” says Kerman with a gleam in his eye, and sets off on another anecdotal aside. “You know, the Germans were better at illustrations than the English back then, but the English had some geniuses, like [Winnie-the-Pooh] illustrator [E.H.] Shepard,” he proffers. “By the way, Winnie-the-Pooh started out as a serialized story for adults in Punch, with wonderful illustrations by Shepard, and only later became a children’s story.”
People who are considering joining Kerman’s trip along the Thames have been advised to ensure they are as well-versed as possible in a number of quintessentially English books. In addition to Three Men in a Boat, the reading list includes Kenneth Grahame’s early 20th-century classic The Wind in the Willows, which is based in the Thames Valley, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, which came out in 1865 – all staples of the Victorian and post-Victorian literary world.
One could imagine that Kerman would have been happier to be have been born in some picturesque Thameside village, such as Cookham, where he says he knows every pub intimately, than in Tel Aviv. But he says he is glad he is an outsider and does not rue his shortcomings in the English language at all.
“You know, people who come from elsewhere generally know more than the locals,” he observes. “All this, my great love of England comes from my ‘handicap’ in English. It’s as if I always have to prove I am more English than the English.”
For more information about Danny Kerman’s lecture and tour of the River Thames: (03) 752-7777.