A review of the memoir “The Sweet Spot” by Ronnie S Landau
Ronnie quotes a therapist as telling him “You’re one of the most oral people I’ve ever met.” As someone who first encountered Ronnie on a course he was giving on the Holocaust and who subsequently interviewed him for a book of my own, I can confirm that the therapist was correct.
This is what has made Ronnie such an outstanding teacher of children in state and private schools, undergraduates and graduates in various universities, and even passengers on cruise ships. But he can write as well as he speaks and indeed, in this memoir, writes as if he is speaking which makes his book an easy, enjoyable and entertaining read.
“The Sweet Spot” is a memoir, not a biography, so he eschews the ‘and then …’ approach, instead telling us a series of stories – often humorous – involving some fascinating characters and his own colourful personality. The title is a reference to both “the enormous good fortune to be born in 1948” (same here) and his fortuitous life and career avoiding poverty, pain and too many problems (except the loss of his first book thanks to the death of Robert Maxwell).
We learn that, outside of his wives and children, the great loves of his life have been supporting Sunderland football club and consuming chopped liver. If these seem odd passions, there are elements of contrast, if not contradiction, in Ronnie’s life.
His two historical periods of erudition are classical Greece and Rome of some two millennia ago and the Holocaust of the last century; his writing suggests a humanistic, even socialistic, approach to life and yet he has spent a significant portion of his career in the massively privileged independent school sector; on the one hand, he wants the Holocaust to be memorialised in a contextual fashion but, on the other hand, he is deeply concerned at how the Holocaust has made Israel “such a politicised, vigilant and, in critical times, paranoid society”.
Predominately, the memoir is about Ronnie’s very accomplished professional career and not his personal life, but there are moving final chapters about his six parents-in-law, three wives and three children. Also there are appendices reproducing reviews and articles on the Holocaust and, as well as heartily recommending this memoir, I would commend his 1992 book “The Nazi Holocaust: Its History And Meaning” which is still available.