Hotel Tiberias: A Tale of Two Grandfathers
Part history, part travel journal and part autobiography, ‘Hotel Tiberias’ is a journey of many layers and resonances, as Sebastian Hope follows the tumultuous story of his family’s hotel in Palestine.In 1900,Thomas Cook, who had been running tours of the Holy Land since the 1890s, financed the building of a hotel in Tiberias, the largest town on the Sea of Galilee, which had long been a stopover point for Christian pilgrims. The hotel, built, run and eventually owned by Richard Grossmann, was situated in the Sanjak of Acre, part of the Ottoman Empire, and after the First World War found itself in the British mandated territory of Palestine, prospering under British rule until the Second World War, after which the hotel was eventually confiscated by the fledgling state of Israel in 1948.With the hotel as the pivotal point in the story, Sebastian Hope researches the story of his grandmother, Margaret Frena and her two husbands, Fritz Grossman (Richard Grossman's son), who shot himself dead in 1938, the year Nazi Germany annexed the Sudetenland, and John Winthrop Hackett (General Sir John Hackett) who served with the TransJordan Frontier Force.Journeying through Rhineland Germany, Turkey and the Middle East, his research takes him to some strange places as he weaves a wonderful, strong family story into a rich, sweeping backdrop of both time and place. Just as he unravels the tumultuous history of the area, Hope digs deep into the history and layers of his own family, and discovers how family histories have an archaeology too.
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HOTEL TIBERIAS
A Tale of Two Grandfathers
SEBASTIAN HOPE
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
This edition published by HarperPress 2005
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004
Copyright © Sebastian Hope 2004
Sebastian Hope asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006551997
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2013 ISBN 9780007404964
Version: 2016-03-24
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From the reviews of Hotel Tiberias:
‘One half of Hope’s story describes the romantic derring-do soldiering of Hackett, whose steps are traced in a modern-day journey to “Palestine”, the other tracks the more elusive figure of Grossmann, from a family of Templars who settled in Palestine … Hope writes so honestly about his lost German family that we share his urgent desire to acquit them of charges of Nazi sympathies … it is heartening to see [Grossmann] rescued from wartime slanders by a grandson who never knew him but will not let him fade’
Sunday Times
‘Hope indicates a new direction in the British travel book: a post-colonial search for roots and for explanations in their families’ involvement in the recent history of the British imperial endeavour’
TLS
‘Hope is a seasoned travel writer and his descriptive writing is vivid and convincing … [Hotel Tiberias] achieves real pathos. All families have their hidden as well as public histories. Hotel Tiberias gives us a poignant glimpse into a particularly dramatic example’
Independent on Sunday
‘The politics of the Middle East are sketched with verve … Hope’s meditation on his grandfather’s suicide and the region’s history is written with conviction and clarity’
Scotland on Sunday
‘Hope takes us down all sorts of intriguing avenues and gives us a vivid and unusual perspective on an endlessly fascinating chapter of the twentieth century’
Edward Stourton, Tablet
‘Moving, intelligent, highly readable and occasionally extremely funny, this is a fine book indeed’
Geographical Magazine
Nescire autem quid ante quam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum. Quid enim est aetas hominis, nisi ea memoria rerum veterum cum superiorum aetate contexitur?
To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain a child forever. For what is the worth of human life unless it is woven into that of our ancestors by the records of history?
CICERO, Orator, XXXIV, 120
CONTENTS
I was sixteen when I found out. We were going on holiday to Scotland with another family. The car was already loaded at 6.30 a.m. with everything from frozen food to an inflatable dinghy. My mother, my brother and I were standing in the kitchen, ready to leave the moment my father said, let’s go, so as not to start the twelve-hour drive on a bad note – we would have to keep our nerve for his overtaking manoeuvres on the A9. Mum said almost as an aside that we were not to be surprised if we heard the other paterfamilias refer to Grandpa as her step-father – why? – because he is. ‘Grandpa adopted Lizzie and me when he married Granny. Our real father was her first husband, and he died when we were very small.’ And then my father said, let’s go.
My world did not fall apart. I did not feel betrayed or deceived because we had not been told sooner. I did not feel as though my own sense of identity had been weakened. As the August countryside passing by in car window-sized frames gave way to the purple hills of the Highlands, I wondered if my relationship with my grandfather would change now he was my step-grandfather. I saw no reason why it should. He was the only one I had ever known – I could not remember my father’s father. We were the only grandchildren he had. Even though we were not related by blood he could never be anything other than our Grandpa. The real surprise was that our mother was not entirely the person I thought she was. I had passed through that stage of early adolescence when you think your parents don’t know anything about you, and I was beginning to realize how little I knew about them. Family gatherings thereafter became opportunities to observe the newly revealed relationships at work.
