Son’s tribute to Cork's former Lord Mayor and his wife

RETIRED barrister and enthusiastic painter, David Goldberg, says his goal in writing his newly published book, Gerald & Sheila Goldberg of Cork: A Son’s Perspective, was to discover who his parents really were and thereby learn a bit about himself.

His father (1912-2003) was Cork’s first Jewish Lord Mayor, elected as an independent in 1977. His mother, who made a significant contribution to the cultural and civic life of the city, was instrumental in founding Meals on Wheels.

Sheila also set up ABODE, providing services for people with sensory and mental disabilities. And she played a big role in the Cork Orchestral Society and was responsible for the concerts at the Crawford Art Gallery. She also fund-raised for the building of the swimming pool at the Lavanagh Centre.

David, one of three sons born to the couple, says his father – a brilliant solicitor - was a difficult man while his mother was “the real genius of the family”.

Gerald Goldberg had “a fire in his head all his life. It burned like a bush and detonated from time to time, particularly when issues arose over what happened to his father, Laban, in Limerick, during the pogrom (in 1904.)”

While revisionist historians call the persecution of the Jews in Limerick a boycott, David says that because of the violence meted out to Jewish people – including Laban – it was a pogrom. Laban and his family emigrated from Lithuania for economic reasons.

They couldn’t stay in Lithuania because the import of very cheap goods from and Poland as well as the availability of trains, destroyed the peddler trade.

Gerald never lived in Limerick as the family moved to Cork where he was born (in 21, Anglesea Street, the house in which the father of James Joyce lived.) But he felt the pain and the insult of his fellow people in Limerick.

“It was like he was reliving all the persecution, the anti-Semitism as well conscription in Lithuania. When his clients came to him, people from disadvantaged areas, a lot of whom were criminals, he took their issues into his head as part of him and projected them onto his familial past. That’s the reason he was such a fabulous fighter. He was a combatant.”

Describing his father as enigmatic, David says he could be loving and kind but could then turn cold and remote.

“I got on with him probably as well as anybody else, perhaps a little bit better.”

David later adds that he had problems with his father. He thinks Gerald may have had autism. He says that his father’s “brilliance” and his difficult disposition and sense of being “wedded” to Cork “were characteristics of an autistic person. He was high on the spectrum. Autism is what makes people brilliant. It can also make them difficult.

If you didn’t have autistic people, you’d have a very boring dull world with no music, no art and no literature.

David spent hours talking to a psychiatrist friend about his father. The psychiatrist reckoned Gerald had been autistic.

“That was a huge discovery for me. It was really telling. Because Gerald was so brilliant, people came to be trained by him. But he couldn’t delegate. He couldn’t trust them. He couldn’t take them into his practice. He had great difficulty forming a relationship with one person, never mind others.

“Autism is not an illness. It’s a genetic condition. Nobody knew about it in (my father’s time.) But he should have left an empire. He should have left a glass palace on South Mall or on the Western Road with ‘Goldberg Solicitors’ Office’ on it. But there’s nothing. There is a pub in Jewtown called Goldbergs. 

I don’t think it’s called after us. But we can always claim it!

David, who is a Reform Liberal Jew, was brought up in an Orthodox Jewish home.

“We followed the rules and rituals and would go to the Synagogue on South Terrace. My mother (originally from Belfast) tried to keep a Kosher house for as long as she could but she couldn’t keep it going as trying to source stuff was difficult. She was a fabulous cook. She had a very good background in Jewish cooking. She would also travel. She went to Italy and took an interest in what they did with food. She came home and started cooking with garlic.”

Gerald and Sheila had a happy 60-year marriage. Apart from first meeting in Donaghadee, Co Down, in their teens, their entire five year- courtship was carried out through letters to each other.

My mother was completely different to Gerald. It was like the yin and yang. They were perfectly suited to one another.

“She looked after him when he got heavy, putting him on a diet with no spuds or bread allowed. It worked.”

Sadly, Sheila developed Alzheimer’s Disease and died in St Luke’s home in Blackrock in 1996. Within an hour of being in Marymount, Gerald died at the age of 91, seven years after his beloved wife’s death.

Dublin-based David, who is married with one daughter, is sad that there is no monument or plaque to his parents in Cork city. He its that his father pushed him into law.

“I didn’t want it. I wanted to be a painter. But I enjoyed law, particularly the jury trials. I inherited a lot of Gerald’s ability to speak, and talk to juries.”

He hopes he has done his parents justice in the book and says it is neither a eulogy nor a detraction, but rather, an honest of the lives of two remarkable people.

‘Gerald & Sheila Goldberg of Cork’ was funded by Cork City Council through the Cork City Heritage and Biodiversity Publication Grant Scheme. It is published by Oak Tree Press, 19.95 euro.