The Hotel of the Good Name

On the Parade in Plymouth’s old Barbican, close to the steps from which tradition says the Mayflower sailed in 1620, there is a wall that is slowly forgetting what it was told. In 1971 a young painter began covering some three thousand square feet of it with a subject no council would have thought to commission: the influence of Jewish thought on Elizabethan culture between 1580 and 1620. Local people sat for figures from Francis Drake to John Dee. The painter put himself among them, holding a begging bowl. He finished in the summer of 1972. Half a century of Atlantic weather has done the rest, and part of the wall is now boarded over.

The painter was Robert Lenkiewicz, and on 31 December he would have turned 85. Across the Tamar, where I grew up, most people knew his name for the wrong reasons. I knew his face. I would often see him on the Barbican with a cup of tea, friendly to anyone who stopped, the least alarming figure in the city’s folklore. The man with the tea and the man in the headlines were the same person, and the tea explains more than the headlines ever did.

He was born in Cricklewood in 1941 to refugees. His father, Isaac, came from Grajewo in Poland; his mother, Alice, from Germany. They reached London in 1939, married in Golders Green the following year, and lost their families in the Holocaust. They ran a small hotel on Fordwych Road that took in elderly Jewish refugees, many of whom spent their last days there. Lenkiewicz called it “part old people’s home, part asylum.” Its name was the Hotel Shemtov.

Shem tov: a good name. Israelis will hear in it the idea behind Yad Vashem, a memorial and a name. The phrase sits inside the title of Hasidism’s founder, the Baal Shem Tov, master of the good name, and the boy who grew up among the hotel’s guests absorbed Hasidic tales from residents with rabbinical training alongside Nietzsche from a former schoolteacher. The phrase also opens the seventh chapter of Ecclesiastes: “A good name is better than precious ointment; and the day of death than the day of one’s birth.” In Hebrew it is a pun, tov shem mishemen tov, the name set against the oil. Read Lenkiewicz’s life against that verse and almost everything strange about it falls into place.

Begin with the name. The hotel taught him early, he said, about mental illness, suffering and above all death. He decided to become a painter after watching Charles Laughton play Rembrandt in Alexander Korda’s film. He went to St Martin’s School of Art at sixteen and later the Royal Academy Schools, but his real curriculum remained the one from Fordwych Road. Having read as a boy about Albert Schweitzer’s hospital at Lambaréné, he adopted a single rule: nobody was turned away from his studio. In Hampstead that made him a notorious neighbour. In 1964 he left for Cornwall, and soon afterwards he was in Plymouth, sharing his home with vagrants and his canvases with them too.

The work that followed was organised by inquiry rather than style. He called his exhibitions Projects, with titles no gallery wanted: Vagrancy, Old Age, Suicide, Death. Each hung research notes beside the paintings. High art circles never warmed to him. The public, which could see its own neighbours on his walls, did.

The mural deserves a second look, because its subject was a quiet joke at England’s expense. Between 1580 and 1620 Jewish learning fascinated England’s scholars. Dee, the queen’s philosopher and astrologer, pored over the Kabbalah; Christian Hebraists prized the language as a key to scripture. Yet Jews themselves had been expelled from England in 1290 and would not be readmitted until 1656. The most prominent figure of Jewish birth at court in those years, the queen’s physician Roderigo Lopez, a Portuguese convert, was hanged at Tyburn in 1594 on a charge of plotting to poison her that many historians now doubt. The ideas were welcome. The people were not. The mural’s span ends in 1620, the year the Mayflower sailed from a few hundred yards away, carrying people in search of a country that would take them. The son of two refugees put the contradiction and the departure on the same wall.

Then the oil. In 1984 a vagrant named Edwin MacKenzie died aged 72. Lenkiewicz had found him living in a concrete barrel near a rubbish tip on the edge of the city, painted him for years, and called him Diogenes after the Greek who lived in a tub. He embalmed the old man, insisting it had been his wish, and refused to tell the authorities where the body was. It surfaced only after Lenkiewicz himself died of a heart attack in August 2002, hidden in a drawer in his library. That November the coroner ruled that the body should go back to the painter’s estate.

It is easy to file that under eccentricity. MacKenzie had no living relatives to bury him. Kohelet ranks the name above the ointment. The painter, characteristically, supplied both. A man the city knew as a problem became, on canvas, a philosopher.

And the day of death against the day of birth? On 1 February 1981 Lenkiewicz placed his own obituary in The Times. He wanted to know, he explained, “what it was like to be thought dead.” Most of us spend our lives avoiding the question the Preacher put. He staged it.

Near the end he reached for another old Jewish story. In 2000 he showed a small project built around Tobit, painting blindfolded in a specially prepared studio so that he would not see the pictures until the private view. His story is a Jewish tale preserved outside the Hebrew Bible, and the old man’s defining act of piety is burying the dead whom others leave lying in the street. It is the mitzvah that tradition counts as the purest kindness, because the one who receives it can never repay. Diogenes had by then been dead sixteen years, and was still unburied.

None of this is a curiosity of the diaspora. The Hotel Shemtov was, in miniature, the problem Israel was founded to answer: a house of the old and the bereaved kept going by strangers who had themselves arrived with nothing. When Israel built that memorial, it took the name from Isaiah: “within my walls a place and a name,” yad vashem in the Hebrew. Yad Vashem rests on the conviction that the worst fate after death is to lose one’s name. The son of the Shemtov reached the same conviction alone, with a brush.

That conviction cuts both ways. Surveys by advocacy groups in recent years suggest that around a quarter of the survivors still living in Israel live in poverty. Every society, Israel’s included, has its Diogenes and its Fordwych Road. A memorial can preserve a name. Only the living can keep it good, and no plaque can do that for them.

In 2008 the Ben Uri Gallery, London’s Jewish museum of art, hung his portraits of himself from 1956 to 2002, about two miles from Fordwych Road. The boy from the refugee hotel had come home.

Lenkiewicz was no saint. He was a showman, and hiding a body from the authorities is a model for nobody. But the rule from Lambaréné held for forty years, and the man I remember with his tea on the Barbican kept it.

The drawer in the library is empty now. His library of some 25,000 books was broken up, its rarest volumes sold. On the Parade, the foundation that bears his name has concluded that a faithful recreation of the mural seems impossible, and that one would be a new painting rather than his. The wall still stands. Within it, the names are fading one by one.

A good name is better than precious ointment. The ointment, in the end, was the easy part.