Wrong Rothschild
Sir: In everything he writes, Alastair Forbes drops names with such a lavish hand that it is not surprising that some- times one turns out to be not a name but a clanger.
`By a typical irony,' he writes in his typically lengthy notice of Alan Pryce- Jones's The Bonus of Laughter (Books, 14 February), 'the only Rothschild to dis- appear in the Final Solution was the shiksa first wife of the ineffable Baron Guy . . .
By a typical irony, the only Rothschild to disappear in the Final Solution was the gentile Lili de Chambure, first wife of the highly effable Baron Philippe of Château Mouton.
In either case, shiksa is an unfortunate word to choose: in so far as I remember my grandparents' Yiddish, it was an odiously snobbish term applied by central- European Jews to gentile slaveys.
Cyril Ray
K1 Albany, Piccadilly, London W1
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