The life of my father, Benny Pollack, who has died aged 78, was marked by his experience of exile and his strong secular Jewish identity.
Like many of his peers, Benny was part of the social and political mobilisations that exploded in his native Chile in the late 1960s. When the socialist Salvador Allende was elected president in 1970, Benny joined the government as a member of Chile’s UN delegation and as an adviser to the foreign minister.
In September 1973, his hopes for the creation of a democratic and socialist Chile were shattered with the violent overthrow of Allende in a military coup. Like hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens, he was forced into exile. His Chilean citizenship was revoked, and he would not return for another 15 years.
When the socialist Ricardo Lagos became president of Chile in 2000, he appointed Benny ambassador to China, a post he held from 2001 to 2004. Although he was not one for pomp and ceremony, this was an immensely proud moment for Benny.
He was the son of Nahum Pollack and Graciela (nee Eskenazi), Jewish immigrant shopkeepers, who had settled in the remote town of Copiapó, in the Atacama desert. Benny was political through and through and his activism, first in the Radical and then the Socialist parties, began in his early teens. When he won a place at university at 16 to study law (he later transferred to the journalism course), the whole family moved with him to Santiago, where he met Gloria Fajnsztejn, whom he married in 1965. They had three sons, Ricardo, Claudio and me.
Offered sanctuary in the UK in 1973, our family settled at first in the Essex village of Abberton, which could not have been more different to the Chilean capital. We moved to Liverpool in 1975 when Benny was offered a teaching post in the department of politics at the University of Liverpool. A gregarious and passionate teacher, Benny was a popular member of staff and would stay in touch with many of the students he inspired. His academic achievements, including books on Spanish and Chilean politics, saw him promoted to professor of Latin American politics.
He never let his children, growing up in Liverpool, forget our history, both as progressives and Jews. His stories were laced with anecdotes of camaraderie, chicanery, all-night political meetings and daybreak visits to the local market to eat strange concoctions of raw seafood to halt a hangover.
Benny was a compassionate man with an unlimited curiosity in people, from all walks of life. One of his greatest joys in retirement was his grandchildren, who knew him as Tata.
He is survived by Gloria, his sons and seven grandchildren, and by his sister, Molly.
