Books
My novel addresses British antisemitism – and that feels rather scary, right now
Leon Craig on publishing her debut in what feels an increasingly hostile literary landscape
September 24, 2025 20:25
Leon Craig on publishing her debut in what feels an increasingly hostile literary landscape
September 24, 2025 20:25The protagonist of my debut novel, Jan Rubin, is not what you might described as a Jewish role model. The Decadence opens with her preparing to go on a highly illegal pandemic holiday to a remote mansion, where her intention is to do as many drugs as she can get her hands on and continue her clandestine affair with her aristocratic host’s girlfriend.
But what she doesn’t know is that Holt House is very haunted indeed. What’s more, the deep history of the place and of her host’s family, with their links back to the Crusaders, has direct and disturbing implications for her experience of the haunting.
The haunted house genre is ultimately concerned with the paradox of a home that is frightening and unwelcoming, a blend that may be familiar to JC readers when considering certain aspects of British history. Jan thinks she is rebellious, modern, entirely secular – but what is a ghost if not forced confrontation with a past that will not stay dead?
What especially interested me while mixing haunted house and country house tropes was the idea of hypercorrection, obsessively adopting the mannerisms of the ruling class as a protective mechanism – and the psychic fallout of rejection when this is demonstrated not to be enough, one is still a Jew after all. In the second half of the novel, it is revealed that one of Jan’s friends has told a pernicious lie involving her and money, which some of the others find believable because of their unexamined antisemitism. I deliberately wrote Jan to be a long way from the perfect victim, which makes it all the harder for her to stridently defend herself from an outright falsehood. She is just as messy and difficult as the friends she seeks to emulate – but this doesn’t mean she deserves to be subject to prejudice.
The novel is written for the general consumer of literary fiction, but laced throughout are details which Jewish readers are more likely to pick up on
The novel is written for the general consumer of literary fiction, but laced throughout are details which Jewish readers are more likely to pick up on, for example the date on which the host’s monstrous Great Uncle Harold finished his additions to Holt House was Tisha B’Av 1938. It was a formative experience for me to learn that my own great-grandfather’s name and address were in the Black Book handed out by the SS in the event of a successful Nazi conquest of Britain and this detail also appears in The Decadence. During a final confrontation at the climax of the novel, Jan’s heritage as both a lover of the English literary canon and as an affronted Jew is expressed with the rebuke: “‘I don’t need thirty pieces of silver, or a pound of your worthless flesh. I needed you to be my friend.
The novel was for the most part completed before October 7, for which I am grateful as I don’t know whether I would have held my nerve with some of the choices I made about Jan’s characterisation as a complex, and sometimes extremely dysfunctional hedonist. To publish a debut novel that takes British antisemitism as one of its major themes into the increasingly hostile literary landscape has felt at times like sheer madness. On the other hand, I wasn’t about to throw away years’ worth of work in deference to people who would most likely always have hated this book, privately or otherwise.
I’m deeply troubled by the literary world figures who agitate in support of artists charged with supporting Hamas and Hezbollah but boycott all Israeli writers, including those who criticise their current government from a place of actual knowledge
I’m deeply troubled by the literary world figures who agitate in support of artists charged with supporting Hamas and Hezbollah but boycott all Israeli writers, including those who criticise their current government from a place of actual knowledge. To balance on the razor’s edge between my heartbreak at the continuation of a war that has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Gazan civilians and which, I think, gravely endangers the remaining hostages, and my terror at the resurgence of open antisemitism is thankless. I do not look forward to doing this more often in public as I discuss the novel and its themes, but must resign myself to the reality that writing the book you wanted to read also means standing behind it on tour.
While I cannot pretend that I am not frightened, angry and often miserable, this time has also brought unexpected positives. I have taken this opportunity to read more commentary by both Israeli and Palestinian writers, and also to try and educate myself on the struggles of the Kurdish diaspora, many of whom live in Berlin.
I grew up in north London, proud of my Jewish identity but not ever going to shul and worrying that as an openly queer woman I would not really be that welcome. I never imagined that I’d be reading transliterated Psalms off my phone while praying that missiles don’t kill the friends and family of people I care about in Israel and in Iran. Jewish life in Berlin is now seeing a resurgence in community participation, particularly from queer and trans Jews who have been driven out of other spaces. I am thankful for the interesting and kind people I have met in the last two years, though I wish it could have been under more peaceful circumstances.
My hope is that The Decadence will find the readers for whom it was intended – both Jewish and not – readers who are not content with facile answers and are capable of getting stuck into a spine-chilling ghost story replete with gothic atmosphere and shocking twists.
The Decadence is published by Sceptre Books this week
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