Call me materialistic, but my most enduring memory of Rosh Hashanah is getting a new outfit.
Every September, my mother would take my sister and me shopping for our High Holy Days outfit. At the local department store, we would be bought a new pair of woollen tights, the sort that retained their creases through the chagim, and, most importantly, a dress.
Mine is not a particularly observant family, but one thing was impressed upon me with something approaching halachic certainty: you wear a dress to shul.
There was a pink corduroy pinafore, a velvet smock, a denim skater dress. When the weather stayed warm, I would swelter in these distinctly autumnal creations, but it did not matter; new clothes for synagogue were the most thrilling part of the holidays. Turning shul into a catwalk was, in retrospect, a clever move on my mother's part.
Growing up Jewish in Norwich, where the last census recorded a Jewish population of 0.2 per cent, meant that announcing your religion could produce the glassy-eyed confusion one might receive after announcing membership of an obscure cult. My friends did not necessarily understand why I was given time off at the start of term to attend a place called ‘shul’, but they understood new clothes.
As I got older, the shopping expeditions evolved into an annual pilgrimage to Topshop, where my mother would, to my immense teenage mortification, ask the sales assistant to turn the music down while I tried to find something that could pass muster as a Rosh Hashanah outfit and simultaneously look sufficiently stylish for the next non-uniform day.
If we were especially lucky, the chagim also meant the arrival of my grandparents from Australia. I adored these visits, which saw larger family gatherings, plenty of Tim Tams and, blissfully, not just a morning off school for shul but several entire days at home.
There was also more shopping. The woman at the Jaeger counter knew my grandmother, Sasha, by name. Her visits from Oz were memorable partly because they meant a family reunion and partly because she would buy so many clothes. Norwich, dear reader, has wonderful shopping.
But the city has something more valuable than consumer goods. Alongside the enduring appeal of its great emporia, Norwich has a tightknit Jewish community.
It is one of the peculiar privileges of growing up somewhere small that your Jewish world is both tiny and enormous. In a provincial community, you really do know everyone, and more than a decade after leaving, it feels the same. The community is cosy in a way that is difficult to capture in a capital city with dozens of synagogues to choose from.
After all these years living in London, I am slightly embarrassed to be a JC writer without a local shul. This is because I bemoan the fact that synagogue in London can involve paying a substantial sum for a pew in festival season – some shuls near me charge more than £100 for the honour – but mostly it is because no minyan in London will ever feel as homely as Norwich.
So, as the chag approach, I find myself wondering where exactly I should spend the New Year.
It is a question my friends never seem to contemplate about Christmas. For them, going home is practically compulsory, and they will traipse back to their parents' houses and stay there for as long as humanly possible. But with no culturally prescribed version of “going home” for Jewish holidays, with rom-coms, pop music and tacky pyjamas to affirm the convention, the chagim are different.
In London, I have built a life with friends to share the High Holy Days with; thank you, Samuel, for last year’s brisket.
Yet the Norwich address where I grew up is still saved as “home home” on Google Maps, and it is there that Rosh Hashanah truly feels right, be that seated with family, or at the shul's communal dinner, which my mother frequently caters for 50-plus.
Going back for festivals is like time travel. I sleep in my childhood bed, open my wardrobe still full of the shul-going dresses that long stopped fitting, and walk into Norwich Synagogue, which has had a splendid renovation since I was a child but smells the same as it did on the morning of my batmitzvah.
Grandma Sasha died in 2014. She used to tell me that you should always wear a good outfit, even if you're just nipping to the shop, because you never know who you might meet.
So, this year if I drive up the A11 for the chagim, I will make sure to go shopping with my mum, even if Topshop is long gone. Going home might feel like stepping back in time, but – like the crisp planner for the start of term and the fresh classroom seating plan as the leaves turn golden – new clothes at this time of year carry all the optimism of new beginnings.
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