I was born there – but people in Stoke have never met a Jew

I’ve always assumed people could tell I was Jewish immediately. Growing up in Ilford (I didn’t spend long in Stoke) everyone had Jewish neighbours, Jewish schoolfriends, Jewish shopkeepers and so on.

It’s not as if I introduce myself as “Hi, I’m Solly, I’m Jewish” every time I meet someone new. Subconsciously, I suppose, I just think it’s obvious that I’m Jewish and they can take it or leave it.

But here’s the dilemma. If you’re the first Jewish person someone meets, what do you do? I mean, you want to create a good impression so that they don’t go away and tell their friends, “I met a Jew. They’re an odd lot” or “He looked a bit like Ben Elton and seemed quite normal.”

Of course, the best option is to be oneself and trust that you’ve done a good PR job for our lot at a time when we’re under attack – sometimes literally. The other option is to overplay the Jewish bit, introduce them to our humour, cynicism, culture, make out we’re more exotic than we really are. Perhaps it’s best not to go into anything political. Not right now.

Woody Allen did it best. In the opening to Annie Hall, to explain what it was like to be Jewish, he told a very old joke about two Jewish women in a restaurant complaining to the waiter about a meal saying how awful it was and then adding “and such small portions”.

Stoke doesn’t have many Jews. According to the census, there are so few they register 0.0 per cent of the population, though there is a shul in Newcastle-under-Lyme that serves not only Stoke but the whole of North Staffordshire and boasts “a small but active” congregation.

There were more when I was born in the 1960s – there was a thriving community in the potteries but then the potteries were thriving generally back then. However, we were still seen as a bit of an oddity.

My mother wasn’t Jewish. When she married my dad she was already six months pregnant and their rushed register office wedding was attended by us three (I count myself) and my mum’s sister and her husband.

Mum’s parents ran a rural pub a few miles outside Newcastle-under-Lyme and they’d never met a Jew before my dad arrived, from a council house in Stepney, to whisk my mother away to a life in London where she converted, not just formally but culturally to become a typical Jewish mamma.

They – and the locals who drank in The Red Lion – accepted us. Being Jewish didn’t matter as long as we knew how to pour a pint and could talk about football. They bought into our way of life. So much so that come Chanukah, my gran would buy me and my brothers a present for each of the eight days and then presents at Christmas too.

Perhaps the most telling moment that there were differences was my younger brother’s barmitzvah in 1978. At the time, there was a by-election going on in Ilford in the run-up to the fall of the Labour government and the arrival of Margaret Thatcher. On the weekend of my brother’s coming of age, the National Front were due to stage a march through one of the most heavily populated Jewish areas in Britain, if not in Europe.

The march was banned by the government, but the NF were out on the streets in force. Shops were boarded up, police were stationed on every corner, Jewish taxi drivers tried to blockade any attempts at a march while every shul had heavy security on hand.

There was an eerie atmosphere as Red Lion regular, Geoff Bennett, drove his coach full of my Staffordshire family and friends through Gants Hill to the shul. For many it was the first time they had been to Ilford and they wondered if the area had always resembled a war zone.

Perhaps seeing a Jewish community determined to live their lives and defend themselves when under the increasing threat of attack is the best introduction of all.