Life
Mum, Dad, you ruined my childhood Purims!
If I’d come from a middle-class Jewish family with competitive parents, it would all been so different...
March 10, 2025 18:12
If I’d come from a middle-class Jewish family with competitive parents, it would all been so different...
March 10, 2025 18:12Purim was always a jealous, bitter, agonising occasion for me when I was at primary school. Because of my parents. It was all their fault. Because of their abject failure to be middle-class, and total lack of possession of even a single iota of competitive alpha parenting.
That’s right, Mum, Dad, you are culpable. I am publicly shaming you. If you are reading this in the Jewish Chronicle, you, dear parents, you – Judith and Menahem – ruined my Purim life.
Yes. Because of my parents, I was a one-trick-Purim-pony.
Other kids at Simon Marks Jewish Day School would turn up, year after year, in fantastically fabulous costumes which their parents had ingeniously created and put together. Spacemen, Disney characters, aliens, wrestlers, soldiers, beauty queens, postboxes, telephone boxes, chefs, deep-sea divers, you name it, the other kids would come in fun and diverse, different costumes each year.
The teachers, those same teachers who usually fawned over how clever I was, would completely ignore me. I became invisible every Purim while all the school admired and gushed over all the children who had come to school in cleverly crafted, fun or witty costumes. One year I remember a boy coming as an actual box of chocolates, complete with a menu-guide.
Let’s send Misha into school for Purim wearing a sari that we will have to wrap around her 98 times and make her look like an entire harem
Why was I ignored? Because basically I was just sent to school – Purim after Purim after Purim, for the seven or eight years I was at primary school – in my aunt’s sari. I literally just put on my aunt’s clothes and that was supposed to be my Purim costume.
In the afternoon there would be a whole-school assembly where the teachers had selected a shortlist of 20 or so finalists, and they would parade up and down and around the entire hall in their stupid clever costumes and then the teachers would select the winner and runners-up.
I’m sure you can already guess from my still-raw bitterness that I never made it anywhere near the parade. After seven years I didn’t even get a pity-vote into the final parade. I’m telling you I was invisible.
The night before Purim, every year, my dad would drive us over, in a panic, to his sister Margaret’s in Clapton. My dad’s family grew up in Aden. Dad’s four sisters were sent to a convent – which was normal for Jewish girls in Aden in those days – and although they wore stylish and cool Western clothes, they also wore saris. It seemed like a clever idea to everyone when I was four years old. “Ooh, let’s send Misha into school for Purim wearing a massive sari that we will have to wrap around her 98 times because it’s so big and which will make her look like an entire harem all-in-one and which will render her unable to walk properly, let alone run and play, for the entire day but at least she’ll have plenty of material to hide behind for crying and wiping her snivelling nose while she never ever gets close to being noticed or called fun and clever.”
That is literally, probably, what my parents would have said, had you asked them. I wasn’t even Indira Gandhi. I was just a very short and enormously swaddled squat little middle-aged nondescript generic woman in a sari. Fast-forward half a century or so and, perhaps, although I will never be fully over it, I may be beginning to heal.
This trauma and pain from my childhood is probably what drove me to become a television extra. I’ve been a Romany gypsy, an Argentinian Olympian in a Victoria Wood special, a fortune teller on Alan Carr’s New Year’s Eve show, a witch in Harry Potter, a prison visitor in EastEnders, a party guest in Peep Show, a Polish cleaner, a forensic officer in Silent Witness, and many more things. Finally, in my adulthood, I have been able to do proper fancy-dress stuff and live the Purim dream.
My own children have had to endure an obsessive parent manically making sure they milked every costume opportunity to the hilt. Every World Book Day, every Spanish Day, every fancy-dress party, opting out was not an option. They have been almost everything between them. From microwave oven, to the White Rabbit, to a sumo wrestler. Anything and everything. Just as long as it’s had nothing to do with a sari.