When comedian Max Olesker got talking to a girl in a bar at the Edinburgh Fringe in the wee small hours, there was instant chemistry. She liked his Jewish jokes. “It’s OK,” he reassured her. “I’m allowed to make them.” And so their love story began. A story that would completely rip up both their lives, and lead Max on the most challenging journey he’d ever undertaken.
It could have been so simple. They were both Jewish, after all. But he was raised in what began as a mixed family – when he opted to have a barmitzvah his mother decided to convert under the auspices of South Hampshire Reform Jewish Community. He was also “dunked” in the mikveh, although he declined to undergo circumcision at that age. And Eliana was from a modern Orthodox family and kept Shabbat.
“Modern Orthodoxy was a concept I was not emotionally or psychologically or theologically prepared for,” he says. “I only realised the implications after some months.”
And so after a year they broke up. He felt unable to commit to the conversion process she wanted. “And there was no way for us to be together unless I did. So with Eliana’s full approval, I started dating other people. If I was going to convert she wanted it to be of my own volition.”
By the winter of 2021 he decided that conversion to Orthodox Judaism was indeed what he wanted.
“It had felt impossible initially, not least because of the non-negotiable surgical implications. But I couldn’t leave the idea alone, even though it terrified and bewildered me, and spoke to many people who had undergone Orthodox conversions. And eventually, it felt like I had answers to all of the questions. And so Eliana and I were united once more.”
There followed a period of three intense years during which he began attending synagogue daily and keeping Shabbat. When the time came that the Beth Din required him to move in with a frum family in Hendon for eight months, they also wanted Eliana to do the same – with a family who lived a few metres away. And they had to renounce all physical contact. On one walk in the park, the couple held the other’s glove because they could not hold each other’s hand.
“It was a strange feeling. I was a man in my mid thirties living in a spare attic room previously occupied by a 14-year-old boy. And my partner is living across the road. And we don’t know how long any of this is going to last. But we were aware of this yearning to make it to the end, to make it to the chupah.”
On top of all this came Max’s six-monthly meetings with the London Beth Din, each more exponentially pressured than the last as they interviewed him on the conversion process in a room that he describes as imposing. Finally came the sacred snip itself, the prospect of which, Max freely admits, left him scared witless.
“I had lots of complicated feelings about the entire conversion process but my feelings towards being circumcised were the least complex of all. I was utterly terrified.”
So, once again, he did his research and came to a swift conclusion. “I spoke to a lot of mohels, one of whom offered to come to my house and do it for 100 quid, which I didn’t feel was enough money. I became very aware that the type of circumcision I wanted was an expensive one. I didn’t want some freewheeling bloke with a pair of scissors just giving it a go.”
Max recalls that he had no notion he would start to write about the conversion experience until very late in the process when stress started to pile upon stress.
“I knew that I would have to reflect on it in some way. And a book felt like it had to happen because it was such a complex and nuanced story with so many different strands and facets that it felt the only way to explain it with enough depth, and to do justice to it, was to write it down.”
Making The Cut: An Unorthodox Love Story was duly published in February to glowing reviews. Five stars from The Times, and “Britain’s answer to David Sedaris”, no less, from Andrew O’Hagan, were among the raves.
At this point, now happily married and with the book written, Max was at last able to sit back, exhale and look back with some kind of perspective on the whole story. And that was when the idea of a solo stage show popped into his head.
And so next month, in a neat piece of dramatic symmetry, he’s taking the whole story back to where it all began seven years ago, the Edinburgh Festival.
Of course, the stage version of Making The Cut, which he will not be performing on Shabbat, will be much more personal than the Max And Ivan shows that comedy and Radio 4 audiences will remember, but Max explains that their work has become more and more autobiographical as time has gone by.
“When we started in Edinburgh in our twenties, we were doing these zany, madcap, almost live-action cartoons where we played 70 characters and it was a fantasy. But gradually those stories became more grounded in who we were in our lives.
“The conversion felt so personal that if ever I were going to perform a solo show, it would be this. So I leapt into the process. Thankfully, the Soho Theatre were receptive to the idea and have been brilliant producers and they’ve been helping me breathe life into it, which, being a novice sole practitioner, I have really appreciated.”
Perhaps surprisingly to followers of Max’s comedy career, the show has been classified in the Fringe programme as a piece of theatre.
“I agonised and overthought it for far too long. Having performed comedy for many years, there’s a social contract with the audience. It’s possible to infuse a comedy show with all sorts of gravity but there’s always an expectation that you will ping back to a one-liner straight afterwards. Which was a period of unlearning for me because I’m so used to cramming joke upon joke, and using jokes as a building block to tell a story.
"But on balance, if the show is almost 50-50 comedy and theatre, I would much rather create a funny piece of theatre than a deeply serious comedy show.”
And how have audiences been reacting to the show in the early pre-Edinburgh run-throughs?
“It’s a love story and lots of people have found it very funny and very sad, and a whole rainbow of emotions in between. And having a theatre space and an audience expecting a story as opposed to a barrage of jokes feels like a really good starting point. It turns out it’s not the same as when you’re sitting in a comedy club ready for an escapist hour. I really hope people find the funny bits funny but after much careful consideration, it’s ended up as a piece of theatre and that feels right.”
So does that mean no knob gags? Surely the backstreet mohel offering to perform the circumcision for a snip must have made the cut?
Max chuckles. “Listen, there are plenty. But I’ve done my best to be quite judicious with them and not given in to the impulse of just absolutely going to town.”
Given that his choice of career had threatened to derail his conversion – “Comedy… Is that really a job for a Jew?” asked the dayanim at one especially tense point in his Jewish journey – it is good to see Olesker is having the last laugh.
Making The Cut, Pleasance Dome,
Edinburgh, August 5-30
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