‘Would lying make me a better Jew?’

Paul Kutchinsky's jewelled creation[Missing Credit]

Then, within a year of each other, I lost my father and my grandfather, severing my last links to that part of my identity.

At Oxford, when the Jewish Society reached out, I rebuffed them like an unwanted suitor – it felt like a world that belonged to my father, and I couldn’t bear it without him in it. When I discovered that my grandfather had disinherited my sisters and me entirely out of a £3 million estate – the gulf widened further. I spent the next two decades introducing myself, half-joking, as “Jewish-ish.”

It wasn’t until I set out to find my father’s egg, a journey that took me halfway around the world, that I realised what I had lost. Following my ancestors from the pogroms to London’s East End and our glittering shopfront near Harrods, I felt a sense of connection with them, with my Jewish roots. But in writing their story in my book, Kutchinsky’s Egg, I may have broken one of Judaism’s central laws.

My motives were good, or so I thought. For decades my family raged against my father’s egg as if it were a villainous human. I hoped that reclaiming it as a thing of beauty might give my mother, my two sisters and me some much-needed closure.

The uncomfortable truth is that, in the short term at least, the book has hurt more than healed. My younger sisters haven’t spoken to me since it was published. I have gone from peacemaker to being likened to Prince Harry, who also spilt family secrets. My mother remains in contact but, despite readers hailing her as the book’s true hero, she still sees the egg, and the book by association, as tainted.

I have largely blocked out this rift, basking in the glow of knowing my father, at least, would have been proud. Only recently, talking to a more observant friend, did I wonder if writing it made me not just a bad sister, but a bad Jew.

Lashon hara (“evil tongue”) is the sin of telling the truth about someone when it hurts them. It’s a minefield for memoir writers. The Talmud bluntly says it “kills three people”: the speaker, the listener and the person spoken about.

To find out where I stood, I sought the counsel of Rabbi Dr Harvey Belovski, who led Golders Green Synagogue for 20 years. He warned he might conclude I was “bonkers” but agreed to hear me out.

I started with Grandpa Jo, the same grandfather who cut us out of his will, imprisoned as a “traitor of the realm” during the Second World War for forging medical certificates to keep men out of the army. Grandma Lily told Mum it was only spoken about on “pain of death”. Had I sullied the reputation Jo had worked so hard for?

Belovski was reassuring. My grandfather was long dead and his prison time is on the public record, so it was hard to call it a breach.

Hopeful I might not be such a bad Jew after all, I moved on to a scene my middle sister objected to. Days after Dad’s affair was exposed and he left home, we were reunited with him. Angry at him for hurting Mum, my sister slapped him. Relieved that he wanted to see us, I hugged him. She felt it made her nine-year-old self look bad, but I kept it because, without her as the counterpoint, my own weakness wasn’t exposed.

“It’s a difficult one,” Rabbi Belovski said. He doesn’t feel it casts her in a negative light. “Maybe she is being over-sensitive,” he observed. But reading it could have brought back trauma. “If it’s something which might cause embarrassment or upset, you shouldn’t do it,” he said, chiding me.

At the root of my family’s displeasure is my rehabilitation of not just the egg but of the woman who stole my father’s heart. When I reached out, I discovered she wasn’t the femme fatale of family legend. I had hoped, possibly naively, that my sisters might be willing to let go of their anger. The opposite was true. “What feels like an important act of truth-telling to one person can feel like a profound betrayal to another,” Chana Hughes, a therapist and rebbetzin, explained.

“This is more complicated than whether something is technically permitted or forbidden,” said Rabbi Belovski, who concluded that I am indeed “bonkers” when he heard the lengths I’d gone to track down Dad’s egg.

“You now have a different perspective on the egg and the mistress, “ he added. “But they [my family] don’t recognise that perspective, and you’ve upset them by foisting it on them.”

So where do we go from here, now that I have, as Belovski put it, “poked the beast”?

“Sometimes the important shift is moving from ‘Can you finally acknowledge that I was right?’ to ‘Can we have a relationship, even though we remember things differently?” counselled Hughes.

While I’m sorry for any pain my book has caused, I’m not prepared to say it was a mistake. I don’t think lying would make me a better Jew. Part of me is pleased to have disrupted their narrative and made my voice heard. After all, I am my father’s daughter: rules, as he told me, are for breaking.

If that makes me a bad Jew, bring it on.