Family memoirs shine in book award - The Jewish Chronicle

The shortlist for the Wingate Literary Prize, Britain’s pre-eminent Jewish books prize, has been announced, with family memoirs leading the field.

Hadley Freeman’s brilliant House of Glass is about the hidden story of her grandmother, Sala Glass. And Ariana Neumann’s acclaimed book, When Time Stopped, is a fascinating account, almost a detective story, about a daughter exploring her father’s hidden and mysterious past.

The family memoir is one of the most interesting Jewish literary genres at the moment. Louise Kehoe’s book about her father, the Jewish architect Berthold Lubetkin, In This Dark House, Mark Mazower’s What You Did Not Tell, and, more recently, Martha Leigh’s Invisible Ink and Simon May’s How to be a Refugee, are all superb examples of children coming to terms with their family’s dark and complex past in mid-20th century Europe.

Bess Kalb’s Nobody Will Tell You This But Me is also about the relationship between the generations, in this case a granddaughter and her grandmother. The second and now even the third generation have found their voice, as in the aforementioned House of Glass by Hadley Freeman, best known as a writer for The Guardian; On Division, a book about the Charedi community by Goldie Goldbloom, an Australian novelist; The Slaughterman’s Daughter by the Israeli writer Yaniv Iczkovits; Nobody Will Tell You This But Me, a book about what it is like to be a second or third generation Jew in America, by Bess Kalb, an American journalist and comedy writer; Apeirogon, about Israeli and Palestinian life and interaction by Colum McCann, an Irish novelist based in New York; When Time Stopped, a family memoir by Ariana Neumann, who was born and grew up in Venezuela and now lives in London; and We Are the Weather, about climate change, by the American writer, Jonathan Safran Foer.

This is a very balanced list. Four women authors, three men. Two (Freeman and Safran Foer) are very well known, the rest less so, but my two favourite shortlisted books are by authors who until recently barely known. There is a good mix of fiction and nonfiction.

As a former judge of the Wingate Prize, I am well aware of the pressures on panels. It is hard for a book about Charedi Jews or a quirky book about a granddaughter’s love for her grandmother to compete with books about the Holocaust. But you can’t give the prize to Holocaust books, historical or fictional, every year.

The second issue is about Judaism. The year I was on the panel, a fellow-judge, Rabbi Jeremy Rosen, argued passionately that scholarly works about Judaism had been unfairly neglected by a largely secular panel. He lost the debate and Zadie Smith won with her novel, The Autograph Man. This year, the chair of the judges is Rabbi Laura Janner-Klausner, who is unlikely to have overlooked the merits of powerful works about Judaism.

Third, Sephardi authors and subjects have too often been neglected. This isn’t just about the Wingate Prize, of course. Only Jewish Renaissance has provided regular coverage of Sephardi issues.

Finally, there is Israel. Many of the best Israeli writers have won in the past, including Amos Oz, David Grossman, Etgar Keret and Amos Elon. It is no surprise to see a book on Israelis and Palestinians on the shortlist.

The larger question, of course, is what does this shortlist tell us about the state of Jewish literature? There is good news and bad news. The good news is how wide-ranging Jewish books have become. Here are books by Americans, an Israeli, an Australian, a South American and an Irishman. The subjects are an interesting mix, ranging from survivors to Charedim, from a Yiddish-speaking slaughterman and his daughter in the Russian Pale to Parisian fashion.

It is also good to see so many young and less well-known authors. Hadley Freeman, Bess Kalb, Iczkovits and Jonathan Safran Foer are all in their 30s and early 40s.

Apart from Foer, none of these are famous, well-established book writers like so many past winners.

So, what is missing? Neumann’s compelling memoir is a first-rate debut, but it is too early to say whether she will become a great writer. Foer was a great writer, one of the most exciting of his generation, but it is some time since he wrote an acclaimed novel. In short, it is not yet clear if we have a single great writer on this shortlist. No Sebald, Anne Michaels or Imre Kertesz, all past winners. No Bellow, Roth or Malamud. No historians, scientists or great thinkers. Think of Oliver Sacks, Nikolaus Wachsmann, Mark Roseman or David Cesarani, all either past winners or shortlisted.
And, finally, something of a curiosity: no British-born writers, though Freeman (who has dual US-British citizenship) and Neumann (who has triple Czech-Venezuelan-British citizenship) are both based in London.