The other day I saw a post on a social media platform written by a friend who had gone round to see her mother. She recounted their dialogue in excruciatingly comic detail. The core elements were: 1. The daughter was looking overweight. (“How much do you weigh?” “I’m not telling you how much I weigh,” etc.) and 2. The daughter must be fed. (“You must eat something. We’ve got smoked salmon.” “I told you, I’ve just eaten,” etc., etc. I made a comment and the author responded: “you should go round, any excuse to feed a nice Jewish boy.”
Now, leaving aside the question of whether I am nice, or still a boy, one thing I cannot say at all confidently about myself is that I am Jewish. I know, I know. You look at my name. You look at my byline photo, which would seem to show a certain kind of intellectual type pausing in mid-kvetch. You look up and check the title of this publication. “If he’s not Jewish,” you might be forgiven for saying to yourself, “what’s he doing here?”
I’ve written about this before here, but I’ll quickly recap: I might have a Jewish surname, I might have been brought up in St John’s Wood and East Finchley, areas of London not unpopular with Jews, our neighbours on either side of us were Jews, and so on: but I’m not Jewish. I had one Jewish grandparent. Any student of the subject would know how far that would have got me in wartime Europe. And that is: it would have been touch and go. So I was always trembling on the edge of Jewishness, but I would feel something of a fraud claiming it, like the American with the one Irish grandparent who makes a jackass of himself on St Patrick’s Day and when visiting Ireland.
But here I am. It all started as a bit of a joke – get me, Schrödinger’s Jew, Jewish and Gentile superimposed – but then October 7 happened, and it stopped being a lark, insofar as it had ever been one, and this is why I am in the Jewish Chronicle and not stomping up and down the streets shouting about you-know-what.
Since that grievous day, I have been doing a lot of reading, let’s just leave it at that. Let’s just say the Jewish part of me has grown, and that I see the world a lot more through Jewish eyes than I used to. It certainly makes the world a lot more interesting and complicated, but, oy gevalt, it’s exhausting.
And yet it is an identity that is alien to my upbringing. I was raised in the milk-and-water embrace of the Church of England, which is the way I like my religion: an administrative matter, a box you tick on the form to save time. One absorbed the stories (up to a point: Scripture was always, by a wide margin, my worst subject, and when it became no longer obligatory I danced for joy) but it had absolutely no influence on either the waking or dreaming life. So to find myself looking through lenses which, let’s face it, have a certain religious factor in their prescription, is somewhat confusing.
Did I say “alien” above? That’s not quite right. The culture, or its superficial element, was all around me, literally, and it was easy to blend in, to move through it without thinking it strange, or even being thought strange. No one was going to throw me and my mother out of Grodzinskis for not being Jewish, although not only did I look rather more Jewish than British, my mother, despite being raised as a Catholic, acted in such a manner, qua mother, that she might as well have been under Deep Cover.
Which of course brings us back to my friend's conversation with her own mother. That conversation is, I am sure, replicated across all cultures on earth that have mothers. And yet, somehow, the Jewish mother seems to own that stereotype. Here we are again with the whole Jews Punching Above Their Weight shtick: 0.2% of the population, or whatever it is, yet vastly overrepresented in Nobel Prizes, Oscars, jokes, navel-gazing, and my friends. And this was before the current situation. Now it is all rather more urgent, more live, as with dealing with electricity. And Jews are also taking up a lot more than 0.2% of the world’s attention, once again.
I could scuttle away from all this but I just can’t. Let’s go back to my hypothetical American with the one Irish grandparent. He would be in danger of a frosty or sarcastic reception from really Irish people if he said this meant he was, essentially, Irish. And yet when I cautiously raise a hand and say “well, I’m sort of Jewish” my Jewish friends have all said variations on “I knew it”, “I told you so”, or “duh”.
So, Hineini, here I am.
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