Why I'm talking (to my hairdresser) about race - The Jewish Chronicle

Years ago, I used to go to a hair salon where the juniors who washed your hair had clearly taken the old cliché about hairdressers sticking to banal topics of conversation as if it were careers advice. They would settle you at the scoop-necked basin, then ask: “Going anywhere on your holidays?” or “Doing anything special at the weekend?”

But for over a decade, we have had Matteo come to the house to cut our hair, and, with Matteo, no topic is off-limits. He knows to dial it down if my son is in the room, or he switches to talking about bands and movies, but if it’s just me, the conversation will range from politics to sex parties (his experiences, not mine — to be honest, I get enough of a thrill when I see that Waitrose has the calming herb tea I really like), religion to dating apps.

Matteo is bright and interesting, but his lack of formal education, coupled with his deep distrust of mainstream media, mean that his views — on everything, not just politics — tend to be very black and white, with no room for nuance or ambiguity or doubt (my three favourite words). He is not someone who is likely to answer a difficult question with “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure.” I sometimes tiptoe cautiously around the edge of a contentious topic, fearing that if he says something outrageous, I won’t simply be able to stomp off in a speedy exit if my colour still needs another twenty minutes before he can wash it out.

On his recent visit, as he was wrapping my head in a towel after washing it, he said, “Who do you think has had it worse over the last 500 years — the blacks or the Jews?”
I paused for a few moments, feeling the fibres of my mind immediately pulling in two directions at once, then said that I wasn’t going to answer the question because I think it isn’t helpful — for anyone. It’s not useful or constructive to try to establish a hierarchy of victimhood, to say our pain is worse than yours because a greater number of us died or more hideous tortures were inflicted on us, or this group’s suffering was greater than that group’s because it’s more recent.

The view that there is somehow a naturally tiered system of atrocities is possibly at the root of Whoopi Goldberg’s comments about the Holocaust (for which she’s apologised), including: “This is white people doing it to white people”, which seemed to imply there was some measure of equality between perpetrators and victims, so it’s less bad, even if that’s not what she intended.

In form-time at my son’s school, his (Indian) form tutor said to the class, “I’ve got nothing against the Jews, but…”(always my favourite opening sentence). He expanded, saying that he felt aggrieved that, relatively, the Bengal Famine has been very overlooked in the teaching of history. Then, just after Holocaust Memorial Day, and having added the all-purpose get-out clause: “I don’t want to offend anyone…”, the teacher did it again.

Afterwards, my son and another Jewish classmate went up to him privately to try to explain that it felt as if he were trying to blame Jews for displacing the Bengal Famine from the attention it rightly deserves.

The teacher’s complaint implies a causal relationship: that the British don’t examine and lament the Bengal Famine of 1943 sufficiently because — implied — they are giving too much attention to the Holocaust. But the two things are not connected. There may be many reasons why the Bengal Famine has been rather swept under the rug, including British guilt that Churchill’s wartime cabinet both exacerbated and underplayed the situation, but it’s not because the Brits are overly focused on the Holocaust.

Perhaps this sense that others don’t understand the depth of our pain is one of the key things that unites us as Jews? For us, history isn’t something confined to textbooks; it’s personal. If my son wants to know more about the concentration camps, he doesn’t need to turn to his history books; he can walk two doors along to talk to our neighbour, who was sent to Auschwitz as a child. One side of my husband’s family was wiped out. My dad’s best friend came here on a Kindertransport. My mum’s two closest friends, both half-Jewish, survived the war in Germany using false papers.

Another friend was on the last train to safety out of Poland in 1939 when he was four. It’s hard to be Jewish without having a head full of personal stories that connect you directly to war, escape, exile and death.

Still, all we can do is at least try to hear other stories, other histories, because how else will we learn or understand them?

I hope I can learn from Matteo, not from his strong opinions, but from his curiosity, his eagerness always to ask another question, whether it’s about the laws of kashrut, the roots of our festivals, or whether I think the United States electorate would happily vote in a gay candidate at the next election (he says yes, I say no).

Claire’s most recent novel, A Second-Hand Husband (Boldwood Books), is available now. Twitter: @clairecalman