Making our Jewish identity public

Published in the Jewish Chronicle 23 June 2006

When I was at university, members of the Union of Jewish Students were encouraged to wear small badges, carrying three discreet little letters, all in lower case: ujs. It was the lapel equivalent of a whisper.

A few years later, I noticed that UJS members now wore T-shirts spelling out the organisation’s name in tall, wide letters, with the word JEWISH the largest of all, covering the wearer from the navel to the neck.

I took that to be a sign that the next generation of British Jews were willing to declare themselves more loudly and proudly than before. Where their parents had been wary of being too noticeable - unsure even about using the J-word too audibly in mixed company - these younger Jews were much bolder. In recent weeks, that hunch has been confirmed, though now with evidence rather more substantial than a T-shirt.

A cluster of new books has appeared in which young Jewish writers pursue overtly Jewish themes. Witness Naomi Alderman’s prize-winning debut novel, “Disobedience,” set among Hendon’s Orthodox community. Or the exquisite “Earl of Petticoat Lane,” a biography of his grandfather - an East End market trader who ended up mingling in London high society - by Andrew Miller, Moscow correspondent of the Economist.

Both Alderman and Miller were born in 1974. Coming soon is a book by TV documentary maker Dan Edelstyn, telling the story of his grandmother who fled the Kiev of the Russian Revolution only to die years later as a converted Catholic, buried among IRA volunteers in the Falls Road cemetery, Belfast. Edelstyn is 29.

There have of course been books about Jewish subjects before. And the forebears of Ms Alderman, for one, are hardly bashful when it comes to identifying Jewishly (see the column directly above this one). Even so, it’s hard not to sense something afoot - an ease about “outing” oneself as a Jew that did not exist in the same way 30 or 40 years ago.

Some of that is simply the confidence that comes with feeling settled and accepted, a comfort not always available to our forebears. But the emerging works of non-fiction at least also suggest a desire to excavate a past our parents and grandparents preferred to keep buried.

In “Remind Me Who I Am, Again,” Linda Grant captured well the initial immigrant desire simply to scratch out a living and survive. Their children, in turn, wanted to advance as far as they could, with little interest in looking back. It has been left to the grandchildren, my own generation, to pause, take stock and remember.

That impulse is not only nostalgic and sentimental, though there is some of that. It is also about the flipside of today’s confidence, a kind of uncertainty about the world and our place in it. That definitely played a part in my own family memoir, “Jacob’s Gift.” It was not solely an account of the lives of three individuals, it was also an inquiry into identity and belonging - both of which have become vexed and confused in today’s globalised world.

Andrew Miller’s book is mainly a lovingly detailed, rich description of a remarkable man - but it is also a reflection on Englishness, class and the surprising fluidity of British life, accepting newcomers more readily than we might suppose.

For his day job, Miller writes about the big questions of high politics and international affairs. Yet when he came to write a book, it was not a biography of Vladimir Putin or a study of the Russian economy that drew him: it was the life story of his own grandfather.

I understand that feeling. Something similar was at work when I chose to research the lives of my mother and two great-uncles: a sense both that identity is one of the great issues of our times and that, somehow, the lives of “ordinary” individuals can tell you more about the world than any number of abstract inquiries into “society.”

Both Miller and I were lucky. One great-uncle of mine left behind a stack of letters; another had been interviewed two dozen times and made sure he kept copies of the tapes. Miller’s grandfather “kept everything: letters, diaries, photographs, address books, invitations, business ledgers and notes scribbled to himself on the backs of envelopes… a musty record of how… he became an Englishman.”

That leaves a troubling thought. In the age of email, we do not write letters, let alone keep them. Our addresses are stored on SIM cards and on databases. We take countless photographs and video recordings, but store them in places and on formats our grandchildren may have no idea how to use. If, in two generations’ time, our grandchildren show as much interest in us as, apparently, we do in our predecessors, where will they start? How will they have any idea what we were like?

“Jacob’s Gift” is now out in paperback (Penguin, £8.99)

Posted on June 23, 2006 11:22 AM

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