Anglo-Jewish Literature Raises Its Voice

By DONALD WEBER

“In England,” observes the Jewishly obsessed narrator (named “Philip”) in Philip Roth’s great 1990 novel, Deception, “whenever I’m in a public place, a restaurant, a party, the theater, and somebody happens to mention the word ‘Jew,’ I notice that the voice always drops just a little.” By turns enraged and bewildered, fascinated and disgusted with the self-muting habits of a tame, reticent Anglo-Jewry, “Philip” longs to return to his only homeland, New York City, a heimish territory filled with “Jews with force.... Jews with appetite. Jews without shame.... Unaccommodating Jews, full of anger, insult, argument, and impudence.”

Feeling uprooted in London almost 20 years ago, Roth himself spoke harshly of his experience as a “de-territorialized” Jewish writer-intellectual living half of each year in England. As he explained in a 1988 interview, in conjunction with the publication of his autobiography, The Facts, “what’s driving [British] society isn’t dramatized with anything like the turbulent intensity that animates America... the intensity that’s generated by the American historical drama of movement and massive displacement, of class overspreading class, region overtaking region, minority encroaching on minority.”

Startlingly, just a few years later, the emergence of a vibrant cosmopolitan landscape whose center is multicultural London belies Roth’s premature judgment. Indeed, contemporary Britain now hums with a rich aural mix: an array of diverse voices, conjured by writers who take the vexed, yet often comic, story of global migration and new-world adjustment as their subject.

Perhaps in response to—or, more likely, as part of—the noisy Babel of voices currently invigorating literary Britain, a rising generation of Anglo-Jewish writers now seeks to be heard. Indeed, Jewish culture in contemporary Britain appears to be thriving: Jewish film festivals, London Jewish Book Week, and various cultural organizations are thriving. This past year Anglo-Jewry marked 350 years of Jewish history in Great Britain with scores of events, panels, and exhibitions. In light of such collective self-consciousness and celebration, can we begin to speak of an attendant Anglo-Jewish literary “revival”?

My recent conversations with editors, writers, and scholars alert to the cultural resonances of contemporary Anglo-Jewish life voice some caution with respect to calling it a literary “flowering.” They suggest that we maintain a measured view, even in a year that featured the filmmaker Mike Leigh’s first, self-declared “Jewish play,” Two Thousand Years, which sold out the National Theatre in the fall of 2005; Naomi Alderman’s debut novel, Disobedience, which received the Orange Prize for best first novel by a woman; and Howard Jacobson’s comic tour de force Kalooki Nights, long-listed for the prestigious Man-Booker Prize, just published in the United States.

At some level the hesitation to embrace the idea of literary-cultural “revival” reflects a deeply ingrained history of accommodation, indeed of self-effacement on the part of British Jews, in worried response to the pressures of “Anglicization.” “In England the price of toleration was Englishness,” recalls the critic A. Alvarez, about the psychic and emotional costs of achieving British citizenship; “the only way to be English is scrupulously to obey the customs of the country.”

We can, perhaps, overhear a poignant version of this familiar Anglo-Jewish dilemma in a poem by 11-year-old Jonah Summerfield, recited before a gathering of dignitaries—including Prime Minister Tony Blair himself—on June 13^th of last year, at Bevis Marks, the oldest synagogue in London, as part of the “British Jewish 350” celebration. Master Summerfield wondered aloud:

Am I Jewish or English?
This keeps me in confusion.
I’m both, you see, that’s my final conclusion.
Judaism is my religion, I make it so, clearly.
I adore England, I love it so dearly.

In earnest, if tempered, adoration of his homeland, the young poet keeps faith with generations of British Jews conscious of the pressures of assimilation. In this respect, Maurice Samuel’s classic 1952 memoir, The Gentleman and the Jew, about growing up as an immigrant son in early 20th-century Manchester, registers the unalloyed embrace of “Englishness” for a generation of Anglo-Jewry: “Among us Jews, as I remember vividly, the attitude toward England was one of intense admiration, respect, gratitude, and affection.”

In Blair’s speech at Bevis Marks, the Prime Minister seized the exemplary story of Jewish citizenship to score political points. Referring to the relatively smooth history of Jewish assimilation into British life, Blair offered an implicit moral contrast between Anglo-Jewish patriotism and the vexed matter of “integration”—as the debate over acculturation is termed in Britain and Western Europe—among newer immigrant communities, perhaps in light of the approaching anniversary of the 7/7 bombings in London, carried out by British-born, alienated second-generation sons of South Asian descent. Speaking of British Jews, Blair observed “how it is possible to retain a clear faith and a clear identity, and at the same time be thoroughly British. As the oldest minority faith community in this country, you show how identity through faith can be combined with the deep loyalty to our nation.” Are the Jews now Britain’s “model minority”?

In the charged political atmosphere of contemporary Britain—above all in the linguistic Babel of multicultural London, where most of Britain’s 300,000 Jews live—questions of affiliation and identity have taken an urgent turn. In this respect, contemporary Jewish writers and critics are re-imagining their relation to “Englishness,” a relationship problematically linked to histories of whiteness and power, a relationship associated with the shameful history of British imperialism.

“Jews are taking advantage of that discussion,” notes University of Michigan historian Tod Endelman about Anglo-Jewry’s participation in current debates in the United Kingdom around multiculturalism. As a result, says Matthew J. Reisz, editor of The Jewish Quarterly, the premier journal of Anglo-Jewish intellectual life, writers now “move in and out of Jewish identity as one part of their British identity.” Jewish stories, Reisz observes, are “being told very well, and unapologetically... in a completely unselfconscious way,” as “part of a wider British conversation.”

And yet the problem, as the comic novelist and provocative cultural critic Howard Jacobson explains, is that “Jewishness is not at the heart of English culture. This is one of the things cultured Jews in England feel every time we write or make a play or music.” Indeed, for the British-born novelist and long-standing American citizen Jonathan Wilson, “A Jew can never really be English” without “the abnegation of a certain aspect of your personality.”

In an empathic gesture, born of love and exasperation and expectation, in the hope of rousing his fellow Anglo-Jewish writers from their self-muted Jewish creativity, Jacobson recently delivered a summons to the rising generation: embrace your identities as British Jews as a source of (as yet) untapped creative potential. “The story of our finely tuned accommodations to English culture is a fascinating one,” Jacobson declared in the pages of The Jewish Quarterly, “sometimes tragic, often heroic, always funny, and never less than urgent beneath a quiescent surface. It is time we told it.”

What stories are Jewish writers currently telling? In an essay entitled “On Being a Jewish Critic,” scholar Bryan Cheyette writes, “A sense of marginality and in-betweeness has led to an extraordinary growth in the inventiveness and originality of British-Jewish literature since the 1980s.” Indeed, even a brief survey of Anglo-Jewish fiction and theater over this past year suggests, if not a “revival,” then certainly a stunning burst of productivity.

Whether in response to the “British multicultural explosion,” in the playwright and theater director Julia Pascal’s view, or in creative release of a long-repressed cultural identity as British Jews, or in an effort to claim, along with other best-selling “ethnic” writers, some of the literary cachet of representing “exotic” subcultures to a general audience (as in the current vogue for South Asian writers like Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, and Gautam Malkani), Anglo-Jewish writers no longer seem reticent. They’re getting mouthy, raising their Jewish voices unabashedly—and in public.

Kalooki Nights is, in this respect, Jacobson’s loud, vibrant answer to his own literary summons. In this ambitious novel, inspired by the transgressive imagination of Philip Roth—surely the major influence on a generation of Anglo-Jewish writers—and the sheer volubility of Saul Bellow (think Herzog or Nathan Zuckerman steeped in the acidic-satiric juices of 1950s provincial Jewish Manchester), Jacobson takes as his subject nothing less than Five Thousand Years of Bitterness, the title his darkly sardonic, shiksa-loving, Jewishly consumed cartoonist-narrator, Max Glickman, calls his magnum opus. “I was an English Jew—that was my dysfunction,” Max confesses, “and somehow English Jews have had all the rudery squeezed out of them.” Like Roth’s Zuckerman, who refuses (as reported in The Counterlife) “to observe British rules of dignified restraint,” Jacobson “is at his best,” Cheyette notes, “when he is putting the ‘rudery’ back into English Jewry.” Kalooki Nights thus represents a therapeutic lifting of cultural taboos around Jewish reticence as it celebrates the anarchic potential of the Jewish voice.

Naomi Alderman’s prize-winning Disobedience also takes transgression as its subject. In this novel about the closed world of her native Hendon, an Orthodox suburb in north London, Alderman’s brash narrator, the “loud and vivid” Ronit, returns home, rupturing Hendon’s long-nourished Anglo-Jewish “investment in silence.” “British Jews cannot speak, cannot be seen, value absolute invisibility above all other virtues,” Ronit (Alderman’s alter ego) screams in frustration. In the end, despite her abject alienation, Ronit accepts her psychological rootedness in Hendon. “There’s something fierce and old and tender about that life that keeps calling me back, and I suppose it always will.”

For U.K.-based critics like Elena Lappin and Golda Zafer-Smith (a contributing editor to Jewish Renaissance, a new magazine devoted both to British Jewish life and Jewish culture around the world), Alderman represents, significantly, a healthy, indeed, “courageous” moment in Jewish writing. Is it now, finally, “cool” to be Jewish in multicultural Great Britain?

Not so fast. For filmmaker and cultural critic Naomi Gryn, “British taste buds consider anything ‘Jewish’ to be a bit un-PC these days.” In Jonathan Wilson’s dispirited, if politically acute, view, there is a sanctioned space for Jewish writers, but only for those who remain “local”: only that is, if they either conjure the “old neighborhood,” as in Alderman’s bounded Hendon; or re-imagine an even older neighborhood, as in Andrew Miller’s nostalgic memoir-novel about the Jewish East End, The Earl of Petticoat Lane; or revisit the haunted literary center of immigrant London, as in Michael Krustow’s moving meditation, “Whitechapel Ghosts,” about Whitechapel Library in Aldgate; or wrestle with the shadow of the Holocaust, as in Richard Aronowitz’s beautiful memory novel, Five Amber Beads, inspired by his foreign-born mother’s “refusal to bow to the tight-lipped path through life of her adopted country.”

What remains off limits, at least according to Wilson, are the current rancorous debates in Great Britain, especially among the intellectual Left, around the question of Zionism and Israel. Jewish writers and intellectuals who defend the state of Israel are accused, according to the newspaper columnist Melanie Phillips, of “dual loyalty.” To be sure, there are important Anglo-Jewish novels that take Israel and Palestine as their subject—Linda Grant’s Orange Prize-winning When I Lived in Modern Times, set in post-World War II Palestine, and Wilson’s own A Palestine Affair, set in the 1920s come to mind—but these works unfold in a less remembered, and thus less incendiary, distant past. But in the present acrimonious atmosphere, however, Wilson claims that “Jewish life is increasingly fraught”; indeed for Naomi Gryn, the volatile exchanges over the Middle East shine an unwanted spotlight on British Jews, casting a discomfiting visibility that “reinforces our sense of otherness.”

Perhaps the troubled history of Anglo-Jewish self-consciousness accounts for the mixed response to Mike Leigh’s intimate Two Thousand Years, his loving, insider portrait of a three-generation North London Jewish family in spiritual and political crisis. Watching this updated “kitchen sink” drama, Jewish audiences felt—for some, uneasily—that they were eavesdropping, overhearing their deepest anxieties voiced out loud, on a stage filled, in Linda Grant’s telling description, with “Shouty Jews.” What happened to the dream of a socialist Israel? the play wonders. (Leigh himself was shaped by the Labor Zionist Habonim movement.) “What does it mean to you to be Jewish?” asks Josh, the spiritually adrift, searching grandson. Two Thousand Years ultimately provides no answer; instead, it poses this Jewish question in order to move its audience to self-critical reflection.

Can we speak, therefore, of a Jewish literary-cultural “revival” in Britain? Based on the recent work of writers and journalists and scholars, we ought to recognize, perhaps even celebrate, this moment of cultural achievement. At the same time, we need to remember that, in the case of a tight-lipped Anglo-Jewry, the impulse to lower the voice is always latent: an instinct born of a lifetime of keeping quiet.