Along with cleaning behind the cooker, I've been meaning to write something about this since Christmas......................... or was it Chanukah? 'How is a body supposed to know these things', as my grandmother would probably have said. I'm using a past tense here (well, present perfect to be exact), not because she's dead, but because Aloysius Alzheimer has left her unable to know or say anything. A silent Jewish grandmother, now there's a first. And silenced by a medical condition with a German name as well, an irony which would have had my poor nanny choking on her own chicken soup ('Oy! So many nice Jewish diseases, and God gives me a German one!')
The head of my department at work gave me quite a hard time for decorating our office (Christmas) tree with Stars of David. Not a hard time in an anti-Semitic way, but a hard time in terms of questioning my motives.
He asked me if I was Jewish (which I'm not), and I said, no, but I have a Jewish heritage (which I do). He then asked me why I celebrated Chanukah if I wasn't Jewish. And again I said because I have a Jewish heritage. It almost seemed as if he were suggesting that I was some kind of religious fraud (there's probably a German name for that condition as well).
Is it me? (Oh no! I just shrugged my shoulders, a sure sign of Jewish blood). Am I imagining something that isn't there? Because for me it's very clear that Judaism (or Yiddishkeit) is something both religious AND cultural. It's like being English. You don't have to be born and live in England to have an English heritage. Just look at how many of our extended antipodean family still celebrate St George's Day with far more enthusiasm than the residents of Cheltenham, or even deepest Bermondsey.
He seemed to be suggesting that I was just some kind of Judophile..............or should that be Yiddophile? But for me it's so much more. Am I missing the point? Or am I really just some kind of freakish Hebe-obsessed, Yiddophile Jew-stalker?
My Polish/Ukrainian-born maternal grandparents (just in case you haven't read any of my earlier blogs) didn't bring up their children in 'the Jewish faith'. They didn't convert, they just stopped................ well, stopped shrugging their shoulders, talking in riddles, and going to schul. But culturally there is such a strong identity that I'm not sure there's such a thing as an 'ex-Jew'. It's a bit like being a cow.
Just because you stop mooing, it doesn't mean that you stop being a cow. You still eat grass and fart all day, and people still look at you and say 'Oh look, it's a very quiet cow'.
Throughout my childhood, I just never realised how (stereo)typically Jewish my grandparents were (especially my grandmother). And of course, like many immigrants from that wartime period, they were never particularly eager to talk about it, or advertise it. I think a lot of the secrecy was partly fear, and partly the desire to be accepted in Britain and not be 'foreigners'. Remember that they came from a land where, before anything else, you were always 'A Jew'. Not a Pole, but a Polish Jew, not a banker, but a Jewish banker, and not a man, but a Jew. And of course, not forgetting that classic, anti-semitic eastern European favourite, 'A Dirty Jew'.
I remember talking about this to an old work colleague quite a few years ago. Although she was (and still is) terribly, terribly middle-class, her surname was Kastner, so I'd always assumed her family were 'of German descent' (or 'foreign' as some people still insist on saying in England). Then one very drunken evening on a balcony in Venice, we got on to the subject of 'who had the oddest family'. It turned out that her father's original surname was Cohen, and that he'd been smuggled out of Czechoslovakia to
Sweden as a small child just before the outbreak of the Second World War. From there he was brought to England, and for some unknown reason ended up with the surname Kastner. But in exactly the same way as my grandparents, he had turned himself into what he considered to be the most English of English.
Now, despite the fact that my family are right up there with the Munsters when it comes to oddness, naturally, she won the competition hands-down. After all, who in their right mind would try to assimilate themselves into post-war England by taking a German surname at a time when Germans ranked second (just below bed bugs) on the list of things that the English hated.
But back to my odd family.
I really didn't know they were either Jewish or eastern European until I was 14, and I didn't grow up in an area with any Jews (dirty or clean!). So, with the exception of the year I spent in Israel when I was twenty, I'd never really been around Jews in any number. Even in Israel it's very different. The modern Israeli culture has very little to do with that classic old-world 'Fiddler On The Roof', 'schlap my tukhes, und call me Moishe' Yiddish kind of thing. It wasn't really until I started visiting New York in my thirties that I was introduced to the whole Yiddish/Jewish thing, and in particular the idea that it was something to be celebrated as our cultural heritage. Anyone who's ever been to New York will know that 'being Jewish' is a big thing, almost as big as the Americans themselves.
I know that most people probably don't understand how I can consider myself to be even remotely Jewish if I have a foreskin, short sideburns, and don't go to schul . But that's just because they don't come from Jewish family. I'm not Jewish by faith, but very proudly Jewish by heritage.
Just because you stop mooing, it doesn't mean that you stop being a cow. You still eat grass and fart all day, and people still look at you and say 'Oh look, it's a very quiet cow'.
Throughout my childhood, I just never realised how (stereo)typically Jewish my grandparents were (especially my grandmother). And of course, like many immigrants from that wartime period, they were never particularly eager to talk about it, or advertise it. I think a lot of the secrecy was partly fear, and partly the desire to be accepted in Britain and not be 'foreigners'. Remember that they came from a land where, before anything else, you were always 'A Jew'. Not a Pole, but a Polish Jew, not a banker, but a Jewish banker, and not a man, but a Jew. And of course, not forgetting that classic, anti-semitic eastern European favourite, 'A Dirty Jew'.
I remember talking about this to an old work colleague quite a few years ago. Although she was (and still is) terribly, terribly middle-class, her surname was Kastner, so I'd always assumed her family were 'of German descent' (or 'foreign' as some people still insist on saying in England). Then one very drunken evening on a balcony in Venice, we got on to the subject of 'who had the oddest family'. It turned out that her father's original surname was Cohen, and that he'd been smuggled out of Czechoslovakia to
Sweden as a small child just before the outbreak of the Second World War. From there he was brought to England, and for some unknown reason ended up with the surname Kastner. But in exactly the same way as my grandparents, he had turned himself into what he considered to be the most English of English.Now, despite the fact that my family are right up there with the Munsters when it comes to oddness, naturally, she won the competition hands-down. After all, who in their right mind would try to assimilate themselves into post-war England by taking a German surname at a time when Germans ranked second (just below bed bugs) on the list of things that the English hated.
But back to my odd family.
I really didn't know they were either Jewish or eastern European until I was 14, and I didn't grow up in an area with any Jews (dirty or clean!). So, with the exception of the year I spent in Israel when I was twenty, I'd never really been around Jews in any number. Even in Israel it's very different. The modern Israeli culture has very little to do with that classic old-world 'Fiddler On The Roof', 'schlap my tukhes, und call me Moishe' Yiddish kind of thing. It wasn't really until I started visiting New York in my thirties that I was introduced to the whole Yiddish/Jewish thing, and in particular the idea that it was something to be celebrated as our cultural heritage. Anyone who's ever been to New York will know that 'being Jewish' is a big thing, almost as big as the Americans themselves.
I know that most people probably don't understand how I can consider myself to be even remotely Jewish if I have a foreskin, short sideburns, and don't go to schul . But that's just because they don't come from Jewish family. I'm not Jewish by faith, but very proudly Jewish by heritage.
And for those alter cockers like my head of department who still don't get the picture. There really is only one answer................kish mich in tukhes!
