Book Review:

CONTEMPORARY BRITISH-JEWISH LITERATURE
RUTH GILBERT
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pb, 192pp, £17.99

From July 2007 to January 2008 MAUREEN KENDLER wrote three pieces for JR, reviewing modern British Jewish literature. The first, about the 1950s, was called ’Peering above the parapet’. The last, about the 1970s-80s: ‘Noses Pressed against the Window’.
The publication of Ruth Gilbert’s new book on contemporary Jewish writing has encouraged Maureen to bring the story up to date.
It is a very different tale...

Ruth Gilbert’s book is short but 50 years ago it would have been much shorter, and probably would not have been written at all. “I don’t think there’s any real cultural life in the Jewish community”, commented Alexander Baron gloomily in a Jewish Chronicle interview in 1958. He felt the dearth of writing was as much due to a lack of Jewish readership as to authorship. I don’t think he was even considering the likelihood of an interested non-Jewish audience.

And now, 55 years later, a much more vibrant readership in both the Jewish and wider community exists. So Gilbert can write a book of 100 plus pages called Contemporary British-Jewish Literature in which she surveys the scene, following the steady emergence of British Jewish literary voices that comprise some sort of coherent genre … albeit a slippery and complex one.

In the early 1990s Linda Grant, sensing the time was right, challenged Jewish authors to write about their lives and experiences, to help create this genre. She was wondering why British output was so meagre compared to American Jewish authors and sensed that there was now both a curious audience here ready to read, and authors ready to write, having amassed the confidence and experience.

Grant herself has made a sterling contribution and her beautiful 1998 memoir Remind Me Who I Am Again is given much-deserved attention by Gilbert.  It occupies a key place in the move towards Jewish writing becoming mainstream.

Grant writes passionately and with great intelligence about her past and present, and is deeply rooted in her Jewishness. But what she has to say moves easily from the particular to the universal, so while her Jewish audience will recognise its authenticity, her non-Jewish readership will appreciate and understand too. Jonathan Freedland’s Jacob’s Gift (2006), and Bernice Ruben’s When I Grow Up published in the same year, fall into this important category of ‘crossover’ literature of the highest quality.

The significance of Howard Jacobson cannot be underestimated in this shift of attitude. He is enduring and unignorable. Winning the Booker Prize for the glorious Finkler Question in 2010 surely sealed the deal that British Jewish literature had ‘arrived’. There is something unflinching in Jacobson’s gaze that makes us unable to look away. We stand accused, challenged, engaged.

It is a frequent cliché for Jacobson to be compared to Philip Roth – in some ways a lazy and inaccurate shorthand – but there are some key similarities. Firstly their work is recognised as having serious literary merit. No-one reads either to find out about what Jews are about, rather they are read because they are terrific books. Neither Roth nor Jacobson are capable of writing a poor sentence. They are energetic and prolific – Roth less so now he has ‘retired’ – but both also fulfil a role of public intellectual, they have a lot to say about Jewish issues but also about other matters, sometimes connected to the community but also about writers, arts and literature, the world.

Gilbert devotes one chapter exclusively to ‘Remembering The Holocaust’, but the Holocaust casts its shadows over every page of her book. This chapter reminds us of the excellent contributions British Jews have contributed on this subject; the powerful, memoirs from Eva Hoffman, Eve Figes and Anne Karpf being shining examples.

Bewilderment from a British vantage point at surviving and surveying the Holocaust seems to be a common thread, as summed up by Naomi Alderman: “The Holocaust is right here… it could happen at any moment… Except it’s not here. Right now, right here, life is about as good for us as life has ever been for anyone in the history of the world. Probably better.”

Gilbert writes about attitudes towards Israel – increasingly uncomfortable – and has interesting takes on location: we are no longer in London’s East End, or even necessarily in the suburbs and themes of working out dislocation/belonging/ attachment are ever-present:
Gilbert comments: “So it is that a Jew such as me, with an Eastern European family background, brought up within a Jewish community in an outer London suburb, can feel entirely at home in a stone cottage in Dorset.”

This seems a new reality for Jews previously rooted in clearly defined communities, synagogues, organisations, in cities. But now Jews who want to write about feeling alienated can put themselves in deliberately isolated places to do so. And, in a further step outwards, Gilbert explores the contemporary situation of ‘Half-Jewish’ identity through the writings of Adam Thirlwell and Mark Glanville. Here the emphasis is how Jewish one might feel, given what is often a complex background of out-marriage and a diluted but powerful sense of heritage. This makes for interesting writing on themes of insecurity and identity, inevitably centred around the struggles of an individual.

But there is also a current body of British Jewish writing which is less tentative, and more robust, centred around Jews as a community. Gilbert touches briefly on the more domestic novels of Naomi Alderman, Charlotte Mendleson and Francesca Segal. (Eve Harris’s successful novel The Marrying Of Chani Kaufman is not mentioned as it was published in 2013, too late for Gilbert’s book). Alderman’s Disobedience (2006) and Mendelson’s When We Were Bad (2007) are less concerned with Jews as minority – they explore, as Harris does, the scenario that under the warm and cohesive exterior of the Jewish community lie faultlines.

The message warns that we should not be seduced by the infrastructures of family and community. When it works it may be wonderful but when it does not, which all three books imply happens frequently – the pressures are intense and disasters follow with the collapse of vulnerable individuals. Harris and Alderman focus on the rigidity of the Orthodox community’s expectations but Charlotte Mendelson’s When We Were Bad

boldly charts the impossibility for a female Rabbi to be the poster girl for perfect Liberal values. Back in 1970 Bernice Rubens’s Booker- Prize winner The Elected Member took us into very dark Laingian territory – in which the Jewish family at the heart of her book
were dangerously crazy. Jewish readers may well have distanced themselves, thinking “well, it is okay, we are not like THAT….” But these more contemporary versions with the minutiae of Jewish custom held up under the microscope are closer to home. The focus is the details, subtleties, and they also highlight the pressure to marry, to conform.

For non-Jewish readers, these narratives are presumably revelatory in the tradition of the ‘insider’s’ ethnic literary landscapes that we all enjoy, from Amy Tan to Hanif Kureishi. Segal’s The Innocents (2012) is the most affectionate and least cynical, playing
on the strengths of comforting suburban rituals and a loving family structure. The family she writes of are not outrageous, just … difficult, pressured, claustrophobic. Like everyone’s lives, only more so. But even Segal’s novel needs the energy of an outsider; the arrival of a glamorous American female relative providing the much-needed drama to the jog-along cosiness. The ending reassures: continuity beckons together with a dozen more bagels...from Carmellis.

What we can offer nowadays is a tame tale of Jewish life in Britain – thank God devoid of direct drama, genocide, trauma. Our struggles are largely internal ones, searches for meaning, trying to fit in, to work out where we belong, exposing little hypocrises, nonsenses, comedies, struggling to find our place.

Our writers are ever-sensitive to the horrors that happened in the distant past here, or nearby in Europe more recently, but we can only respond second-hand. … thank God again. We look over our shoulder with nervousness, always alert for antisemitism but for the moment we are safe and our writing reflects that. That safety may not produce the most edgy, exciting of books – hence any new work by Howard Jacobson is a welcome splash of icy water on our faces –but as Gilbert explains, we can take our place proudly and confidently on the bookshelves that explore life lived here. We win prizes for it, reviewers will take our perspective seriously, we will be read with interest by non-Jews and with diminishing paranoia by Jews.

Result, Mr Baron? You are out of date.