I wrote numerous works of fiction throughout my teens and twenties, none of which included any Jewish element, but when I came to produce what would be my first published novel it seemed completely natural to me to draw on my own family history, which contained so much drama I could hardly resist fictionalising it into a narrative of my own (you can read the true story here). In doing so, I also found myself exploring themes of loss, family, identity and belonging which were deeply personal to me and deeply Jewish, but also, to my mind, universally human. I adopted the approach of portraying the universal experience through the very particular.

How naïve I was in hoping my acutely Jewish story would touch a general nerve, I have only gradually come to realise. First of all, I was completely unable to find a publisher in the UK even after the subsequent success of The Genizah at the House of Shepher in winning or being shortlisted for several prizes (Jewish prizes). Whatever the shortcomings of the novel itself, the narrowness of its perceived market undoubtedly stood in its way, as one or two editors were bold enough to tell me. To be a Jew in Britain is to be a minority among minorities, and so far as bookselling is concerned, the numbers do not add up. The idea that the book might have an appeal beyond the Jewish readership was never entertained.

America has been more welcoming to my work: it is here that I have been published, won prizes and found readers. New York, it seemed, took me to its heart, as I, indeed, have taken it to mine. Yet here too, so far as I can tell, my sphere remains almost entirely Jewish; though I believe I also have some readers among religious Christians. In addition, some of my readers seem to have assumed that I am American.

Of course, I do now see that, to the average reader, the titles of my books have something intimidating about them, not to mention my own name, which, apart from relegating me to the bottom right-hand corner of the bookshop shelves, is never likely to signal a novel of English manners. But my credo of the-universal-in-the-particular, to which I still hold, does prove dubious, it seems, when it comes to being a British Jewish writer. A British Jewish writer with Israeli roots, writing about Yorkshire, the lost tribes and Jerusalem. Now that’s just too particular.

So where to now? I am no longer writing on Jewish subjects; my latest, as yet unpublished novel is about a village in northern England and the draft novel I have just completed is about women who have chosen not to have children. I have stopped writing on overtly Jewish themes not merely because I aspire to reach as wide a readership as possible but because, for the time being, I feel I have said all I have to say fictionally on those subjects. (Well, maybe not entirely. My Jewish sensibility will always influence my work and my village novel is still about natives and incomers, belonging and not belonging.) This is not to say that I won’t return to Jewish territory. I still have at least one Jewish novel in me, and I hope to write it one day.

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This being my final entry I just want to add a note about blogging. I’ve always resisted having a blog so far because I felt it would take up too much of my working time. Writing a daily blog this week has proven to me what I suspected already: that I feel the choosing of words as such a heavy responsibility that regular blogging would consume an inordinate amount of headspace. I have always kept a private handwritten diary in which, since it is intended for my eyes alone and not for instant worldwide publication, I can write freely, easily and cathartically. Is the blog killing off the private journal? I hope not. But I thank Jewcy for giving me the opportunity to write here and express some of my thoughts in the presence of their readership.

The post From the Particular to the Universal: The Pitfalls of Being a British Jewish Writer appeared first on Jewcy.

Sebald was a lifelong exile who made his home in England at the age of 26 and was for many years professor of European literature at the University of East Anglia. His books were all written in German but beautifully rendered into English by his translators Michael Hulse and Anthea Bell. He had perhaps reached the peak of his literary reputation at the time of his tragic death in a car crash in 2001, aged 57.

I had already conceived and begun mapping my Tales of the Ten Lost Tribes when I encountered Sebald’s The Emigrants, four stories about exile whose links, contrasts and parallels combine to form a threnody of loss, punctuated by Sebald’s characteristic grainy and evocative black-and-white snapshots. They have the feel of reportage but are in fact fiction, and indeed it is part of Sebald’s unique style to blur the borders between fiction and non-fiction, memory and invention, history and myth, in a literary form of his own which I call the mental travelogue.

This form works best, in my opinion, in those works of his which are the least self-consciously novelistic, most notably Vertigo and The Rings of Saturn, books whose richness and complexity seem to me almost inexhaustible.

Having already conceived and planned the book I wanted to write it is true to say I was not influenced by Sebald so much as inspired and – what can be even more important – given permission. Here was an author producing page after page of prose without dialogue and virtually without paragraph breaks (never forgetting, of course, those strategic snapshots) and the result was unstoppably readable, utterly compelling. I didn’t want to dispense with paragraphs but I did know that I didn’t want much dialogue and I did want to write a lot of prose. W. G. Sebald gave me permission to try.

The other thing Sebald did for me was to amplify my theme: that of displacement, longing and wandering (leavened always by a dash of salty humour).

I wrote earlier this week of the Jew as metaphor and wish to note that although most of the protagonists in Tales of the Ten Lost Tribes are not overtly Jewish, I have taken the Jewish story of displacement as my central metaphor and the Jew him/herself as the embodiment of exile. In doing so I wanted to ask a question of myself and also of my readers: is the condition of being Jewish always and necessarily one of exile and unbelonging? Is this an essential part of who we are, Israel notwithstanding?

And I would further ask: without this essential sense of journeying, of discomfort, of always seeking a further destination, what would Jewish culture be like?

No homeland, no Israel figures in my novel in which the narrator ends up more lost than ever, pursuing a possibly mythical jungle-dwelling Jew. If that is the case, then it is probably because despite my own deep family and ancestral connections to it, Israel too is a place where I know I will never properly belong. But I was deeply moved, last summer, while discussing this very topic at the Sami Rohr Literary Institute, to hear an Israeli-born author I greatly admire and respect express how, while working and raising his family in the land of his birth, he too does not feel that the destination is reached, the ache assuaged or the journey over. Perpetual longing, it would seem, is an ineradicable part of the Jewish and maybe of the human condition.

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When I look back over my main literary influences the thing that strikes me is how disparate they are: a real rag-bag, if you like, or a pick ‘n’ mix, but probably that is the way it should be. And perhaps the way it had to be for a Jewish girl with a working-class aspirational mother and a Jerusalemite father receiving the most traditional of English education complete with Latin.

At the age of thirteen my reading was narrow but intense. I was up to my eyes in Brontëana but each evening after school would walk the short distance to the Talmud Torah to sit in a bare classroom reciting verses from the siddur and Chumash: the whole class in chorus, Hebrew and English, Hebrew and English. I had no idea at the time that these evenings were laying down a rhythmic pattern in my engrams which would remain with me forever and influence my writing, so that, as my protagonist Shulamit puts it in The Genizah at the House of Shepher, "my brain is now embossed with the black mosaic, the Hebrew Bible."

I remember these as happy times, sitting in the darkening classroom, one entire wall of which was made of glass, looking out onto a number of venerable horsechestnut trees whose leaves, as my memory has it, were always turning gold, whose branches were always waving in a descending storm, reading Exodus, thinking of Wuthering Heights and scribbling, in spare moments, fragments of Emily Brontë-inspired verse in the corners of my Hebrew dictation papers.

Later I would learn about the different forms of parallelism in biblical poetry: synonymous, antithetical, climactic. This is the characteristic repetition, amplification or contradistinction of ideas in the two halves of a poetic line which lend the psalms their unique flavour. It was parallelism, more than anything else, which left its impression on me, so that, for example, when I came to produce stories such as Return to Zion, the opening piece of my collection Kafka in Brontëland and one which is shot through with biblical influence, I would find myself writing sentences such as: "We watched his light moving in the darkness of the garden: the glowing tip of his cigarette moving among the thistles."

After an adolescence spent immersed in Victorian fiction (from which I learned words like "penetralium" and "lachrymose") and Romantic poetry, I moved on to the Europeans and great contemporary authors such as Milan Kundera, who impressed me with the sharpness of his mind and the brevity and directness of his expression. Like almost anyone reading in the eighties, I could not help but be seduced by the lush exoticism of the South American magical realists, who encouraged me to deepen the mattress of my prose and – what is now, I suspect, becoming more and more unfashionable – to describe. Kafka hit me in my early thirties.

Foreign and translated authors have dominated my reading ever since, and I have often thought it strange that, while still acknowledging the Brontës as my earliest influence and despite my profound attachment to the Yorkshire landscape in which I live, my literary instincts both as reader and writer should remain so firmly European. I have come to the conclusion that it is an inevitable legacy of my Jewishness, and that it is an asset of which I am glad. Given the large immigrant population in these hills from the Indian sub-continent and elsewhere, I watch for the emergence of other northern authors similarly nourished by a mixed heritage.

As a young writer, I consciously limited my reading for fear, as I said then, of "being influenced." Older now, and increasingly assured in my own voice (though always with more to learn) I see that, like it or not, one writes what one reads, and to read less is only to concentrate that limited experience. A writer is the sum of their influences, and learns through imitation, whether conscious or unconscious. I wish now that I had read more. A writer can never read too much.

The post You Write What You Read appeared first on Jewcy.

Tales of the Ten Lost Tribes is not a book about the ten lost tribes so much as a study of lostness, longing and belonging. Nor is it an autobiographical book except insofar as it deals with themes and emotions which, for various reasons, have had a dominant place in my life.

It is true that, at the novel’s opening, the narrator’s father is engaged in researching the lost tribes and this serves as a convenient means of introducing the metaphor against which the ten portraits are suspended. The Jew as metaphor is, after all, an old and trusted literary device (I would cite the Bible as its first example). But what mattered to me most in writing this book was the portrayal of ten human beings, each suffering their own particular form of exile, and that they come alive for the reader in all the poignancy of their predicament.

The narrator who travels through life from childhood to maturity encountering each of these personalities in turn is neither named nor assigned a gender. This was a deliberate decision on my part, and for two reasons. First of all, it is not the character and identity of the narrator which matter; the narrator is no more than an observer through whom we too encounter this succession of lost souls. Secondly, through keeping the narrator in a sense both characterless and identityless, I wanted to make a deeper point about our own essential unknowability both to ourselves and others.

If any autobiography is present in the book, it is only in the most oblique and subtle form. For example, I told my editor here at Jewcy that the fifth tale, Gad, is the most autobiographical of them all, yet I doubt whether even my closest friends and family would know it. The story tells of a woman who, in her youth, leaves her home in the South and travels to a northern port with the intention of leaving the country. Forty years later she is still living in the port, never having summoned the courage to set sail on her grand adventure. Several times a year she rides the train back and forth between her old home in the South and her place in the North; she never feels settled; when she reaches one she immediately longs to be in the other. The only time she is at peace is when she is riding the train.

The terms “South” and “North” have quite different connotations here in the UK from those they possess in the US. Here, South means London, the Home Counties, prosperity, better weather and the seat of power. North means provincial, industrial (or decayed industrial), bleak uplands and wild weather. When I left my home city of Leeds to live in the high moors of the Pennines, I was enacting an escape from my own version of “South” to head “North,” but I was also setting up a lifelong tug-of-war within myself between the call of the wild and the allure of the city (apart from anything else, the city meant the Jewish community; there are very few Jews out here). I embodied this dilemma within my protagonist, though I have never, like her, shuttled back and forth on the train between London and Yorkshire with a basket of goodies; but I have done so spiritually.

As for her original intention, never fulfilled, to take ship for the horizon: in the autobiographical sense this too must be read as metaphor. The ship I intended taking was no physical one… So far as the subject of autobiography in fiction is concerned I cannot express it better than Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being:

“But isn’t it true that an author can write only about himself? … The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities … Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own “I” ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author’s confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.”

The post All is Metaphor appeared first on Jewcy.

Such are the vicissitudes of writing and publishing, nearly twelve years have passed between the writing of my novel, Tales of the Ten Lost Tribes, and its appearance last month in paperback from St Martin‘s Press. At that time I was working on what turned out to be my first published book, The Genizah at the House of Shepher. The research for that novel – which ranged over a hundred and forty-five years and several countries – had carried me to sources in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Oxford and Toronto, but it was a place much closer to home, here in Yorkshire, which provided me with my richest and most inspiring material.

The Porton Room in Leeds Central Library is a wonderful, random, surprising, bounteous accumulation of Judaica brought together, seemingly, from all sorts of locations including various defunct synagogues in the city. Tucked away in a corner of the fourth floor and rarely visited (or so I was told; the librarians tended to use it for staff meetings) the room itself was atmospheric: large, high, with Victorian cornices, vast windows and a big conference table running down its centre, it looked out onto the neighbouring Town Hall and its recumbent stone lions, opened by the Queen herself in 1858. A stately but shabby room, at least, that is how I remember it after twelve years; for reasons I shall explain I left abruptly one afternoon in 1998 and have not been back since.

The room was tall and so were the bookcases, filled to repletion with books on all kinds of Jewish subjects; so many of them, in fact, that they spilled into the corridor and took over another wallful of shelves out there. Here I browsed Talmud in English, and dipped into the Guide To the Perplexed (enough to cull a good quote, at least), and examined old maps of Palestine, and stumbled onto a treasure-store of information, misinformation, lore, legend and nonsense about the ten lost tribes.

Early on in The Genizah at the House of Shepher, one of the characters, the deeply religious Shalom Shepher of Skidel, is possessed (like numerous other Jews of previous centuries) by the determination to go off in search of the ten tribes of Israel: those carried away into exile by the Assyrians in the 6th century BCE and thereafter lost to the pages of history. An ancestor of mine, one Joshua Kimchi, did actually undertake such an escapade back in the late nineteenth century, with rather disappointing results. Stories about the tribes circulated freely in Yiddish chapbooks among the Jews of Eastern Europe, often highly fanciful, describing the tribes as living in a state of luxury and self-determination unknown in the shtetl. The coming of the Messiah, of course, depended on the ingathering of Jews from the four corners of the earth: the whereabouts of the tribes was therefore a subject of keen interest not only to Jews but to some Christians eager to precipitate the Second Coming.

It’s well-known among writers that research can be seductive, that it can, in fact become a substitute for the writing of the book itself. In my case, the ambition behind my first novel was so high, my consciousness of my own ignorance so crushing, it did seem sometimes that the more knowledge I acquired the less I knew. But every writer knows, too, that there are times during the process of research when signs and symbols seem to appear, links are miraculously made and everything falls into place like a jigsaw puzzle. I had that feeling while sitting in the Porton Room.

There under the presiding portraits of (I assumed) Mr and Mrs Porton, I read and made notes for hours on the history and pseudo-history of the tribes, far more than I needed to write the relevant chapters in my book, but a novelist’s research is like an iceberg – only the tip of it shows. And as I read the idea came to me for another book, for my Tales of the Ten Lost Tribes.

I read of the Dutch Jew, Manasseh ben Israel, who in a bid to get Oliver Cromwell to readmit the Jews to England penned his The Hope of Israel in 1652. In this he strove to prove that the Jews were already scattered to all four corners of the earth and that only the British Isles remained to be populated: if they were only admitted there, the biblical prophecy would be fulfilled and the Messiah (or Jesus) would come. To this end, he maintained by quoting ancient sources that the native American population was descended from the tribes, that they were indigenous to the Indies, India and China. Cromwell did readmit the Jews, but probably more for trade reasons than eschatological ones.

Then there were those who, for complex motives of their own, sought to prove that virtually every ethnic group on the planet was in fact Jewish. Take this observation, from Maurice Fishberg: "Successive investigators have discovered that the English, the Irish, the Basques, the Spanish, the Franks, the Huns, the Romans, the Greeks, the ancient Peruvians and Mexicans, the dead peoples of Central America, the Japanese, and many others are the descendants of those carried by Shalmaneser into a distant land… That they ‘look like Jews’ goes without saying."

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was, in addition, a contingent of what I can only call British supremacists seeking to establish descent from the tribes and so claim biblical promises of glory for the nation. These were among the most curious and amusing accounts. A certain Mr Harris writes: "The people whom we call Saxons were not natives of England but captured it from the ancient Britons, and had themselves come from the shores of the Black Sea. ‘Saxon’ is traced to ‘Sac’s sons’ or sons of Isaac." "Great Britain!" he further muses. "A strange name for a few small islands at the far-western point of Europe! It sounds almost absurd when you come to think of it. Is it because this country has been the home for these many centuries of the nation of Israel, the greatest nation that the world has seen or ever will see? … It is said – and I do not think it is any secret – that the Royal Family of England are deeply interested in this subject."

As I continued to read, I found myself falling into deep ruminations on the nature of ethnicity, origin and identity, all of which seemed to become more fluid, more equivocal with each turning page. Either we were all Jews or – by the same token – none of us were Jews in the strict sense of the word: we were all mixed, mongrel types, with ancestries more complex than we could possibly imagine. This seemed to be summed up in the title of an article by Joseph Jacobs in the Popular Science Monthly for 1899: Are Jews Jews?

Identity and belonging have always been my subjects. I thought I would like to write something which played on this conundrum metaphorically through the notion of the ten lost tribes which, according to one account, "melted away, like snow in water." I would use the tribes as my structural reference point, but I would write of individuals who all, each in their own way, struggled to find their place in the world, their sense of belonging. And I would take a break from the head-crackingly difficult Genizah.

I spent many happy hours in the Porton Room, scribbling away, so absorbed in my work that I often did not notice if anyone else came or went. Mostly I was alone, until, one afternoon, bent over my notebook, writing with intense concentration, I felt a presence behind me. I did not turn or stop writing. But I felt, like the blast of a pheromone, a wave of pure malice. Then it was gone. I turned, and my handbag had vanished.

That was the end of my time in the Porton Room. Sadly, it closed with a police interview and phone calls to my bank. I’ve never felt like returning. In any case, I think I had got what I needed. When I look through my notebook I come to the place where my notes abruptly break off: "They are in league with the Kuffur-at-Turk, who worship the wind and live in the wilderness, and who do not eat bread, nor drink wine, but live on raw, uncooked meat. They have no noses, and in lieu thereof they have two small holes through which they breathe."

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