This Much Is True

I’m militantly secular — religion has caused so much horror in the world — but I believe in tradition; I want to honour the past, honour my parents, my ancestors and all those who died, and so I follow many of the Jewish practices. To this day, I am a member of two shuls (the Yiddish word for ‘synagogue’) in South London: an Orthodox synagogue in Streatham with friendly Rabbi Myers, plus I can’t resist the delightful Chabad rabbi of Battersea, Rabbi Moshe Adler, a young American, and his family of three children and sweet English wife, who wears a sheitel.^[22] They have treated me with warmth and frequent offers of hospitality, as I am a woman alone — most people are in couples.

I fast on Yom Kippur (and always have), maintain the dietary restrictions during Passover (no leavened bread etc.), and have never eaten bacon, shellfish of any kind, ham or pork in any guise — not even at a restaurant. I may not believe in God, but I’m very proud of my roots: they nourish me. I’m fascinated by the pull of Judaism and its culture — the food, the jokes, the vitality, the suffering, the guilt and the history — it’s all part of who I am and what I’ve inherited. The fact of my being Jewish informs the whole of my life. It informs connections with people. More than anything else, being Jewish informs my actor’s aesthetic: emotion is always trembling on the brink for every Jewish woman. It comes with the territory, and it’s very useful as I don’t have to delve to find joy, despair, laughter and tears.

Why, being so militantly atheist, do I want to be Jewish? Why do I still belong to a synagogue everywhere I live? In LA, I was a member of Beth Ohr, a liberal reconstructionist synagogue in the Valley with the most delightful rabbi. Straight out of Central Casting. Rabbi Michael Roth was an elderly Hungarian exile, with a wise face and a strong accent. When I confided in him about my lack of faith, he said, ‘Miriam, don’t worry, I don’t know if I believe in God, either. Who knows? But for me, it’s better that I do, so I carry on.’ That’s unusual; I don’t know any other rabbi who would say that. He was insightful and compassionate. He had a wisdom and open-mindedness that was both reassuring and illuminating. That’s what you hope for in a rabbi.

As a secular Jew, I can’t accept the beliefs but I love the rituals. I asked Rabbi Adler to bless a mezuzah for my front door: a piece of parchment inscribed with a specific Hebrew prayer from the Torah, enclosed in a slim, rectangular, decorative case and affixed to the doorpost of Jewish homes to fulfil the mitzvah (Biblical commandment) to ‘write the words of God on the gates of your house’. As you go into your house, you’re supposed to put your hand on it and kiss it. (If you watch the TV series Shtisel, you’ll be very familiar with this tradition.) I wanted to demonstrate to the outside world that I was a Jew.

My parents were, of course, believers. They were not Orthodox, but they were observant: Judaism was part of the armour that helped them to deal with the problems of the world. We belonged to the Oxford Hebrew congregation and I attended the synagogue school, where I learnt about the Torah, and Hebrew. A lot of the members of the synagogue were London refugees like my parents, and yet the Jewish community in Oxford was not a warm one. It was a curiously split community, mirroring the rest of the city: you had the Jewish intellectuals, the dons, people like Cecil Roth who was a very important member of the synagogue, but the actual president was a trader in the market called Mr Bloom. Indeed, snobbishly, my mother regarded a lot of the Jews of Oxford as rather common people.

We had Friday night dinners at home. Mummy sometimes lit the Sabbath candles. We didn’t observe the Sabbath the way that really Orthodox people do, so it was like a normal Friday night and Saturday in every respect — we listened to the radio, went shopping, or I went out with friends — and we could ring our doorbell whenever we wanted.

Shabbos lunch was usually a roast chicken, and Mummy also fried fish in olive oil and matzo meal, instead of the more usual flour which non-Jews use. Matzo meal is made of very finely ground crackers — if you ever fry fish, you should always use either matzo meal, or matzo flour, not real flour, because it’s much finer. I like chopped liver, smoked herrings, smoked salmon. And cheesecake. And something that Mummy used to do called gribenes: scraps of fatty chicken, and the skin fried up to a crisp in olive oil with onion and garlic and bits of fried egg and fried vegetables — it’s absolutely delicious. So, in that sense, being Jewish was part of our lives. I am neither a good nor frequent cook — but if I do cook, it will always be something Jewish — soup or chicken. I’m primarily a culinary Jew.