British Jews – Miriam Drori, Author

Meeting Yourself in Fiction

I’ve given this post a different title, but in a way it’s part of That’s Not Me! Yes, I think it can include the banner.

In a recent guest post, Ritu Bhathal wrote about the problem of not identifying with the protagonists of the stories she read. That was what led her to write her own stories about British Asian characters.

I found myself identifying with what she had to say. The stories I’ve read have not often included Jewish characters, and almost never British Jews.

“Does that matter?” you might ask. I’m sure it does, especially for a child, growing up and trying to make sense of her world.

The characters in the novels I read as a child never struggled to fit in due to being Jewish. They never worried if they were saying the “correct” thing, whether to non-Jews or to other Jews. They never had to forgo an activity because it didn’t chime with their religion. They seemed to live such uncomplicated lives.

When I did read a book about Jews, I devoured it, even when it was set in the twelfth century (The Star and the Sword by Pamela Melnikoff). Even when it was a thousand pages long, like The Source by James A. Michener. Even when the Jews mostly weren’t British, as in Exodus by Leon Uris, as well as The Source.

In my case, the lack of Jewish characters in fiction didn’t cause me to start writing them. It took me several decades to even attempt to write my own stories. No. In my case, the rare books with Jewish characters, especially Exodus, influenced my decision to live in Israel. Because before and after the twelfth century and up to five years before I was born, Jews had nowhere to go where they felt protected. And now, we had our own country and I wanted to be part of it.

I have to say that, considering what’s going on in the world now and the way Jews are being treated, I’m gladder than ever that I made the decision to move. Israel is the only place where I’m never afraid to say who I am. It’s also the only place where I feel the authorities have my back. I know mistakes were made recently that enabled an enormous massacre to take place, but I don’t think that will happen again.

In contrast, the absence of a different group of characters from novels did influence my decision to write. I saw no characters with social anxiety, no characters who struggled to join in a conversation or to put themselves into the limelight, and there are still very few such fictional characters. I wondered if that was because they’re hard to write. If a character doesn’t say much, they could be considered uninteresting and therefore a bad template for a protagonist. But I decided to have a go, anyway, and I believe I succeeded. Even if a character doesn’t talk a lot, they can have an interesting variety of thoughts, and the people around them can have plenty to say. My uplit novel, Cultivating a Fuji, has two characters who have developed social anxiety. My Jerusalem Murder Mystery series (book 2 to come soon) has one.

It turns out it’s possible to write a character with social anxiety, and I expect the reason why authors don’t do it, despite the very large number of people who live with the condition, is that the topic doesn’t interest them. I would argue that it should interest them, because even if they don’t have first-hand experience of it, they probably know someone who does.

How about you? Did/do you see yourself in books? Do you think it’s important to see yourself in books? Have you written stories with characters like you?

Whose History is it, Anyway?

History was one of the subjects I quite enjoyed at school. I wasn’t so keen on the ancient history we started off with, but I found later history interesting. I also liked the fact that the History teacher often chose me to read from the text book while the English teacher never did. I was disappointed when I couldn’t continue History to O-level because of timetable conflicts.

How much of my three years of History do I remember now? Not a lot. Certainly not the lists of dates I memorised then. But there are some facts I remember learning – like the invention of the printing press by William Caxton, for instance. In fact all the people and places we learned about were either British or involved in wars against Britain. I didn’t really question why this was. I sort of assumed that only Britain mattered in the world.

Anyway, I was British and it was good to know how important Britain was, especially while the news was often about the colonies that Britain was losing.

In some ways I felt the history we learned belonged to me while in others I didn’t. Jews were never mentioned in that history. The only time I heard about Jews of the past at school was in an English lesson when we started studying The Merchant of Venice. The teacher said, “I know that a lot of you are Jewish and there has been some criticism of the portrayal of the Jew in this play. You have to remember that there were no Jews in England at the time it was written because they’d been expelled, so Shakespeare didn’t actually know any Jews.”

“Hmm,” I thought. “Why weren’t we told about that expulsion in History lessons?”

Then I found a book at home called The History of the Jews in England, and I actually read it just out of interest, because I identified with the people mentioned in it more than I did with the kings and queens and everyone else in my school text books.

I digress. Where was I? The printing press and the trigger for this post. It was a BBC Radio 4 series called Germany: Memories of a Nation. In one of the episodes I learned something that surprised me: the printing press was invented by Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz, Germany. William Caxton visited Gutenberg in Mainz and introduced Gutenberg’s invention to the English.

Why didn’t we learn this at school? Why was British history the only history? Why were deeds of note by foreigners transferred to British people?

I wonder if this has changed since I was at school.