When Howard Jacobson won the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate prize in 2007 for Kalooki Nights, he explained his particular affection for the prize in his acceptance speech: “All good books are essentially Jewish, so it follows that all book prizes must be Jewish.”
While Jacobson can aggrandise the prize with trade-mark humour, and we could argue forever about the semantics of the word “Jewish”, it is hard to think of another book prize that achieves so much with one award. The Booker, the Orange and the hundreds of other prizes designed to reward outstanding literary achievement, bring unknown writers to prominence or crown the brows of the establishment with laurels — and are also good for business. But there is only one that tells the story of a whole people: the JQ-Wingate prize.
Each year, the long-list maps the history of the Jewish people with books covering almost every period of Jewish life: pre-Temple, diaspora, medieval, the shtetl, 20th-century, through to today — in history, memoir, biography, fiction and poetry.
At a time when being Jewish, in the UK at least, is in danger of being reduced to a position on Israeli politics, this is an important reminder of the very much bigger picture. Inescapably, the prize is often dominated by the defining experiences of the last century — Israel and the Holocaust, a dream come true and a nightmare that continue to shape Jewish identity. Yet it is fitting that the JQ-Wingate prize champions writers and books that have gone on to redraw the map of Jewish scholarship and further refine the timbre of Jewish voices. Some are established (Appelfeld, Oz, WG Sebald) and others barely known: in 1996, in the halcyon era of separate prizes for fiction and non-fiction, Theo Richmond won with Konin and Alan Isler with The Prince of West End Avenue. Prior to victory, neither had a literary profile but the prize catapulted both to a wide reading public.
Next Wednesday, the judges will announce this year’s winning book. How they will measure Jackie Wullschlager’s feted biography of Chagall against Amir Gutfreund’s and Zoe Heller’s contemporary novels, Fred Wander’s and Ladislaus Lob’s memoirs of survival, or Denis Macshane’s impassioned case against antisemitism, I cannot imagine. But the winner will undeniably enhance the general reader’s understanding of Jewish life.
