It was screenwriter Nora Ephron’s mother Phoebe who famously said, “everything is copy” and, in an honest and hard-hitting radio programme next week, the Sunday Times writer Katie Glass proves that to be true.
She’s often mined her own life for feature stories but this time, in And The Good News Is, You’re Jewish, she takes on a difficult exploration of her own identity.
The springboard for this quest was the death of her father, Edinburgh-born Cyril Glass. “I’d always known that he was Jewish but whenever I would ask him he would say he wasn’t interested in discussing it; and when I asked my mother, she said it went through the maternal line, and so I wasn’t Jewish”.
Her father had “no Jewish paraphernalia, not a kippah, not a menorah”, so it came as a huge shock to be contacted by a rabbi from the West End Great Synagogue, telling her about the funeral arrangements. Glass, who had seen her father just before his death, had had no idea that he intended to have a Jewish funeral. She went through the process “knowing nothing, I didn’t know about the kaddish or my father’s Hebrew name. It was a complete shock, and I also thought, because we had conversations about many things, that it was sad that he hadn’t been ready to talk about this with me”.
