The Choice
Radio 4, Tuesday, September 16
Until the age of 23, Roderick Young would not have believed that he would ultimately become a rabbi. Not only was he not a religious man, he had no idea that he was even Jewish. Young was a Wiltshire lad, born and brought up in Salisbury into a middle-class Christian world. His father was a rather dashing RAF pilot, who flew off with another woman when Young was just four. On his mother's side he was told he was somehow descended from Charles II. He was brought up and confirmed as an Anglican, and went to a traditional boarding school.
There were hints that Young was slightly different. As he told Michael Buerk in this true story, which had all the elements of a compelling drama, he was teased about his "enormous nose", which, with his mother's encouragement, he had corrected as a teenager.
However, despite dark whispers from his Aunt Thea about there being a skeleton in the family cupboard, he did not learn the truth until, at the age of 23 in 1983, he met Thea for lunch in London. It was then that she dropped the bombshell that was to change the course of his life. Thea told Young that his mother had been born to Jewish parents.
"To say I was stunned was the understatement of the century," recalled Young.
His reaction to the news made for a moving few minutes of radio. He literally ran to the nearest synagogue in Great Portland Street, and completely ignorant of the fact that this was Shabbat afternoon, banged on the door, shouting hysterically, "I think I'm a Jew and I don't know what to do about it."
Far from cowering away from this seemingly unbalanced young man, the rabbi invited Young in and told him that he should attempt to find his grandparents' marriage certificate.
He discovered to his amazement that not only were his grandparents Jewish but that they had been married at the Central Synagogue, to which Young had run in his panic. But what should he, an Anglican sceptic, do with this information? On the one hand he was strongly attracted to his newly discovered identity - revelling in his first Friday-night dinner and feeling he had "come home".
On the other hand he risked upsetting his mother. He discovered she had been bullied mercilessly at her own boarding-school for her Jewishness and had decided that her son should be protected for his own sake from the knowledge that he was Jewish. To this day, said Young, his mother was deeply uncomfortable about the decisions he made - first to enrol in a Jewish-studies course in New York, and then to study for smichah. There was also the problem that he was openly gay (a fact that seemed to trouble his mother much less) and also the fact that Young's partner, David, was not himself Jewish.
Ultimately, Young was given a place at a reform rabbinical college and his partner, David, decided that he wished to convert.
There were still compromises to make - the main one being the agreement that he would not wear a kippah or a Magen David when he visited his mother and that when her friends asked what he did for a living he would reply that his mother preferred that he did not talk about his career. "I bet they all think I'm a pimp or something," he laughed.
Who Do You Think You Are?
BBC1, Wednesday, September 17
Meanwhile, in the latest installment of the BBC1 genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are? (or Who Do You Think Jew Are?, as it might be renamed), actor David Suchet discovered that on his father's Jewish side - the family name had originally been Shokhet - one of his great-grandparents had been a Russian who pretended to be a renowned French photographer in order to set up a studio in London, and another was a Litvak who pretended to have been born a Turk in order to allow his sons to obtain travel passes to flee the Pale of Settlement. I wonder where Suchet got the acting genes from?