I have written a memoir. It’s about my family. My family, as you may know, are/were Jews. But the truth – which the book is very committed to – mixes that up a bit. For example. I say early on that I went to an Orthodox Jewish Primary School – that, every day, I wore a yarmulke and tzitzit, learnt Hebrew, said blessings before every meal – but was often, every morning before I got there, eating bacon and eggs for breakfast. Similarly, I say at one point that I grew up in a Jewish bubble, as everyone I knew in the 1970s, certainly all my parents’ friends, were Jews. But then later there is a footnote specifying that one couple regularly visiting our Dollis Hill abode – Bill and Ruth Mulligan, if you’re interested – were not. So much not, in fact, that Ruth had in her childhood been a member of the Hitler Youth.
So, as ever with Jews, it’s complicated. Very few Jews grow up in what you might call a homogenously Jewish household. But then again, very few people do – very few people come from any kind of background with no contradictions, no fractures, no nonsense. Which is interesting as regards My Family: The Memoir. Several readers have already said to me that my mother, as portrayed in that book (as also happened when I did a stage show about my parents), really reminds them of their own mum. It’s tempting then to say “What, your mum had an affair with a golfing memorabilia collector and subsequently turned your house into a golfing memorabilia palace, as a kind of shrine to her lover’s hobby?” To which the answer, probably, will be no, but what they mean is that their family, like all families, was idiosyncratic and eccentric, and stuff that happened behind closed doors when they were young may have seemed normal at the time but looking back was in fact just weird. My version of it is specific to me, but if you are specific enough, you will often chime with the universal.
However, there does seem to be something about my family story that Jews in particular do connect to. Something about it makes it chime even more with Jews. It may just be the setting, the lower-middle-class mundanity of NW10 – maybe the words “Dollis” and “Hill” just ring ordinary but comforting bells in their souls – but I think it’s possible that the strangeness of my family background relates to a deeper place.
My mother was born in Nazi Germany. Her parents, my grandparents, had been rich industrialists in the East Prussian city Konigsberg before losing everything and fleeing with her to the UK in August 1939. She never lived any of that gilded life, but somewhere in her, I believe, was a fundamental, driving sense of how things may have turned out for her without Hitler. So, when she found herself in an unfashionable part of London, with a Welsh working-class bloke whose main loves in life were food, football and shouting “who the f***ing hell is this now?” every time the phone rang, a part of her yearned, I think, for her lost Prussian Prince. Prussian Princes not being in abundance in Dollis Hill in 1975, she latched on to the nearest thing she could find, which happened to be a smooth, polo-necked pipe-smoker with an avid interest in a sport that, perhaps not coincidentally, was at the time often being played in clubs that were barred to Jews.
I’m reading her subconscious here, of course, but I think my mother cannot be the only Jew taken out of Germany when young whose future was defined by that damage. When, on a live TV show, an episode of Baddiel And Skinner Unplanned, my mother, very typically, boasts about the idea that she may have been unfaithful, she goes on to say: “It shows I had a good life.” At one level, this is simply very her, a post-sexual-revolution sense that having an affair is glamorous. But I think as well, she means that despite all the odds, she had managed to live her good life: the one that had been stolen from her.
The poignancy of this makes her story universal. We all have dreams of a life when young, and when our actual lives don’t match up to it, some of us will get depressed, whereas others, like my fantastic, in all senses, mother, will retro-engineer whatever they had into a version of what they always hoped for. But a corner of it will still be Jewish, because of the many, many Jews that had to divert their destinies because of the war.
Of course, some of you may just be reading this and thinking “yes and also because Jewish mothers are crazy”. But that’s – although it is perhaps also the same one – another story.
David Baddiel’s My Family: The Memoir published by Fourth Estate is out now
