When Nicole Burstein was very young her dad held a glass of water in front of her and asked how full it was. “Half-full,” she replied, instantly.
Last month she did a personality test at her day job in customer support for a financial technology company, the sort that gives your temperament a colour, and the result was sunshine yellow. When she read English at university, her dissertation was on fairytales.
“There has of course been anxiety in my life, and even periods of depression, but optimism is definitely my default setting,” she says. “And it’s always been very important to me that others also feel upbeat, hopeful. I get into trouble for smiling and laughing too much!”
Her natural inclination to look on the bright side goes some way to explaining Burstein’s evening job of romance author. Evening job is not a fanciful description. She writes her novels for an hour or so from Monday to Friday after the day job — “you can’t really pay the bills writing fiction” — producing between 5,000 and 7,000 words a week.
Her first two were written for a teenage audience, but now under the name Amber Crewe, Burstein pens warm-hearted romantic comedies. Her debut novel Adult Virgins Anonymous was published in 2020 to glowing reviews and during lockdown she wrote That Jewish Thing, published last month and this week shortlisted for the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s Romantic Comedy Novel Award.
High Res Cover Image
“The novel is a comedy according to rules of Greek theatre and Shakespeare — the lovers end up together,” she explains. “When they don’t, as in Hamlet and Anthony and Cleopatra, it is classified as a tragedy.”
But as the title shouts, this uplifting romcom is also a novel about what it means to be Jewish. This is explored through the character of Tamsyn Rutman who discovers that in love, and in life, it is not easy to run away from who you really are.
We first meet her at her cousin Abigail’s Jewish wedding — Georgian country house turned extravagant arboreal wonderland, Britain’s Got Talent finalist crooning away — where she is seated next to Jewish lawyer Ari Marshall. The bride has taken the opportunity to do a bit of her own shidduch-making.
But urbane, fashionable Tamysn is having none of it. She is determined not to fall into the trap of someone else’s happily-ever-after, gives Ari the brush-off and focuses on work instead. That job is journalism, which is how she ends up interviewing London’s hottest new chef.
He sweeps her off her feet, but throughout her steamy relationship with this (lovely) non-Jewish man she keeps crossing paths with the very lovely and very Jewish Ari…“This is not an autobiographical novel by any means. Tamsyn is much trendier than me, for starters. But in terms of her how she relates to being Jewish, she sits in a place where I once did,” says Burstein.
“In my teens I had a tough time with my Jewishness, with embracing my heritage. I didn’t feel that I fitted in to Jewish teenage social groups, I didn’t go on Israel tour and I didn’t get anything out of going to shul. I thought: maybe I don’t belong?”
It took moving from North West London to Durham University to realise that she did. “Within my first week, I got the ‘you’re the first Jewish person I’ve met’. Then there was my English tutor who used the word chutzpah to add flavour to his lecture, but who mispronounced the word so badly it made me cringe. And the time I mistook scampi for fish goujons because I had never come across the former – after many chats about Jewish dietary laws with the college’s catering. Luckily, my friends stopped me popping a scampi in my mouth, but those are kind of incidents that make you feel different.”
If there were other Jewish students at Durham University from 2002-2005, she only met one of them. “We were the Durham Jewish Society. We had to bring in someone from the Christian Methodist society to be our treasurer. Then, I stepped up and became president, realising that if I didn’t, the society would crumble. Before I left I’d organised the university’s first ever Chanukah service.”
And now she has written That Jewish Thing which she describes as a love letter to her family, her community, her culture. “It was my editor’s idea that my next novel should be about Britain’s Jewish community. I think that if she hadn’t suggested it, I’d have been nervous too. I’d have thought it too niche. But then I thought, well, if people actually want me to write this novel, I’m going to make it both real and personal.”
And personal it is. “My family is Tamsyn’s family — a very large, agnostic, High Holy Day and Brent Cross North West London Jewish family. Edgware, to be precise — in the book and life.”
It is also a family that speaks a lot of Yiddish and, accordingly, the novel is a deep dive into the language — with a 13-page glossary at the back. “There was a bit of argument about whether to italicise the Yiddish because that’s normally what you do with foreign words in a book. But I said: well this is a Jewish novel and this my language, it’s how my family speaks. I’m not injecting Yiddish to add flavour. I didn’t want to ‘other’ my Jewishness.”
For similar reasons, the book has a very Jewish calendar — it opens with a wedding, has a barmitzvah in the middle, a Friday night dinner, a funeral towards the end and concludes a couple of weeks after Yom Kippur. “I am who I am today because of my family, and we have particularly connected at simchahs and sad events. I hope this book honours those experiences. And I hope that anyone feeling disconnected with their Jewishness, as I once did, will read them and feel a sense of pride, too.”
This year’s Romantic Novelists’ Association’s award winners will be announced on March 7. ‘That Jewish Thing’ by Amber Crewe is published by Coronet
