Candace Bushnell is not Jewish. If she were, the plotlines of Sex and The City would have been very different. For one thing Carrie Bradshaw would have had a mother who hated Mr Big on sight. There would also have been arguments about Carrie’s size-zero figure (“eat something already, there’s nothing of you”) and the absence of sensible shoes in her wardrobe.
But it was not to be. Of course, not every Jewish female author writing fiction, romantic or otherwise, feels the need to insert a stereotypical cholent-making matriarch to thicken the plot. Many do very nicely penning love stories that do not draw on their own heritage. Others, however, just cannot help themselves.
Regardless of the subject matter, a dash of Yiddishkeit slips into the storyline and characters that are not officially “Jewish” in the book behave and react as though they might be. And suddenly the chick-lit you slipped into your holiday bag with the Factor 20 has become chicken-soup lit.
“It is true that many of the characters in my books have Jewish qualities, so to speak, even if I don’t actually out them as Jewish,” admits Anna Maxted, whose latest book, A Tale of Two Sisters (published by Random House), is officially about two Jewish siblings. “Very often the characters are Jewish in my head, but I don’t feel the need to mention it. My first novel, Getting Over It, is all about mourning, and was written after the death of my father. But I took care not to touch on religion because it wasn’t important and I didn’t want it to get in the way of the story. Oddly enough, I was verbally lambasted by someone while promoting the book in America, who wanted to know if I had something against religion as I had failed to mention any kind of faith. Little did he know.”
Having written five very successful novels filled with characters that are either confirmed Jews or “subliminally Jewish”, the 40-year-old mother of three young boys is resigned to the fact that her background will always push its way forward.
“As a people we are full of contradictions and I can’t resist using that, although I hope people can see that any mockery is gentle and fond,” she says. “Ultimately, I think it depends on the sort of book you want to write. If it is about emotions, which do inform what we write, then being Jewish is part of my emotional make-up. I have never hidden from that in my novels regardless of the plot.”
Julie Cohen’s late grandmother Lillian has been the inspiration for several characters in her novels and none of them are Jewish on paper. “I often have very sociable, talkative elderly women in my books who provide the heroine with a mother figure conveying wisdom through example on how to love,” says the author, who has been busy promoting Girl From Mars (Headline Little Black Dress), a romantic comedy about a female comic-book artist who takes a vow not to get a boyfriend.
“My grandmother was very good at loving and showing me how to love, not by telling me how, but by the example of her life and behaviour. None of the women in my books ‘are’ my grandmother — they’re all much stranger, for a start — but they have elements of her. One character even had her curtains.”
The American-born Cohen, who grew up in Maine but moved to the UK in 1992 after studying at Cambridge, has never had reason to feel guilty about leaving her family behind, for over the years they have all appeared in various guises in her books. In Girl From Mars, it is her great Uncle David’s turn — he becomes the model for the heroine’s father.
“Uncle Dave was probably the first real intellectual I ever met,” reveals Julie “He’s a professor of physics and always appears to be solving some fiendishly difficult problem in his head. And yet despite, or perhaps because of his intellect, he is always gentle and kind.”
Grandma Lillian is due for another appearance in 2010, when she will appear (metaphorically speaking) as the hero’s mother — Lady Ginevra Naughton — in The Bad Twin. “I didn’t realise it was my grandmother until she started talking, when I wrote her first scene the other day,” says Cohen, while insisting that although her characters are fuelled by Jewish relatives, they are not overtly Jewish in behaviour.
“I think that my stories commonly return to the feeling of being different and an outsider. This has a lot to do with the fact that my mother converted to Judaism, so my brother and I were different not only in the context of our town, which was predominantly Catholic, but we were different from our cousins, aunts and uncles, too. I often wondered what it would be like to be part of such a large group who shared your beliefs, although I was very happy to be Jewish. Often my characters have to accept their own oddness, and embrace the foibles of their families.”
Identifying Jewish traits in non-Jewish characters created by Jewish authors is not something that had ever occurred to the Romantic Novelists Association, which counts Julie Cohen and Freya North among its members.
“Why are Jewish writers different from all other writers?” pondered Myra Kersner of the RNA. “Well, they’re not. They draw on their own lives, consciously or not, like every one else.”
Freya North, who has held a prime position on the bestsellers list with her new romantic novel, Secrets, insists that Judaism does not come in to her books at all. “It hasn’t shaped my writing in any form,” she says. “Possibly because I always write in the third person.”
Lauren Weisberger, by contrast, favours the first person, or at least she did for The Devil Wears Prada, which had an official Jewish heroine in Andrea Sachs. However, even when her characters “aren’t” of the faith — as in the case of her most recent offering, Chasing Harry Winston (Simon & Schuster, out soon in paperback) — she throws in a Brazilian model to provide the “Jewish” angst.
“It is important to me to include Jewish characters and themes, less out of a need to make a statement and more just because it’s a way of life I know and one with which I’m comfortable,” says Weisberger, who is currently shuttling all over the US and Canada promoting her novel CHW.
“When you’re looking to create new characters or flesh them out with more detail, you naturally turn to what’s around you, and in my case it’s a lot of Jewish friends and family.”
Not even power-crazed fashion editor Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep in the movie) escaped the Jewish treatment in The Devil Wears Prada. We discover that her previous incarnation was Miriam Princhek, one of 11 children from an Orthodox Jewish family in the East End of London, who transforms herself from “Jewish peasant to secular socialite”.
There is nothing covert about the kosher content of The Matzo Ball Heiress (Red Dress Ink). New Yorker Laurie Gwen Shapiro is proud to have written one of the most blatantly Jewish chick-lit novels since… well since George Eliot wrote Daniel Deronda in 1876.
“The irony is that so many authors are Jewish but they go to great pains to cover up their last name and characters,” says Shapiro, 42, who is also an independent filmmaker.
“My surname is Shapiro, and I proudly put it prominently on the title page. Many authors will use other names that seem more romantic. I remember when I was younger, I even toyed with Lauren Stanbury, which sounded so… not Jewish.”
Having christened her matzo ball heiress Heather Greenblotz, there was no turning back for Shapiro, who also wrote the heavily-Jewish themed The Unexpected Salami, and The Anglophile, which is all about an American Jewish woman obsessed with British men. And now she has written the soon-to-be published The O’Leary Batmitzvah, based largely on the reactions of her non-Jewish Australian husband to their daughter, Violet, going to Hebrew classes.
“It’s all about how religion affects a relationship,” she says laughing, before going on to explain that The Matzo Ball Heiress had been optioned by Brad Pitt’s production company prior to his break-up with Jennifer Aniston. “Heather Greenblotz was one of the least known casualties of the Brangelina affair.”
Back in Britain, novelist Sasha Blake could well be following in Shapiro’s footsteps, albeit with a more secular name. Her debut novel, Betrayal (by Bantam), is a bonk-buster with a Jewish hero and highly-recommended for the beach.
“Jack, the protagonist, is desperate to be part of the British establishment, enters the world of finance and then turns out to be dishonest, and I had a twinge of worry about making him Jewish,” says Blake. “But then as his wife is Catholic and equally bad, it would be a little unfair of me to make the Jewish one perfect.”
Not if Jack’s mother has anything to say about it, and, if this really is a Jewish book, at some point she will.
