Naomi Alderman still remembers that prickling feeling of unfairness — the uneasy sickness at something being not right — from her early time at Sinai Primary School.
Each day would start with prayers; all the children would thank God that Jews were no longer enslaved people. The girls would then say, in Hebrew, “Thank you God, for making me according to your will.” And the boys would incant, “Thank you God for not making me a woman.”
Looking back now, she laughs, “I would say potentially they put the wrong girl in that environment.
Naomi Alderman (Getty Images)
“I know that might have been fine for many women but I knew that no, it was not for me.”
While she remains imbued with her Orthodox upbringing — this is the first time I’ve ever interviewed anyone who quotes Hillel at me several times — it is no surprise that a woman with a brain as questioning as her’s also rebelled against it.
This is someone, she tells me with glee, who even writes letters to the JC to disagree with articles written in this paper by her historian father Geoffrey.
Her literary debut was 2006’s Disobedience about a North London rabbi’s bisexual daughter, which was made into a film with Rachel Weisz, but she is best known for the international bestseller The Power, which was born from growing up in a world in which women were and remain second-class citizens. Her experiences at school might have been an early education in it, but it was the secular world that showed her how entrenched it was.
“I was going through a miserable break-up, waking up every morning crying and then, eventually, getting on with my day,” she recalls. “One day I got on the Tube and there was a movie poster with a photograph of a beautiful woman crying.
“And because I was spending my mornings crying, it felt like the whole world was going, ‘Good, that’s what you should do; that’s what we like.
"We find women crying beautiful.’ And something snapped in me, I spent the rest of that journey thinking: ‘What would need to change in the world for me to go onto a Tube and see a poster of a beautiful man crying for once? And the book became an answer for that.”
In The Power, starting with teenage girls, women around the world mysteriously gain the power of electricity; they can electrocute people, they can turn off the power supplies to a city. Suddenly, for the first time in human history, the female of the species becomes more physically powerful. This turns the world on its axis.
It is a brilliant novel, not just in terms of imagination but also looking at how almost every element of human interaction is based on the knowledge we all have that men are physically more powerful.
A scene from The Power (Prime Video)
And now finally — after an extended break in filming due to the pandemic — the TV series based on the book is about to come out. Starring Toni Collette as politician Margot Cleary-Lopez, Eddie Marsan as Jewish gangster Bernie Monke, Ria Zmitrowicz as his daughter Roxy and Toheeb Jimoh as aspiring journalist Tunde, the Amazon series is, thankfully, as good as the book.
When I meet Alderman, 49, at the series junket in a London hotel, she is almost hoarse from speaking all day about the show, which she also wrote and co-produced, but she’s practically bouncing up and down with excitement about it.
This has been a long time in the works — it took her four years to write the novel (at one point she junked 200,000 words of it and started again) — and filming was halted for 18 months just a few days before it was due to start in February 2020.
“I think I can safely say to the people who loved the book around the world, ‘don’t worry’ because they will love the show, the show is really good,” she says. “It is a relief to say that it is good and it also a relief that we finally got here because there were points during the pandemic where I thought the show was not going to happen anymore.”
In some ways now, the pandemic experience we have all been through has added a texture to the show about a worldwide phenomenon.
“In 2019 in the writers’ room, we would be talking about how people would cope if girls could electrocute people— would they close the schools? And the idea of that was hard to even contemplate,” she recalls.
“There is also an element of people seeing what was happening in other parts of the world — something that we all really saw during the pandemic.”
While the story is in many ways a wish fulfilment, it is also deeply cynical. Some of the women become as corrupted and violent as men. This too is something Naomi looks at through a Jewish lens.
“As a Jewish person you obviously grow up knowing a lot about the Holocaust and asking yourself questions about how would I know when to get out? How do I avoid it? What are the signs?
"But then I started to think about the other important question; how do I prevent myself from being a Nazi? How do you spot when there is an injustice going on in the world that you need to speak up about it?
“There is a really strong sense within our community for standing up for others because of our experiences. But it did make me think, what would life be like if you had this much power?
"Even if you start off as the nicest person in the world. The terrifying lesson of the show is that we all think we would be great, but the evidence is most of us would not. It is something I think about a lot.
“Toni Collette’s character starts off as someone idealistic but then, because of this changing world, she gets offered more and more power and with that her lines begin to get a bit blurred. She compromises a little bit, and then a bit more. And that’s how they get you.
“And that’s one of those other questions about the Nazis; how much power can change you. Did the people who suddenly attacked their neighbours always have it in them? To segue slightly: we’ve seen in the last few years how you can suddenly enact laws that can make you very powerful. You can give huge PPE contracts to your mates for example.
“Hillel said, ‘Where there are no men strive to be a man’ and the Torah says, ‘You shall not follow a multitude to do evil.’ There is a reason they have to say these things.’
The show also features, unusually, a Jewish gangster played by the excellent Eddie Marsan who is not Jewish but often plays Jews.
Eddie Marsan in The Power (Prime Video)
Bernie starts off misogynistic and dismissive of his illegitimate daughter Roxie, whose non-Jewish mother became pregnant with her when his wife was also pregnant. She wants to be in the family firm. Suddenly, the new world order means he has to take her seriously.
One of the opening storylines features Bernie’s wedding to a new bride and is pitch-perfect when it comes to what a Jewish wedding looks like — even the prayers are said correctly. Perhaps not so surprising — Naomi’s cousin and aunt worked as extras for the scene.
“God, I love that family!”says Alderman of her Jewish gangsters.
“I love an East End bruiser family. I really love tough Jews; I like to see that in the world. We’ve had enough of the Seinfeld style of nebbeshy Jew. I like a tough character and so I love Bernie and Roxie.
"There is that tiny part of wondering how do I feel that in the traditional Judaism that I grew up with, Roxie would not be considered officially Jewish.”
Alderman doesn’t use her fists but is a tough Jew in a different way: insisting that we question everything. She considers herself more culturally Jewish than anything else and would love for Orthodox Judaism to have a wake-up call — as she did all those years ago at Sinai — when it comes to how women are treated.
“There are Orthodox values which I think the world could do more with; those of fighting for justice and the healthy disdain for aesthetics,” she says.
“I love the story about Hillel telling the man who wants to be taught the Torah standing on one leg: ‘That which is hateful to you, don’t do that to other people.’ That is how I try and live my life.
“But there is a lot of stuff which is unhelpful. In the same way that people can invent an eruv so people can carry their keys, surely they can reinterpret some of it when it comes to women?’
‘The Power’ is available on Prime Video from today
