My novel shows that Jews and Scots have more in common than you may think - The Jewish Chronicle

To many people brought up in Scotland, the name Daiches has a resonance – and one they hold great reverence for. To some, the name evokes the legendary rabbi of Edinburgh Hebrew Congregation, Salis Daiches. To others, it’s the rabbi’s sons, barrister Lionel Daiches and academic and historian David Daiches who come to mind. But for present-day Scots it is Jenni Daiches, David’s daughter – the writer, historian and poet, and author of an astonishing 28 books, including biographies of Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson and George Orwell – of whom they think.

Now she has written an absorbing family saga, Somewhere Else, that tells the story of intertwined generations of Jews and Scots through two world wars, which has been long-listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. The shortlist will be published on April 2.

Daiches, 84, admits she was “delighted – and surprised” at her nomination. “I once won a Children’s Hour poetry competition when I was 12 or 13,” she says with a smile. “But the Women’s Prize definitely generates more attention. It’s a wonderful thing.”

Though the book reads like a fictionalised version of her own life, Daiches is at pains to say it is “not at all” – though she does say it draws on her family history.

I found a character who I knew I wanted to be at the centre of the story. It just evolved. There wasn’t a lightbulb moment

Sparely written, in the present tense, it follows the fortunes of Rosa Roshkin, a little Jewish girl who witnesses her family in Poland being murdered in a pogrom. She survives and eventually is brought to Scotland to become the adopted daughter of a childless Jewish couple, Dr Max Solomon and his wife Nora. All she has of her previous life is a small, shabby suitcase, and her father’s violin.

Since the book begins in 1906, years before the Kindertransport and the eve of the Second World War, I asked Daiches how it is that Rosa arrives in Scotland in the first place.

“I think there were Jewish homes for children, certainly in London if not elsewhere in the country.” she says. “But I do believe that there was a practice of ‘rescuing’ Jewish children from eastern Europe and giving them to homes where the couple had been unable to have children.”

So Rosa Roshkin becomes Rosa Solomon, and through the other surnames and family roles she takes on, there is one constant: the Edinburgh home that serves as the anchor for Rosa and her eventual descendants and extended family.

Daiches’ own family history is also one of migration, displacement and assimilation. Her grandfather Rabbi Salis Daiches was born in Vilna in 1880 but followed his parents to England in 1903 to undertake a doctoral thesis on the Scottish philosopher David Hume. He became minister in various congregations in England before moving with his wife and three children, including Jenni’s father David, to Edinburgh in 1919. The novel’s twists and turns contains multiple expressions of Jewish and Scottish identity, reflecting in many passages the 20th-century Scots’ tolerance towards its tiny Jewish minority.

In one of his last interviews before his death in 2005, David Daiches told the JC that his father “really absorbed both Western and Jewish culture. He knew Kant, he was educated in Germany, but his motto was Torah im derech eretz – Judaism with an understanding of the wider world. He was delighted to come to Edinburgh because he described Scotland as “the promised land, the only country which has not shed Jewish blood”.

“I am very aware of the experience of displacement of my own family, as refugees, as people who moved from one country to another,” says Daiches, who herself was born in Chicago before moving to Scotland with her parents in 1951.

He was delighted to come to Edinburgh because he described Scotland as ‘the promised land, the only country which has not shed Jewish blood’

“But the overwhelming theme [of life] in the 21st century is also one of displacement, migration, people finding themselves – possibly without even moving – in a different country from the one in which they started, because borders have shifted much. The issue of disparate people getting together – it’s a 20th and 21st-century phenomenon.” All the same, it’s not always a happy one. Somewhat ruefully Daiches adds that she thinks there is “latent antisemitism” now. “It doesn’t take much to bring it to the surface now – for understandable reasons. I think there is a discomfort now between the two communities.”

Like her elder brother, Daiches grew up in Chicago after her father took a job with the university there in 1937. When war broke out the family were unable to return home and so for a period her father worked instead for the British Information Service, first in New York, then at the British Embassy in Washington DC. The household was liberal and not overtly religious. “I wasn’t brought up to be observant,” says Daishe. “It’s never been something which has appealed to me at all, but having said that, I’ve been brought up to identify as Jewish. My mother, Isabel (Billie) Mackay, who was of Highland origins, but grew up in Edinburgh’s Morningside Park, converted to Judaism in Chicago. My Jewish heritage is extremely important to me.”

From a very young age she wanted to write. “I always wanted to tell stories but in my early years I drew them rather than wrote them. But I can’t remember a time when reading and writing weren’t a passion, if not an addiction.

“The fact that I was growing up in a house full of books and bookish conversation meant that writing seemed the most natural thing – though neither of my siblings became writers.” The idea for Somewhere Else came slowly. “It’s something that had been quietly growing for a long, long time. I found a character who I knew I wanted to be at the centre of the story… it just evolved. There wasn’t a lightbulb moment.”

Daiches has three children with her former husband, the Scottish writer and poet Angus Calder, who died in 2008. The couple divorced in 1982.

She tends to publish her non-fiction under her married name but she’s not only a writer: she worked at the National Museums of Scotland from 1978 to 2001 and latterly as head of museum of Scotland International.

She has also been president of Scottish PEN, which champions freedom of expression and literature across borders.

A number of chapters in the book refer to Rosa’s daughter Esther, who qualifies as a doctor and, after time spent treating survivors of the concentration camps, accompanies some of them to a kibbutz in pre-state Israel. Daiches herself spent time in Israel on two visits in 1960 and 1961, and has not been back since. She describes it then as “a place of great hope and excitement and energy, that has stayed with me” – but adds that she does not really like to talk about Israel today.

On the last page of her book, Daiches offers the reader what she says is a Yiddish saying, untranslated: “Zog nisht keynmol az du geyst dem letsn veg.” In fact, this is the first line of what became the anthem of the partisans of the Warsaw Ghetto during the war. It means: “Never say that you have reached the end of the road.” It seems an apposite epitaph for the families of Somewhere Else – and also for Daiches’ own family. She offers a spirited optimism, reflected in her life and her novel, that Jews and Scots have more in common than might be thought.

Somewhere Else, by Jenni Daiches, is published by Scotland Street Press

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