Playwright Rose Lewenstein is "sort of" Jewish. Unlike her grandparents, who were certainly Jewish. They came from Russia on her father's side and Germany on her mother's. But her parents passed on neither the religion nor the culture, and Lewenstein - born in Hackney and from the age of six, schooled and raised in decidedly monocultural Sussex - lived with a question that was often put to her but to which she had no answer.
"People go, 'Are you Jewish?'" she says, nursing a mint tea in a Hackney cafe. "And I go, 'Sort of, yes.' And then they say, 'So you do Friday nights?' and I say 'What do you do on Friday nights?' My relationship to my Jewishness is complicated'."
Perhaps her latest play will simplify that relationship. Or clarify it at least. To some extent, Now This Is Not The End, currently at the dynamic Arcola Theatre in East London, is a mirror of Lewenstein and her family. It is populated by three generations of women, the eldest of whom, Eva, is Jewish and was born and raised in Germany. Her English daughter Susan has little connection to her German/Jewish past while the youngest character, Rosie is drawn to the country that her grandmother fled two generations earlier. Rosie lives in Germany and has a German boyfriend who, in one of the play's most emotional scenes, meets Rosie's Holocaust survivor grandmother.
Truth and fiction begin to diverge here. The real-life Rose has returned to her roots by living in Hackney not Germany, although her British boyfriend is "Aryan" she jokes.
"The play draws on my family's backstory but the characters are all fictional," explains the 29-year-old playwright. "The most personal thing to me is this question of identity and wondering what roots are. I do think it's sad that my only relationship to Judaism is the Holocaust which is part of my history. It's why my grandparents moved here and why my great-grandfather was killed. So it's there as a kind of backdrop you can't get rid of."
Lewenstein's enquiry into the dormant Jewish side of her identity has a personal dimension, too.
"Last year, I did a bit of research and decided to throw a Passover party. I knew that one of my great, great-grandmothers must have been doing this. I made fish-balls and tried to say prayers. Some [non Jewish] friends came and it was really fun. I wrote a script for us to work to. My friends loved it. We all love the food ritual. And I'm in theatre and it felt like the most theatrical festival - the water, the breaking of the matzah, Elijah. It was fun but we took it seriously. Everything had to be kosher."
If there was a trigger for this what might be called awakening, it was a newspaper article that Lewenstein read a few year ago. It pointed out that there will be soon no Holocaust survivors left. How, Lewenstein wondered, would families with experiences such as hers pass those stories on to the next generation - a question at the core of Now This Is Not The End.
"Everybody told us to forget about it. Now we're all dying and everybody wants us to remember," observes Eva in Lewenstein's play which, whatever the identity of its author, certainly reads like it was written by a Jew exploring the legacy of the past. And yet, as Lewenstein says, her relationship with Jewishness remains complicated. Does she feel Jewish?
"No I don't," she say emphatically. And then, like her play, she starts digging a deeper. "A bit. I'll always feel a bit." And then a little deeper still. "I definitely feel something in my identity that's Jewish." And finally, "Yes."
‘Now This Is Not The End’ is at the Arcola, Ashwin St, London E8 3DL
