I was 11 when my grandmother died and I learned the truth. The family secret was no secret to those with eyes and ears. My maternal grandparents, with their thick refugee accents, “foreign” mourning rituals and absolute fixation on the risk of persecution, had been born and raised in Hungary not as Gentiles but as Jews.
Traumatised by the Shoah, they had imposed a family taboo on the subject of their heritage, although I sometimes wonder whom they thought they were kidding. Their cousins continued to practise, and few of their friends in Hampstead appear to have been fooled.
I’ve written elsewhere about the fuller details of my own family’s history. Yet what I’ve learned, 25 years later, is that a secret I once considered a unique family idiosyncrasy is, in fact, a Jewish tale as common as Jewish tales come. Madeleine Albright; Romola Garai; George Osborne; every other day I seem to encounter a well-known face whose grandparent or parent made a similar choice.
Jewish families who have always taken pride in who they are may, quite understandably, judge those who have treated the same heritage as a mark of shame. But the shared ingredient in every hidden Jewish history is trauma. As an infant, Albright lost her grandparents, uncle, aunt and cousin in Auschwitz. Her parents never found the words to tell her what had happened. Another such acquaintance once told me that her father was the sole survivor of a large extended family. When questioned, he always insisted that his entire family had died in Nazi-occupied Hungary “of the flu”. Some flu.
This week, it’s the actor Nigel Planer who adds his story to my compendium of contemporary crypto-Jews. Speaking to Hadley Freeman in the Sunday Times, Planer told of his own father’s trauma as a child refugee from Berlin, leaving his toys behind in Berlin and, with them, the Jewish identity that made him a target for genocide. Planer, like many assimilated English Jews, would go on to contribute to quintessentially British building blocks of our shared culture, from The Young Ones to Blackadder. In the latter, he appeared with Stephen Fry, whose story is not dissimilar. Does he consider himself Jewish? “I think of myself as a category error, a misfit”, Planer told the Sunday Times. As do many of us.
Eventually, we all shape our own identities in our own way. But the complexity of Planer’s identity — as he notes himself — demonstrates the myopia of our culture of identity politics, a culture which demands that we all define ourselves, publicly, all the time.
Ethnic and cultural identity, and not only in Jewish communities, has always been built around family narratives, the true and the untrue.
Those of us whose family secrets are not entirely our own to tell now find pressure from employers and diversity consultants to spill the beans. I finally decided to tackle the complexity of my family’s story, writing a long essay for the Financial Times in consultation with my parents, when a series of editors began to ask me to define my “right” to write about antisemitism.
Hidden heritage: Actor Nigel Planer attends an award show (Photo: Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images)
Nigel Planer clearly feels similarly conflicted. “I’m grassing him up now, aren’t I?”, he says of his father, and for a brief moment in Freeman’s interview he even compares himself to a child denouncing a parent to the Nazis. His situation also proves the absurdity of current norms about casting actors by “identity”. To gain employment, must we all grass up our parents? One production on which he has recently been working “wanted to make an announcement that the cast was entirely Jewish”. Planer scotched that plan, although in part because he describes the question as being “connected to religion”.
Last year, I interviewed the actor Adrian Schiller for the JC, who has a similarly conflicted relationship to defining himself as a “Jewish actor”. “It’s a very intrusive question — ‘are you Jewish?’” Schiller told me. “It could be, for a man, as intrusive as, ‘are you circumcised?’”
For many of us with repressed backgrounds, the journey to defining as Jewish is a process that develops over years, a bit like coming out of the closet.
It’s hard to regain a lost Jewish heritage. Nigel Planer now celebrates festivals like Rosh Hashanah with his Jewish wife but points out that it’s not the same as growing up with them. What does make a difference, however, is being welcomed back by the mainstream Jewish community.
Such a welcome requires deep reserves of empathy and forgiveness. I’m all too aware of how hostile some of my Jewish friends found my grandparents’ attitudes in the past. It’s not easy to forgive this kind of rejection. But without reconciliation, a whole branch of the Jewish family will stay lost to the Jewish community, for good. Our grandparents buried their roots out of fear. Those of us who now acknowledge our heritage do so with pride.
