Vic Seidler

James Shapiro recently published Shakespeare and the Jews, a book not so much about Shakespeare as about the culture of which he ways a part. A professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia, Shapiro argues that scholars have overlooked the role that the Jews played in helping the English define themselves. Events in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries worked to complicate stable notions of English identity. The Reformation had pitted Catholics against Protestants and the quest for empire was reshaping nations. In an interview for the Chronicle of Higher Education( 2 February 1996 ) Shapiro says that: ‘At a time when many writers were trying to reinvent what it meant to be English, the English increasingly defined themselves by whom they were not. Very often that was the Jews, I would argue that the English were obsessed with the Jews.’

Like many post-Holocaust Jewish scholars, James Shapiro had kept his Jewish identity separate from his professional work. Though e was raised in a traditionally observant family and continued his religious education until he finished high school, his undergraduate education at Columbia in the 1970s and his graduate work at the University of Chicago brought him into an intellectual world that gave vision of modernity his Jewishness. Within the terms of an Enlightenment vision of modernity his Jewishness became a matter of private concern and individual belief. It was a disconnected from the public discourses of the university where it had no space, Shapiro chose to specials in the English Renaissance, a culture deeply infused with Christianity.

Not only is his Jewishness silenced but its suppression organizes a field of intellectual work. As Shapiro recalls,

When I got to graduate school, I was told that where were no Jews, or only a handful, in Shakespeare’s England-and so no issues to discuss about the Jews. I was always conscious of what was being suppressed- the discussion of Jews that was seeing in the texts. Finally, I realized that I’m both a professor of English and a Jew, and I wanted to know how my people had shaped the culture I was studying.

This is already an unsettling notion for scholars who have learnt to conceive of their Jewishness as a matter of individual religious belief alone. Without in tighter terms of a post-war English culture that teaches Jews that they need to assimilate into a dominant culture, they have less space than the other ethnic identities of post-war United States.

Shakespeare and the Jews explores how the English in Shakespeare’s time focused upon the Jews as a way of exploring troubling questions about the themselves. The English explored issues of nationhood through considering whether the Jews, without a homeland, could be a nation. The issue of whether the English could be considered a race was often thought about in terms of whether a religious group like the Jews had a radical identity. English writes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries repeatedly contrasted the Jews to the English. Theirs was often a gendered discussion relating to masculinities, though Shapiro dose not seem to frame it in these terms. Jewish men were said to be effeminate- even to menstruate- which English men were ‘manly’; the Jews smelled bad while the English were clean.

The writings Shapiro examines seem to return again and again to a deep anxiety about who was and who was not a Jew. This apprehension in fact seemed to mask a widespread concern about the stability of English identity. The question he sees obsessing the English was whether the English could lose their own identity and becomes Jews or takes on attributes of Jews. This question seemed to be part of the fascination- and revulsion- for a figure like John Tracked who was imprisoned in the seventeenth century for founding a sect of Christians who followed some Jewish doctrines. It echoes anxieties that have their source in the long-standing Western denial of Jewishness of Jesus. This repression was often linked to the demonizing of Jews as the ‘other’ within the West, where the wandering Jew became a figure of punishment.

In his exploration of The Merchant of Venice Sapporo is concerned to show how the portrayal of Jews would have resonated with contemporary audiences. He goes back to early editions of sources from which Shakespeare could have drawn for the story that likens a Jew’s demanding a pound of flesh to male circumcision. He argues that the story would have provoked widespread fears that non-Jews could become Jews. Such questions recur in the play’s many allusions to religious conversation. This recurrence reflects uncertainties in relation to the issues in relation to Jewish identities have been frame d in ways that allow for reflections upon the re-visioning of England.

Being Jewish/being ‘English’

Growing up in England in a refugee family which had escaped from Continental Europe just before the war was top grow up in the shadow of the Holocaust. In some sense it was to grownup without representation, to be ‘invisible.’ I was born in England in1945. I shared with many others the name of ‘Victor’, for the second World War had been a ‘victory’ that was to be remembered and celebrated in the streets. After years of a long and difficult war, there was to be a time of peace and reconstruction. England was to be reborn out of the ashes of the Blitz and this was a time to look forward, not to dwell on the past. Not only had English been victorious, but tit was to bring into obeying a period of social justice when the fruits of the peace were assumed to be shared by all.

I was named after this victory and as I was named so I was also marked. I carried a public name which carried meaning beyond the personal boundaries of what I was to became-‘English’, like everyone else- I was a promise born in Hendon, North, London. In those days, since I was born in England, I was entitled to ‘be English’, even though my parents were ‘foreign’ because they had been born in Poland and in Austria. It was not easy for them to become English, accepted or that they ‘belong’. They were largely to remain ‘Continental’ in their own terms. They did not ‘speak right’ in a culture where accent was so important. But they felt gratitude for a country that had provided them with refuge and did not really want to be reminded about the many that were refused refuge when they had nowhere to go.

The Jewish community that was established was not always welcoming to these ‘continentals’ who had their own practices and traditions. They were expected to ‘fit in’ and to accommodate to ‘English ways’. The Jews who had come over from Russia and Poland towards the end of the nineteenth century were already on the way to assimilating into a dominant culture. They were to ‘be English’ even if they happened to have different religious beliefs. This forced assimilation was a matter of individual belief and was not thought to affect their status as equal citizens. Our parents could not feel so confident in the hopes and aspirations of a liberal culture, for they had experienced the revoking of their rights in Germany and Austria which supposedly cherished the ideals of Enlightenment modernity. But it was in these’ civilized’ communities that their rights as free and equal citizens were revoked, even though their families had the medals to prove the sacrifices they had made in the First world War.

Often there was a silent and unspoken feeling of rejection. They did not speak easily abut the communities which they had come from and felt so integrated with. They carried the pain of rejection. At some level this burden was transformed in the aspiration they had for their children who were to be ‘protected’ from the truth of these pains. They were to have their own revenge through splitting for their pasts and in feeling that they could give to their own children the precious gift of become English’, but this gift was also important at another level, for to be English was to be ‘safe’.

It was this safety that my parents were ready to make sacrifices for and it was part of their Dee[ and unquestioned gratitude to England that they did their best to pass on this sense of safety top their children. They would not have a bad word spoken about England. I remembered how difficult it was for them when I went to join a ban the Bomb marc on its way back from Alder Aston. My Stepfather Leo had learnt from his experience at hands of the Nazis in Germany that Jews should not be involved in politics. As a Jew you had to learn to keep your head down. You were to learn to be invisible. As far as he was concerned you had to lean to behave properly, ‘to be seen and not heard.’ This was a message I was never consciously happy with, but it left its mark. It made me careful and at some level held me back, I learnt not to take too many risks.

Our parents looked forward to their children ‘becoming English’. They felt this new identity as one of the gifts they could offer us. It was part of working for a future and refusing to look back to the past. It was also a way of coping with not being overwhelmed by the sufferings of the recent past. There was a determination to make a kiting in England so that they could provide for their children what they did not have themselves. The children were to come first for they were to come first for they were the future. They allowed their parents to focus on the future so that thee parents did not have to deal with the past. It was also that we were to be different form all those Jews, all the those uncles, grandparents, brothers and sisters who had died in the camps.

This was to be a new beginning, and England in the 1950s was to be a land of hope and opportunity in which the past could be left behind. We as children were not to be like them, though often we carried the name of the dead, as this was the ancient Jewish custom, we often now that we were ‘English’, tough somehow we were alsi supposed to be pround of being Jewish. We were carry the hopes of depressed because such emotions threatened to be remind them of felling they did not want to touck. Rather it was our duty to be consitantly happy and, if we felg different, we soon leatnt to keep these feelings to ourselvers.

Names matter, but often we carry quite ambivalent feelings about out names and who we might be named after. It can be part fo an uncertain familyinheritance, especially if, as happened in som many Jewish families, you were named after a family member who had died in the Holocasue, This legacy creates itss iwn link and responsibility, but it can produce its ownrifts if, as in my case, you hace a ‘public’ name that turns you outwards the world whilst you also carry an inner name. I was called ‘Victor’ for the world. This was a form of self-protection and in the 1950s it was still called your ‘Christian” name. But I also carried the name ‘Jacob’ which ws an inner name. It was my Jewish name or my remained hidden and was spoken only within the rituals of the synagogue. It remained a private name and at some level I felt uneasy, even ashamed, in relation to it.

I did not feel easy about being called ‘Vitor’, however, since with the destruction of European Jewry, there was little to celebrate. As far as the Jewish people were concerned, it had not been a victory but a devastating defeat. So it was a name that I carried but which I felt it diffcult to identify with. I soon shortened it to ‘Vic’ as if I wanted to make myself less visible. A children growing up in the 1950s we did not really knowing ly embody this sense of defeat for we were often left with very ambivalent feelings towards our own sense of Jewishness. It was so much easier to think that we could be English like everyone else. Even if our families were to be protected from the cruelties of the past, we were to represent hope and the future and we were to live without the stains ans injuries of the past. This ambivalence was to protect us as a childred, but it was also to make things easier for our parents who found it difficult to speak about what had happened to them. To speak was to make it real and to expose yourself to a pain you often did not want to be reminded of.

The histories of the war and of pre-war life in continental Europe were not to be talked about. These histories were often not to be shared, for the sense of rejection they threatened to bring to the surface could not be tolerated. At some level it was as id these histories had bit really happened. There was an anxiety growing up in immigrant communities in the1950s that the children ‘be bormal’ and so be like ‘everyone else’. If we wondered why we did not really mentioned in the family or only in passing. It was just said as a matter of fact that we had little ectended families. And so as to reassure us friends of our mothers were renamed as ‘anutie’ so that again we would not feel deprived. It was important for our parents that we thougjt of ourselves as having happy childhoods and for us to think that we were not really different from other children.

This pretence of normality was even sustained when my father died in1950 when I was Just five. He had just found out what had happended to his brother duting the war.I felt that he had died form a broken heatt, but that was a story that I created for myself. It felt true at some level. These were difficult times, especially for my mother who had been left with heavy debts. She had to work to support different situation from other children, especially at school. We learnt not to talk about it, but we still owed it to out refugee families had to come to terms with. But I can still find it difficult to acknowledge fully what a particular experience we had as children growing up in the shadows of the Shoa.

Modernity an Jewishness

The idea that as Jews growing up in England we were ‘like everyone else’ was part of the dream of an Enlightment vision of modernity. We were to grow up into a liberal moral culturewhich believed that our primary identities were as free and equal rational selves. We were to learn, as Sartre explores it in Anti-Semite and Jew to treat Jewishness as if it were contingent and accidental. It did not in any meaningful sense define ‘who’ we were, which meant that if you did not happen to share these particular religious beliefs you could dispense with ‘being Jewish’ altogether. Enlightment vision prepared for those Jews who were keen to assimilate. What is more, they could welcome the Enlightment as the realization of the universal aspiration of a prophetic Judaism.

In terms of Kant’s moral theory, history and culture were deemed to be forms of unfreedom and determination. As we had to learn rise above inclinations which reflect an animal nature, so we also have to rise above history and culture. We had to learn to think for ourselves as free and autonomous moral agents. It had nothing to do with public and civic identities. Within ht public realm we were to be ‘like everyone else’ and we were guaranteed equal legal and political rights. These dreams of modernity still held sway in England in the 1950s. At some level it was as if the Holocaust had not happened.

A dominated England culture had not begun to come to terms with the way the Holocaust challenges fundamental terms of modernity. The existence of legal and political rights had not proved a guarantee of the humanity of Jews in Nazi Germany. Rights had not been able to secure theh human diginity of Jews once these rights could be taken away by the state. This was the crisis that Levinas was responding too, recognizing it as spart of a crisis of western conseptions of modernity. It had to do with the place of ethics and the poverty of ethical tranditions that treat ethics subjectively, as a matter of individual opiniao alone. Having lived through this time himself, Levinas recoognised thte importance of a Jewish tradition could offer the wewst and was part of the conflict between Athens ans Jerusalem. It was open for us to acknowledge the priority of ethics over epistemology.

But there was also a recognition in Levinas of the ways an Enlightment vision fo modernity, whilst offering a liberal vision of freedom and equality, also worked to weaken Jew’s relationship with their own traditions and histories. For presenting, in Kant’s terms, Jewishness as a form of unfreedom and determination tendend to deface a person;s relationship with their own Jewishness. As we were growing up in post-war England, security lay in ‘becoming England’ and it seems to be normal and like everyone else which were central values within an assimilationist culture, we learnt unconsciously that we were not to be visible as Jews. At some level we were not comfortable in thinking gof ourselves as Jews at all. With Sartre it was easy to feel that it was the anti-Semite who ws to do the naming.

Going ato a North London grammar school in the 1950s’, even one with a relatively high proportion of Jewish students who held their own assemblies, it was easy to feel that Jewishness was something to be tolerated. You learned to feel grateful for the tolerance of English society, but this was a tolerance that was often to be paid for in terms of visibility. At some level the very lack of public recognition and Jewish. In school you could feel ythat ther was something almost shameful in being Jewish.l In school you could feel between being Jewish and being English as is there was something automatically suspect about having diverse loyalties. The question was in the air of a was between England and Israel It was as if you were called upon to declare yourself and to make a choice.

AN earlier generation had known this conflict in a different form. Within the terms of an Enlightenment vision of modernity these should be a straightforward response, that you are ‘Englsih’ and you that you happened to have a different religious beliefs were recognized and excluded from civil society. As far as they had been concerned, religious beliefs were recognized. But English Jewish who felt for theit co-religionists in Germany were themselves questioned because they were told that these people who were suffering were Germans or Poles while they were ‘ Englsih’ . So English Jews felt that they had to hide their feelings for what was going on. They were made to feel that it was wrong for them to feel so angry and hurt..

Modernity established a firm distinction between public and private spheres. Within the public sphere of citizenship, we existed as free and equal rational seleves. It was only in the private sphere of family that difference was acknowleged, and then only as individual differences of baelief. As Jews we were supposed to be ‘ invisble’ in public where we learnt that we were to be ‘like everyone else’, whilst in the grounds. This creats an ambivalence that is familiar to different generations of refugee children. The ease with which you learnt to switch, often assuming different identities within these different spheres, makes switching almost automatic. But you also learn to police these boundaries and you can feel uneasy when school friends come home. I can still feel some of the tension. I can also appreciate the efforts my mother went to provide and abundance of food, as if to compensate for grounds of unease.

Double consciousness/ double identities

Growing up within the refugee community in North-west London, we often had a limilted sense of our parents as ‘refugees.’ This ws partly because they were in many cases the lucky ones who had had the money and the connections to leave. We were living in a relatively prosperous middle-class community. In London in the 1950s to different was abnormal and this was a fear. Often it was important for us, as children to remind ourselves that we were born in England so we must be ‘English’. The logic seemed incontrovertible and so reassuring. At some level we did not want to feel ourselves as different and we invoked the will not to ‘be different’.

As children we learnt about the war and were told about the Nazis, but often this lesson was in gerneralised trems; sometimes as a warning against thinking we might marry anyone who was not Jewish. AS Anne Karpf has said recently, ‘other children were told the stories about monsters, goblins and wicked witches; we leant about the Nazis’. We learnt about what had happened to the Jews was there in the background of everyday life to be mentioned at times, but not really to be explained. Often we learnt about what had happened to the Jews during the war through the same newsreel images of dead bodies as anymore else. Often the images were overwhelming and very little was said about them. It was left to us to imagine that they could be our uncles and aunts. It was too terrifying – and the realization only came much later in adult years- to recognize that theu could also be our cousins. We did not want to left these images in, because they threateaned the sense we needed of living a ‘normal’ and ‘happy’ childhood.

Often we learnt to watch in silence, feeling uneasy for our parents, in some way instinctively wanting to protect them. We learnt not to expect the adults to say much. It was as os we had already abrorbed their pain unconsciously as the second generation. At some level we knew that, whatever they had suffered, they had experienced in their own lives. They had been separated from their parents at a young age and often had not reveived the love they needed. Somehow it wa our task as children to make it good for them. We knew the wounds could not be healed, but art least we could learn to expect very little for ourseves. Often we leant to responsible before it was time. Many children in the second generation learnt to look after their own parents, automatically forsaking their own need. This altruism could seem the least they could do.

As children we learnt to not to ask about the war and what had happened to the wider family. We learnt that our parents ‘had suffered enough’. We learnt to hide and conceal our own unhappiness and depression from them, for we did not want to add to their pain. Rather we learnt to collude in the idea that we had everything we could want. I even learnt to believe this when my father died, somehow not need to mourn ourselves. We had to exercise grief in the privacy of our own dreams. But children often leant to blame themselves and it was easu for me to promise in my dreams that ‘ I would be good’ if only my dad would come back.

The questions that at some level haunted our childhoods, though they were rarely articulated, were ‘How didi our parents survive whem so many people too difficult and painful to voice, so often they were unconsciously passed on to the second genertation. But theu were not questions that we could ask anyone; reather they were left hanging. Sometimes they were questions whose presence we achive in whatever arena, to prove aht we are entitlement but somehow we had to redeem and make doos the broken livers of our parents. This act of redemption was not something that was consciously demanded. It could be expressed in a look of disappointment. That was more than enough.

Anglo-Jewry in the 1950s was in many ways a frozen, tranmatised community that had not really begun to come to terms with the Shaoh. The child refugees, such as Kitty Hart, describe in ther Return to Auschwitz how quickly they learnt on arrival in England not to talk, even to their closest family, about their camp experience. She was told by her uncle that people would just not was told by her uncle that prople would just not want to know and not embarrass them. She kept her silence until the 1970s and her own family were grow-up before she started to share some of her experience. Post-war England wasnted to turn its back on the sufferings of the war and did not want to be reminded of what had happened to European Jewry. Life was to get back to normal and people were looking towards a new future. They did not want to be reminded of the past, or else only in the herotic terms of the movies.

The refugees who lived in England throughout the war learnt to fit in as best they could. They werefrom nowhere and didi not really have a past’. They had been uprooted, as Simone Weil describes ti, in both space and time. Their energies were to be given over to making a living as best they could. SO it was hardly surprising if we felt strangely suspended and uprooted as children, doing our best to root ourselves in often not very hospitable English manners and cystoms, It was wasy to feel that whatever you did you were ‘not right’- your nose was too big or you talked too emotionally with your hands. You learnt to contain yourself, for often it fell to you as childerne to mediate between your parents and the host community. A some level, despite every thing that you didi, you felt yourself an outsider. This is why it was so exciting when Colin Wilson published the Outsider in the late 1950s. It helped to name a significant felling and it gave some acceptability to it. Years before post-modernism it created a limited space for difference and named a tradition of double consciousness. The assimilationist English culture was still very much intact, but there were some spaces opening up. It could help to make you a little more self-accepting, a little easier and less judgmental on yourself.

Embodying difference

It was in the 1960s that the cracks in modernity began to show. With the influx of an Afro-Caribbean population and the racism which the community met in terms of jobs and housing, there was others who were not going to be able to live out their dreams of the ‘mother country’ The high expectations were soon dashed and the realities of life in an England which was so resistant to the notion of a multicultural community ere hard. It toll time to recognize that it was not simple an issue of individual prejudice but that there was institutionalized racism that had to be confronted. It was a matter of undoing the like not only between being English and being Christian that the Jewish community had to confront but also between English and being white. Historically there had also been the issue of whether Jews were ‘white’ and in earlier times they were not allowed to be even if they wanted to. Whiteness was tied up with the conditions of modernity.

As Christianity had supposedly superseded Judaism, as Daniel Boyar in has it. The disembodied spirit had superseded ‘carnal Israel’, so within modernity the mind was to control the body. The identification of Judaism with the body sexuality and ‘carnality’ was central to the anti-Semitic discourses of the West. It helped to produce its own forms of Jewish self-hatred, which Self-hatred, which Sander Gillman has explored.

The language of monorities often fails to recognize the ease with which ‘others’ come to see themselves through the eyes of the dominant culture. As Simon Weil grasps it, this failure is part of the working power. It is also something that mirror and has to come to terms with his negative feelings about his own body. His body stands as a reminder of the ‘uncivilised’ and he has been brought up within a colonial culture to despise it. He shares his inner struggle to shift his attitude and feelings about his body and so about himself. Here is an inner link between the internalized oppression of racism and the Jewish self-hatred that Gillman explores in Jeweish Self-hatred. Often these struggles take place away from the gaze of the public sphere. In public people learn to hide these inner struggles and present themselves in more acceptable ways.

Its attention to the multiplicity of voices within texts can also help to show, as in Bryan Cheyette’s work, ‘the Jew’, so helping us question what is taken to be a ‘native’ assumption in relation to a too homogenized vision of ‘the Jew’. It is only through the display of meanings within a particular literary text that we can say what the display of meanings within a particular literary text that we can say what meaning is being given ‘to the Jew’. But this literary practice, alive as it is to the multiplicities of deferred meanings, involves its own forms of denial. As with Lyotard’s discussion of ‘ the Jew’ this practice finds it difficult to give adequate recognitions of the Jews as people. It unwittingly servers to silence this discussion, as it too often gets caught in a circle of representations. It is just this circle that Lecvinas helps to break in his recognition of ethical obligations to the ‘the other’.

Modernity is still to be named as a secularized Christian project in its rationalist disdain for the body, sexualities and emotional life. If recent postmodern work has sought to give belated recognition to the body and emotional life as sources of knowledge, it has too often focused upon the play of the meanings within text. This focus makes it difficult to recognize how racism and anti-racism are entwined within the terms of modernity. In more recent years young Jews have learnt from young black man and women. The notion that ‘black is beautiful’ involved a reevaluation of what has so easily been devalued and despised. As ypung Afro-Cariggean men and women have also had to come to terms with slavery, without being limited by it, so young Jewish men and women have demanded the spave to come to terms with the Shiah, without limiting Jewish identities to this experience. These explorations are shared in art and literature as they are in the cinema, Yhe Jewish film festival has been significant in sharing these representations.

We may be able to celebrate the nee hybrid identities that are being created, but we must not minimize the pain that is experienced as young people feel torn between different cultural inheritances. The high rate of young Asian women who have committed suicide should make us more aware of the emotional and material diddiculries that people jave to endure, before they can feel at ease with themselves in the new settings. A re-visioning of England which allows recognition of a multi-culture, society will offer more space for the exploration of diverse identities vegore we jade really inderstood the complex attachments to cultures and tradition. If these ate not to ve automatically defied in negative terms, we need to refigure Enlightenment notions of modernity.

As they have learnt from their own bitter experience , the issue is not exclusively a matter of what representations are available in the broader culture , important as this is , but also how we eant to voice our own his /her stories. For second generation that has frown up in the shadows of the Shoah, it has been a matter of whether you can find a voice at all in the face of the pain of that suffering. It has also veen aeuwion, which Tisebweig and Gevuabs has suffering , It has also veen aquestuion, whichTisenseig and have stifled with, if whither you can speak our of thevitality of a living Jewishtraditiuon within contemporary cyltires, Yhis has to e part of a re-visioning of Tngland as much as it has to be pat of a reframing of what has been so easily talked aobut as ‘Christian’ Europe.

Postscript

Why does it still feel so difficult to talk more personally about these questions of Jewish identities in an academic context? Is it because at some level I still feel that ther is something shameful and that I fear being rejected if I share some of these feelings? Is this feat of rejection in the particular form that it takes lined to masculinity, since Jewish feminists seem more easily to blend the personal with the theoretical? Are ther particular issues that come into play when it comes to speak theoretical? Are they particular issues that come into play when it comes to speaking about Jewish masculinities? Is it as if with modernity you can only prove that you are a ‘man enough’ if you are ready to be silent about your Jeweishness? For there is almost a contradiction in terms that bring ‘Jewish’ and ‘man’ together, for there is a culturally entrenched notion within modernity that Jewish men are ‘really’ feminine. This is a fear talked about in relation to Weininger. It means that they are somehow ‘pretending ‘to be other than what they are.

This act of pretence links in complex ways to the issue of being exposed or ‘found out’, a sense that at some level, as Jewish, you ate somehow already guilty and that if people somehow discover that you are Jewish they would show you the door. So you learnt automatically to conceal your Jewish identity , unless you feel if is safe to reveal it. This feeling is linked to a fear of being found out even though you may not have the slightest understanding what it refers to. It connects to the familiar feelings , reproduced within the terms of modernity that if people get to know that you are Jewish they will reject you, so you had better keep this particular piece of information to yourself, This reaction becomes so automatic a part of a process of self-policing that you are barely aware you are doing it. The fear, so of a process of self-policing that you are barely aware you are doing it, The fear, so present for the second generation, is that won’t be ‘save’ and that it is best to keep yourself hidden and concealed.

When I turned up on Sunday morning to give my paper to the conference for which this chapter was originally written, I was very politely told that I had been two weeks and had not been able to contact me, so assumed that I no longer wanted to do the paper. This explanation made me feel very uneasy; part of me felt that I should just leave there and then; part of me also knew that I had wanted to contact the organizers but had not felt the need, because I was on the last draft of the programme that had been sent out. But at some unconscious level I was struck that it probably also had to do with my unease at talking about some of these issues directly and personally within a academic environment, I know that the suggestion for the paper had been warmly welcomed by the organizers, bet this support did not stop me feeling uneasy.

It was as if these issues should not be talked about in public, that it was too risky and too dangerous. At some level I was speaking in such a setting on such themes. But once I had begun I felt a lot easier. I felt as if some kind of load had lifted and I felt a little fuller in myself. The discussion it provoked was interesting and fruitful and helped to focus some important questions. Not it also made me feel a little odd for it somehow confirmed in public that I had a ‘different’ past and that I was forced to deal with issues in my growing up that seemed quite strange to many people. It was as if a re-visioning of England and what it could mean to be English was going on in the room.

At the same time as I was talking about a Jewish childhood in which I wanted to be normal and like every one else-and this is partly how I experienced myself internally-it was also difficult to live in public with the strangeness of the history that I was sharing. It was as if I had to meet myself in a different public, possibly for the first time. But in many wasys it also helped me explain different things I have felt in the past. From now on I think it is going to be a little easier and I will feel a little more at ease with myself and with my Jewishness. It is part of a process of coming out as Jewish. I do not think it will be easy but it will be easier.

As we went for lunch a young Irishman pulled me aside to say how much her had learnt form the session. He told me that just the week before his mother had come down to Dublin to spend an evening with him. They had shared a bottle of wine. This had almost never happened before and he sensed that she had some thing to tell him. The wanted to tell him about his middle names – he had two and one was acknowledged as Huguenot and talked about in the family, and the other was Jewish. He heard for the first time that his maternal grandmother had been Jewish. This discovery had been unsettling to the sense of identity which be Jewish . This discovery had always carried the second middle name but never really knew what it meant-‘it was just a name’.

But it was probing very helpful for him to know about the cultural derivation of this naming for it made a number if things clearer to him. He had always felt very much at ease with Jewish friends and often wondered why this should be so. He had found himelf with close Jewish friends ar different times in his life. It is easy to think of this discovery as a coincidence byt itraises question , questions we have difficulty think about within a rationalist culture about hidden/buried identiries and what it is we can be said to ‘carry’ from our ancestors. These are questions that African traditions have little difficult with, but, even with the openings of postcolonial literatures, we often refuse to validate traditional forms of knowledge. It could be said , in Walter Benjamin’s terms, that some ‘spave ‘ had been filled out in his aura with this new information that his mother had passed on to him. She had felt the urgency to make a special visit. She had recognized that this was significant information which she had withheld and which, you could say, he had a right to know. It was significant if he was to revise this identity.

Knowing a little more of where he had come form , he also knew a little more about who he is. Within a homogenized vision of England, these knowledges have been long suppressed. People did not often want to recover the complexities of Englishness, so often played out in relation to the Jews. This is not simply a matter of available knowledge, for you have to be ready to heat what is being said. He process that cannot be forced, nor is it a matter of will. Often it is a matter of taking the next step when you are ready for it.

Someone else came up who was also from an Irish background, though this had been barely acknowledge when he was growing up. His mother had done her best tp present herself as ‘English’, but now he felt it was important for him to explore his Irish inheritance. This was part of a felt knowledge about himself, though he could not really explain it. He just knw in some way that it was something that he needed to do for himself. It was not simply a matter of reframing experience in terms of a different discourse. Rather it opened up difficult issues about the relationship of language to experience.

Such responses often follow the breaking of a silence and they are heartening when they are made. But often these realizations remain are odds with the dominant ways we theories identities within contemporary theoretical frameworks. These traditions also have to be shifted if we are to bring light to bear upon complex identities which have for so long been denied and shamed. This shift to complex, previously denied identities is a crucial part of the re-visioning of England. It has often been in the darkness of the cinema or in the privacy of reading literature that some of these connections have been made. It has been though extending the realm of imagination that we have also been able to vice aspects of our his/her stories that have for so ling been repressed in the name of an England that has long passed.

17th December, a day to remember.

I just came back from Manchester and couldn't wait to input my whole expirence for today. I dreamed to travel alone years ago. Today I put it into practice. That's it.

4 of us set off in the morning from Liverpool St. Lime Station, after having dinner in a Chinese restaurant in Manchester, I said to them: “Well, take care. How about we separate here. I want to travel alone."

" Don't be stupid, man." They tried to convince me to give up this silly thought. But I just made up my decision.

" Okay, if you insist. Take care. See you." 

"See you then in Liverpool." I made a "V" gesture.

Before that, I had already got a plan in mind. The first place for my trip would be the centre library and then I would head to the University of Manchester. I searched the locations on Google Earth. From Centre Library to the University of Manchester, what I needed to do was walking down the Oxford Road, no turns, simple and clear.

Since I was not familiar with the city, in case of getting lost, I bought a city map from a convenience store. Okay, map in hand, there was nothing for me to worried about anymore.

Now I was standing on the Peter Street. I was pretty sure about that. Oxford Road actually was connected with it. I couldn't miss it. The map made me feel more confident. Struggling in cold wind, I advanced with great zeal. Suddenly China Arch appeared. Oh, no! The wrong way had I chosen. Mosley Street. Why the hell I would be in this street. I searched my Mini City Map. My eyes were full of Latin Alphabets. In some places there were printed from left to right; somewhere from right to left; somewhere from top to bottom. Fuck this map off! I got confused and I had to admit a fact: I got loooooooooooooost!

Who could help me out! Suddenly a bus came to my side. Okay I didn't want to wast my time. So I got on the bus, asking the driver:

" Sorry mate, is this bus to the University of Manchester?"

"Yeah~"

Ahh, I had a feeling of relief.

So I took a seat, dreaming this bus would take me to the place I wanted to go. University of Manchester, such big university, there was no possiblity that I would not see it from the bus. So I told myself: "Get relaxed. You can't miss it." So I looked out of the window, the darkness began to fall down. Lights were on. What a superb view! Half an hour passed and I still couldn’t find a university. What I knew was that the buildings became less and less crowded. University! My eyes were lit up by this word. What?! Saleford University~ what the hell~ I opened my map. Checking closely in the south corner, word by word, alphabet by alphabet, there was no such university around the University of Manchester. "That's funny?" I murmured. Okay let it be. I began to refold my mini map. At last in the West North corner I found the Saleford University. The two universities are actually in the opposite direction. Nothing would be worse than that. 40 minutes ago, I got lost in the city centre. Now this bus took me to somewhere cold and dark. I got out of the bus. Nobody walking in the street, my destination shifted from finding University of Manchester to finding some human being. It was amazing and ironic~ At last I successfully found a woman, not so beautiful but really helpful. She told me what bus should I took :

" Young man, this bus will not automatically take you to the university. Get off in the Piccadilly Garden. Then ask the driver."

"Cheers~"

Feeling starving and freezing, I was standing beside the lamp alone. Only the warmly yellow light shedding from the lamp could offer me hope. A strange feeling arising from my soul: I would found you at any cost. With this thought, I began to cheer up. The bus came, I got on it. This time I became clever. I asked the driver to tell me when to get off. Another 40 minutes, I arrived at Piccadilly Garden. And I asked a police. He told me how to go to the University of Manchester. I changed another bus. Standing beside the driver, I couldn't allow any mistake happening this time.

Another 15 minutes, oh I saw her at last- University of Manchester!

The rest things were easy. I only needed to find out where the Lime Grove building is. The god seemed to play trick on me for the last time. Lime Grove Building had already changed its name into Samuel Alexander Building years ago. However it didn't take me very long to find it out.

“Confucius Institution, I'm coming...."

"15th December" I murmured to myself. 3 months bofore, I went out from the Manchester Airport. Taking a deep breath of the fresh air, this was the first time that I had the taste of something called "freedom" . As the temperature fell, my overheated emotions also began to cool- my excitement and fears. Drinking beer in front of the laptop, the shining screen light made me dizzy sometimes.

I saw a hazy shape reflected on the screen. Is the shadow mine? I cannot recognize it anymore. Had I really changed too much to be indentified?  I couldn't offer an exactly answer. Someone said I had undergone tremendous changes. Well, that was really a good guess. Eating bread sometimes, drinking coffee sometimes, accpcepting girls smoking, learning Scouse, making stupid joke. Even for myself, I thought I was doing somthing great. Because I tried to cross a line that I would never touch before. "Okay man! You should be prond of yourself~ You make some changes, no matter progress or decay." A voice said. Yes, I am eager for some changes.  I wanted to turn my back against myself, cause I felt him so isolated and boring.  Betray myself, do something different! This thought occurred to me from time to time.

Suddenly I realize how childish is it to have such thought. Looking into the mirror, a man asked me:" Mate, what are you doing there?' Yeah, what I was doing here. Betray myself? Stupid answer, isn't it. If you are pretending to be some one that you actually are not, the question following is what sort of man you want to be?

Everybody is different. However, apparently, no one is satisfied by himself.  Pretending to be someone who never exist or facing yourself directly? I've found the later way suits me better. Travelling far away from home, my dream is to find out how I am, what things I can do.  Each day has taken me closer to this aim, I believe.

the dawn of 16th December-

yesterday

how far off!