Why Anti-Semitism Matters by Denis Macshane

The first political pamphlet I ever wrote was in 1978. It revealed and denounced the indifference of British newspapers and television to the problems facing the black and Asian communities in the UK. It asked why there were no Afro-Caribbean or Asian broadcasters, reporters, news-readers or by-lines in our papers. I cited the anti-Semitism of the Daily Mail and Daily Express in the 1930s when they told readers that too many Jews were being allowed into Britain from Germany and that our small island could not face any more aliens arriving to disturb social harmony or compete for professional jobs. I argued that in some respects the media treatment of the then BME communities in the 1960s and 1970s had some similarities.
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Faith and The Believers

What prompted you to explore a specifically Jewish family?

I knew early on that I wanted to write about the child of atheist parents becoming religious and the daughter of atheist Jewish parents becoming a ba’al teshuvah, it seemed particularly rich in possibilities. I liked the idea of having one kind of religious Jewish identity confront another secular form of Jewish identity based on progressive politics and social activism. My husband and I have had a series of debates/negotiations over the years about Jewishness and Judaism and in particular how we want to raise our children. (We are both atheists, but I grew up celebrating Christmas and my husband was raised Orthodox). Making my fictional family Jewish was, at one level, a convenient way to translate some of these discussions into the novel. Read more

Shadow Play

On summer evenings, Uncle Nathan used to put on shadow plays. With nothing but ten fingers and a beam of light against a plain white wall, he astounded us with lions and monkeys, alligators and train engines. All eyes watched, riveted, when the silhouette magic began. He didn’t ask for much — a wall, a light. In the back rows of wedding halls, or when holiday dinners were winding down, his fans would gather to marvel: a butterfly, an antelope, Theodor Herzl, a turtle.

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Afterword: on translating The Seventh Well

Fred Wander called his recollections Das gute Leben,  The Good Life — good not in either of its narrow senses of virtuous or epicurean, but rich, full, kindly, generous.  Its alternate title is Von der Fröhlichkeit im Schrecken — something like ‘remaining cheerful in the midst of horror. ’ He was born in Vienna in 1917,  and died there almost ninety years later,  in 2006. The horror was, if one may so put it,  in the midst of the cheerfulness. Between 1939 and 1945,  he was an inmate of twenty different Nazi camps in France, Germany, and Poland.   Read more

My Man Malamud

I never met him. I know exactly where I was standing when I heard he was dead. It was in March 1986 and a friend came in to tell me that the Jewish American novelist I admired had died. ‘Saul Bellow,’ he said, then paused, ‘No, Bernard Malamud’, he corrected himself.

It was a Malamud moment — mainly serious, half comic, also awkward. I remember I thought to myself: I will never get to meet him now, though I had never before thought of doing so. Malamud, not Bellow, was my man. In July 2005 I was sitting in the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, reading my way through the Malamud archive there and read this in a notebook entry for 21 October 1976: ‘Bellow gets Nobel Prize. I win $24.25 in poker.’ This was the little man, the one who always felt he came second, who, while shaving, would mutter unconvincingly to himself in the mirror, ‘Someday I’m going to win.’ He had known no real success until he published his first novel at the age of 38. I can guess what he would have said the day I heard I was shortlisted for the Wingate Prize. But at least it wasn’t alongside a biography of Saul Bellow. Read more