Atone deaf

The Day of Atonement usually comes but once a year. In our house, it came whenever my father damn well pleased. A childhood encompassing escape from 1930s Berlin to set up home in the UK as a dispossessed, orphaned Jewish teenager who spoke only German and Hebrew gave him, not altogether surprisingly, the sense that organised religion hadn’t done him or his family much in the way of favours thus far (cosmic wishing, at that time, not having been invented) – so he decided to ditch it.

The world, he told us, would be a better place if all religion were abolished, given that it tends to benefit only those who are card-carrying believers of whichever God happens to be in vogue with those in power.

These were fine sentiments. Unfortunately, being Jewish isn’t something it’s easy to give up. It’s a race thing. You can’t be born a Christian. With a Jewish mother, you can’t be anything else. My father did his best, marrying a Gentile or, as we liked to call her, Mum, but however hard he worked on renouncing his Jewish ancestry, it insisted periodically on creeping up on him and giving him a gentle nip on the bottom.

His resulting bouts of ambivalence had me swinging from steeple to synagogue faster than Tarzan in a cassock. One minute I’d be belting out ‘There is a green hill far away’ in school with the rest of my Church of England class mates - Christianity might have manifest flaws but at least they were conveyed in a language I could understand - the next, thanks to a letter from my father, I’d be whisked into a side room for a quick burst of Jewish assembly, where a clever girl called Natasha led the prayers in Hebrew and I mouthed the words, miserably conscious that I was opening the book at the wrong end and that every word I failed to pronounce proclaimed nothing but my half and half, in-between status to the world.

Because my father had married out, I was not only not Jewish but, as my father occasionally reminded me when I was being a bit uppity, ‘worse than a bastard’ in the eyes of the orthodox Jewish community. I felt bad about this for years, until I worked out that unless I’d used latent pre-foetal telepathic powers to bring my parents together, they could have been part Klingon and it still wouldn’t have been my fault.

Objectively, of course, my father knew this. But his heroic early history – scrimping and saving to buy food for his parents; wheeling and dealing until he acquired a pistol when Jews faced severe punishment for possessing firearms – made him, I now believe, envious not only of his own child’s relatively pampered existence but also of the fact that I took it for granted. He did his best to get the message across, lending me grim autobiographies of life in concentration camps; one, I remember, was called, simply, ‘I survived’. I read them as I read everything, fast and uncritically, enjoying it as a gripping adventure story while feeling guiltily conscious that this wasn’t what I was supposed to feel.

Some mixed marriages provide a happy fusion of cultures. In my family, what we ended up with was a kind of religious half-life that concentrated on all the negative emotions – notably guilt and fear - provided in generous abundance by all religions everywhere, and avoided anything approaching a celebration. My father’s belief – that we were sufficiently Jewish not to celebrate Christian festivals, but not Jewish enough to enjoy theirs, made Christmas a tough time as my mother, whose birthday also fell on December 25th, felt strongly that celebration of some description was essential and resorted to guerrilla tactics, planting decorations at night like explosives, and disguising entire Christmas trees as over-sized pot plants. We even managed a Christmas meal of sorts, although my father’s valiant attempts to fight back by refusing to make small talk were so successful that one year, when we timed it, we sped from turkey to crackers in under 15 minutes.

My father’s dead now, but his half and half legacy lives on. Even at his funeral we mixed and matched, playing traditional Jewish prayers for the dead but scattering his ashes in the woodland he loved – something his parents would have considered sacrilegious but we thought he would approve of.

Now I have to work out what, if anything, to do about my own children. Their ancestry shouldn’t, of course, make any difference in a society where religion is, supposedly, in decline. And for those in full possession of their spiritual credentials, whether or not they choose to flash them about in public, this is probably true. But, as with all these things, religion looks anything but a spent force when you’re having to operate on its fringes.

My children know that their inheritance confers a difference that I’d like them to be proud of, but they don’t really understand what it is. The youngest keeps asking to be christened; I keep saying no. Christmas, with Santa’s visit and a string of light polluting, ASBO-worthy outside decorations has become a big deal but when we go to church, I mumble my way through the prayers and leave out Jesus’ name when it appears.

All this I can live with. But I struggle with legacy of the Holocaust. To me it’s a family memory. To my children, it’s something to tick off on the list of National Curriculum projects, a bad thing that happened to other people a long time ago and has nothing to do with them.

Some of my cousins, who share my half and half inheritance, have gone the other way, strengthening the blend by marrying Jewish partners and having children who, within a generation or two, will be up to full religious strength. I’ve gone for full camouflage, with an identity, name and lifestyle that relegates my Jewish ancestry to an interesting sideline in dinner party conversation.

For now, that’s where it will stay. But, every now and then, as I survey my children, the irony of their situation strikes me. For while their Jewish ancestry remains something they comprehend only with difficulty, if at all, the Nazi party, which required only one Jewish grandparent to have shipped them straight off to a concentration camp, would have had no problem acknowledging the legitimacy of their inheritance straight away.