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110 pages

English

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Actress and playwright Vanessa Rosenthal has been searching for her identity her whole life. Is she Jewish or not? English or not? This character, or that, on and off stage? As she explores these conflicting positions, her frank and funny findings form the basis of this fascinating memoir, bringing her to no fixed conclusion. Vanessa's story covers her early life and family - and how her mother's conversion to Judaism sowed the seed of being on the outside looking in. It takes the reader through her years of marriage and family, and the comic trials and successes of life as an actor, mother, wife and 'establishment' partner as well as her travels in Europe and Israel. Along the way she examines many taboos on Jewishness, including the deeply sensitive subject of how Judaism deals with conversion.The questions persist despite a happy and creative life, bursting at the seams but this multifaceted and moving memoir moves her closer to one answer: as an apparently insufficiently Jewish Jew, what or who should she be? This memoir will appeal to readers who enjoyed Lynn Barber's An Education and Laura Cumming's On Chapel Sands.

Sujets

Philosophie et théologie

Memoir

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Publié par	Distributed by eBookpartnership
Date de parution	21 octobre 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781839784040
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	17 Mo

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Extrait

INSIDE OUT
A LIFE IN STAGES
Vanessa Rosenthal

Published by RedDoor www.reddoorpress.co.uk
© 2021 Vanessa Rosenthal
The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permissions granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book
Extract on page 175 and p.178 from ‘Fern Hill’ by Dylan Thomas. Taken from The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas: The Centenary Edition published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson © The Dylan Thomas Trust, published with permission. Also taken from ‘Fern Hill’ by Dylan Thomas, from The Poems of Dylan Thomas , copyright 1945 by The Trustees for the copyrights of Dylan Thomas. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
All material by Karen Gershon published with permission of Stella Tripp
‘Lady of Letters’ in Talking Heads by Alan Bennett published with permission of Alan Bennett
The right of Vanessa Rosenthal to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the author
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Typesetting: Jen Parker, Fuzzy Flamingo www.fuzzyflamingo.co.uk
Cover design: Clare Connie Shepherd
Cover image: Vanessa Rosenthal as Fanny Margolies in Arthur Miller’s The American Clock (Newcastle Opera House, 1988)
To Judith, Nerissa, Emilia and Nigel

Contents
Chapter 1
BELONGING?
Chapter 2
LONDON LIGHTS
Chapter 3
BEGINNERS ON STAGE
Chapter 4
‘LET ME NOT ADMIT IMPEDIMENTS’
Chapter 5
ALL ROADS ROAM TO LEEDS
Chapter 6
‘BY INDIRECTIONS FIND DIRECTIONS OUT’
Chapter 7
EASTERN EUROPE
Chapter 8
RUTH
Chapter 9
NEW HORIZONS
Chapter 10
BIALYSTOK TO BURNLEY
Chapter 11
NORMANDY AND BEYOND
Chapter 12
BEING EARNEST
Chapter 13
TWILIGHT
Chapter 14
‘WRITING THE CENTURY’
Chapter 15
A NEW END
Chapter 16
AND NOW
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
BELONGING?
I am six years old and standing in line with my class at cheder (Hebrew school) and at long last I have inherited the brown, velvet dress that my sister Judith has outgrown. I’ve begged and pleaded to be allowed to wear it today, against some dissent from my mother. For two years I’ve coveted its short, puffed sleeves and its crocheted lace collar, but I’ve had a growth spurt over the autumn and the hem of the dress now barely skims the top of my thighs, which are mottled with pink and mauve splodges because of the cold. We are in the inadequately heated, prefabricated warehouse that stands in for a Reform synagogue on Cheetham Hill Road in Manchester. Plans for the building of a new synagogue in the city centre have been put on hold ‘because of the war’.
‘Because of the war’ is a commonplace in the vocabulary of my school playground. Because of the war that ended five years ago there are bombed-out craters throughout the city centre. There’s a bombed-out shop across the road where Judith and I will catch the bus home at the end of Hebrew classes. Willowherb grows up through its collapsed rafters. We are forbidden to play in it, but we will. Because of the war sweets are on ration; so are many other things and when we play at shop, we cut out the coloured squares from the old ration books our mother lets us have with the blunt scissors from my toy post office set.
I’m not really paying attention as we recite the ‘ Shema ’ (central prayer of Judaism) which I’ve learned rote fashion. Hebrew is very inadequately taught to girls of my generation. Every Sunday, before we file off to our separate classrooms, all of us children come together with our teachers for morning prayers. Suddenly I’m aware of Miss Myers staring at me. She looks very angry, which makes her beaky, thin face really scary. As soon as the prayers finish she pulls me out of line by one of the puffed sleeves on my dress and hauls me up to the rabbi, who stands at the front. She is muttering something about the indecency of my hem line and the inappropriateness of the velvet dress. I sense that she is overanxious to ingratiate herself with the handsome rabbi. Maybe Sunday mornings provide a frisson of excitement in her bleak, spinster life. Now she’s whispering to him, but not quietly enough. I can hear every word. She is saying ‘Fancy sending the child to cheder dressed like this. It’s not decent. And look at her. I don’t think she’s Jewish at all.’
This is 1950. My parent’s mixed marriage and my mother’s conversion to Judaism is still a rare phenomenon for the times. One much gossiped about behind closed doors and shunned altogether in certain quarters. I squirm on the spot. I know enough to realise there are secrets in my family; that the air sometimes parts and leaves spaces when my tall, auburn-haired mother enters a room. I know my father’s family maintain only a distant and condescending connection to us. Minus extant grandparents on either side we are a family of four, in a culture that embraces family connections to the far outer reaches of cousinhood. I know I look like my mother because people have told me so and my dark-haired sister looks like my father.
There is a pause and then the rabbi whispers back to Miss Myers. He is saying, and meaning it kindly, that it’s all right. That he knows the parents and that my mother is a convert. Both of them then look at me with some sympathy and the rabbi tells me to go back into my line.
Now it’s spring time, nearly Easter and nearly Passover. I’m too young to make the slightest connection between the two or to know the Crucifixion occurred when Jesus was in Jerusalem to observe the Passover Festival in a seder for ever after known to the world as ‘The Last Supper’.
Instead we have matzos and chocolate, but not at the same time. Any of the latter has to be reserved until the festival is over. For its week long duration we eat only matzos with no buns, biscuits or foodstuffs of any kind that contain leaven, to commemorate the haste with which we left Egypt when Pharaoh let us go.
On the first night of Passover we celebrate with a family seder at my Auntie Bessie’s and my Uncle Adolph’s house. Bessie, full name Rebecca, is my father’s first cousin and his elder by twenty years. She is the only cousin of that generation to be born in Bialystok, then in Russia, now in Poland. Her parents, Samuel and Leah, left her as a six-month-old baby with Leah’s widowed mother when they migrated to Britain around 1884. Once they were established in Manchester in a small drapery business, Leah’s mother was to come over, bringing the baby with her; a task she duly accomplished with every intention of remaining. But after a year, her misery at the sight of the blackened cityscape of nineteenth-century Manchester drove her back home. She left behind her, as well as the baby, her younger daughter, Jane. Now the tale takes on a familiar Jewish twist. In due course, Samuel invited his brother Eleazer to join him from Russia and, lo and behold, Eleazer met Jane and there was a shidduch (match)! When Jane and Eleazer married, at the Great Synagogue in Manchester, family ties were then doubly cemented. Bessie’s children and my father’s children, Judith and myself, thus share the same four great-grandparents. This should make us doubly connected: it doesn’t.
By the time of this seder in 1950 none of these great-grandparents or grandparents were alive. Grandmother Jane was alive at the time of my parents’ wedding and shunned the whole event as a sign of the tragedy she felt had befallen her son, my father Leonard, in marrying ‘out’. This sense of being not acceptable is one I have already absorbed in a process of osmosis: if my mother isn’t, and wasn’t, acceptable then maybe I’m not either. I don’t know anything yet about words like identity crisis, but I will recognise the concept intellectually as I grow up and trail it behind me as I go on in life.
So here we are. Uncle Adolph at the top of the table. Bessie at the bottom with her two sons, Leslie and Harry, together with their wives and their two children apiece, arranged along the sides of the table. Our family is down the bottom, near Bessie, a woman of character and intelligence and one of the few people here who genuinely and warmly accepts my mother. We like Bessie, although her appearance startles us a little. Now in her mid-sixties, her hair is dyed jet black and pulled tight to sit in a bun on the top of her head. Her complexion is parchment white from the layers of powder that sit on her cheeks and her mouth is permanently turned down. Judith and I think it is because of the misery she must endure married to Uncle Adolph, a narrow-minded, bigoted man with eyes only for his progeny and their children.
Leslie and Harry are nearer my father in age, although it is Bessie who is my father’s first cousin. The twenty years between Bessie and my father sets all the generations in a jumble. Leslie, like my father, is a GP and is married to the glacial Florence, who is a rabbi’s daughter, and Harry is married to the blonde, Irene.
We begin. I love the sound of the men racing each other as they daven (pray in an energetic, emphatic manner) their way through the Passover story, my father amongst them. Here he is a real me