This is my story. Scratch a Jew and you’ve got a story. If you don’t like elaborate picaresques full of unlikely events and tortuous explanations, steer clear of the Jews. If you want things to be straightforward, find someone else to listen to. You might even get to say something yourself.
A book worth discovery, just as best-kept secret British author Linda Grant launches another this year, WHEN I LIVED IN MODERN TIMES [2002] is a deep dive into the chaotic coming-of-age of a British Jew in the post-war pre-partition period in Palestine. [1946 - 1948] Grant paints a fascinating picture of that time in that place.
Cake seemed to be the principal sustenance of the inhabitants of Tel Aviv and Netanya. The cafes sold many kinds: gateaux with cream, like the Belgians made in SoHo; tortes from Vienna made with glazes of apricot jam; cheesecakes from Poland and Russia; and tiny syrupy, flaky things, decorated with small green nuts. All these you could have at any time of the day or night in Tel Aviv and it was said that if the Messiah was ever to return to the Holy Land he would have to go to the cafes to deliver his message to the people.
With no means and no family, nineteen year-old Evelyn, heeding the advice of her mother’s long-time lover, ships off to Palestine, where she foregoes a plan to be an artist in favor of surviving as a hairdresser. She vacillates between Jewish and Gentile identity. She struggles to makes sense of British colonialism. She enters a passionate affair with a man who seems to embody the masculine ideal she missed in an absentee father, but whose daily activities are a mystery. And she struggles to comprehend a chaotic transient way of life foreign to her bedrock British heritage.
We had our thinkers and now what we needed were fighters, Jews who scared the living daylights out of people. The other choices had their merit, but Johnny’s seemed to promise the most certain outcome. Now, of course, knowing what we know, perhaps I would have decided differently but the future is a door into a darkened room and however much you fumble for the light switch you will never find it.
Grant’s sharply observed detail – dress and scent and topography – reveal in simple prose what most of us cannot imagine: the rise of a new nation. She captures the influx of European and African refugees and the ensuing complexities of mixed cultures. The many little things which define a people come to life here, so no wonder [although frankly shocking to me] she beat Zadie Smith’s WHITE TEETH that year for the prestigious Orange Prize for fiction. [Smith’s fabulous novel is also highly recommended fiction on cultural displacement.]
The second half of the novel moves more rapidly from backstory to trajectory as our narrator/protagonist evolves in surprising ways in response to her experiences and the country moves toward greater violence and, ultimately, the United Nations resolution which forever divided Palestinians and Israelis. The novel is as much a history lesson as a predilection for what we are witnessing now in Israel, as their democracy and way of life moves more toward authoritarianism.
My painting speaks of the command to return from exile and I had obeyed the injunction. Was home. Whatever happened, I would never leave Palestine, this strange, violent, mixed-up place where things were not always pleasant, indeed rarely so. Where people’s manners were bad and they spoke roughly, but to the point. Where everyone came from somewhere else and everyone had a story to tell and these stories were not always inspiring or lovely. Where life was chaotic, because that is what life is. Where the past was murky and tragic and the future had to be grasped by the throat. Where Europe ended and the East began and people tried to live inside that particular, crazy contradiction.
Footnote: In the novel, the play, An Inspector Calls, written in 1945 by J. B. Priestley, which takes place in 1912, is cited, and is also a highly recommended peek into the effects of British colonialism.
WHEN I LIVED IN MODERN TIMES is available in paperback at Bookshop.org or used via Thriftbooks, and for Kindle e-reader.