BEING AN OUTSIDER – THE JEWISH CHRONICLE

Being an outsider can often feel like a mixed blessing, and yet if you asked almost any novelist, and any Jew, you would probably find that it is characteristic of both. Small wonder, then, that so many novelists are Jewish. As a writer, I am interested in subjects that are universal - crime and punishment, love and family, the conflict between ambition and goodness and, of course, being an outsider and an exile. Yet they are also particular to Jews. Being both author and Jewish means you belong to everyone and no-one.

Every sensitive teenager responds to Camus’s classic book, to Hamlet and to poets of loneliness like Keats and Emily Dickinson. The outsider is both privileged to be granted unique insights, and very vulnerable: both of these are almost prerequisites for creativity. A Jew is in a similar position to a writer, and yet the two greatest authors we have, Shakespeare and Dickens, both drew on every anti-Semitic stereotype to create Shylock and Fagin. True, the former briefly allows Shylock to be a human being; and Dickens, once he got to know a real Jewish family who told him how offensive Fagin was, removed every reference to race is later editions of Oliver Twist. Why pick on Jews? Well, apart from the author’s perennial dance with poverty, writers also tend to want to belong. Finding someone to portray as the Other helps, as does sucking up to those in power. Look at Proust, with his imaginary aristocrats peopling the cork-lined room; and look, too, at Irene Nemirovsky with her distinctly anti-Semitic portraits of Jews.

The first Jewish novelist of note, Disraeli, was far socially ambitious to write about heroes who were anything but Gentile. The first great portrait of a good Jewish man was depicted not by a Jew but by a Christian woman who knew very well what it was like to be ostracised – George Eliot. Deronda has the world at his feet, but no purpose in life until he discovers his true parentage, and destiny.

Jewish writers are always at their funniest, most profound and best when writing about this longing to find a place in the world. The inner voice that, like Bellow’s Henderson cries out “I want, I want” is present in everybody: but Jews, being outsiders, are always more alert both to the “I” and to the “want”. Philip Roth, Linda Grant, Howard Jacobson, Elinor Lipman and most recently Naomi Alderman have written superbly on the anguish of wanting what you can’t have. My own heroine, Polly, in Hearts and Minds responds to her Jewishness by constant apprehension of threat, which why she is a human rights lawyer, and also why she solves a murder. Although I have a Jewish family, the Viners, recurring in my novels she is the first to whom I’ve given my own recurring nightmare of having to run from the Nazis with a child on each hand. I was born long after World War Two, but like Polly took in compassion – and fear – with my mother’s milk.  It’s what makes me a satirist, a feminist and, of course, a novelist.