CHAPTER ONE

ESSEX BOY

I was born on January 15, 1959, in Thorpe Coombe Hospital in Walthamstow, on the edge of London, where the great city meets the often-mocked county of Essex. The county is rural as well as urban, but the parts of it that join London are thought to contain loud young women, aggressive young men, working-class caricatures, and gauche new money. It’s largely a snobbish condescension, and Essex isn’t very different from most other places in this regard. As a maternity hospital, Thorpe Coombe had seventy beds, and my mother remembered that they gave her Guinness to drink because, they said, it was good for Mum and for baby. The hospital closed in 1973 and would later become a mental health facility. I wonder if Guinness was still being recommended.

My parents were then living in a small, rented apartment in Leytonstone, a few miles away. No central heating, a bath once a week, but it all seemed warm and safe and fine to me. I’ve thought hard about first memories; I’m pretty sure the earliest is of Mum peeling vegetables in the small kitchen, and the smell of the nearby oil heater. Even now, anything even close to that is comforting. My grandparents, Mum’s parents, lived in the same building. Dave and Bertha Schneider were very “East End.” They were raised and lived in Whitechapel, infamous for Jack the Ripper, famous for being the home of waves of immigrants from first France (Huguenot refugees fleeing persecution), then Irish Catholics, then eastern European Jews, now Muslims from Bangladesh. Poor, rough, close-knit.

Very close-knit for some of the locals, because Bertha became pregnant with my Uncle Maurice in 1928, two months before she and Dave got married. They lived on the same street. Dave was an orphan, raised by a Jewish family (presumably his birth mother was Jewish, too), and Bertha a blond, blue-eyed Anglican. They were a handsome couple who would live and love together for many decades, never leaving the small, basic apartment and hardly ever apart, other than for the few years that Dave was in North Africa, Sicily, and Italy during the Second World War. “Every time I saw him, he had another stripe on his arm,” my mum would say.

Many years later, I hired a genealogist to trace my maternal grandmother’s family tree, and a large binder was presented to me that would, I was told, explain everything. In truth, family histories do and they don’t. Grandma had been Bertha Jones, and the book traced her particular branch of the Jones family — and her mother’s family, the Cranmers — back to the mid-eighteenth century. Almost all of them had been farm labourers in rural Essex, owning no property and obviously struggling to make a living. Eventually the clan left what now seems like bucolic rural England for urban and noisy east London. By the late nineteenth century, they simply couldn’t manage financially to continue farming at their basic level, and London offered work and money. To me it seems a shame; to them it seemed unavoidable.

My mother, Sheila, was raised in Whitechapel and then nearby Stepney Green. She spent all her early life in the East End of London, apart from a year in Walsham le Willows in rural Suffolk. During the Second World War, the Luftwaffe’s Blitz was screaming its way through the country, and many of the children of London and other major cities were evacuated to safer spots. Around 3.5 million young people would eventually be housed temporarily outside of the most bombed areas. The policy was voluntary, sensible, and humane, but not according to young Sheila, who hated every moment of being away from her home. I drove her back to visit Walsham many years later, and it was beautiful. “Not when I was bloody there,” said Mum. It was, of course, but it wasn’t home. She felt like a foreigner.

Dad — Philip Coren — was raised in a small apartment in Hackney, just to the north of where Mum was from. It was also a poor area, and home to a large Jewish community. The area wasn’t as communal and co-existing as the East End, and there was more anti-Semitism and friction. Dad was one of four children — two boys, two girls — and unlike my mum, he was raised in a relatively orthodox Jewish home. His mother, Grandma Rose, was born in Europe, and there was still something strongly eastern European about the home. As a child, I’d visit with my parents and always felt somehow out of place there. Where Mum’s parents were loving and fun, I found Dad’s to be more distant and controlling.

So, three of my grandparents were Jewish. Judaism, as opposed to Jewishness, runs through the maternal line, and although I’m more than Jewish enough for anti-Semites, I’m not Jewish enough for some Jews. And even their definition varies, depending on the person and the situation. In Israel, only one Jewish grandparent is required for citizenship under the Law of Return, meaning that there are Israelis who are only tentatively Jewish. There are, for example, Russian-born Israelis who have citizenship but still consider themselves to be of the Russian Orthodox faith. I wonder how that makes Palestinians feel, when their families have been resident for generations? Actually, I don’t wonder at all. There are entire books, shelves of them, written about and around this subject, and I’ve met too many Palestinians to not understand the bitter dilemma. For me, what I was mattered and didn’t matter to varying degrees, depending on the situation and the context.

Having a foot in both camps, being a relative outsider — neither one thing nor another, perhaps never quite fitting in — has been a constant theme in my life. Whether it’s race, religion, class, or politics, I’ve seldom been anchored. That’s been a comfort and a help, and an ache and a wound. I was sent to Hebrew school when I was a child, but always complained that I had to go and insisted that I didn’t want a bar mitzvah — for which I hardly even qualified. My father eventually agreed, which was quite a compromise for someone raised as he was. But then his upbringing wasn’t always happy. I discovered later that his father, Harry Coren, had hit his children, and I get the impression that my dad was the usual target. Rose, my grandma, was gentler and more loving, but life couldn’t have been easy for my dad. He never once raised his hands to me, but he had a temper, he shouted, he could be triggered by something so small, and that pushed me away. I now believe that the shouting and the impatience were likely the result of the way he’d been treated as a child. It’s impossible to understand that when you’re also a child, though, and it made life much more challenging. Dad was generous, incredibly hard-working, and good in so many ways, but the bloody temper was like a huge splinter that would never disappear. My mum gave as good as she got, however, and their arguments were loud and frequent. I loved them, they loved me, but that constant possibility of screaming and shouting was painful and destabilizing.

Sometimes I’d be left in the care of my great-auntie, who was like a grandma to me. She was from what is now Ukraine but was the Soviet Union when she was a child. We called her “Bubba.” She smiled all the time but spoke very little English. While our linguistic communication was limited — her first languages were Yiddish and Russian — our common conversation was love. I could feel it in the way she laughed with me, played with me, sat with me.

Sometimes I’d catch her looking in my direction; staring, really. Even then, long before I could read a proper book or understand the proper world, I could tell that behind the smiles, there was something deeper, perhaps sadder, at work. She always wore dresses that covered the entirety of her arms, but as she was a lady of a former time, this seemed unsurprising. Then, one hot July day, she absent-mindedly rolled up her sleeves and I noticed something.

“What’s that, Bubba?” I asked excitedly.

It was the only time she ever seemed upset, even angry with me. She replied that it was nothing, pulled down her sleeves, and turned away.

I thought I’d hurt her somehow, and I might even have had tears in my eyes. All I remember was that she immediately lifted me up and hugged me tighter than ever, in an embrace that seemed like protection and grace knitted together. It wasn’t until long after she died, and I was a teenager, that I was finally told Bubba’s story. She had been in a death camp, and the mark on her arm was a tattoo. The Nazis sadistically scraped them into the arms of their chosen victims to dehumanize them before torturing and murdering them. She survived, but many of her family and friends did not. I can only imagine the mingling of emotions that was her relationship with me: lamentation for those years spent in hell, for lost loved ones, for slaughtered children. How I wish I could speak to her now; how I wish I could speak to so many of them now.

While most of my father’s family had left Poland, Ukraine, and Russia for Britain around 1900, during yet another wave of pogroms, some remained behind. That was my great-aunt’s part of the clan. Her brother had fought in the Red Army through most of the Second World War. I met him only once, when I was a child, and he seemed very old. He wore his uniform for the reunion; his medals chimed like a victory march. He drank vodka all day long. He pinched my cheek a lot, and it hurt. “There are two types of vodka,” he told me in broken English. “Good vodka … and very good vodka.”

Because he spoke Yiddish as well as Russian, during the war he was used as an interpreter. Yiddish is its own language but its basic grammar and vocabulary, although written in the Hebrew alphabet, is Germanic. When German soldiers were interrogated, their lives were often in his hands. He was reluctant to say much about his experiences, but he must have seen such a lot. He was a captain when he left the army, even made a temporary major, and fought all the way through to Germany.

He did tell me one story, about a teenager he and his men captured in 1945. The boy admitted to my uncle that he was in the SS. He cried and he begged. My uncle’s commander asked what the boy was saying. “He’s a kid who has been digging tunnels for them,” my uncle replied. “He’s nothing.” They let him live. I asked why he had done that, especially when the Nazis had murdered so many of his relatives. With his perennial wide grin briefly gone, he replied, “I’d seen enough of that shit. Sometimes we have to forgive — sometimes we have to forgive.”