I didn’t start out Jewish. Well, not exactly. For years my identity felt unresolved, shaped in part by a vague awareness of the Ashkenazi strand woven through my family’s complex heritage. We did Christmas and my mum fasted once on Yom Kippur, but that may have been because it fell on the first Wednesday of the month, when for dietary reasons she’d abstain from food.
This sense of ambiguity didn’t bother me until I had to complete the census, attempting to shoehorn my multifaceted experience of race, religion and ethnicity into a few tick boxes. The first time, I declared myself a White British atheist. The next, no religion, and a couple of years later, White Other Jewish.
Then some chance uncomfortable events forced me to confront who I was and what I believed, leading me to embrace Jewish practices with its myriad rules and rituals. Alexa reminders alerted me to the start of the Sabbath, its weekly times pinned to my fridge and homepage. I took a blowtorch to my oven to make it kosher and a couple of years later married a woman who covers her hair with an ornate red, orange and yellow headscarf. We now have four children. My evenings are spent debating the texts of the Talmud and the many interpretations of the law, no matter how unlikely the situation, or sitting on synagogue boards arguing over biscuit and herring budgets for upcoming festivals. At a WhatsApp alert I’ll attend the homes of the recently dead and help prepare their religious burial with five other men of a similar wry temperament, known as the chevra kadisha.
I never made sense of how my life turned out the way it did and what motivated my choices. There was nothing that connected these random events into a cohesive narrative.
Then the answer came, it took me off guard in the most unexpected of circumstances. My wife and I emigrated to Israel, had a family and rented a flat in Yemin Moshe, a part of Jerusalem where a lot of Anglos lived. Every year when celebrating Passover, we would recite the Haggadah sitting on a balcony overlooking Jerusalem’s old city, with its ancient bricks showcased in the light. Nearing the end was a song Chad Gadya, which, being too tired, I hardly paid attention to, but suddenly, in a flash, made sense of everything – how a single event can lead to so much more.
Like the story in these verses which begins with a child whose dad buys him a baby goat, my start was similarly unremarkable – a chicken wing sizzling on a barbecue, which no one else wanted except me. I just couldn’t help myself. They say a lack of self-control is a flaw, something to overcome, but on this occasion, it would turn out to be a blessing, nudging my life in the right direction, even though it would take a long time to appreciate.
The barbecue itself was hosted by Nigel, a friend from school I hadn’t seen for years and bumped into on the train. He insisted me and my girlfriend Kate attend this birthday celebration.
On the day his friends hovered around the flames with their shirtsleeves rolled up as they jabbed and flipped the meat. They were taller than me, much taller, still had hair and some were tanned. Kate walked up to the women sat near a table and started chatting, but I hovered near the guys not knowing what to say, so I started helping myself to burgers. I ate more, hoping it would distract from feeling self-conscious and that eventually someone would introduce themselves.
That chicken wing lay on the barbecue for a good ten minutes sizzling next to some greasy fried onions, portobello mushrooms and potato wedges, until it was charred around the edges. There was no way I’d eat it – that would be greedy but seeing an overzealous waitress start to scoop up leftover food, I was worried it would go to waste. I sidled up to the grill with my plate and lobbed the wing onto it, saying under my breath to the guy nearby, “Waste not want not.”
“Oh my God, that is so Jewish,” he replied, mouth almost drooling. He had these massive teeth, like a horse feasting on a carrot, blonde hair and big eyes with creases underneath.
I giggled, hyena-like.
What he said seemed funny at first, as I hadn’t considered at the time that stereotypes about Jews were necessarily racist. That belief came from my school, where being called Jew was just codeword for not being fun or a little stingy. Or maybe such a comment was a backhanded compliment – miserly yes, overly fastidious yes, but also frugal and sensible.
“You gotta Jew what Jew gotta do,” I replied, making light of his comment and hoping to spark up conversation.
And he laughed, not just a groan but belly ache hysterics where he knelt down on his knees and banged his fists repeatedly against his temple. “Oh, that is brilliant.”
I looked down at the floor and then away.
He stared at me suspiciously, and with his hand on my shoulder said, “Oh my God, mate, you’re Jewish, aren’t you? I’m so so sorry.”
“Well sort of, half Jewish I think.”
This apology grated because it was him, not me, that got to decide that the comment was antisemitic, and secondly, saying sorry made it look like he was the good guy by being able to police his own casual racism.
“I’ve been to Israel, once or twice, fucking love the place, fit birds. Tel Aviv was amazing, great clubs and beaches, and the way the country defends itself – really impressive. Must be hard though with everything that’s going on.” He trotted out the compliments in quick succession, anxious to dispel his original offence.
“I don’t know too much about the Israeli-Palestine conflict, just from what I’ve seen on TV.” He continued.
I grabbed a glass of white wine from a waiter who was passing by and drank it. Kate was sitting, leaning on her knees, face in her hands.
*
“What is wrong with you? Why didn’t you say anything?” My girlfriend said.
The drive back took longer because of a diversion not far from our street caused by a burst water pipe. It was pouring outside and rain pelted the windscreen. I gripped the steering wheel and looked at the shopfronts as owners wound their shutters down.
“I dunno, his comment kind of ambushed me.”
“I get that, but why follow it up with that stupid reply, like you were going along with him?”
“For fuck’s sake, it doesn’t matter. He apologised and now it’s over.”
“But I still don’t understand why you just took it. Weren’t you insulted?”
“Well no, because I’m not sure if I’m totally Jewish.”
“Right, so you can be antisemitic as long it’s not in front of someone who’s properly Jewish. And besides, I thought you were?”
“I dunno, it’s not something I’ve looked into that much. I think I’m a mix. My parents did Chanukah and Christmas and possibly a bit of Diwali. We didn’t believe in belonging to one religion.”
“Weren’t you circumcised?”
“I think for medical reasons. Look, maybe I should have said something, but the bottom line is that he apologised.”
Kate looked round, scratching the back of her head. “I sometimes wonder if I know what you believe in. You might be Jewish, you might not, you hate your job and sometimes you don’t – you’d rather do a PhD, or maybe go into comedy or perhaps documentary production…” For each statement she tilted her head from left to right. “Do you actually know you want?”
*
Our relationship would not end well. A kindly neighbour, a retired physics professor, used a grabber to fish my underpants and jeans from the top of a rosebush after Kate tossed them out of the window.
I felt lost, the incident with the chicken wing and the ending of my relationship left me vulnerable, and yet I couldn’t make sense of why or how to respond. I emailed a therapist I’d read about in a magazine who specialised in helping men in their thirties. A friend recommended a podcast called the Alpha Male Inside by an American realtor turned guru about developing your goals and improving self-esteem. I learnt the tango, took up pottery and joined a local walking group, then started something I loved. It was just a course, then I practised and practised, listened to videos and tested my material with friends.
*
It started in small pubs, open mic nights where I began to build a reputation in the Jewish North London scene. I had a name for the act and booked my debut at a Jewish cultural centre in Westbourne Grove. On the night watching the people on the screen pouring into their seats before I came on, led me to reflect how I got here. Perhaps this calling was the solution for someone not sure of who they were – pretend to be someone else – or maybe it was only standing in front of an audience that I could be who I was? At the end of the film The Full Monty, the out of work steelworkers finally get the respect and admiration of their spouses and exes once they strip off onstage and bare themselves.
My name was announced. I breathed in, started to jog on the spot. A moment to remember, my first big performance, this was one small step for Leon Stewart, one giant step for underachieving Jewish men from North Finchley.
Heading to the middle of the stage, I grabbed the mic from the stand, my head tilted to the right. I scratched my chin.
“Wonderful to see so many people here willing to pay fifteen pounds to spend their Sunday evening hearing a forty-year-old man in a baseball cap moan about what a disappointment his life has been.”
The audience laughs.
“This feeling of low self-worth partly comes from my dad telling me how important it was to be self-made, which for me is a tricky ask. I’ll give you an example. When a guy turned up at my house the other day to run through a questionnaire on personal finances, he asked me who the chief income earner was.
“Mum and Dad’s will. The rent from two three-bedroom apartments in Marbella. Pays on time and I don’t need to go through a performance review any time I want a salary rise.”
I took the microphone, walked back and sat on one of the chairs near the back of the stage. “I miss my parents. Mum was a true lady, never had a bad word to say about anyone…” – I leaned forward – “while they were in the room. But one piece of advice I’ll never forget, the two topics she’d never discuss with her friends – sex and religion.” I pause. “But as none of you are my friends, once a month, and if I’m lucky twice around birthdays and anniversaries, and that I am, ladies and gentlemen, a born-again Orthodox Jew.”
I was relieved to still be keeping the audience’s attention.
“I wasn’t raised Jewish. I was kind of half and half, the bottom part circumcised, the top loved a bit of bacon. But there is a particular group I have to credit with helping me discover my religious identity long before I would, people that I have to applaud for their tremendous commitment, dedication and single-mindedness, sticking to their cause through thick and thin, no matter how fashionable or unfashionable it was – antisemites.”
“My road to Orthodox Judaism started at a friend’s barbecue. A piece of meat was lying on the grill, so wanting to make small talk with the person next to me, I said, ‘waste not want not’, and popped it into my mouth.
“‘Oh my God,’ he replied. ‘That is so Jewish’.”
I flipped my microphone forward and stared blankly at the audience.
“Which struck me as a bit odd because I had no idea that someone’s actions could be tied to their religion. You don’t say ‘Oh my God, that is so Protestant’ when someone blows their nose, or drinks orange juice, ‘ah, classic Muslim’.
“I suppose I was a bit upset, but wasn’t sure, because if I was only half Jewish, I could only be fifty per cent offended. In fact, the only person really insulted was my girlfriend. This hurt our relationship because she was prouder of my Jewishness than I was and couldn’t understand why, especially as she wasn’t Jewish.”
“So I decided to establish once and for all whether I was a proper Jew, beyond having had a circumcision, which I think was done for medical purposes. I had to prove that on my mother’s side everyone was Jewish, and sure enough, we found my maternal great-grandmother’s marriage certificate from her synagogue.”
“‘You realise, Kate, that if you did marry me, you’d be the Jew annihilator, as our kids would no longer be Jewish’,” I said. Pausing, my face went glum. “She dumped me.”
With a melancholy expression I gazed at the audience and buried my head in my hands. “If only this incident didn’t happen and I didn’t go on this stupid journey of Jewish self-discovery.”
Then I looked up. “But then something unusual happened. I had a Jewish friend from university called Jess. She met and fell in love with this Jewish guy, but when it came to them wanting to marry there was a problem – the rabbis wanted proof of her Jewishness, and while it turned out that my mother’s mother’s mother was Jewish, her mother’s mother’s mother was not, even though her dad was. She could not believe that I, the non-practising one, was actually Jewish, whereas she, with all her devotion to the religion, was not. She could have converted but was so angry at the unfairness of it all that she refused, and her boyfriend dumped her”.
“Both of us supported one another during this weird and difficult period of our lives. But then she reminded me how lucky I was to be Jewish, given her efforts had been in vain. If she couldn’t embrace the faith she turned out not to be a part of, then I must. So we did a trade-off. Meeting at the pub, I handed her the pork, prawn cocktails and all the tasty food her Judaism wouldn’t allow her to eat until now and she gave me her kosher cutlery and crockery”. A few people in the audience laughed.
As the box was shoved on to my part of the table, Jess said, ‘You’re a proper Jew now, bloody make the most of it’.
“So I started keeping kosher, kept the Sabbath, wore this kippa and…”
Two men leapt from their seats, lithe and muscular, then the distinct colours of a red triangle adjacent to the three horizontal bands – black, white and green. The flag swung from left to right, as if leading a battle charge. I knew what this was about, had heard it happen to others, but didn’t think it would affect me.
“Free free Palestine, free free Palestine, free Palestine!” Their yells silenced the room. A rhythmic chant that seemed to demand a hearing; less a plea for a resolution and more a wail of protest.
One of them was an elderly Asian man with a thin beard, the other a young White guy.
With the shouting of each word, they banged the flagpole against the ground. Their faces were awash with a rage that I, an overweight comedian from North West London, had sparked in them.
The protestors made their way down the steps, when from the side emergency doors came two broad-shouldered men in dark trousers and puffer jackets with walkie talkies and earpieces who grabbed them.
“End the genocide in Gaza. End it now!” the White guy said while being led away.
As they were taken to the exit, any hope of positive reviews for my show was ruined by the only headline I could imagine – “Pro-Palestinian protestors disrupt a Jewish comedy gig”. No way were they going to be the story of my performance. Better to have a bad review than my material not mentioned. I would decide how this was going to end.
“Excuse me, sorry.” With my mic, I left the stage and followed them. “Could you let them stay?” I asked the guards.
“We can’t, they’re disturbing the show.”
“They’re not, they’re very much a part of it.”
“No, we fucking aren’t,” the younger guy with blonde hair said, looking suspiciously at his older Asian friend.
“You are now.” I walked up close to him and folded my arms. “I’m going to give you a platform,” I whispered. “You either join me on the stage or you fuck off and I bring charges against you for disrupting my performance.”
They looked at me for a moment, conferred between themselves, and then trailed up onto the stage. I pulled out two chairs from the back and sat opposite them. The older man put the flag next to him, the other rested it on his knee.
I stood up facing the audience. “Ladies and gentlemen, what would normally happen is that these two men would be removed from the venue, but as someone who’s come out of a psychologically bruising relationship, I’ve begun to appreciate the importance of conflict resolution, even if others don’t. On that note, shall we do some introductions?”
“Abdul Hussein,” the older man said.
“Tristan Jones,” the younger guy said.
“Well, Tristan and Abdul, there was a bit more left of my show, but given your sudden appearance – over to you?”
“Sorry?” Abdul said.
“Well, you leapt up from there with a lot to shout about, now the stage is yours. Perhaps explain to us why you’re here?
The men stared at me. Responding in a somnolent tone, Abdul said, “You know why we’re here.”
“This government,” Tristan said shouting and raising his hand as he was doing so “spends millions from your taxpayers arming Israel to commit the ongoing genocide against the innocent Palestinians in Gaza.”
“Uh-huh.”
I spotted two people in the audience whispering and pointed to them.
“Hi there, sorry for being rude, I just wondered if you wanted to share with us what you were saying, although of course you don’t have to?”
A bald-headed man in his thirties spoke up: “Well,” he said in a cockney accent with his arms folded, “we’ve come here tonight to hear comedy, not this.”
“Do you know how tiny Gaza is?” Tristan asked the man in the audience, his voice agonised. “It’s like North West London. The Palestinians are being boxed in and massacred.”
“Oh yeah, what lovely light entertainment,” a woman at the back in a vest T-shirt shouted.
“In which case lads let’s keep this short and snappy.”
“Look,” Abdul said, “we’re not here because we want to be. We’re here because we’re desperate because of the ongoing killing and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “I mean, once you’ve finished protesting against the British and Israeli governments, why not turn up and yell at a Jewish comedian performing at a small club in Westbourne Grove, that’ll stop the Israeli Defence Forces in their tracks.”
“We just hoped that given the Jewish people’s history of suffering….”
“I’m gonna have to stop you there.” Changing the tone of my voice from sombre to light-hearted, I said while strolling across the stage, “Ladies and gentlemen, time is getting on, I do hope you enjoyed what you’ve seen tonight.”
Leaning back with his hands resting on his hips, Abdul held out his hand. “Look, we’re sorry if we caused any trouble tonight.”
“No we’re not…” Tristan replied.
Abdul placed his finger against his mouth to quieten him. “We don’t wanna be here anymore than you, not wanting to see so much killing and destruction done by the government of Israel. And it’s all so unnecessary, the Jewish people never needed a home in Palestine, they lived all over the world.”
“Well I just did a quick-fire poll of six million Jews and I’m afraid to say they all disagree with you.”
From the shocked looks on their faces the two men weren’t expecting this response, nor was I.
There was a pause but a moment later, Tristan picked up his flag and hurled it above him. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ll be protesting at the Israeli cultural comedy festival next Wednesday. Please come and show your support.”
“Where I’ll be performing,” I said. I handed them both a flyer for my show. “It’s a double act called ‘Identity Crisis’ – about how I discover my Judaism but still struggle with belonging, and my co-comedian, Sammy Tamien, a Palestinian gay asylum seeker who fled from the West Bank to live in Tel Aviv. Look forward to seeing you there!”
“Free free Palestine, free free Palestine, free free Palestine!” The men yelled.
I left them on the stage as they pounded their flagpoles against the floor in a monotonous baritone rhythm, like the sounds of a sombre procession. The audience exited the theatre, but the two men remained until they were escorted out.
*
I eventually got married, and two years later my wife and I emigrated to Israel and had kids. We were celebrating the Passover Seder in a flat in Jerusalem, which brings me back to the start of the story and the sudden realisation which helped me make sense of everything that had happened in my life. We were reading from the Haggadah. At a quarter to one in the morning, I was half asleep, struggling to finish singing Chad Gadya at the end, but the insight of this song led me to jolt upright, which surprised my wife, because for once it was me waking up and not her elbowing me.
The ice cream and cakes had long been cleared away, with only matzah crumbs and wine stains on the table, and my daughter Keren snored away in her buggy. The words of Chad Gadya begin A kid, a kid, a kid, which my father bought for two zuzim, a kid, a kid. So far so sweet, but then the poor baby goat gets feasted on by a cat. The dog bites the cat, who in turn is beaten by a stick.
Eventually, after this strange sequence of assaults and killings, God puts an end to it all, “smiting the Angel of Death”, who slaughtered the last person before him.
A part of me had always wondered what this song was about. Approaching the end of the Seder, Chad Gadya was the final effort to end the long meal on a high. With hands banging on the table, and the kids barking like dogs or meowing like cats, imitating the sounds of the different animals, we were like revellers at a beer fest belting the tune out as loud as we could.
Each verse of Chad Gadya repeats what happened before as a new character enters the story, whether it’s the goat eating a cat, the stick that beat the dog which bit the cat, or water, which put out the fire that burned the stick and beat the dog, and so forth. Perhaps this repetition was designed to show how the dog, the cat, the pail of water and the ox were adding to the story. Insignificant on their own, but crucial in building up to something bigger.
And then it all started to make sense. The chicken wing on the barbecue provoked an antisemitic jibe which set off a spiral of events leading me on a search for identity, to comedy and the performance interrupted by the protestors making me realise where my true home was to here in Jerusalem celebrating the Pesach Seder. The child would never have believed that their simple father’s purchase of a baby goat would have consequences for so many others. Similarly, that lost version of myself attending a barbecue in my mid-twenties could never have imagined how a piece of charred chicken would alter the course of my life and take me to where I was now.
I looked at Nechama, my nine-month-old, lying asleep in her buggy, and whose cheeks quivered in the cool Jerusalem breeze, and banged my fists against the table. My other kids woke up.
“Chad gadya, chad gadya!” I sang. My kids Boaz, Ariella and Itai stared at me, and my wife Ruth swept some matzah crumbs off the table, eyed me disparagingly and cleared the remainder of the drinks from the table.
__________
Ethan Greenwood is a UK civil servant. His previous short story ‘The Last Time We Said Goodbye’ was published at OfTheBook Press last year. He holds a Diploma in Creative Writing from Birkbeck.