A Radical Romance by Alison Light

Author:Alison Light
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241244517
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd

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I so much associated Jewishness with food that I was taken aback when Raphael announced, before we first visited his mother, that she could not cook. After the breakdown of her marriage to Raphael’s more Orthodox father, she had abandoned cookery, heavily bound up in religious ritual, as she had bourgeois comfort. An air of faded modernism hung over Minna and Bill’s house, a 1930s semi on a road out of Princes Risborough, a small town in Buckinghamshire. The fitted kitchen, once smart and up to date, had seen better days, the pale wood arms of the Ercol chairs were sticky and the parquet flooring scuffed. Minna retained enough Jewish housewifery to roast a chicken (I had lapsed from my vegetarianism), and she gave us the liver as a pâté on Carr’s Table Water biscuits. She and Bill generally ate plain fare, a stodgy English diet, with bacon a particular treat. Though she had grown up in the East End speaking Yiddish with her parents, I don’t recall her ever playing with Yiddish in her speech.

In the late 1930s, when she became a Communist, Minna renounced Judaism, a religion she no longer believed in and thought reactionary. ‘Being against God’ was one of the commandments she handed on to her son, who at eight years old became, he wrote, ‘a true believer’ – in Communism. Judaism and progressive politics were at odds in their eyes: the one backward-looking, clannish and patriarchal; the other future-orientated, universalist and egalitarian. Barnett, Raphael’s father, made it a condition of Minna’s having custody that Raphael would go through his bar mitzvah. Apparently the thirteen-year-old cheerfully recited from the Torah with a copy of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man tucked under it. Minna chose not to go to the synagogue. Inevitably Raphael’s father remained a shadowy figure to me. An affable, clubbable man, who became more pious, or frum, as he grew older, he died in 1971. His family, Raphael believed, had come from Odessa before settling in Wales, in Tredegar. Holidays spent in Wales were among Raphael’s happiest childhood memories. He longed to be Welsh and spent hours as a child practising the lilt in the speech.

If the family is the cradle of identity, then Raphael’s was rocked by several hands. While Minna worked in a factory during the war, Raphael was sent off to progressive, slightly wacky boarding schools, wholly immersed in communal activities with other children. He was a lonely child, deeply homesick, seeing his mother only at weekends. Back in London in the holidays, his first proper home was with Minna’s sister Miriam and her husband Chimen, Raphael’s mentor and ‘the patriarch of our family Communism’, as he put it in The Lost World of British Communism. As the oldest male cousin, Raphael was hugely ‘fussed’ (a positive word for Raphael), his precocity in argument – including Marxist dialectics – and in book learning encouraged. Twelve close members of the family were in the Party, as were nearly all their friends. Alec

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