This is a brilliant book, and absolutely compelling reading. It is also a huge book - not in number of pages, but in scope. At the centre of the book is an exploration of the experience of being Jewish in the 20th century, but it is much more than that. The experience of being committed to, or to want to run away from, a religion, or a sect - what does that do to a life and friendships? It is also about the generation who lived through the first World War and the experience of the second; it is about making money and the life of the middle class in England. It describes life in Liverpool between the wars and in London immediately after the second. It is about love - in families, between families and aspirations to marriage. It is a huge, wonderful book.
To a Jew, like the author of this review, it is marvellous to watch a non-Jewish author picking apart, with both love and distaste, the experience of being Jewish in England (and, a little bit, in Germany in the 1930s). It is a tour-de-force of the novelists craft - getting inside the skins of others.
"The chosen race,’ Poley said. ‘All right, but you do the choosing."
This book has been republished at a time when the Jews in the UK have just had a decisive effect on the political future of this country. Understanding Jewishness is a timely thing to do, and Sam Youd does it with great sympathy, and, I think, some yearning for the certainties that emanate from being chosen But he also understands - so well - the claustrophobia, and he sees the faults as well. By making his families mixed religion - Irish Catholic as well as English (originally German) Jewish, his plot becomes full of shafts of light from unexpected directions.
The opening chapters of the book are one of the best renderings of the experience of childhood - unfolding understanding through wreaths of obscurity - that I have read. It is an excellent book. Read it.
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- R. PhillipsReviewed in the United Kingdom on December 14, 2019
Who is chosen, and by whom?
