My mother’s explanation for seeking to escape her Jewishness was similar to the explanation given by the Princess to Daniel. My mother said she had wanted to give us every access and advantage, and being Jewish wasn’t one of these. I think for her being Jewish meant, above all, the deprivations of her childhood in the East End of London. My mother’s father, Louis, an immigrant tailor to England from the Ukraine, had died on a trip to Berlin when she was an infant, leaving his family quite destitute. She had visited his grave in the 1930s and told us about the German children who came around throwing stones and shouting “Jüden, Jüden.” After the father’s death, my non-English speaking grandmother, Rebecca, who could get work only cleaning public lavatories, placed her youngest two children in the Jewish orphanage, where my mother’s golden hair was shaved to the scalp. We came to know the story. Six years in the orphanage, where Lily Shiel became head girl of “the school,” captained the cricket team, and won the Hebrew prize. Her first job as a skivvy in Brighton cleaning a five-story house. Home again to take care of her mother, dying of cancer. An older brother beating her. Escape to her own little flat in the West End. A Pygmalion early marriage. The creation of Sheilah Graham. “Passing,”—blond and blue-eyed (a Cossack twixt the sheets, she surmised)—in the worlds, successively, of the London theatre and English high society, New York journalism, and Hollywood movie making. “I don’t want to be in a ghetto,” she always said, adding, if challenged, that “all religions are hocus-pocus, mumbo-jumbo.” Why should she be bound by one?
My mother told Scott Fitzgerald the truth about herself—not just about the poverty and the orphanage but also her Jewishness. But it’s as much a part of the story that Fitzgerald abused her trust as that he had won it. As she put it in her book College of One, during his great drinking binge of 1939, he screamed “all the secrets of my humble beginnings” to the nurse talking care of him. That same day, my mother and Fitzgerald grappled over his gun, and she made the pronouncement of which I think she was rather proud. “Take it and shoot yourself, you son of a bitch. I didn’t pull myself out of the gutter to waste my life on a drunk like you.” What Fitzgerald had screamed to the nurse, my mother eventually told me, though she never brought herself to write it in any of her books, was that she was a Jew.
I am pleased that increasingly over the years of her old age my mother seemed more at peace with her Jewish heritage. She reestablished contact with her two older sisters, both of whom lived in Brighton, and was close to them until they died. She was enormously enthusiastic about Israel, which she first visited in the 1970s. In London she took me to see where she had lived in the then still-Jewish neighborhood of Stepney Green, and together we peered into the windows of a dismal basement flat. Later in New York we went down to the Lower East Side one time to eat blintzes, for my mother truly loved Jewish food. In her eighties she was invited to a seder though I don’t think her hosts knew she was Jewish. I saw her when she returned from it and—for nothing to do with the food—she was indignant. “They got the prayers all wrong,” she said. Then with a swell of pride in her good memory, she proceeded to recite them correctly.
But this is my mother’s Jewish heritage, not mine. She knew those Hebrew prayers; I knew the Nicene Creed. I have often thought that my mother succeeded in what she set out to do—in alienating my brother and me from our Jewish heritage. Not that I can put it all on her. I don’t know if my brother feels this, but I see myself as complicit in remaining an outsider to Judaism. A couple of times I wandered into temples and felt both uneasy with the strange liturgy and a little bored, as always, with religious ritual. I’m just too secular, I told myself, and continued my occasional attendance at Episcopal Christmas and Easter services.
But isn’t it possible to imagine another path? I might, like Daniel, have studied Hebrew. I might have moved to Israel. (Wouldn’t that have been a fine form of daughterly rebellion?) Or, a less extreme option, I might simply have married a Jew. Living in New York in my twenties, I knew and dated many Jewish men. Donald Fairey, however, was lapsed Church of England. Emily, our daughter, sang in the children’s choir of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Our children’s own mates, with whom they have had their children, are non-Jews. The genes are thinning out.
Nonetheless, when in 1989, precisely thirty years after learning that my mother was Jewish, I learned right after her death, that she had lied to me about the identity of my father and that my biological father was, in fact, the British philosopher A. J. Ayer, one of my very first thoughts, given that Ayer had a Jewish mother, was that I seemed to be becoming more Jewish. This pleased me, if only for the irony. I also remembered Freddie’s well-known atheism. Perhaps the psychological seeds of that intellectual position lay in his experience as a Jew at Eton, just as my own atheism emerged as a form of defiance at Rosemary Hall. Not having had him in my life as my father, I search for parallels in our experience.
I know I have taken pleasure in evading what George Eliot calls “partiality”—commitment to a specific culture and people. Much of my life has been lived in predominantly Jewish milieus, Hollywood and New York, yet I feel a cultural
