Christopher Hitchens: ‘She didn’t much want to be a Jew’
Richard Johnson/National Post
"My mother had not wanted anyone to know her heritage," writes Hitchens, "and indeed my father had been all his life unaware"
By Christopher Hitchens June 9, 2010 – 10:56 am
Due to an unexpected emergency, Christopher Hitchens has cancelled his book tour visit to Toronto and will not be able to participate in a planned online chat.
For the first forty-odd years of my life I had thought of myself as English, latterly with ambitions to become an Anglo-American. This national self-definition underwent an interesting change as a consequence of my maternal grandmother’s outliving both of my parents. Yvonne took her own life at a distressingly young age. My father’s robust health began to fail him in his late seventies and he died in late 1987. My brother, Peter, in the meantime, had become engaged to a Jewish girl and had taken her to meet “Dodo” — old Mrs. Dorothy Hickman — our only surviving grandparent. Later, and after she’d congratulated him on his choice, she rather disconcerted Peter by saying: “She’s Jewish, isn’t she?” He had agreed that this was the case and then she’d disconcerted him even further by saying, “Well, I’ve got something to tell you. So are you.”
How had this taken so long to emerge, and why was it still to be counted as a family secret? My mother had not wanted anyone to know, and indeed my father had been all his life unaware of the fact, and was to remain so to the end. I have now been back through all the possible recollections and am fairly sure that I can guess the reason, but here’s the trail I followed.
In what was once German Prussia, in the district of Posen and very near the border of Poland, there was a town called Kempen which had, for much of its existence, a Jewish majority. (It is now called Kempno and is about an hour’s drive from the Polish city of Wrocław, formerly Breslau.) A certain Mr. Nathaniel Blumenthal, born in Kempen in 1844, decided to leave or was possibly taken by his parents, but at all events arrived in the English Midlands and, though he married “out,” became the father of thirteen Orthodox children. It appears that he had disembarked at Liverpool (the joke among English Jews is that some of the duller emigrants did that, imagining that they had already reached New York) and settled in Leicester by 1871. On later census forms he gives his occupation as “tailor.” In 1893, one of old Nate’s daughters married a certain Lionel Levin, of Liverpool (the Levins also hailing originally from the Posen/Poznan area), and the British bureaucracy’s marriage certificates certify them as having been wed “according to the rites of the German and Polish Jews.” My mother’s mother, whose birth name was Dorothy Levin, was born three years later, in 1896.
It doesn’t seem to have taken them long to decide on assimilation, in that by the time of the First World War the Blumenthal family name had become “Dale” and the Levins were called “Lynn.” This might have had something to do with the general revulsion against German names at that epoch, when even the British Royal Family scrapped its Saxe-Coburg-Gotha titles and became the House of Windsor, conveniently metamorphosing other names like “Battenberg” into “Mountbatten.” But nominal assimilation didn’t quite extend to the religious kind. Dodo could recall drawing the curtains on Friday night and bringing out the menorah, and also fasting on Yom Kippur (“even if only for my figure, dear”), but she also remembered being discreet about this because in Oxford, where my great-grandparents had by then moved, there was a bit of low-level prejudice.
My father had died very soon after Peter brought me the Jewish news, and I had flown over to England for the funeral (which Dodo was too frail to attend) and then gone at once to see her. What I wanted to understand was this: How had I been so incurious, and so easily deceived? She seemed determined to act the part of a soap-opera Jewish granny (“I could always see it in you and your brother: you both had the Jewish brains . . .”), and she certainly and rather abruptly looked Jewish to me, which she hadn’t while I was growing up. Or perhaps better to say, when I was a boy I wasn’t in any sense Jew-conscious: Dodo had dark ringletted hair and a complexion to match, and when I registered this at all, it was with the stray thought that she looked like a gypsy. But when you are young you take your relatives for granted, and even if you do ask childishly awkward questions you tend to accept the answer. “Hickman” wasn’t an especially exotic name — my mother used to laugh that she couldn’t wait to get rid of it and then wound up marrying a Hitchens — and when Peter and I asked what had happened to Dodo’s husband, we were hushed with the information that he had “died in the war.” Since all family stories of all kinds were always about “the war” we accepted this without question, as being overwhelmingly probable. It was years later when Peter discovered that Dodo had been married to a drunken and adulterous wife-beater, Lionel Hickman by name, who had continued our mischling tradition by converting to Judaism in order to marry her, given her an all-around vile time and then been run over by a tram during the blackout that accompanied the Nazi blitzkrieg. Killed in the war, to be sure.
As I sat with the old lady in her little suburban parlour in the south London suburbs, I kept asking myself if I had any memories that might amount to premonitions of, or other awarenesses of, this heritage. Once one starts looking for such things, I know, the chance of “discovering” them has a tendency to increase. There on the mantelpiece was a photograph of Yvonne, looking young and blonde and venturesome and obviously quite well equipped to “pass” as a Gentile. “She didn’t much want to be a Jew,” said Dodo, “and I didn’t think your father’s family would have liked the idea, either. So we just decided to keep it to ourselves.”
• Excerpted from Hitch-22. Copyright © 2010 Christopher Hitchens. Published by McClelland & Stewart Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
Saturday
On the last time he saw his mother
Monday
On his time at Oxford and his run-ins with future U.S. President Bill Clinton
Tuesday
On why visiting a brothel with Martin Amis isn’t as fun as it might sound
Read more: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/06/09/christopher-hitchens-she-didnt-much-want-to-be-a-jew/#ixzz0qRFQaUsc
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