A very welcome Jew
Inside Out: A Life in Stages
By Vanessa Rosenthal Red Door, £16.99.
The theme of Jewish outsiderness is at least as old as matzah. Vanessa Rosenthal’s memoir gives it a troubling twist for our times. As a 1950s child from a mixed marriage in Orthodox Jewish Manchester, she never felt Jewish enough for the acceptance she has always craved.
Rosenthal’s father was an Orthodox Jew and family doctor. Her mother, a convert, came from Lancastrian stock. At the age of six, Vanessa was singled out for wearing her sister’s coveted, but immodestly short, hand-me-down velvet frock to cheder. Her scary teacher hissed to the rabbi “It’s not decent. And look at her. I don’t think she’s Jewish at all.”
In her teens, this view became reinforced. Rosenthal was dumped by a nice Jewish boy when he realised she wouldn’t fit with his plans to enter the rabbinate through Jews’ college. “Guilt has already entered the equation,” Rosenthal says of her early years “and comes dragging shame behind it”.
Although framed as a lifelong search for belonging and for an “authentic” Jewish self, Rosenthal’s story is not at all a tale of rue and rancour. It’s clever, colourful and often comic, remembered with a precision surely acquired over decades of learning lines, after Rosenthal trained as an actor and embarked on a long and rich career, finding her own, thespian, tribe in English theatres with repertoires that spanned Agatha Christie to Arthur Miller, the Bard to Alan Bennett.
She shares some great anecdotes, featuring the likes of David Suchet and Vanessa Redgrave, with whom she shared a scene in the film of David Hare’s Wetherby. The floor manager designated her “Susan” because there could, of course, be only one Vanessa.
Rosenthal doesn’t underplay her years juggling as a working mother (well before this was à la mode) with unsocial hours and a husband whose position rising to emeritus registrar of the University of Leeds really called for a wife in a supporting role, not greasepaint. Vanessa Rosenthal, ironically, distressed her mother by marrying “out” — to Jim Walsh, a divorcé and former communist to boot, but the marriage reads as a rare and glorious love match. Jim offered intellect, adventure and the freedom to flourish. Vanessa began finding her own, uniquely creative Jewish way, as a writer of plays about Holocaust figures who touched her deeply. Her pride in a distant relative,
Hershel Rozental, wartime activist demanding armed resistance over Nazi compliance, inspired the play Exchanges in Bialystok. In 2012, her piece about the German-born poet Karen Gershon (Karen’s Way: a Kindertransport Life) was acclaimed at the Edinburgh Fringe.
Before Jim’s death in 2008, Rosenthal’s synagogue involvement was “very spasmodic and infrequent”. Inviting a still grieving Rosenthal for tea, the rabbi at Leeds Reform Synagogue gently suggested that if she wanted her own community enough she must reach out from the lonely touchlines. And so she did, finally discovering warmth and welcome. She mentions her envy that “other Jews possess an unthinking confidence in both themselves and their birthright”.
But readers may in turn envy Vanessa Rosenthal’s intelligence, wit, and the sparkle that renders her quintessentially one of us.