Finally, the new Jewish heroine has arrived
Glamorous and witty, these icons deserve their longawaited spotlight, says Amanda Craig
When Michael Frank won the annual Wingate Prize on Friday for his memoir The Mighty Franks, a dazzling portrait of an eccentric Los Angeles family, it set the seal on what looks to be an annus mirabilis for a new kind of heroine. From Rachel Brosnahan’s Mrs Maisel to Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman, she is a million miles away from the kind once depicted by actresses from Barbra Streisand to Maureen Lipman. Glamorous, confident, beautiful and brilliant, the new Jewish heroine has arrived.
As one of the judges of the prize, given for the best depiction of Jewish life in literature, I found myself wishing that somebody like Frank’s Aunt Hankie had existed in my own. “I considered her quite simply to be the most magical human being I knew,” Frank writes, and her combination of intellectual confidence, sophistication and beauty is something that could have come from the pages of Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch or, indeed, Proust.
It comes as a surprise to many of my closest friends to learn that, despite my Scottish surname and Celtic colouring, I am, according to Jewish law, 100 per cent Jewish. My mother’s mother “married out” to a Gentile artist, and when she did so, her respectable South African family of bankers, doctors, scientists, musicians and academics mourned her like the dead. (How elated they would have been to learn that, two generations later, their grand-daughter would marry back in, to a Dr Cohen.) Given n that Jewishness travels down the female line, however, both I and my y daughter still count as part of the tribe. I remain proud of this heritage. ge.
Yet growing up in the Seventies and Eighties, it was challenging work to o find Jewish heroines to identify with. th. Not, of course, in terms of courage (Anne Frank) or wit (Nora Ephron). But what you long for as a young woman an is also glamour, style and beauty. Generally, Jewish women have been en portrayed in popular culture as parodies of femininity that verge on n anti-Semitic.
Hollywood has, of course, always been brimming with Jewish talent, and so have the British artistic and intellectual worlds. Yet Jewishness itself has not been celebrated as something interesting or valuable in the same way that, say, being Italian or Greek has. Stories have tended to be doomily focused on suffering, injustice, neurosis and anger: hardly surprising in view of the age-old persecution of the race, and the Holocaust.
Yet where were the ones that celebrated its warmth, vitality, humour and resilience? I could think nk of only one, Fiddler on the Roof, which ich was dated even in the Eighties; and no matter how hard I looked, I could never find female characters who reflected the wonderful real-life women I came to encounter. All this has, however, changed, especially in the past year. With the very Nordiclooking and sounding Scarlett Johansson J making it clear in a TV documentary last November that she is Jewish, and Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, K Kate Hudson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jennifer Connelly and Rachel Weisz starring in an endless string of silver screen roles, there is now nown a bevy of cool, elegant women standing stand up as icons.
Last Las month, Amazon’s hit comedy series s The Marvellous Mrs Maisel, about a Fifties Fifti New York wife and mother who, dumped d by her adulterous husband, husba becomes a stand-up comedienne, comed won two Golden Globes. It is, quite q simply, bliss. Played by the enchanting encha Rachel Brosnahan, its 25 year-old yearheroine is, despite anxieties over entertaining the rabbi to dinner and maintaining m a chic Upper West Side address, a creation anyone can enjoy. enjo What young woman, madly in love for the first time, has not frantically frant re-applied make-up while her h partner pa is sleeping? What woman, disappointed disapp in love, does not yearn to get the th best revenge in the form of professional profes p success?
Dauntless Dau and good-natured, The Marvellous Marv Mrs Maisel, with its exquisite Fifties clothes, spirited heroine and charming period music, has cheered audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. For once, every major character but one is Jewish. Yet while the jokes are laced with the selfdeprecating irony familiar in comedies from the Marx Brothers to Woody Allen, Midge Maisel’s family and friends are universal archetypes. They are Every Family. Given the resort to stereotypes in even the most sympathetic portrayals of Jewish culture this series’ avoidance of lazy tropes or condescension is a significant accomplishment. It’s very, very funny and its heroine is stunning. A second series is on its way.
‘Jewishness has not been celebrated as interesting or valuable’
Interestingly, Midge’s perfectionism also manages to be comically celebratory of the femininity that Orthodox Jewish women, however intelligent, educated and opinionated, are expected to conceal. It’s a custom that is also challenged in Disobedience, the hotly-anticipated film of Naomi Alderman’s bestselling first novel, released in April, which stars Rachel Weisz as a woman returning to an Orthodox Jewish community in north London for the funeral of her father.
Liberated by New York, she reencounters the love of her life – another woman, played by Rachel McAdams, whose wig and dowdy “frumm” dress are the outward manifestations of a religious convention as strict and strange to most British Jews as those of the Amish are to Anglicans. Weisz is internationally acclaimed, yet this is only the second time she has played a specifically Jewish role.
There is, I suspect, a sombre reason for this, in that the Muslim community is now the one so often demonised as alien and dangerous, making it less risky, perhaps, to play a Jew on-screen. Yet I also think that in any year, a book like this Wingate winner’s would have melted all hearts because of its captivating real-life heroine. You fall in love with her, much as the author does.
A former Hollywood scriptwriter, Hankie was at odds with what is normal. “You don’t want to be ordinary, do you, Lovey? To fit in?” she asks her young charge in Michael Frank’s excellent work. “Fitting in is a form of living death. You want to stand apart from your peers, always”.
Her words could stand for all those who are now stepping forwards into the limelight.
The Mighty Franks by Michael Frank is published by 4th Estate (£16.99). To order for £14.99 plus p&p, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk Amanda Craig’s latest novel, The Lie of
the Land, is published by Abacus, £8.99, and she will be discussing Fictional Families at War in Jewish Book Week on Sunday March 4: jewishbookweek. com