LIVING IN FEAR 80 YEARS LATER:
Author Keren David on struggling to protect her children and finding the courage to confront the ‘poison’
WHEN Keren David picked her son up from school one day, he was verbally abused in the street. As a teenaged girl walked past them, she spotted the Jewish skull cap that was part of his uniform, then turned and spat out one word: “Jew!”
At the time Judah was just seven years old. “He asked me why she’d said that and I didn’t know what to answer,” the author recalls. “How does a Jewish parent explain that to their young child?”
Four years later, he was waiting at a bus stop with classmates from his Jewish secondary school. A group of older boys circled them and, jeering, began pelting them with pennies.
More recently, her daughter Phoebe sat astonished in her A-level economics class to hear other students declare that Jews ran the world and controlled all its money.
“You’re ignorant and bigoted and you need to educate yourselves,” she told them.
Yet Keren admits that anti-Semitism is a subject she has struggled to confront herself. As a best-selling novelist who writes for young adults, she realises that it might seem the perfect theme for one of her often gritty books.
It’s not as if she has shied away from difficult subjects in the past. Her first novel, the multi-award-winning When I Was Joe, published in 2010, is about a boy who goes into police protection after witnessing a stabbing.
But when her agent suggested she make contemporary anti-Semitism the subject of her 12th novel, Keren’s first response was no; it was just too scary.
“It was an obvious subject for me to tackle but also a really frightening one,” she explains. “Anti-Semitism is my greatest fear. I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to avoid thinking about it. ”
However, she found herself increasingly drawn into engaging with the subject.
As she watched the debate unfold on social media about anti-Semitism in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, Keren felt compelled to wade in.
She tried to highlight the history of antiJewish racism, doing her best to remain calm and rational while often feeling anything but. People’s ignorance and assumptions were upsetting.
SO DESPITE saying no to her agent, Keren couldn’t get the idea out of her head. “There was clearly much to say and explain,” she says. The result isWhatWe’re Scared Of, a young adult thriller that explores the realities of modern-day anti-Semitism head-on, weaving real-life testimony from a Holocaust survivor into the fictional story of twin sisters Lottie and Evie and their experiences of prejudice and persecution in current-day Britain. Published just ahead of today’s Holocaust Memorial Day, Keren hopes it will help readers understand why anti-Semitism is frightening and wrong, as a portrait of a family forced to face the challenges that being Jewish can bring. Challenges that range from how to deal with hurtful remarks from classmates and conspiracy theories about Jewish power on social media to, eventually, bricks through windows, violence and murder. Frighteningly, every single anti-Semitic incident in the novel is based on true events. “When I was planning the book I wrote lists of the different ways anti-Semitism can affect people,” says Keren. “I didn’t lack examples.” For two chapters towards the end of the novel, she hands over to a real person, Holocaust survivor Mala Tribrich, now 90. “I knew I’d have to write about the Holocaust and I knew I wanted the absolute truth. I’m all too aware of the danger of Holocaust denial. There was no need for fiction when we have first-person testimony,” she explains. “I’m infinitely grateful to Mala for sharing her story with me. A story of hiding, of surviving again and again against all the odds, of the terrible murders of her mother and little sister, of what it was like to be a slave labourer, and to arrive in Belsen, where the bodies lay in piles all around.”
Although the Holocaust is taught in British schools, wider Jewish history is rarely on the curriculum and this, says Keren, is one reason for the “huge ignorance” about Jewish people, their history and their culture.
“People don’t understand the context of the Holocaust, that the Jewish story is a story of persecution. Anti-Semitism didn’t start and end with the Holocaust.
“There is nothing new about the things people say about Jews on social media, the conspiracy theories they repeat – they are spouting from a long-established playbook of anti-Semitism.” But anybody expecting her novel to be a rant on Corbyn’s treatment of