Teenage minds are ready for more than mere stereotypes

IIT’S not every day that someone asks you to judge if he or she is an antisemite or not. It happened to me a few years ago, and it was just as awkward as you’d imagine. I was part of a panel of four authors speaking to secondary-school pupils in the north of England. Our books had been shortlisted for an award. In the morning we would speak —20 minutes each — to 200 pupils from local schools and, in the afternoon, to a similar-sized group. The only drawback was that we would have to hear each other speak twice. Or so I thought.

Two of the authors had written books set in Berlin during the Second World War. One spoke about his research into Nazi propaganda, how it infiltrated every aspect of everyday life. The other talked about her mother’s upbringing in a German Quaker family that helped Jews escape persecution. She mentioned that she had many Jewish friends herself, “including Keren here,” she said, gesturing towards me.

I have to admit that I felt a little irritated. I wasn’t there to represent Jewish victimhood or survival. I wasn’t there as a Jewish anything. I was there to talk about my book, a book with no Jewish characters, themes or content.

Then the next author spoke. He decided to read the first chapter of his book, a thrilling adventure set in the Far East. My mind wandered, thinking about my own speech. But then I heard him describe the shock and fear on the face of one of his characters as being like someone you see in the news, “a street child in Palestine, waiting for bullets to slam into him”.

Ouch! I pondered the sloppiness in thinking, writing and editing which allowed Israel to represent all the war and evil that one might see in the world. Was it worth saying anything to the author? No, the book was written and published. I’d keep my thoughts to myself.

At lunch though, he came to talk to me. “I didn’t realise you were Jewish,” he said. “I want to ask you something.” An influential bookseller had objected to the Palestinian reference, he told me, with some indignation. Furthermore the bookseller had written to others, asking them not to stock the book. Was that right? Did I think he was an antisemite?

Well. What to say? “No, I don’t think you are an antisemite,” I told him. “You didn’t intend to cause offence. But I can see why he was offended. If you had said ‘Palestine or somewhere,’ or offered other examples, it wouldn’t have the same effect. By just picking out Palestine, you make a choice that can offend.

“But do you agree with him that my book shouldn’t be stocked? That it should be boycotted?”

“No, I don’t agree with cultural boycotts. But I can also see why it might put some people off stocking and buying the book.” I could also see that many people in the world of publishing — the book’s editor for example — wouldn’t think twice about presenting a Palestinian child as an exclusive symbol of victimhood, therefore casting Israelis as the ultimate villains.

This, combined with the double dose of Nazi history, made me feel gloomy. The lunch break came to an end, and we went back to the audience of new children and did it all over again.

Jews as victims, twice over. Jews as villains, once. This time my fellow author didn’t “out” me. So I was the invisible, anonymous Jew, speaking about her work without mention of her ethnic and religious background. The chance that I had to influence the way that British children see Jews was, arguably, wasted.

British Jews don’t play a big part in teenage culture right now. Mostly, Jews feature only in American sitcoms, books about the Holocaust or books which portray Israelis as brutes.

In The Wall, “Jewish atheist” writer William Sutcliffe’s latest he wanted to portray his experience of visiting the West Bank. “Everything I thought I knew about Israel was shattered… it was so much more brutal than I thought it could be.”

I hope Sutcliffe has provided balance and context in his moral fable. I’ll read his book with interest (although I can’t say I’m looking forward to it). But how does one show British teens that there’s more to being Jewish than the simplistic clichés?

As it happens, my book won that particular award. And when I came to write this article I had a look at the latest edition of the Far East adventure book. Now, after “Palestine”, the words “or somewhere” have been inserted. Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin Donna-Lee Frieze Yale University Press £25

RAPHAEL LEMKIN was an obsessive in a vital cause. He was a Polish lawyer and a Jew who, anticipating disaster, fled to the US in 1939. His family did not survive. Reflecting on the unparalleled crimes of Nazism, Lemkin was concerned that no word existed that encapsulated them. So he invented one: genocide.

The word “genocide” is the most important neologism of the modern world. Lemkin, a former student of philology, derived it from the Greek genos, meaning race, and the Latin cide (from the infinitive caedere), meaning killing. He spent the rest of his life attempting to enshrine this concept in international legal codes — first in the UN Genocide Convention of 1948 and then in incessant lobbying to get states to sign up to it and observe it.

Lemkin’s life was tough. He was an itinerant academic and lawyer who died prematurely and in penury. By all accounts, he was not an easy man to warm to, nor was he naturally gregarious. But part of the reason was his extraordinary clarity of vision in understanding the threats to civilisation and his tirelessness in trying to ward them off by the force of law. At his death, an unfinished manuscript of his autobiography was in his possession. It is now published for the first time, sensitively assembled and edited from drafts that Lemkin left with the New York Public Library.

Totally Unofficial is not a great work but it is a historic one. And the humanity of the man is luminous. He recounts, with understatement, receiving a letter from his parents in 1941, written on a scrap of paper, stating simply: “We are well and happy that the letter will find you in America.”

This was a message, Lemkin states, of “subdued despair”. It was of immense significance and nobility that his response was action rather than fatalism in the face of the catastrophe of European Jewry. It framed his lobbying during and after the war when the fate of the Jews was commonly seen as merely one by-product, rather than the perpetration of a distinct and as yet nameless crime.

Lemkin wisely sought to extend the protection of the law internationally. The tragedy of his efforts is that, in an anarchic order of nation-states that has no sovereign supranational authority, genocide has persisted — most recently in the Balkans and Rwanda in the 1990s. By the exertions of this extraordinary man, we know this crime and call it for what it is. Thankfully, his story now lives, in his own words.