OUR COMPLEX RELATIONSHIP WITH THE COUNTRYSIDE
THE NOTION that Jews hate the countryside is a long-standing one. Linda Grant’s enchanting new novel The Dark Circle, concerning East End twins sent to a post-War TB sanatorium in Kent contains one of the best and funniest portraits of it. Lenny and Miriam long only to return to where thin Italian shoes do not have to resist mud, and flowers are florists’ roses. “They had refused to learn the names of trees or flowers or pick up any useful country lore. They felt themselves to be amongst barbarians.”
The Lynskey twins are part of a long line of real and fictional Jews who view the countryside with misapprehension if not misgivings. To their author Linda Grant, the countryside is similarly “the gap between the taxi and the front door.” She grew up in Liverpool, with parents who associated the rural with shtetls “where villagers were massacred by Cossacks. Once we drove through the Lake District, and my grandfather, who didn’t speak a word of English, said ‘Here, they could build houses for the workers.’”
If you are someone who feels the countryside is nice to look at from the window of a car, but would be improved by an art gallery and a high street, then the chances are you are Jewish. (Or black or brown.) If you prefer the sea-side to hills and fields, or the noise of traffic to silence, and would rather have a nice car than a bicycle, the same applies. Jews are expected to be urban and urbane, cosmopolitan and cultured. We aren’t supposed to yearn for anything more natural than a beach. Francesca Simon has riffed on this repeatedly in her internationally best-selling Horrid Henry series.
“I feel safest on concrete,” she said. “The countryside feels so alien… it’s too wild and untamed. The first time I came to England, I was invited for a weekend in Sussex. It was freezing, with driving rain, and when my host asked, “Who’s up for a walk?”, I thought it must be a joke until everyone started putting on their wellies. I thought, I’m living in an insane asylum. I love the sea, but the pitfalls of cowpats, nettles, snakes…”
The literary agent Jonny Geller agrees.
“I certainly used to think that the countryside was an interruption between places and my summers were all about getting to a beach in the sun, not striding across a field and braving a windswept Norfolk beach. That might be down to the Jewish need to have a reason for things, and walking around enjoying the countryside doesn’t ‘achieve’ anything? Also, it is hard to read and walk.”
I entirely sympathise with Geller’s point about not being able to read and walk, and I, too, have a horror of being bored, cold and damp. On the other hand, I am not free from the nostalgie de la boue either. In my new novel, The Lie of the Land, a couple who can’t afford to divorce must leave their home in North London and move to a remote farmhouse in Devon — cheap because it has, unknown to them, been the scene of a murder. Half-German Lottie, who has grown up in Hampstead, falls in love with her new habitat, but Quentin, who is the son of a Jewish mother, hates it. “Better one day in London than a thousand years with the sheep” is his attitude, and the conflict is one that, as the daughter of a Jewish mother and a Gentile father, I myself feel.
Yet here’s the rub: it is my Jewish mother, who adores the countryside and all things rustic, just as it is my husband’s clan of Cohens who all choose to live in rural places from the Cotswolds to Cornwall — my late father-in-law was even a keen supporter of the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England. When I first met my husband, he talked longingly of big landscapes and bashing in fence-posts. It is not our children on his screensaver at work: it’s our Devon farmhouse, with its collapsing drains, periodic infestations of mice, flickering broadband and absence of shopping or cultural opportunities. Yet I am as in love with it as he is, and the water that comes out of the taps is no longer brown.
So where does the idea that Jews hate the countryside come from? It certainly isn’t the case with French
The countryside is too wild. I’m safer on concrete Jews are expected to be both urban and urbane
Jews, if Proust’s and Irene Nemirovsky’s rhapsodies on hawthorn, rivers, woods and meadows are anything to go by. And nor is it true of South Africans like my mother.
When I first posed this question on Facebook a year ago, dozens of friends protested against it. “You must know the wrong kind of Jews,” said one indignantly. Others cited their enthusiasm for riding, rock-climbing and country childhoods: Nicola Solomon, lawyer, rabbi’s wife and now chief executive of the Society of Authors, grew up in Kent and still loves it.
Few Jews, however, seem to choose to live there. Naomi Alderman, who put her own love of the English countryside into her second novel The Lessons, says the Jewish tendency to identify with the urban is “deeply culturally ingrained. For hundreds of years, it was illegal for Jews to own land across most of Europe, meaning that the normal peasant/gentleman-farmer connection to the land wasn’t possible.
“In addition, Jewish people have had to move on quickly from many different countries across our history. This means that we prefer professions which are very portable: medicine, the law, trading, learned professions. Professions with a connection to the land are harder to You must know the wrong type of Jews move on from quickly. Jewish people who had those professions and decided to ‘stay and see how this pans out’… didn’t survive.
“Also, Orthodox Jews need to live in close proximity to each other, because you can’t use horses or motorised transport on the Sabbath, and you need a quorum of 10 men to do Sabbath prayers. Living close together is easier in cities.”
This is close to what Howard Jacobson thinks.
“Behind the jokes I like making about my exclusively urban Jewishness — and I truly never have known the name of a single tree, flower or bird — is a nagging critical voice that says this is entirely circumstantial. We were not allowed to own land or farm it; we were ghettoised literally or figuratively, so no surprise if we find the countryside foreign. But if we go further back than that, isn’t it of the essence of Jewish morality to reject the natural man, to refuse the Gods of nature and magic, to codify our ethics in order to place more value on the spiritual than the bodily? It’s not a rural landscape we abhor, it’s nature unimproved by civility and judgment.”
Civility and judgement are needed in the city, too, of course but search any work of classic English literature, and you will — with the honourable exception of George
Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, brought up as an English gentleman in ignorance of his mother’s race — be hard put to find a single Jew leaving the city for a visit.
There is, however one: Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm, a work of comic genius concerning English country life is horribly marred by its portrait of Mr Mybug — properly named Mr Meyerburg — a biographer and follower of the Bloomsbury set.
Far from hating Nature, he sees it through the absurdly sexualised lens of D H Lawrence, exclaiming “God! Those rhododendrons had a phallic, urgent look!”
It’s clear that we are meant to laugh at him not just for his obsessive misconceptions but for being an outsider. You might as well call him a rootless cosmopolitan.
Raymond Williams pointed out in his seminal work The Country and
the City how “the country has gathered an idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. The city has gathered the idea of an achieved centre of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation.”
The self-identification of the white English middle and upperclass with the pastoral, rooted, virtuous and idyllic is one that can shade into antisemitism in the blink of an eye. Yet it’s an identification that, as Williams points out, “reaches back into classical times.” Anyone who reads Juvenal’s
Satires will be struck by the poet’s condemnation of the city (Ancient Rome) in contrast to the simple life of the country, and his attitude to the clever, cosmopolitan Greeks has a curiously familiar ring to it too.
If the ruling race owns land, and the immigrant or subjugated do not, then it’s no surprise if the latter feel the countryside to be hostile.
You only have think of how very differently Israeli Jews feel about the kibbutzim to see that deep and passionate feelings about land are not at all the preserve of a people. It must be circumstantial (or at least dependent on decent central heating.)
My own view is that cultural stereotyping is something to be resisted — even if I am as guilty as anyone of exploiting it for comic purposes.
We are each of us, as Beatrix Potter put it in her fable, Town Mice or Country Mice, needing occasional respite from the opposite but cleaving to our own homes.
‘The Lie of the Land’, is published by Little, Brown on June 15.
We laugh at Mybug for being an outsider’