Feminist pioneer My refugee past
— Women were seen as spoils of war they were raped
IF MOST Jews who fled Nazi Germany came away with little to say that was positive about their former home, for Ursula Owen, a founder of feminist publisher Virago Press and later chief executive of Index on Censorship, that wasn’t so. “It’s quite common people don’t talk about terrible things, but the thing about our upbringing was we were brought up with lots of good stories about Germany,” she recalls when we speak ahead of the publication of her memoir, Single Journey Only. The phrase was stamped on her exit visa in 1938; the Sachs family (her maiden name) would indeed be staying put in Britain.
“We were a relatively lucky family in the sense not many people died in the camps. Two or three relatives, but we were not brought up to feel this fear and loathing.”
Her father, by then established in British metals trade, returned to Germany with the army in 1945 to survey the state of the country’s industry. “He had some difficult encounters and says [in letters home] ‘here they are, the Germans again thinking it’s nothing to do with them’, but he doesn’t go on about it. He was someone who felt you just have to get on and do the next thing.”
Owen is a curious kind of immigrant, in that she was British born. With Hitler in power, her wealthy parents had the foresight to ensure her mother gave birth in England. She was a toddler when they left Germany for good, settling in Putney, deliberately avoiding the capital’s Jewish pockets. Now 82, Owen has, ironically, spent much of her adult life living in north London.
Her parents converted to Anglicanism— less to fit in and more, she says, linked to their support for the Christian opposition to Hitler in Germany — yet remained culturally German Jewish, with their emphasis on music and distinct culinary habits. But she and her siblings (a brother and sister) were encouraged to embrace English life. All — along with all their cousins — married out.
“My parents wanted us to assimilate, because they wanted us to have as easy a life as possible,” she says. She wanted it, too. As she writes, with immigrant parents and a mother struggling with mental illness, her childhood was spent trying, desperately, to fit in.
Judaism simply wasn’t a feature. “If you look at my family, they were secular right the way back, with a few exceptions,” she explains. “The first time I went to a Seder was with my grandchild aged eight, I wish there had been more Jewishness in my life, but there wasn’t any. I slightly wish I had looked for it more, but I didn’t.”
Decades on, she sees assimilation as overwhelmingly positive. “My feeling is it isn’t about succumbing to the dominant culture; that wasn’t my experience. My experience was you had one culture, you had the other culture, and you accepted some of it and you accepted some of your own,” she says.
Today, Owen’s identity is mixed. “I still feel Jewish, I still feel quite German, I still feel quite English, I’m a feminist, I’m a grandmother and great-grandmother,” she says. But with age, her lifelong search for belonging has dissipated; she is finally at peace with herself. “Something about growing older if you’ve been lucky with life, which I feel I have, and done really interesting things and had an interesting love life and lots of friends, I somehow feel less anxious than I used to.”
Single Journey Only starts with her family’s emigration, but covers much more, including Virago’s founding in 1973 with the writer Carmen Callil, and the public implosion of that partnership, her marriage to the historian Roger Owen, their years travelling the world and adoption of a daughter, and her many passionate affairs after they split up.
Virago had a big impact, “in all sorts of ways… The idea of making feminist books a commercial success Ursula Owen was unusual. What happened was that we and other feminist publishers began to show that was possible. Then eventually the bigger publishers began to see that they sold.”
Some Virago books sold very few copies; others, like those by Maya Angelou and Margaret Atwood, flew off the shelves. We speak on the publication day of Atwood’s The Testaments, the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. Owen counts “Peggy” as a “comrade” and old friend, interviewing her recently at the Ledbury Poetry Festival, for which she sits on the board.
Owen feels proud to have played a part in championing feminist literature like Atwood’s, although notes the author is “rather an exception”. But she is even more gratified by her role in championing less prominent writers. “We did academic books, commissioned from young women who hadn’t even got to the first step on the academic ladder and now they are all professors. It’s not insignificant.”
Even with the women’s movement at its peak, feminism was a controversial word. “We didn’t use the word feminist on the covers, because we thought that would put people off,” she recalls. The early years were a shoestring operation. And “even though we were running a very successful business and having a great time, we got a lot of flack.” At the time, Owen was embedded in the women’s movement; a regular on marches. But her feminist awakening was slow; she was initially drawn to socialism at Oxford.
Her memoir recalls how traditional Britain was in the 1950s. In her third year at the all-girls St Hugh’s College, “many of us came to breakfast with engagement rings” she says. “There was a pattern — not everyone but a lot of people — which is you got engaged at the end of university and your career revolved around what your husband did. That’s absolutely what we knew, and what was really interesting was we didn’t mind.” Indeed, she married Roger and spent a decade in his shadow, moving from country to country including Egypt and Lebanon (as a Jew in Arab countries at the time, she was nervous, but never experienced any real trouble).
Looking back, it took her a while to understand “that maybe this way of living wasn’t necessarily that suitable for all women”. She welcomes that things have since changed. “My granddaughters are thinking about their careers, not about who they are going to live with first.”
She’s less convinced the challenges of being a working mother have eased. In the early Virago years, Owen’s daughter was very young. “Carmen was not at all concerned about that, which wasn’t great,” she says, relatively diplomatically. “We survived it somehow, but you had to fight your way. That was quite odd considering we were a feminist press.” In the book, she is more outspoken, saying Callil wanted Owen “to remain in a box of her making, not too visible to the world”. No doubt Callil would have a different version of events.
She is concerned about an increasingly censorious culture in Britain. “This notion of offence, that you mustn’t offend people and mustn’t be offended, really worries me a great deal,” she says. “The truth of the matter is you need to educate people to have answers. It’s different going round provoking, but I think the idea you can’t say things in universities and people are no platformed is very bad indeed.”
In 1990, Owen was made cultural policy advisor to Labour (and embarked on an affair with the then Shadow Arts Minister Mark Fisher). She wants a Labour government today, although adds “I can’t say I’m entirely in agreement with everything Corbyn believes”.
Owen is dismayed by Brexit Britain — “It’s not a lovely place at the moment,” — and at people who have lived here for years having to apply for settled status. “I’m a rather extreme version of freedom of movement, and I can see it’s not always possible but, as close as it could be, there should be freedom of movement.”
Yet she hasn’t applied for a German passport. “I’ve thought about it, on behalf of my grandchildren. At first I thought I’m not sure I want one, then I read a really good piece saying the Germans are different now,” she comments. “And the Germans have been admirable in many ways, the best country for making reparations.”
She has visited Germany multiple times, wandering streets where her ancestors once felt at home. It’s where she does her “what ifs”. “What if we hadn’t had to leave and hadn’t been Jewish and I’d grown up struggling to live in a bombed out Berlin rather than worrying about whether I was belonging in Putney?
“My father really thought you just do the next thing whatever happens, you get on with your life,” she says. “Which, I suppose, is what I’ve done.”
A review of ‘Single Journey Only’ (Salt) will appear in next week’s JC