By Jeanette Copperman
Jewish Women in London Group (1989) Generations of Memories; Voices of Jewish Women; The Women’s Press, 1989, London.
The first feminist book I remember reading was Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex when I think I was 13 or 14. I grew up in a strictly orthodox Jewish household and Shabbat (Saturday) was a day when you couldn’t write or shop or watch tv or even turn lights on and off. Being an only child in an area where there weren’t many other orthodox Jews, Shabbat was often a lonely day, unless I was going to visit my friend Pamela on the other side of Manchester where there was a whole observant community. We lived on the less orthodox side of town, and our house was quiet on a Shabbat after coming back from shul (synagogue) where my father worked as the chazan (cantor). In the summers Shabbat stretched right into the late summer evening and when we lived in Glasgow we would go to bed before Shabbat was out and do Havdalah (the prayers that end Shabbat with spices and a candle) the following morning. The one thing you could do was read, so I read and read – books at home were mainly Agatha Christie (despite the fact she generally had a nasty, money grabbing Jew in her novels she was a great favourite of my mother) as were Evelyn Rose’s cookbook and the Encyclopedia Judaica and religious texts.
The library at school was my refuge and the place where I could explore other worlds. I don’t remember how I got hold of The Second Sex or how much of it I really took in or understood, but I was fascinated living in rainy Manchester in the 1960s by the glamorous life that Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir seemed to live in Europe, living in hotels, sitting in cafes late into the night discussing things, taking lovers, doing no housework when housework and cooking were a constant theme in our home. Although their world was a world away for me, the idea of women being the second sex and that someone had written about it, chimed deeply with the restrictions and expectations and contradictions that I was subject to in my own life; the expectation to achieve academically and the pride my father in particular put in my doing that, the importance of education to my parents, neither of whom went to university. At the same time the absolute expectation that the most important thing you could do in life as a girl was get married, create a family, have the next generation in the face of the loss that underlay so much of Jewish life then, when the Holocaust was a near and living memory.
Photos of Rose Kerrigan who is interviewed in Generations of Memories. She was born in Dublin and her parents were from Russia. In her 80s she was still an activist fighting for pensioners’ rights
At school when we learnt about the second world war, the Holocaust was not mentioned, and as I couldn’t bring in lard to school to cook with in domestic science, I was put in detention! I ate my lunch on my own – everyone else had to eat school lunches, no one at the time including me thought any of this was strange.
As a child I spent my holidays in Dublin and from five I would get on the plane on my own to spend my summers with my grandmother and my Auntie Belka, her sister. They had both fled Poland – Auntie Belka had barely got out of Poland in time, travelling as a young girl on her own in the late 1930s across Europe. Their lives fascinated me, Auntie Belka an early feminist had stood up and challenged the Rabbi in Poland, in the synagogue unheard of! She was a wonderful cook and I loved her ‘glasses’ a concoction of jelly, fruit and cream. I made challah (twisty bread for Shabbat) with my grandmother. Yiddish was their first language and in the evenings they sat together to embroider intricate tablecloths and challah deckels.
Photos of Rita Allan from Generations of Memories. Born in Germany, she became a refugee from Nazism in the UK, but most of her relatives in these pictures perished in the holocaust
I had the idea to set up the Jewish Women in London group in 1982 as a result of being in a Jewish socialist reading group – we read books celebrating the history of the East End of London, and almost all the figures being written about were male socialists! Where were the women? What about their lives? The Greater London Council (GLC) was giving out grants, it had just given a grant to an Irish women’s history group, so a few of us went with a proposal to set up a Jewish women’s oral history project to document the history of Jewish women’s immigration to the UK. We set up a steering group, advertised for workers and began interviewing women, eventually producing a book, a tape slide show and an exhibition. I wanted to interview my Auntie Belka, I was named ‘for’ my great grandmother who had perished in the Holocaust. People said ‘for’ rather than ‘after’ then. As if you were a replacement. Auntie Belka, when I tried to interview her, said she didn’t want to talk. Only later I understood that her and my grandmother must have felt a lot of guilt at leaving their family back in Poland.
For the book Generations of Memories*, we wanted to include as many different Jewish women’s voices as possible. I interviewed Rose Kerrigan who grew up in the Gorbals in Glasgow and became a lifelong socialist at the age of 14 and was still campaigning. We interviewed Jewish women from Iran, who had come over at 16 to arranged marriages, an Indian Jewish woman, part of the Marathi ‘Bnei Yisroel’ community who had come to the UK as a result of British colonialism, and a woman who had come as a child from Austria on the Kindertransport, as well as the first openly lesbian rabbi in the UK, who still did not feel she could include her story publicly in the book. That has changed for the better. Sheila Shulman went on with other lesbian feminists in the 1990s to set up ‘Beit Klal’ in London, a liberal Jewish community with lesbian feminist teaching at its heart for those who felt estranged from Jewish life. Women shared their moving family photographs with us. I am glad feminism made us feel entitled to honour those women’s lives.
*Jewish Women in London Group, Generations of Memories; Voices of Jewish Women, The Women’s Press, 1989 London.
