Walking up Hampstead High Street in London recently, I heard someone calling my name from the other side of the street. A man sitting outside a café leaped up and launched himself toward me, hand outstretched. He was talking for a while before I recognized him as someone I knew from childhood, someone I hadn’t seen for years, maybe decades.
He was telling me, with some urgency, about how he’d taken an ex-girlfriend and her mother to see a play of mine a few years ago at the Hampstead Theater.
“Can’t remember the name of it,” he told me cheerfully (turns out it was my 2017 play Filthy Business), “but I do remember my ex and her mum didn’t like it at all.”
“Oh,” I replied, feeling slightly awkward.
“No,” he went on happily, “they really, really didn’t like it. Not at all.”
There was a brief silence. What does one say in that situation?
Then, to leaven the atmosphere, I suggested this: “Too Jewish?”
He considered this for a moment and then cried, “Yes! That was it! Too Jewish!”
I mention this encounter because it represents an issue I suspect is unique to the Jewish writer’s experience. The play was judged neither on the quality of the story nor the production, but on the level of squeamishness the audience member feels about its Jewishness.
That play, set in the 1960s East London and based on my family’s rubber business, is about Britain and immigration, work and family, but it has as its central character a dragon-like Yiddish-accented matriarch, who suffocates and manipulates her children and grandchildren, and criminally abuses anyone else who gets in her way.
I remember when I started writing the play, I tried to hide Yetta’s Jewishness, to make her simply an immigrant from Eastern Europe. But it didn’t work, didn’t ring true. It needed to be overt. She needed to be shamelessly Jewish.
I always do this. My first impulse is always to run from it, to hide it, to write the everyman, to write characters who are universal. And then some deeply repressed voice takes over, and I’m off again. At it again. Writing about those Jews.
And it’s not as though it doesn’t pay off. I’ve written a bunch of Jewish-themed plays, and they always get produced, and they always draw crowds (Jews and non-Jews), and they’re even sometimes well received.
Taking criticism
Why, then, am I reticent? And why do I feel that strange trace of suspicion, of resistance, maybe even of resentment, from some people? Sometimes from other Jews?
Maybe it’s because putting my “head above the parapet” makes other people feel unsafe. Triggered.
I’ve just been reading about the master chronicler of pre-war Jewish life in London’s East End, Emanuel Litvinoff. After he was attacked by his fellow Jewish literati for writing a poem criticizing T.S. Eliot’s antisemitism, he responded by reminding them of the old joke: Two Jews are facing a firing squad. One whispers to the other, “They’ve tied this blindfold too tight, it’s hurting my eyes.” “Sssh,” the other one says, “don’t make trouble.”
The joke hasn’t aged. The cat’s out of the bag. Trouble is here. The question is how to deal with it.
When we began discussions about reviving my 2011 play The Holy Rosenbergs, quite a few people advised caution.
Set after the Cast Lead operation in Gaza in 2009, the play follows a family of North-West London kosher caterers whose son dies fighting for the IDF and whose lawyer-daughter investigates Israeli (and Hamas) war crimes for the United Nations. It puts a Jewish family – and their friends – in polarizing conflict over Israel and what Jewishness means.
After the first production of Rosenbergs opened at the National Theater in London, legendary Czech-born British playwright Tom Stoppard careened over to me at a party at our agent’s house.
“You’re a writer,” he purred grandly. “What’s your name again?”
I told him. He rolled my name around his mouth curiously. “Rrrryan Crrrraig?”
He side-eyed me. “Where d’you get that from?”
“My dad,” I answered.
I can’t blame him. My name betrays the Irish Catholic lineage. I don’t look Jewish, I don’t practice Judaism, and my family is a mixture of Protestants and Catholics, as well as Jews. Maybe that’s why I always try to short-circuit myself before I start writing these plays. Maybe I feel like a fraud. An imposter. Not Jewish enough to write about being Jewish, not British enough to write about being British.
Anyway, I told Sir Tom that my father had changed his name from “Cohen” in his youth, and that seemed to mollify him.
An English masterpiece
This, of course, was a few years before Stoppard had written his definitive “Jewish” play, Leopoldstadt, but he was clearly wrestling with his own sense of self.
After his mother died in the mid-’90s, Stoppard’s stepfather demanded that Tom cease using his “English” surname. Stoppard – by then one of the most celebrated authors in the language, with “Stoppardian” entering the Oxford English Dictionary, and his works Arcadia, The Real Inspector Hound, and Shakespeare in Love all lauded as quintessentially English masterpieces – had to explain to the old man that it wasn’t convenient. The bitterness must have lingered. The feeling of being an alien in your own home.
I think every Diaspora writer understands that inner conflict. Writing is an acutely personal act; you can never totally suppress your identity, not if you want to write something real. Just be aware that some people won’t like it very much.
Not because of your talent or your skill but because you did something unforgivable – you revealed the fact of your heritage. In all, it’s messy, traumatic, contradictory, triggering glory.■
Ryan Craig is a playwright and screenwriter who was writer-in-residence at the National Theatre 2012/13. His plays include Our Class; The Glass Room; Filthy Business; Charlotte and Theodore; Emma; 1984; and The Holy Rosenbergs. Craig was nominated ‘Most Promising Playwright’ at The Evening Standard Awards for What We Did to Weinstein, and won an Edinburgh Fringe First for Broken Road. He wrote Robin Hood, Musketeers, and Hustle for BBC1, and Saddam’s Tribe for Channel 4.