Playwright Julia Pascal has spent the last 18 months interviewing 50 British Jewish women for an archive, Mothers and Daughters. The women - actresses, politicians, writers and judges - all speak on tape for more than two hours each, telling their stories of identity. The archive was launched with a compilation showing of the stories - Edwina Currie having yet another go at John Major; Maureen Lipman composedly and with utter deadliness telling the story of dealing with anti-semitism on the garden party circuit; younger faces talking about painful family differences and older faces speaking in mildly bewildered tones of where they came from, where they were under threat, to here, where they still feel the threat, but can't quite define it.
While all cultures start with oral story-telling - Homer was spoken before ever written - Judaism has in-built structures to reinforce the tradition. Pesach, the annual Passover festival, is built round the injunction, "And you shall tell your children ..." the story each year, of the exodus of the Jews from Egypt. Each night, observant Jews recite the "Shema" with their children, containing the words, "and you shall tell your children ... these words ... when you sit in your houses, when you walk on the street ..."
What was striking to me about Pascal's collection was how Jewishly impoverished so many of them were. Afterwards, some people said to me it was the difference between the American experience of growing up Jewish, and the British one. Many of the women in the archive seemed to have grown up with only a sense of Judaism as a theme of persecution. No Chassidic tales, none of the colours and vibrancy of the festivals, none of the educational wealth of the culture, none of the traditions. Except one - they all spoke at great length; they all told their stories.
I asked Oona King which side of her heritage storytelling came from - her father a black activist, her mother Miriam Stoppard's sister (so one generation back, a traditional Jewish home). Did she think it was specifically Jewish, this oral telling? "It's a human trait," she said, and of course it is. Brer Rabbit is just part of the strong heritage of oral black narrative. But it remains alive and thriving within the Jewish world.
