Travelling home

I’m surprised and delighted and really honoured that Kelly has invited me to be the very first guest blogger at Scribblers on the Roof.

For more than 30 years I’ve been a full-time travel writer. So of course, all that time I’ve been visiting foreign places and writing about them. Yet paradoxically, I’ve never quite understood the concepts of ‘home’ and ‘abroad’. How far do I have to travel to be somewhere foreign? To another country – or to another part of the same city? Do I have to go anywhere at all? When I return from a trip, my own familiar street seems just as foreign as any other place.

Robert Louis Stevenson, the great 19th-century Scottish novelist and travel writer, made this nice point: “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign.” And it was that feeling of being a ‘stranger in a strange land’, even at home, that I wanted to explore. Instead of writing always about other people, in other places, I wanted to tackle something close to home, in every sense of the phrase.

Fiction was the right medium for this. The J-Word is set right on my own doorstep, in London’s major Jewish neighbourhood, Golders Green. The characters confront issues of Jewish identity that have been important to my family and me for years. Writing it allowed me to take a good look at what it means to be Jewish when you are secular and assimilated.

The J-Word is the story of an unlikely hero, 80-year-old Jack Silver. He’s changeable, irascible, capricious, demanding, argumentative. He’s a maddening individual. But at the same time, Jack is intelligent, warm, outgoing, kind, and essentially a very good person.

Jack Silver is an atheist and he thoroughly dislikes religion (he has strong views on every subject). He long ago repudiated everything Jewish. Even though his speech is still sprinkled with Yiddish and he’s quite obviously Jewish, he likes to think he has given up being Jewish and become English.

Jack is asked to come to Golders Green to look after his 10-year-old grandson, Danny, for a few days. While Jack is in Golders Green, he is set upon and beaten up by anti-Semitic thugs. A more religious Jew comes to his aid.

This terrible incident sets a lot of thoughts and memories in motion for Jack. He has been identified as a Jew both by the anti-Semites and by the religious Jew. Yet he does not identify himself as one.

Jack wants justice – and not the kind you get from going to the police. He sets out to get it in a most unusual and secretive way with the help of his little grandson, Danny. Danny knows nothing of his own Jewish heritage, so he doesn’t even know what an anti-Semitic attack is. He soon finds out.

Whether or not Jack does get justice in the end is for readers to decide. Yet, as a result of what happened to Jack, he and little Danny discover a shared identity spanning generations. The experience eventually draws the whole family together.

The J-Word was published in the UK this year. I’m interested to find that it has resonated not only with Jews, but non-Jews as well. Perhaps they too are intrigued to venture into that curious, troubling identity called ‘Jewish’ which Jack Silver finds so hard to shake off.

The J-Word is released in the US in January 2010. Can Americans relate to a story that’s set in London? I hope so. By the way, I’m still a travel writer. Yes, I’m working on another novel – but also on a guide to Normandy!

Read more about The J-Word at Andrew’s blog, here.

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