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Marion Baraitser, founder of Loki books |
| Love and faith shine against backdrop of Jewish heritage |
Small publisher Loki Books say its latest short story collection gives a new slant on what it is like to be a Jewish woman in Britain, writes Claire Davies
Mordecai’s First Brush with Love New Stories by Jewish Women in Britain Loki Books, £11.99
MORDECAI’S First Brush with Love, produced by Primrose Hill based publisher Loki Books, is more than anything concerned with the business of being human.
It brings together the tales of 19 Jewish women authors living in Britain, including Elisabeth Russell Taylor, Wendy Brandmark and Erica Wagner. Their Jewishness informs their writing, but so too do themes of motherhood, of food and young love, of generational divides and mixed marriages.
Marion Baraitser, editor, founder of Loki Books and contributor to this latest collection has great faith in the short story medium.
“Writing a short story is a specific skill,” she says. “You are structuring a moment of epiphany and we wanted to show the advances of Jewish women writers in this discipline.”
Shelley Weiner, a contributor to the book and a lecturer at Birkbeck College agrees. She says: “In a short story you have to suggest in a very few sentences a whole world; you can’t wallow in words as in a novel, you have to grab the reader immediately.”
In the book experienced writers such as Weiner, who has written an update of the biblical story of Ruth and Naomi in Naomi’s Lament, are read alongside less well-known writers. Ms Baraitser hopes the collection will act as a springboard to some of the authors. “Writing can be very lonely,” she says. “It is so important to have mentoring and support and I see this book as an extension of that.”
Loki Books, based at Ms Baraitser’s home in Chalcot Crescent, has already published a collection of contemporary Hebrew short stories in translation called Cherries in the Icebox. The next project is a companion book of short stories by Arab women living in Britain.
In Mordecai’s First Brush with Love many of the writers show an ambivalence in the face of their Jewish heritage, but reading each author goes some way to explaining the complexity of the Jewish legacy.
For Elizabeth Sarkany, 43, a doctor for many years at the Tavistock Centre in Belsize Park, this legacy is mixed up with a story that is deeply autobiographical, telling of visiting her ailing, silent father with a bag of cherries.
She wrote Cherries under the pseudonym of Stern because she was worried about her mother’s reaction to the story. But with the publication of the book she has shown it to her mother who liked it very much.
“For me the point of the story is the paradox that I could only be interested in what happened to my father when he was no longer able to tell me,” Ms Sarkany says.
Marion Baraitser, 63, understands this sentiment. “I feel confused by this insider/outsider sensation,” she says. “It is a feeling that links all refugees, where we don’t know if we’re meant to be British or Jewish.”
Lana Citron, originally from Dublin was brought up in the orthodox Jewish faith. It is her story that lends the collection its title and sees her writing her first explicitly Jewish piece.
“Being brought up exposed to a generous measure of Catholic shame and Jewish guilt,” she says.
Mordecai, the young boy of Ms Citron’s short story is pinned into his ancestry and his current surroundings – there are references to Camden Town record shops and the Kilburn High Road.
“There is such a strong Jewish community in north London and I was trying to evoke that strong community feel – evoking the traditional idea of the shetl,” she says.
Like all the best fiction, this collection will take you to places once visited or never before seen, if only for a few pages.
* A free reading from the book will take place at Swiss Cottage Central Library, Avenue Road, NW3 at 2.30pm on Saturday.
Published:
Thursday 4th March 2004
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