LIDIA VIANU

Poets

ELAINE FEINSTEIN

The Dilemma of Assimilation
 

Interview with ELAINE FEINSTEIN (born 24 October 1930), British poet, novelist, translator and literary critic

Published in Semnal, 116/April 2006, Toronto, pp. 28-29
© Lidia Vianu
 

LIDIA VIANU: Where exactly were your parents born? Do you feel connected to Eastern Europe in any way?

ELAINE FEINSTEIN: Both of my parents were born in Liverpool, England. My grandparents however, came to England in the nineteenth century from Odessa in the Ukraine, and I have always been very conscious of that. As you know I have worked on the lives and poems of Russian writers all my literary life.
 

LV. You did not experience the Holocaust yourself. But you do write about it. What is your feeling about that part of Jewish (though not only Jewish) history?

EF. In fact, I don’t write about the Holocaust, though my novels deal with survivors of it (Children of the Rose) or a group of people so caught up in their own personal lives that they seem unaware of what is approaching (The Border). I was in England throughout the Nazi massacres, which I only learned about when I saw the films of the liberation of Belsen in 1945. Those films marked my young life however. In a sense, all my generation were ‘survivors’.
 

LV. You are undoubtedly part of British literary life now. Have you ever felt – or do you now – that you also belong to a Jewish tradition?

EF. I do see myself as belonging to a long tradition of poets and story tellers from all over the world and not just this island.
 

LV. Can Jews – are they allowed to – ever totally assimilate to the country they live in (since most Jews live in exile)? Is not living in Israel equivalent to (religious) exile to you?

EF. It is easier to assimilate into Britain now than it was in my parents’ generation, though even then uncles and aunts on my mother’s side went to University and deliberately became as English as they could be.
 

LV. Were you brought up in the Jewish religious tradition? Are you a religious person? Have you brought up your own sons in the same way?

EF. My parents were conventionally religious; and I still believe in God – though I have many questions about that—and keep up some of the customs. However, my husband was a scientist and a rationalist. All my sons married non-Jewish girls. Two out of three are convinced that my religious beliefs are superstition.


LV. What exactly does ‘being Jewish’ mean to you?

EF. It means being part of an honorable, loving family of people who believe in peace and reason, and have contributed a great deal to human understanding.

LV. Have you ever experienced racial persecution or rejection? Have you ever felt an alien in England?

EF. No. Though very recently both the liberal press and the BBC have been increasingly hostile to Israel, and it has become far more acceptable to use old Jewish stereotypes in cartoons and anecdotes. I find myself having to remind my liberal friends how it was Israel came to be created.
 

LV. Has it ever occurred to you to leave the country you were born in and go to Israel, be part of the literary life there, learn the language, make a difference politically, not just intellectually (which you already do, wherever you are)?

EF. Well, I went to Israel a couple of years after the foundation of the State, and I realized I was not a natural pioneer. Life on the banana plantations was very hard. But in any case I could not have given up the English language.


LV. Should a Jew assimilate to his country of adoption (if he is allowed)? Is assimilation possible, as far as those who are not Jewish are concerned? Is it easy to be accepted?

EF. Assimilation is a perfectly honorable option. If it is possible. My sons feel they already have assimilated, and my grandchildren do not even think of being Jewish. But this is a situation that has happened many times. Most markedly in Germany. I don’t know what will happen. Something deep inside me believes the whole story will not have such an easy end.
 

LV. Is race important nowadays? Have we outgrown the concept?

EF. I think we are witnessing clashes of culture and religion rather than race at the moment. But of course there are overlaps.
 

LV. If you could choose another life within a race/culture/religion you desired, which would that be?

EF. I cannot answer that. I am 75, and I cannot believe in another history for myself.


Scattering

1
In the lands of Sepharad, on the river Tagus:
a town the colour of biscuit, a long horizon,
smooth, bare mountains, and beyond
the desert and a white sliver of moon.

It is the limestone city of Toledo, where
people settled after Jerusalem
-- silversmiths, traders, basket makers, scholars?
and Spain at first was happy to receive them.
There was a Golden Age, and in that hope,
houses were built with fountains in the courtyard;
men in their book-lined studies were translators
who brought the Greeks through Arabic to Europe.

But when they had to leave, with sombre eyes,
they bartered a house for a donkey,
a vineyard for a piece of cloth,
and nicknames followed them, like police spies.

2
And those who did not leave?
They turned to the Holy Cross,
though some lit candles on a Friday night
without remembering why,

and cooked in oil rather than lard;
others became fervent New Christians,
and married into the best families;
until the Inquisition began to inquire

more urgently into their old habits,
-- for instance, if they did not light a fire on Saturdays in a cold winter
-- Neighbours gave evidence against the rich.

Most admitted their sins under torture, as
people will, and some were brought to blame
fellow conversos for their practices.
It did not help them to escape the flames.

Nor did the ignorant suffer any less.
Read how Elvira del Campo pleaded,
as they broke her arms, only to understand:
‘Tell me what I have done that I may confess.’


April 2006