LIDIA VIANU

Poets

RUTH FAINLIGHT

The Dilemma of Assimilation
 

Interview with RUTH FAINLIGHT (born 2 May 1931), British poet
Published in Semnal 115/2006, Toronto, pp. 26-27

© Lidia Vianu

LIDIA VIANU: What did it mean to you as a writer, to be born in New York and Jewish?

RUTH FAINLIGHT: It still means the same – it is the fact of my place of birth and the place my mother lived in from the age of about 6 until her 40s – therefore much of the effect on me was through her. But I have not lived in the USA since I was 15, so I have probably been more deeply affected by England, where I have spent most of my life.

LV. You do not write much about your Jewishness in poetry. One poem is emblematic, though. Here it is:

The English Country Cottage

A Jewish poet in an English village:
incongruous and inappropriate
as a Hindu in an igloo, a Dayak in
Chicago, a giraffe at the South Pole.

That shadowy yew in the churchyard, only
a few steps away from this cottage door,
was planted in the centuries between
the Lincoln pogrom (when little St Hugh,
they claimed, was murdered by the Jews, and all
Christ-killers left alive were banished)
and the year when Oliver Cromwell changed the law
to grant honourable men of Israelite persuasion,
with their prudent wives and obedient children,
the privilege to be legally present in England.

As a youth, my father was a patriot,
a Labour-voting true blue. But though
he felt entirely English, the problem was:
to certain natives of whatever class
he was a wily, greasy Levantine
and always would be. His solution was
to leave the country, go far enough away
to ‘pass for white’, somewhere he could play
at being pukka-English through and through.
(Yet still more proud to be a Jew.)

Maybe because she came from Bukovina,
my mother had no illusions. She was used to
rejection, born to it. First, the shock
of Ellis Island: another world, another
language (I knew how hard she tried). Then
further uprooting; though the nineteen thirties
were not exactly propitious, her restless husband
— handsome, dreamy, unpolitical —
felt the lure of home, dragged her to England.

I ran straight into the fire’s centre,
towards the focus of trouble, glamour, danger;
danced, like Esmeralda, on the Round Table
as desperately as if to save my life.
Such were my tactics in those distant times.
Now (though mimicking the locals dutifully),
thatch and cruck-beams cannot camouflage
the alien. The carillon rings mockery.

Sometimes I wonder if I should have known better:
to sweetly smile and eat the mess
of pottage — but never sell my birthright
for an English country cottage.

A few other poems mention a Holocaust you have never experienced. Do you feel different from the Americans you grew up with or the English, among whom you live now?

RF. Different from most of them – but I imagine that is because I’m a poet!
 

LV. Do you think all Jews feel outsiders, even if they find themselves at ‘home’ (if one can say they really have a home) in Israel? You told me once most of your friends were international, so to say, now that you live in London and have done so for almost a lifetime, since you married your husband, the well known novelist Alan Sillitoe. You also said your home was New York, but you did not think you would ever go back there...

RF. I don’t know if all Jews feel outsiders. But I do believe that they are almost always regarded as such by the people they live among – and that it is a mistake to forget that. I don’t think I will live in America again – my family are all here: husband, children, grandchildren. But who knows?
 

LV. Your family came from East Europe, not far from Romania, from what is now Ukraine, you said. Do you have Chagall’s awareness of the tragedy of the race that once went on there, even though you were never part of it?

RF. My mother’s family came from the Bukovina area, she was born there. And I do feel a profound connection to the Jewish culture of that area which was destroyed in the Second World War. But my father’s family came from Poland to England in the 19th century and he was born in London.
 

LV. Does religion mean much to you? Are you religious, do you follow the Jewish tradition? Do your children continue the Jewish tradition in any way?

RF. I have no doubt that I am a Jew, but I do not follow the tradition in my daily life, nor do my children.
 

LV. Does it take Jewish traditions to make a Jew? Is assimilation a sin? You yourself seem to have assimilated, blended into your British environment. Is it time people forgot about race and figured out another way of building their identity?

RF. I do not feel that I have assimilated or blended into the British environment. But that might be the result of my own temperament – and that temperament is undeniably Jewish!
 

LV. If you were to be born again and if you could choose your race, what would you be?

RF. There is certainly something that links Jews regardless of whether they come from India, Yemen, Sweden or the USA – but I don’t think that “race” is the correct word here (nor in the previous question).

I am very aware that being a white woman in the West is to have – at least for the moment – an immensely privileged position and identity, and probably I would not want to change it.


6 May 2006