Box Room
Judaism
Being Jewish is not a situation from which you can opt out. As my mother told me when I was about six, you are Jewish if others say you are. Her experience, of course, was moulded by growing up as refugees fled from the elected government of Germany in the 1930s that decreed who was Jewish and who was not. But, over and above this socio-political aspect, there appears to be a way of thinking - grounded no doubt in the theology and history of the people - that can be seen as "typically Jewish". George Steiner described it as the tendency to think in the abstract: hence the high proportion of Jews who excel in such areas as mathematics, music and chess playing (Steiner's examples).
Most of my abstract thinking may be read about in the Library of this house. But other Jewish themes spill over into this little room: my involvement in performing klezmer music, awareness of the long shadow cast by the holocaust, and stories that seem to grow from Biblical texts.
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