Dolmen Domikles

Who are you? Who am I?

Who are you? Who am I? So many ways to describe ourselves. One way is to say where we are from. From my town or city? From my region, province, county, or state? Or from my country, my nation?

Or do we define ourselves by our culture? Our work? Our family status? For me, my personal history means a lot in helping me figure out how I got to be where I am in my life. Is my ancestry in there somehow? That could be described by a DNA analysis. But for me, family stories are an important source of feeling who I am. I feel lucky that both my parents told me their stories.

My father’s stories represented stability. A great-great grandfather William who migrated from Northern England to London as a boy, and was apprenticed as a blacksmith in Woolwich Arsenal, where they made arms to supply the troops of the British Empire. His son Richard was apprenticed also as a blacksmith in the Arsenal. The message was that if you worked hard and carried out your responsibilities, you could prosper in an unassuming way. They went to church, they didn’t drink alcohol,and they saved money. You could buy a house, and raise a family.

My grandfather Ernest was apprenticed at the Arsenal in his turn. His story was that on his first day, he was tasked with shaping a steel rod into a coil spring using a hammer. His spring looked terrible. At the end of the day he realised he wouldn’t be any good as a blacksmith. So he studied at night school and passed the civil service exam. He worked for the government until he retired. He married my grandmother Margaret and they had three sons, Dick, Jack and Roy, my father. When I was born in 1953, the second world war seemed close, with war films in the cinema, and war stories in the comics. I learned that our plucky little country Britain had fought against Germany, no-one thought we could win, but we did. That was a wonderful thing, because the British were good, and the Germans were bad. I learned that I was British, and that was great, because Britain was the best country in the world. At school, in the playground, we would play Tommies and Jerries, and we would run around machine-gunning each other. It dawned on me that the Jerries were in fact Germans, so they were bad. They would have to lose every battle. We all wanted to be Tommies, but we had to take our turn being Jerries. There was a certain demonic pleasure in being bad, trying to kill Tommies, and threatening to overturn the security of our world, before succumbing to the heroic Tommies, like in the comics.

But I was aware of a problem in my world. Of course, I was British. We won the war. I was being brought up as a Christian. But my mother was German. Or she had been German, because she was British now. So she wasn’t German any more, fortunately. But my mother was definitely….foreign. That was not a good thing for a child in 1950’s England, even forgetting about the German bit. I was embarrassed because she was different in so may ways. She had a trained singing voice. In church, everyone would be singing the hymn in a restrained English way. She didn’t know the hymn, but every so often, she would join in for a beat or two, her operatic soprano drowning out the whole congregation, then suddenly ceasing. I wanted to disappear.

Her story was that she had been German, but Hitler chased her out of Germany. Why? Because Hitler was mad. I can still remember the image I formed as a child of Hitler chasing my mother. I knew my mother couldn’t run fast because she had a bad leg, so I imagined Mad Hitler running a few paces towards my mother, stopping, his eyes staring and teeth bared, then running a few more paces, while my mother hobbled painfully out of Germany. That really scared me. My grandparents were living in the basement of our house. My mother had helped them escape Germany. Oma and Opa seemed quite isolated. I sensed that something bad had happened to them. But my dad’s father Ernest was a solid, safe figure.

And there was another thing. My Oma and Opa were Jewish. They lit candles on a Friday night, and sang prayers in a funny language. My mother had been Jewish, but now she was a Christian like us. Hitler chased my mother because she was Jewish. Later I learned that Hitler had actually caught my mother’s Oma, and her favourite aunt, Alice, and killed them both. My Oma and Opa had only just escaped. I realised that it was much safer to be British and Christian. And, luckily, that’s what I was. I wasn’t Jewish. So I should have felt safe. Somehow, in a way I was unaware of for decades, I never felt safe. In my forties, while learning breathing techniques to help my asthma, I found I had chronic hyperventilation. I wonder why. As I look back,how solid were my defences against the suspicion that I might be a teeny weeny bit Jewish, or even German?

I did well at school, was sociable and popular as a child, but things were difficult for me as a teenager. And I had no idea where I would fit into the world. Looking back, my sense of who I was had no foundation to it. Or, as I discovered later, half of my identity was erased. I dropped out of university, and lived a nomadic life in my twenties. By 32 I had figured out something of who I was in the work sense. I would combine creativity and helping people who were struggling in life, eventually working in the NHS as an Occupational Therapist and then as a Dramatherapist. Helping people discover their stories. I even managed to find a wonderful partner, Ava, and have two fine children, Gabriel and Nathan. Having children really did bring up the question to me of who I was and what I had to pass on.

At this time I had a dream of standing with my Opa, who was holding my arm out with his over a table with a white cloth on it. There was a ceremonial feeling to it. What did it mean?

I was part of a drama group, and sometimes we would gather to make masks together. I made a mask of a character who turned out to be a Moses-like prophet. Another mask turned out to be a Jewish tailor from the East End of London, called

Alf. For the life of me, I was puzzled why I had created these masks who had absolutely nothing to do with me, as I saw myself.

I felt that somehow, I had no centre. My homoeopath urged me to visit her synagogue. I went one Saturday morning. I had a feeling of coming home. I remember the first time I tried saying to myself “I’m Jewish”. It seemed true, but felt as weird as telling myself I lived on the moon. But I got used to it. I joined a local synagogue. Began to light candles on Friday night, and intone the same prayers my Opa used to sing. My partner Ava accepted in good spirit that she was now living with a Jewish man. My eldest son Gabriel who was four asked me why we lit the candles. I told him I was Jewish. He asked, “Am I Jewish?” I told him he could decide when he was older. Three weeks later he decided he was. My youngest son, Nathan, joined us.

What was it like, this new feeling of being Jewish? It was good. I felt more solid more present. I had always had this sense of not belonging, and I didn’t know why. Now I knew why, and it felt better knowing. Jewish people have been made to feel on the outside. It connected me with my people’s tradition of resistance. I had already unconsciously felt the guilt and the shame, but now I also had access to some pride, and a connection with the amazing traditions and stories through the centuries. I belonged there. And because I knew where the feeling of not belonging to England came from, I could challenge it with strength, and say, “I am English. It’s mine. You’re not taking that away from me.”

To begin with, I felt I was not as authentic a Jew as the people I imagined growing up in that tradition. But I studied Hebrew, and I even had a Bar Mitzvah. And I realised how difficult it is for so many Jewish people in our painful and fractured history to feel they are “good” Jews. I’m there, amongst us all, in my inadequacy, my pride, my shame, my solidarity, my resistance, my love of sitting with family and friends, Jewish and not Jewish, amidst lots of delicious food, at Passover or Hannukah. We’re here, and we have survived. And I have my full story.

Or do I?

OK, I’m Jewish. What about being German? One day my sons told me they wanted German nationality, and could I help them. They felt deeply connected to Europe, and felt they were losing that. I phoned the embassy, and found I was born three months too soon to be German, with the law as it was. But I had this thought that maybe like I was Jewish, I actually was German. Did I need anyone else to allow it? No! It felt good to feel my connection with Germany. Am I proud of being German? Proud of being British? It’s just something I am. Through both those identities, I feel pride, connection and joy from the great things achieved by my compatriots, and shame about the terrible things they have done. But I belong to both, like I belong in my family, for better or for worse. It was exciting to join the Article 116 group, and I am full of admiration and gratitude for Feiix and Isabelle in helping the law to change. It was a wonderful thing to be welcomed warmly with my sons at the German Embassy in London, and to receive our certificates of nationality together. But I feel I was already German. I always had been, I just didn’t realise it.

So, is this gathering about reconciliation? My story tells me that I have to reconcile all the parts of myself to feel whole. When I tried to shut out something that was so terrifying and shameful, I lost a part of myself. I needed it. And when as a child I was hanging on to being British in that paranoid way, shutting out the “other”, I wonder if that is what people do when they are attracted to ultra-nationalist and xenophobic political parties. They want to feel safe and certain in a threatening world, but they will lose a part of themselves. I love coming to Berlin, and experiencing German people trying to be as whole as they can be, by connecting with the “other”, both in peoples of different cultures, and the shameful bits of one’s own cultural past. So, about my initial questions, “Who are you? Who am I?” – should that be, “How much of ourselves can we manage to be?”

Let’s remember, and reconcile.