My new audio drama ask whether we are more than the stories we tell ourselves
In approximately 1997 when I would have been 15 or 16, I attended Limmud (the Hebrew for ‘to learn’) – a music, culture, literature and All The Things I Like event – for the first time.
I put up my hand at a prominent author’s Q&A and asked why being Jewish wasn’t ever just one aspect of a characters’ lives in his books. It was always the most important or visible thing about them. It was never a thing, but always the thing. That author said there was no point in them being Jewish in the story unless that was the most important thing about them. I didn’t disagree aloud, however strongly I felt this was, at best, the opposite of my own experience of what Judaism being a fundamental part of my identity felt like. The best Q&As are, after all, Q&As. They are not ‘This is more of a comment than a question’ territory. I wasn’t prepared to (or brave enough to?) turn it into that. I listened to his answer and saw it as his answer, and knew it didn’t have to be mine.
But I continue to disagree, and to feel that Judaism never seen as one of many things about who a character is in themselves is a significant missed opportunity.
How important something is, how fundamental it is to who you are, doesn’t always equate with how visible it is.
Thinking the opposite, or not thinking about it at all, is why those of us who are have that permanent background exhaustion that goes a little deeper every time the BBC posts a picture of ultra-orthodox, male Jews praying in an instantly visible way whenever they talk about anything Jewish; whether that picture is representative of the story or not. The tiredness of having to say (or live with not saying) every day that just as a government doesn’t equal a country, just as a country doesn’t equal a diaspora, just as a diaspora doesn’t equal everyone agreeing about everything any more than a family equals identical units who agree about everything… that I am just as Jewish as any first-in-the-Shutterstock-images choice the news makes. I am just as real a picture of what my identity means.
I don’t directly explore this in Winter Spring, my new audio drama coming out on the Alternative Stories platform on 13 September. Instead, I do something I think there’s far more of a call for, if we really do want society to be about living together rather than apart.
Alice Winter, her brother Ash Winter and cousin Harris Spring are the third generation of a family property company, founded by their German immigrant grandfather who taught them the one thing the world would always need was good landlords. Three generations later, in order to survive, Ash has turned the business into an estate agency: the thing their grandfather hated most. A new tenant, only known as Poppy, moves into the top floor of what she discovers used to be their family home. Alice lives in the other flat with Kit, the imaginary friend she’s had since childhood. As stories of future and past fight to be ‘true’, the story asks are we more than the stories we tell ourselves?
None of this is autobiographical in its specifics, but it’s ethically autobiographical. It’s what I inherited not just from my parents and grandparents but from the songs, the stories and the ceremonies around them that have shaped our life cycles for two thousand years.
Poppy doesn’t pick up on Ash’s Jewish identity through looking at him; she gets it through listening to his stories, his history, his view of the world. The connection they begin as a result makes her rethink what being an estate agent means (based on me facing one of my own real-life prejudices: someone who is now a really good friend I at first thought had to be fake, the depth to which we got on had to be a trick because he was an estate agent. I discounted our growing up in the same town, knowing the same places and laughing at the same geographical in-jokes because of my prejudice. That friend was the first person I shared the idea for this script with).
From escaping domestic violence to the relationships we have when stories offer us imaginary friends, Winter Spring is about what it means for a story to be true. Like audio drama itself, the stories we carry our truest stories without pictures. It’s about remembering that and be ready to listen – to others’ stories and to our own. Because they can all be true.
Winter Spring by Rachel Knightley, an Alternative Stories production, will be released on 13 September. Watch this space.