Autobiography

CHAPTER FOUR
C4. JEWS, JEWS AND MORE JEWS
As a young boy living in the East End of
London, I was something of an enigma.
My surname was Jewish, my dad was Jewish
and my grandparents on my father’s side were
practising Jews, but my mother was a
Christian. I didn’t go to a synagogue, nor could
I speak Hebrew.
I had no religious beliefs then and neither do I
now, but I am Jewish by birth and background.
When you are as poor as we were, religion was
the last thing on our minds. It was simply not
part of our lives.
People associated Jews with being better off,
but I was the only boy in the class receiving
RO (Relief Office) free meals. I’ve already
mentioned the misery of clip clopping along the
wooden block floors at school, RO ticket in
hand, when the pupils were called up to pay
their school dinner money. The fact that we
were poor Jews didn’t seem to matter as we
were seen as scroungers as well as Jews.
We were to be despised by everybody, which I
discovered from other kids taunting me. They
could only have learnt such hatred from their
parents. They simply couldn’t understand the
correlation between ‘Jew’ and ‘poor’ and they
beat me up anyway. This was the first time I
encountered anti-Semitism.
50