A Lonely Jew in London

The nice weather we’ve been experiencing recently has taken me not just to the city parks, but to the suburbs as well. After I posted that seemed to be no Jews in London, I got a bunch of posts from family and friends insisting that there was, in fact, a strong Jewish community in London. You just need to know where to look. My single other Jewish friend at Kings (who is also American), and I decided to go in search of them. We had missed every major Jewish holiday this term except for Passover, though the two person Sedar we cobbled together in my kitchen was barely worthy of the name, so I was fuelled by the deepest, most culturally specific force a Jew knows to go and find my people, and atone for neglect of my culture: guilt.

We found that the main Jewish neighborhood in London is called Golder’s Green, and it’s located way to the north of the city, in Zone three on the tube map. We took advantage of the May day holiday (May first is a bank holiday here, for no apparent reason) to grab a bus out to the burbs. When we arrived we looked around, unsure what to expect. Would there be a synagogue on the high street? Would the soundtrack to Fiddler on the Roof be playing in the background? What made this neighborhood more or less Jewish than the rest of London? We weren’t sure, but the high volume of Chinese restaurants told us we must be in the right place. And sure enough, as we walked down the high street, amid the McDonalds and the Starbucks we began to see Kosher bakeries and restaurants, and stores selling Jewanalia like menorahs and mezuzahs.

As I said before I don’t consider myself to be really Jewish. I was never Bat mitzvahed and I don’t practice, but this semester has made me feel more Jewish than at any other time in my life. There’s something about being the only Jew in the room that makes you extremely aware of your heritage, and I have been the only Jew in the room since January when I arrived. But I’ve always considered myself culturally Jewish, and I missed the things I considered to be my cultural heritage that I took for granted in the states—bagels and lox, hamentaschen, matzah ball soup; my connection to my religion was deeply culinary.

We had come, then, to Golder’s Green to perform the only kind of Jewish ritual that I knew: eating. We wandered in and out of the bakeries and delis, buying a piece of ruggelah there, and pickle there to take home and eat later, but we took our time before selecting a falafel stand with a line out of the door to purchase lunch. With our deep fried chick peas and diet cokes, we ate outside and watched the passers by, thrilling at the sight of men wearing long beards with curly forelocks, and women in long jean skirts with children in their arms. Back home, obviously conservative Jews made me uncomfortable because I always felt inadequate around them. Besides from the disagreements about Israel and a woman’s place in the workforce that I felt we were sure to have, I knew that I was not their idea of a good Jew, because, well, I wasn’t a good Jew, and that made me resentful. But here it was amazing just to look down the street and know that I was not alone. Here, I wasn’t the bad Jew, I was the only Jew (well, one of two,) and that was tough. It has been ages since I had felt that I didn’t have to be the one carrying the Jew-torch: in my flat and in my classes I was the one who had to know everything about being Kosher, or the exact translation of each Yiddish interjection. In Golder’s Green I could finally relax and let others carry the torch; I could go back to being the bad Jew that I’d been all my life, and that was a great feeling.

After the falafel, and a desert of Kosher cookies, we decided to walk to Primrose Hill. It was a long walk that took us over Hampstead Heath, which is one of the highest points in London and offered a great view of the city. Away from the rush of inner city London, it was nice to take some time and just stroll through the increasingly green landscape. Of course, this could only go on for so long before the sidewalks vanished entirely, and we were left looking over our shoulders to watch for the SUVS (less common than in America, but still a presence) and Lexuses didn’t get us. And I realized that suburbs are nice, but Jews or no Jews, there’s no place like the public transportation system.