of the household gods. Handsome green volumes of his oeuvre lined the drawing-room bookcase, the works of the disciples by their sides. We were encouraged to read them almost as soon as we were out of nappies, not just the theory, but also its application in works such as Moses and Monotheism or Civilisation and its Discontents. My parents accepted his precepts unquestioningly. Theory was also put into practice. Mum was in therapy with a brilliant polymath in Reading, learning as much about zoology and Shakespeare as she did about herself. My brother and sisters all had counselling at one time or other. Only Dad didn’t. He just sent everybody else off to be cured, hoping his life would be made easier once we had been. Had he been analysed himself we might all have benefited. Freud was good enough for us, but the barbs in his beard might spike Dad’s muse.
My own analyst, Dr Woodhead, was a proper Freudian, old enough to have known the great man and grown up with the passion of a new faith. I’d lie on the couch while she sat behind me, white-haired and elegant in county tweeds, stopwatch ticking for fifty minutes, both happy with silence, and content to bounce questions back at me with a sure forehand. Our sessions were twice a week. I was ferried from school and then home by Douglas ‘Buzz’ Wells, an ex-racing driver, golfer and boxer with a toothbrush moustache who referred to her as Timbernut. The expensive navel-searching must have seemed indulgent to a man who’d resolved his own frustrations in the ring or on the racetrack. Our laddish conversations lifted the damp, analytical gloom my sessions left me wrapped in. A couple of visits a week to his place in Norland Square, just round the corner from my parents, might have benefited me more.
To the left and to the right of Sigmund Freud stood Groucho Marx and Lenny Bruce. Together they comprised a Jewish atheist’s trinity. A diet of the sayings of these three topped up with a daily Holocaust catechism constituted our religious education. Hatred of our enemies defined my Jewishness as we weren’t kosher, and didn’t observe any of the holidays or festivals. In fact adherence to the central part of the Trinity deprived me of the sacred B’rith, the covenant of circumcision that binds all Jewish men to God. My Freudian parents thought it would lead to a castration complex. Dad certainly had one. He regularly informed me that Jewish women were domineering shrews to be avoided at all costs. He could get away with saying this as Mum was only half Jewish.
A central event in family lore was the Kossoff trial. The broadcaster, David Kossoff, had accused Dad of writing anti-Semitic handbooks, a slander that deeply upset both my parents. Mum’s tears drove Dad to a court action which he won, conducting his own defence. It was a case that made the front page of the Evening Standard. Kossoff’s main target, The Bankrupts, was in fact an unremittingly scathing and negative account of the idolatrous, philistine suburban Jewish world of ritual without religion that public school had allowed Dad to escape. ‘Who likes the Yiden? The goyim hate the Yiden, the Yiden hate the Yiden. Nobody likes the Yiden,’ my great-grandmother apparently used to say.
The only Jews I knew were Dad’s friends from the literary and intellectual world like Frederic Raphael and Isaac Bashevis Singer, fascinating, charismatic people I could listen to for hours who would have shared his view of the environment he’d had to escape in order to define himself. Jewishness seemed synonymous with non-religious values and aspirations (embodied by these people) which I cherished and admired. We saw little of Dad’s family. His beloved father had died when I was a baby and his mother lived in Hove with her second husband Bobby, known to us as Uncle Booby, and there, as far as Dad was concerned, they could stay.
There had been plenty of Jewish kids at The Hall. At Pimlico I couldn’t name one, which might explain why the words Jew and Hymie were bandied about so readily, demonising the absent race, substituting the Jew of anti-Semitic gentile folklore for the reality.
‘’Ere, Froggy! Gi’s back that twenty pence wot I borrowed yer!’
‘Ain’t go’ it, Dave?’
‘Nah. Course you ain’t, ’cos yer a fackin’ Jew, incher?’
‘Don’t call him a Jew.’
Alan and Froggy stared at me, bemused.
‘Why? ’O says ’e ain’t?’
‘If you want to say someone’s mean, say so, but don’t say they’re a Jew.’
A smile stole across Alan’s podgy, red face.
‘Alright, Hymie!’
‘Can we have silence over there, please?’ yelled the teacher.
‘Hymie, Hymie Goldberg.’
The silly, and basically harmless refrain spread across the row behind me, but I’d made them conscious of a usage that came too trippingly off their tongues. Now I’d got it out in the open there was more chance of being able to tackle it. It amused me they’d actually hit on my real name. I turned round.
‘Just don’t call someone a Jew if you want to say they’re stingy.’
Again the refrain.
‘Oy, Hymie!’ Alan smiled. ‘Comin’ out to play football?’
As the pips went for the end of break and the drudgery of geography beckoned, I heard someone call out ‘Nice goal, Hymie!’
It was Klewer. Twice the size of anyone else in the class, well liked for his friendly, open nature, but considered to be one of the best fighters in the school.
‘Shame you ’ave to be so Jewish with the ball, though.’
I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, so I grinned but he didn’t smile back.
‘What’s the matter, Hymie?’
The rage began to fill my chest. Before me stood the embodiment of the abuse and savagery inflicted on my people for two thousand years, that I heard recounted daily, that had led to Mum’s cousin Theo being gassed at Auschwitz. I spat full in Klewer’s face. I’d never seen him look angry before. He lurched towards me, a big brown bear.
‘Fight! Fight!’
Other boys alerted the ones who hadn’t made it back to the classrooms and I was aware of figures scurrying towards us. My only chance against this giant was to do a Muhammad Ali, so I moved in fast, through his cumbersome blows, and hung over his shoulder, not giving him the chance to swing, reducing his punches to pats and paws. If Klewer broke free I’d be in hospital.
‘Come on, Klewer. Smack ’im!’
‘Belt ’im!’
‘Cam on, ’e’s a wanker!’
I wondered how long I’d be able to hang on before the crowd’s incitement mixed with his anger would cause the explosion to free him, but the blows began to peter out and eventually we separated. Klewer gave me a cold, unforgiving look.
‘You’re lucky!’
‘Klewer could’ve killed yer!’
‘Yeah! Knock sixteen colours o’ shit aht o’ yer!’
‘Finish it later!’
My passion was spent. I looked at Klewer. He just seemed fed up.
I couldn’t wait to tell Dad how I’d fought a bigger opponent in defence of my Jewishness.
‘Filthy anti-Semitic bastard!’
‘He’s not. He’s just ignorant.’
‘Is he a Polack?’
‘No idea.’
‘With a name like Klewer?’
‘Could be anything.’
I didn’t need to forgive Klewer. I could have embraced the boy who’d allowed me to focus my sense of being Jewish so keenly.
Conversation at the court of King Brian flowed as normal that evening.
‘You know what my friend the Irish watchmaker says, “Oi’ve always worked on the principal that every Goy is an anti-Semite, and d’you