Page 167 - White Lives The Interplay of 'Race', Class, and Gender in Everyday Life

160 How English am I?
It’s quite interesting, David for example is English, is third-generation
Jewish immigrant. But culturally he’s got – he’s not a practising Jew
and neither is his family, but culturally he’s quite Jewish. You know, he
sort of believes in things like racial memory. And certainly I can see in
Rachel for example, it’s very peculiar, because she resembles him most
physically in that she’s got a dark appearance and an olive skin that are
obviously not part of my gene heritage and you know, she’s got quite an
imaginative melancholic streak in her which is what her father has, you
know. And that’s a cultural inheritance if you like, rather than a national
one.
(Interview 43, emphasis Liz’s)

Jewishness was here about something other than Englishness. Although
for Liz, Englishness could also contain Jewishness – her husband could be
Jewish and English. This was a reflection of the different trajectories of as-
similation and acceptance for Jewish and black people. Liz made a distinc-
10
tion between cultural and national inheritance to distinguish between what
was Jewish and what was English, but this construction left Englishness and
her identity as something outside of culture. When I asked whether her chil-
dren were brought up with much Jewish culture, Liz detailed their contact
with their grandparents ‘who come up once a week and their grandma feeds
them chicken soup [laugh]’ and occasional participation in religious events
and parties. She went on to explain ‘but they’ve never, I mean I think David
will at some time, they’ve never really been to a synagogue, simply because
David doesn’t go to a synagogue. That part of his cultural heritage is dying
out because his grandparents kept the religious observances [. . .] and his
parents don’t do it any more and obviously we don’t do it’. It is interesting,
however, that when I posed a question, echoing her own use of the word
‘heritage’, it met with incomprehension. White, Protestant, working- or
middle-class Englishness did not have a ‘culture’ or a ‘heritage’ in the same
way.

BB: So do they see your side of the family as well?
Liz: Yeah, yeah.
BB: And is that, kind of, you know, heritage, how important is the
kind of family heritage idea to you, do you think . . .
Liz: . . . um, what do you mean by heritage?
BB: Well, I don’t know, whether you have any sense of giving them
a family . . .
Liz: Um, I don’t, it’s not a term I’ve ever given any thought to, quite
honestly. I mean if you say to me heritage, I think of national
trust properties and things like that.
(Liz, Interview 43)

For Liz, heritage was something that belongs to others, to cultural others
who may have Jewish or some other ‘exotic’ heritage, or to class others.