|
By George! My Jewish faith gets deeper
PEOPLE have always asked me what it was like to grow up psychic.
But this week the comedian Alan King asked me for a quite
different perspective - for his new anthology Growing Up Jewish.
Alan and I first bumped into each other around 1970 in Yaffa.
He was a master of his audience even then, a walking encyclopaedia
of gags with lightning reflexes and a memory like a computer.
(But back then, of course, only Nasa had computers.)
I watched his faultless, instinctive timing as he tried out
punchlines on friends and got laughs from people who must
have heard the jokes 20 or 30 times already.
He's a perfectionist and a completist, and I was not even
slightly surprised when his Great Jewish Joke Book gathered
together just about every rib-tickler worth remembering. This
is my favourite Alan King joke:
Mrs. Cohen is yelling at the lifeguard who has just pulled
her husband out of the ocean. He tells her he is going to
give artificial respiration. She yells back: "You'll
either give my Benny real respiration or nothing!
So I was delighted to get Alan's request: "All my life
as an entertainer, I have enjoyed recounting stories of what
it was like to grow up Jewish, and now, I'm asking well-known
Jews from all walks of life to recall their fondest memories
of growing up Jewish.
"Your recollections can be a paragraph, a page, or more,
and can be humorous or serious.
"You can write about your family, your friends, a particular
event or incident in your life, celebrating the holidays or
about going to school or summer camp."
My first reaction was to think of sending Alan a potted version
of my autobiography, from my earliest memories, of my cot
in Tel Aviv to my service in the Israeli forces as a paratrooper.
But when I read the letter again, I realised he wasn't interested
in life stories - he wanted the essence. The defining memories.
And for me, "growing up Jewish" wasn't the essence
or my childhood.
It wasn't even "growing up psychic". What defined
my existence was "growing up Israeli". My mother
had fled the Nazis, my father had fought to throw the British
out of Palestine, and I was a boy in Fifties Israel when we
expected an attack any day that would, as the hostile Arab
states that surrounded us swore to do, "drive the Jews
into the sea".
Israel was on the defensive every day of my childhood, and
this state of near paranoia climaxed when I reached my 20s
with the Six-Day War.
I lived in a country that wasn't recognised by much of the
world, that was peopled with survivors of Hitler's systematic
attempt to wipe Jews from the face of an Ayran earth, and
that defined itself as a religious state at a time when most
nations were taking God out of politics.
I have not lived in Israel for many years. My family settled
in Britain in the Eighties for the sake of my career, and
my children can't remember living anywhere else.
I haven't lived in Israel, but Israel lives in me. I don't
even have to think about my homeland consciously - I express
my national culture in every gesture I make and every decision
I take.
And in every word I speak - as impressionists love to remind
me, my Israeli accent has never softened in 30 years of using
English daily.
Perhaps that's because Hanna, my wife, who is also an Israeli,
and I use Hebrew around the home. I was rarely conscious of
being Jewish, until my parents split up.
Till then, when I was about 10 years old, my family's faith
was as unremarkable as the apartment we shared and the food
we ate.
Of course we were Jewish - we also sat on chairs, put shoes
on our feet and used cutlery when we ate. Anything else would
have been odd.
As a matter of fact, odd things did happen to our family
cutlery - but I believe that would have happened even if I'd
been born Muslim or Confucian.
I truly became aware that I was Jewish, and that this was
something to be proud of, when I was sent to stay with the
Shomrons, a Hungarian-born family who lived in Kibbutz Hatzor.
This communal farm near Ashdod, a long way south of the home
and the mother I was leaving, strived to take children from
broken homes and give them a stable upbringing.
I didn't want a stable upbringing - I wanted my Abba and
Muti, my parents.
And I wanted my dog, Joker. We could faintly hear the fighting
during the Suez War, and I will always cherish the memory
of my father racing up to the kibbutz in his battle Jeep,
caked in dust, a rifle over his shoulder.
He had taken a few hours' leave from the front to visit me,
and I was so proud of him.
The people of Kibbutz Hatzor were the most observant Jews
I ever lived among. Within two years, I was living in Cyprus
with my mother and her new husband, and my school was a Catholic
Christian one - they don't have many kibbutzim in Cyprus.
I was even given a Christian name: George, which the priests
claimed was the equivalent of Uri.
It's still one of the few things I can't bear, to be addressed
as George by friends who knew me from those days.
My Jewish faith has become deeper as I've gained in years
and experience, and my awareness that I am Jewish is far more
intense.
So perhaps the most truthful response I can make to Alan
King is: I am still Growing Up Jewish.
Email
him at uri@urigeller.com
|
Engage
Uri Geller - Maximise your potential, the world's leading motivational
speaker
