דייוויד באדיל הוא מן הקומיקאים הבריטים האהובים עלי.
ולא רק עלי, כמובן. אפשר בקלות להכתיר אותו כאחד מיקירי הפזורה האנגלופילית, שיש לה לא מעט חברים גם בארץ, אבל לא רק בזכות ההומור. באדיל הוא גם סופר, יוצר של תוכניות רדיו וטלוויזיה משובחות, ומחברו של רב המכר שראה אור לאחרונה גם בעברית ״לא סופרים את היהודים״. הוא גם מגיש, ביחד עם הברונית וארסי, פודקאסט מעניין בשם A Muslim and a Jew Go There, כי כמו בספר, וכמו בסטנד אפ שלו, הוא בעד לדבר על הכול.
אז דיברנו – באנגלית, כמובן, אף שדייוויד למד עברית בבית הספר היסודי – דיברנו על מה שהוביל אותו לכתוב את ״לא סופרים את היהודים״, ואז, כמתבקש מפודקאסט שעוסק במוות ואבל, דיברנו גם על הוריו, ובעיקר על אימא שלו שהוא הקדיש לה תוכנית הומוריסטית נפלאה בשם My Family – Not the Sitcom (שאגב, הפכה ממש בימים אלה לספר) ובה הוא דיבר על הכול, כולל השירים הארוטיים שאמו נהגה לכתוב למאהב שלה והדמנציה של אביו, וכל הרגעים המצחיקים, המביכים, המוזרים והקשים – כי מבחינתו של באדיל, אידיאליזציה של המתים מוחקת אותם שוב, והוא לא רוצה למחוק, הוא רוצה לזכור באמת.
תאריך עליית הפרק לאוויר: 23/07/2024.
קריינית: "על החיים ועל המוות", עורכת ומגישה דפנה לוי.
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דפנה: דיוויד בדיל הוא מן הקומיקאים הבריטיים האהובים עליי, ולא רק עליי כמובן. אפשר בקלות להכתיר אותו כאחד מיקירי הפזורה האנגלופילית, שיש לה לא מעט חברים גם בארץ, אבל לא רק בזכות ההומור. בדיל הוא גם סופר, יוצר של תוכניות רדיו וטלוויזיה משובחות, ומחברו של רב המכר, שראה אור לאחרונה גם בעברית, "לא סופרים את היהודים". הוא גם מגיש, ביחד עם הברונית וארסי, פודקאסט מעניין בשם "A Muslim and a Jew Go There". כי כמו בספר וכמו בסטנדאפ שלו, דיוויד בדיל הוא בעד לדבר על הכל.
אז דיברנו, באנגלית כמובן, אף שדיוויד למד עברית בבית הספר היסודי. דיברנו על מה שהוביל אותו לכתוב את "לא סופרים את היהודים", ואז, כמתבקש מפודקאסט שעוסק במוות ואבל, דיברנו גם על הוריו, ובעיקר על אמא שלו, שהוא הקדיש לה תוכנית הומוריסטית נפלאה בשם "My Family, Not the Sitcom", שאגב, הפכה ממש בימים אלה לספר, ובה הוא דיבר על הכול, כולל השירים האירוטיים שאמו נהגה לכתוב למאהב שלה, והדמנציה של אביו, וכל הרגעים המצחיקים, המביכים, המוזרים והקשים. כי מבחינתו של בדיל, אידיאליזציה של המתים מוחקת אותם שוב. והוא לא רוצה למחוק, הוא רוצה לזכור באמת.
David: Okay, so let me tell you what happened, which is so… It’s kind of mad that the book is now in Israel. It’s, obviously… It’s about Jews. I did an interview with Itamar Katzir, and it was a really interesting piece, I thought. He asked lots of interesting questions. But he said something, which I think I talk about in the book, in the intro, which is, you know, he said that he thought the reason, one reason, why it might not be published is because the book is about how in the, you know, west, Jews are not recognized as a proper minority in the way that minority politics is a big deal in the West. And he said, yeah, but Jews are not a minority in Israel. And so it doesn’t speak to them in the same way. And then we had this conversation about how maybe since October the 7th, Jews feel they’re sort of minority status, as it were, globally, a bit more in Israel. And all this led [laughing] to a big piece. And then, next thing I knew, there were about three publishers [laughing] wanting to publish it in Israel. So that was quite good from that point of view.
I mean, the book, as you probably know, has in it my position on Israel, which is that I’m not someone who feels, you know, like some diaspora Jews. I don’t feel incredibly connected to Israel. And that was also a possible reason why it hadn’t been published. It’s obviously of interest [laughing] either way, to lots of Jews in Israel.
Daphna: It’s not only that we don’t think of ourselves as a minority here. We also never ever think of ourselves as being able to do something wrong. And therefore, we’re constantly in shock whenever we are, you know, rebuked or something.
David: Right. That’s interesting. I mean, because one of the things I think the Jews around the world feel at the moment, is a slight annoyance, more than a slight annoyance, that sort of thing with Israel about that. However connected other Jews are to Israel, I think all Jews feel like: “I wish Israel would show a bit more awareness in what it does, of the impact on diaspora Jews”. Because it never seems to have any sense of that. There’s never any sense that Israel’s actions, when they become out of hand, which they do, from time to time, I think, how much that is going to impact on Jews around the world.
Because, of course, you do have this thing, which I oppose in the book, and challenge in the book, which is that Jews around the world are held responsible for what Israel does. And I don’t accept that, of course, and it’s racist. At the same time, it exists. And so a part of me thinks: you know, fucking hell, Netanyahu specifically, you know, the way you’re behaving will lead to violence against Jews in America or in Britain and whatever, and… and your actions will be used as justification. And however unjustified that is, it would be better if you weren’t behaving like this.
Shall… shall I explain to people, who haven’t read it, what the book is about?
Okay, so the book was written in 2021. And I was asked to write a short essay book by Harper Collins, kind of about anything. And I almost instantly said, I want to write it about how Jews are not recognised, by the progressive left specifically, as being, you know, included in the conversation about identity politics, about minorities, about offence, about representation, about all that language, about how we try and think positively about minorities now to minimize racism and to include representation. That, that’s something that Jews are not really at the table of.
And I begin the book with about 12 examples, some of them quite extreme, and some of them, in a way, quite trivial. From proper aggression to microaggressions against Jews, that have had no corresponding kind of outrage, such as you would see, if this was any other minority.
And I sort of… most of them are personal, some of them are not, some of them are political. I mean, for example, there’s one example how on the radio, on the “Today” programme, which is the big news programme in Britain, at one point, a… Interviewer is talking to an American politician, and he suggests… And this was quite a while ago now, it feels slightly less extreme now, but at the time, it felt very extreme. He suggests the Democratic Party could get out of some of the problems that they’re having with, like, Ilhan Omar and whatever, by just announcing that anti-Semitism is not as important a racism as other forms of racism, just by saying it.
And my point in the book is, that what is amazing, if he said that about any other form of racism, there would have been a huge outcry. But there was nothing, literally nothing. I was the only person who sort of [laughing] noticed it and had to sort of try and create a storm on social media about it.
Daphna: Even if something like that would have been said about feminism, for example…
David: Oh no, also, yeah, I mean, one of the things about the way that I’m placing Jews in the kind of hierarchy of minorities, it’s not just about race. So I include, you know, LGBTQ people, women, to some extent, yeah. It’s just in the list of causes that progressive people care about. [laughing]
Jews are very low down on the list, and I then examine the reasons for this, and they’re complicated, but they can be boiled down to the notion that Jews are powerful, that Jews are powerful, and that therefore they cannot be considered a vulnerable minority. And it’s vulnerable minorities, particularly now, that, you know, progressive people want to ally themselves with. And allyship is a very key notion in the modern era. And there’s no, kind of, points involved in allying yourself with a minority that are seen as wealthy, powerful, privileged, in control of the world.
And all of this, myths about Jews, stands, obviously, in opposition to the persecution of Jews over centuries. So that’s really what the book’s about. And there is a bit in it, quite a short bit, about Israel.
Daphna: [expresses agreement] Hmm.
David: And the shortness of the bit about Israel is to some extent because I find, particularly if you’re talking about progressives, that they tend to reduce anti-Semitism, which is a centuries-old racism, to what’s happening presently in the Middle East, whatever it is. And that itself is a “Jews don’t count” issue, [laughing] because anti-Semitism should not be seen as, you know… it’s as if the only reason there is anti-Semitism is because of Netanyahu. And he does increase anti-Semitism, but it’s without doubt a reduction of the reality of anti-Semitism, which continues throughout the world anyway.
And, you know, as I think I say in the book, you know, at one point I refer to someone at a march, this wasn’t a recent march, but in 2019, who said that if the occupation ends, then anti-Semitism would end. And what I wanted to say to that is, I don’t know if you know, but there was quite a big anti-Semitic global incident three years before the State of Israel was established.So it’s nonsense to imagine that. And that’s partly why in the book, there’s only a short bit about Israel, because I want that to be mimetic, as it were, of my attitude, which is - don’t make this about Israel.
Daphna: I have a friend that is now trying to do a film about… he’s suggesting that Israel would be moved as one unit, all of us together, to someplace else.
David: To where?
Daphna: He is applying to the very enlightened nations of Europe, or America, or Australia, or whatever, if you’re so concerned about the fate of… umm… Palestine, then let us have some place. That we are a very, a very tiny country. Let us have some place that is not inhabited at the moment. But nobody would have us as neighbors anyhow.
David: Yeah, well, oh… [laughing] okay. I mean, obviously, actually, it’s interesting, because I’ve just been asked by a production company if I wanted to do it. I sort of don’t want to spend all my time talking about Jews. It’s one of the unfortunate things about having written a successful book about anti-Semitism, is now I get asked to do a lot of Jewish-based things. And, you know, I’m a writer and comedian about, hopefully, many things, but I was quite interested in this, and I’m talking to them because someone’s asked me to do a documentary about Theodor Herzl.
And what they want is someone who is like me. I identify as a non-Zionist, by which I mean I don’t particularly, umm… I… It’s just, not something… It’s a really weird thing, actually, when I have to explain that to people. It seems to me that as a British Jew, I just spend most of my time thinking about what’s going on in Britain, and, you know, occasionally other parts of the world. But I don’t spend much of my time, never have, certainly until October the 7th, spent much of my time thinking about Israel, just as any other minority, like a British-Chinese person, you know, might occasionally think about what’s happening in China or whatever, but they don’t spend all their time. And certainly to imagine that they do, is racist, right?
Daphna: [expresses agreement] Hmm.
David: So I, I just always identify as a non-Zionist because I also didn’t want to be considered one of those very-very left-wing Jews who hate everything about Israel, because I don’t do that either. And in a way, it’s more of a… it feels more of a radical statement to say: “Yeah, I’m just not that bothered about this foreign [laughing] country”.
Daphna: By the way, the title of the film would be “Altneuland 2.0”. Altneuland is the… Theodor Herzl’s book.
David: Oh, yes, well, Theodor Herzl, who I don’t know much about. That’s partly also why I think they want me to do it, to find out about him. As far as I’m aware, was not at all bothered about the area of land that you’re on now. He just wanted a homeland, or a safe space, right? for Jews?
Daphna: [expresses agreement] Hmm.
David: And so the notion of it being in the Middle East is, I don’t know, actually, where that came from, but I would guess…
Daphna: Oh, of course, it came from the Bible.
David: Sorry, you misunderstand me. I obviously know it came from the Bible. What I mean is, at what point did Zionism decide that the biblical heritage was something they had to completely go with, as opposed to this Herzl idea?
Daphna: It would be a good argument to say, we were here before, we were, you know, deported from this area, we were… we should have the right to return. Which is…
David: I see, I see. I’ll find out more about this. But anyway, the book is about that, the book is about the downgrading of Jews and anti-Semitism in the current conversation. And it’s, you know, done very well, and, you know, created a conversation maybe that wasn’t there before.
As I say, some Israelis are… get annoyed with me about it. And actually, I made a film… I made a film which has gone out on Channel 4. I think it has been shown in Israel, actually, I don’t know on which channel. But I got some angry messages from Israelis on Instagram. Because again, like, I have a conversation with Miriam Margulis, Miriam Margulis…
Daphna: [expresses agreement] Hmm.
David: And Miriam Margulis is a massive anti-Zionist and very angry about Israel. And what’s interesting about that is, I’m arguing with her, and my argument is, essentially, the problem is, Miriam, you are much more connected to Israel than I am. You’re the one who’s connected, because you’re the one who feels betrayed and smeared and “not in my name”, whereas my position is - mehhh!
Daphna: [laughing]
David: You know, what is this to do with me, really? And that’s what any other minority would think. It’s only Jews. It’s partly because we only have one country, right? We only have one country. So that’s why I think a lot of Jews feel that.
Part of what “Jews Don’t Count” is about, is saying Jews should be like other minorities. They should think of themselves like other minorities. And if we are going to do that, then other minorities do not spend all their time, if they’re in country A, thinking: "Oh, I should think about my country of origin. I should defend my country of origin." Who does that? You know? Most people don’t do that, and because they want to live in the country where they live.
Daphna: It’s very difficult for me to… reply, because I… I was born here, and I grew up here, and I was educated in the Israeli umm… education system and all that, but I never really thought of myself as being Jewish. I am, obviously, Jewish, but because I grew up in a completely atheist home, living here, I never thought of myself as being Jewish, and… But moving to England 20 years ago, I… all of a sudden I realized, people look at me as being Jewish, all of a sudden.
David: Yeah, well, one of the key things about “Jews Don’t Count”, and actually, we can move on a bit to “The God Desire”, which might bring us into grief a little bit. [laughing] “The God Desire” is my other book.
One of the key things about “Jews Don’t Count”, which I haven’t mentioned, is that probably the most… extre… you know… I didn’t even think of this as a huge revelation, but it seems to be for a lot of people, is that anti-Semitism, I say in the book, is racism. What it is not is religious intolerance.
A lot of people think that anti-Semitism is religious intolerance, and the way I express that it is not, is that I say: "I am an atheist, but the Gestapo would kill me tomorrow”. And did, in fact, kill large members of my family who were secular Jews. Because my mother was born in Nazi Germany.
Racists do not care about religion. Religion is almost irrelevant in the whole conversation. It’s not completely irrelevant as regards Israel, because Israel does seem to be a country founded on some notion of religion, which is complex. But I think that my book is about racism. It’s about anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is misunderstood by many people as being to do with religion, and it’s not, because racists don’t care about whether you keep kosher or anything like that.
But I do think that I have always felt Jewish. I mean, I had the same kind of upbringing as you did, which was kind of… some atheism, and then some Pesach, and some Rosh Hashanah, and whatever. But I went to a Jewish primary school because it was the nearest school. I wore… I kept kosher. I spoke Hebrew, biblical Hebrew, when I was young. Ahh… I wore a kappel, and tzitzit, and whatever.
And what I became aware of quite early on, was anti-Semitism. And anti-Semitism is what makes you feel Jewish, not religion, I think. It’s knowing that you are other, and can be discriminated against, that makes you feel Jewish, I think. And again, that might be a reason why some Israelis don’t particularly feel Jewish. Because within Israel itself, of course, there is no anti-Semitism.
Daphna: The frequency in which I encounter racist remarks about other people from Jews in Israel is increasing all the time. And always, at the background, the excuse is: “We were persecuted. We are discriminated against”, which is also a very big problem.
David: No, no, I’m sure that is a problem. I’m sure it is, and I’m aware, obviously, of that happening. I mean, from my point of view, which is complicated, is that I agree that that happens, but I also think that the notion that anti-Semitism, you know, is being weaponized either by the State of Israel, or by the right wing, or whatever, that doesn’t mean anti-Semitism doesn’t exist.
That’s what tends to happen, is that I am… progressives, again, when they argue with me, will say: “Oh, but the State of Israel is always claiming anti-Semitism, or people are always mixing up anti-Semitism with criticizing the State of Israel”, and all that stuff. And that’s true, but that doesn’t mean that anti-Semitism is that… poof, it’s gone. right? That’s what they tend to do, is they tend to say, “Well, stop calling out anti-Semitism, because this is really what it is”. And that’s not true. It can be both things.
Can I… I just think it might just help, in terms of what you normally talk about, to just mention one thing. So, I wrote a book called “The God Desire”, which will, if successful, [laughing] follow up to “Jews Don’t Count”. And it’s… but it’s more of a philosophical book, and it’s about why I’m an atheist. But part of it is why I’m a Jewish atheist, which some people are confused about.
I talk, actually, at one point, about how the Jewishness of me has not much… has got nothing to do with God. But I feel it, and I talk about how, in a funeral… actually, shall I read it? Shall I read this bit?
Daphna: Yeah.
David: ’Cause… hang on, it might take me a tiny minute to find it, but it includes Hebrew, so I apologize in advance for my rubbish Hebrew.
Daphna: How many years did… did you spend going to some Hebrew school when you were a child?
David: About six years, my primary school. Okay, so…
Daphna: Just before you begin, who is the person in the photo just behind you?
David: Oh, that? Yeah, that’s my great-grandfather.
Daphna: Your great-grandfather?
David: That’s Barney Baddiel, my great-grandfather, yeah. And by the way, most of my family are extremely religious. I don’t know most of them. So he came to Britain from Latvia, or somewhere, in about 1890 or something. And in the way of these things, he had about 27 children, [laughing] and they all ended up being really religious. And I occasionally meet them, but they spend most of their time, you know, in, whatever, Yeshivas.
And so, Dovid Baddiel, for example, set up one of the biggest yeshivas in Britain. My whole family is very eminent in rabbinical terms, apart from my line, which became entirely [laughing] secular.
Daphna: This is your great-grandfather from your father’s side, from the Baddiel family?
David: My father’s.
Daphna: Ok.
David: Baddiel family, yeah. My mom’s family came from Germany in… very late in 1939, in August 1939.
Daphna: She came as a child?
David: Yeah, as a baby. And they were Reform Jews. Quite eminent Reform Jews, or had been, before. Obviously, all that was destroyed. But I just wanted to read this, which is a… So this is a book about why I’m an atheist, but it is more… I don’t know what the word is. It’s sort of more feeling towards religion than most atheist books. So I’m a stone-cold atheist. I’m 100% atheist, but I understand, because I’m Jewish, really, in the way that, say, maybe Richard Dawkins doesn’t, what religion is doing for people. So that’s why it’s called “The God Desire”. At one point, I talk about this, to say, sometimes…
Daphna: Which is a reference to his book, The God’s… God’s… “God Delusion”.
David: Yeah. I’m talking about how, most of the time, I’m very ironic about the religion. The religion is a source of comedy for me. But I say: “Sometimes […] the irony falls away. A friend of mine - a man of science, an atheist - whose son died tragically young, sung Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, at the funeral. This is what it means in English: “Magnified and sanctified be your name, Oh God, throughout the world, which you have created according to your will. May your sovereignty be accepted in our own days, in our lives, and in the life of all of the house of Israel…” Et cetera, et cetera. “The usual stuff of prayer, the endless OCD-like repetition of praise, the desperate hope that, if you say something enough times, a fragment might get through the ether. I do not find it moving. But the Hebrew…”
[מבטא בריטי כבד] "יִתְגַּדַּל וְיִתְקַדַּשׁ שְׁמֵהּ רַבָּא בְּעָלְמָא דִי בְרָא כִרְעוּתֵהּ, וְיַמְלִיךְ מַלְכוּתֵהּ בְּחַיֵיכוֹן וּבְיוֹמֵיכוֹן וּבְחַיֵּי דְכָל-בֵּית יִשְׂרָאֵל, בַּעֲגָלָא וּבִזְמַן קָרִיב, וְאִמְרוּ אָמֵן."
“Or rather, the Hebrew”, and here I show it, I show the script. “Because the sound in my mind carries the association…”
Daphne: Yeah.
David: “…of the script. The ancient hieroglyphic […] because I had to learn it at my Jewish primary school, I can read […] You don’t have to know what it means. At the burial of a son, those words, just the sound, the ancient music, the sonic pain of them, connects you, the atheist Jew praying, and the atheist Jew listening, with centuries of tradition and suffering and defiance. I knew I would do the same in my friend’s terrible place.”
And so, I’ve sort of brought that out because your podcast is normally about grief and death. And being in that situation, there’s no doubt that the Jewishness of the prayer, which has nothing to do with any sense of the supernatural, affects me emotionally in a way that is useful in terms of processing grief. And so there’s a connection there between what I’m trying to say about my Jewish identity and generally, you know, the emotional reality of dealing with life and death.
Daphna: Was your mother buried in a Jewish cemetery? Did you have to say “Kaddish”?
David: Yeah, umm… it was actually, [laughing] it was kind of weird, because she was buried… she was cremated in Golders Green crematorium. So there’s a sort of typical thing with my weird parenting, which is… Golders Green is the most Jewish area of London, but obviously, a crematorium… you’re not supposed to be cremated if you’re an orthodox Jew. And so, there was some “Kiddish” [sic] said, but it was kind of a… more of a sort of… overall sort of humanistic service.
My dad, actually, had a more religious burial. He was buried and there was a proper… You know, there were lots of prayers. I don’t think it was anything to do with my dad. My dad was more of an atheist, [laughing] but… but my dad, just his plot was in a slightly more Jewish-y cemetery.
Daphna: When did he die? When I saw your show, he was still alive, I think.
David: Yeah, he died two years ago.
Daphna: Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.
David: That’s okay. He was very ill…
Daphna: Yeah… And we do have a crematorium in Israel now.
David: Oh, you weren’t… you didn’t allow to have one before?
Daphna: People couldn’t really digest the idea of having a crematorium.
David: Oh, right, really… But also, I think in history it’s… it’… it’s, I don’t know, in orthodox Judaism, you’re not allowed to cremate.
Daphna: It took a while, and… but now you can have like a civil service as well.
David: Yeah.
Daphna: You have to pay for it.
David: Well, you have to pay for everything. [laughing]
Daphna: The services that are run by the orthodox Jews are subsidized by the state.
David: State. Oh, I see. Ok.
Daphna: Yeah, so if you don’t have money, [smiling tone] you have to be religious.
David: Right. I mean, so, so, for… again, for people who don’t know, I did a show, and I’m actually writing a book based on it now, called: “My Family, Not the Sitcom”. And that was… my dad was alive then, but he had dementia, quite advanced dementia. My mom had died. And really, that was quite interesting, as what you’re talking about… because the reason I did that show was I was at my mom’s funeral. And there were a lot of… there were a lot of old Jews there, whether or not she was cremated. [laughing]
And they were all telling me that my mother was wonderful. They were saying: “We wish you a long life”, and all that stuff. But they were also saying, you know, “She was wonderful. She was wonderful. She was wonderful”. And I thought, this says nothing about her, this idealization of the dead that happens at funerals. Like, you might as well… It felt to me like a second erasure of my mother, that she was being idealized.
And, and I wanted to say, you know: “What do you know about her?”. In fact, there’s a bit in my book where I say: “What I wanted to say is, do you know what her real name was?” Because my mother’s real name was not Sarah Baddiel. Her real name was Fromit. Originally Fromit was a name given to her by the Nazis, because Jewish children had to be named from a quite unpleasant list of names. And that was her given name. And she didn’t use it later on. And that kind of detail is why I felt that, you know… This bland sort of idealization didn’t work for me.
So in the end, I did a show. And the show is about how… Mainly, it’s about how she had an affair with a golfing memorabilia salesman in midlife, and became obsessed with golf, as a result, and turned our lives over to golf. And golf was everywhere in our house. And it was mental. And… Very, you know, later on, it was clear to me she kind of eroticized [laughing] golf and wrote erotic poetry. And it’s hilarious, but it’s also very tragic, because I think it’s all to do with my mother’s self-drama, which was to do, I think, with the life that she would have had in Königsberg, which is where she was born, had she… had Hitler not existed.
Daphna: It’s the same place where Immanuel Kant was born.
David: Yes, exactly. Immanuel Kant’s birthplace, and what had been a very beautiful town. And her parents were rich, semi-industrialist Jews. She would have had a society wedding. It would have been, you know, that kind of life. Instead, she was from quite a sort of… you know, my dad was a Welsh working class guy. She lived in a dull part of London with three children. And I think her way of dealing with this was to find glamor where she could find it. She’s with this golfing guy, but because she was obsessive, that then became her entire life.
And in a way, what I’m saying is, in terms of your normal focus on death and grief, is that, is that might sound like. But what you’re doing there is like, you know, bringing up stuff that a few people would say: “You’re bringing up things about dead people that you shouldn’t do”. And I say exactly the opposite, which is by doing that, I completely brought her back to life.
My brother, who was uncertain about it, came to the first show. And I said to him, in the room, after the show, I said to him with all the audience there, I said: ”what did you think?”. And he said: “I loved it because it felt like she was in the room”. And that’s, that’s how you should remember people, including… With all their bad shit, because that keeps them alive. I say in the show, the dead, despite what we might like to think, are not angels. And that’s… That’s the key to it.
Daphna: I think it’s an imperative, a religious imperative? I don’t know how to… exactly how to translate the word “mitzvah”, not to speak ill of the dead.
David: Of course.
Daphna: You talk about many eccentricities your mother had, but all in all, you paint a picture of a person, a well-rounded character, as we would say about, I don’t know, fiction or the cinema.
David: Yeah, well, that’s the… that’s what I’m trying to do. I mean, by a well-rounded character… It’s the same with my dad, by the way. My dad, who is now dead, but was dying during the show, because he had advanced dementia. I’m also trying to… In the same way, I refuse to be over-reverent about that. Because his dementia, which was [laughing] a very sort of rude type of dementia, involved him swearing a lot and being disinhibited, was sort of hilarious, right?
And it was tragic as well, like… because I don’t recognise the boundaries between those two things. But again, even when someone’s alive, you can do the same thing, which is to erase them by just sort of treating them as if they’re a sort of, you know, hallowed object that needs to be just sort of placed in a corner and taken care of. Whereas, in fact, he was still unbelievably sort of pugilistic and fighty and sweary and difficult, and that was what made him alive, right?
So that notion of “do not speak ill of the dead” is a… Is very much something I would fight against. Because a few people I know, when their parents did get dementia, they felt ashamed, and they felt ashamed of it. One particular woman told me because she’d always put her father on a pedestal, and she couldn’t think of him as this reduced figure.
But what I think is that I always thought of my parents as deeply flawed. And by that, I mean, I always thought of my parents as deeply human. That’s what human beings are. We are all deeply flawed. And [laughing] so therefore, if you want to render that humanity, you have to include the flaws. And that’s why speaking ill of the dead is a mistake. [sic]
Daphna: I think it’s only when you recognise these flaws, and when you actually speak about them, it’s much more intimate.
David: Yeah, exactly. It’s much more intimate. That’s absolutely correct. There’s an intimacy to it. And also, there’s a kind of trust, I guess, even though they’re not alive, so the trust has to be assumed. But there’s a trust. I had the trust with my brother, right? So my brother, both brothers, were very uncertain about me doing this show. And then I said, look, you’re going to have to trust me that it is an act of love. Even though I am revealing things about both of our parents that they might not want to be revealed, the fact is they are either dead or not cognisant anymore. It won’t actually affect them. And overall, this will land as a complex but real act of love. And that is what happened.
It’s not a show that I would [laughing] necessarily want anyone else to do. But as her son, you know, it… It is imbued with sort of affection. Partly, by the way, affection that comes later. Because I think when some of this was happening, particularly with my mum’s affair, I think I probably was quite freaked out, and then later…
Daphna: You were aware of it when you were growing up?
David: Yeah, that’s one of the funny things about the show, is that my mum was incredibly proud of her affair. Because she thought it was glamorous. In a very 1970’s way, she thought having an affair was not something to be ashamed of. It was glamorous. And so she told everyone about it. I mean, the only person who didn’t seem to know about it was my dad. And that [laughing] seems like everyone knew that my mother was having this affair, including her children. And that’s damaging, right? That’s damaging, that’s transgressive and not, not good parenting. But at the same time…
Daphna: But on the other hand, it gives great material for art.
David: It gave material for art, but also, I now think of it, I do think of it, and some people wouldn’t, as sort of… There’s a sort of richness to it, that I like. You know, I’m a very un-judgmental person, particularly with anything to do with sex or whatever. And so I don’t judge her now at all for it. And I think it does provide this unbelievably funny, rich, unusual backing to my life, to my early life.
Daphna: I know that she passed away quite surprisingly.
David: Yeah.
Daphna: How long afterwards were you able to sit down and write your material for the show?
David: Almost immediately [laughing]. So that’s to do with what I think is called the sliver of ice in the heart of a writer. I wanted to write it very soon. And my brother, my older brother, who I’m very close to, and who actually is probably the nearest thing I have to a real parent… because both my parents were not proper parents, they were just mad people living their own lives in different ways, especially my mother. My dad was more of a standard, emotionally absent father. I mean, he was there, and, you know, very much in his own very male, very working class way, he definitely loved his children. But, you know, I was frightened of him as well, because he was angry a lot of the time and all the rest of it. My mum was just off having her mad golfing, you know, melodramas the whole time. So the way I was buffered from this was through my… my brother.
Daphna: Who is much older than you.
David: He’s 18 months older than me. I was definitely parented by my older brother, who the book is dedicated to. And I think he took a lot of, you know, of the emotional damage on himself. But anyway, when he sat down with me and said: “Oh, you know, you sure you want to do this?”. That was quite early. That was like two or three months after my mother had died.
But it was a lot to do with my sense of like, the full story of this woman is not being told. And also, because she died very abruptly. It felt to me like, okay, there’s a gap in my understanding of who my mother was, or my sense of needing to process who my mother was. And in a way, the show did that.
I did do the show, the show got nominated for an “Olivier Award”. And I did it in Canada and Australia and as well as in the West End twice. So, it’s interesting, because I’ve always felt this is not really anything to do with death or Jews or anything. But I’ve always felt about art, especially about stand-up comedy, actually, is that you should try and be as specific as possible. Because by being specific, you will chime with the universal, right?
So, no one else’s mother, literally no one else’s mother has had an affair with a golfing memorabilia salesman and become obsessed with golf and blah, blah, blah. But everyone who saw that show said to me: “Oh, I really felt like I knew your mother, it really felt like my family in some ways”. And, you know, and the madness of family was encapsulated via this very, very idiosyncratic thing that my mother did.
Daphna: I never knew her, of course, and it might be very presumptuous of me, but while watching it, I thought that she would probably be proud of it, because you are giving her the sort of glamor.
David: Yeah.
Daphna: People are paying to come and hear the story of her life.
David: Yeah, I mean, the show, at the end of the show, I very much discussed this idea of whether she would like the show. And I… And I say, bits of it, definitely not. But overall, she would love the idea that I was doing a show about her. She… She… And there’s no question that she would have loved that. And to some extent, there’s no question that she would have wanted a show about her and this guy, because he was the great love of her life. He, to some extent, ignored her. I mean, apart from having sex with her and occasionally making her sell golfing [laughing] memorabilia on his behalf, he just ignored her. And in a way, I was also doing her work there. I was saying: “You can’t ignore this”. Because he was, in fact, he may… I don’t know if he’s still alive or not, but he was certainly still alive when the show went down.
Daphna: And you got in touch with him?
David: No…
Daphna: You had some sort of connection?
David: Well, no, in fact, the papers got in touch with him. “The Daily Mail” tried to get him to come to the first night, but he lives in, or he did live in, Slovenia, and refused [laughing] to come. But, you know, the one thing my mother wanted more than anything was for people to know about her affair with this guy. And so that very much, you know… I did her wish…
Daphna: While you were writing, were you censoring yourself in any way, or did you just discuss everything?
David: The process of art, the process of storytelling, there is censorship. It’s not necessarily a moral thing. The thing that I left out, which I have not left out of the book, is my mother’s death, because it was horrible and extremely sad and broken. And my dad had dementia then. So we had this extraordinary time where my mother died very horribly in hospital, very much not a Hollywood death, very much like a frantic hospital whole day of her coming in and out of consciousness.
And then me and my brother, having to go to my dad’s, their house, and tell my father. And even though they had a very complicated, difficult marriage, him looking totally broken, and then 45 minutes later, having to tell him again, [laughing] and then again, and that’s… that’s a circle of hell.
I, you know, don’t want to revisit. And so I didn’t think that was for the show. It’s in the book. And I’m quite pleased with it in the book, because I think it… It renders all that expressively.
I’m actually doing the show again, by the way, just for two… And so the place called the “Royal Court” in London, where interestingly enough, there was a huge anti-Semitism fuss a couple of years ago with a play that they put on. But anyway, at the “Royal Court” in London, I’m recording that show and the two other one-man shows I’ve done over the last 10 years. I’m recording them for “Sky Arts”. So maybe you’ll get to see it in Israel. I don’t know.
Daphna: I hope so. While you were writing or researching, I assume that you did some research as well, did you discover things that you weren’t aware of before?
David: Yeah, well, there’s lots of things. I mean, that will take two… I mean, one of the… Is the Nazi… The way that my grandparents got out of Germany, which is unbelievably anxiety creating when you read it, because they got out so late. And I knew this a bit, but I didn’t know the full story.
They basically… My grandfather had been put in a concentration camp after Kristallnacht, I think Dachau, after Kristallnacht, where something like 30,000 Jewish men were taken after Kristallnacht. Meanwhile, my grandmother was trying to write to people they knew to put money in a British bank account because the German Jewish Aid Committee, which is how you got visas or whatever, required a 1000 pounds in a British bank account before they would allow any Jews to come andthey didn’t have any money. So they were trying to borrow it, you know, from friends.
And it’s all… the letters are so awful and frantic. And then what’s really weird about it, which I have to say, confuses me, is there’s no mention of my mother, of the fact that she’s also pregnant with an oncoming child until very late in the day. Suddenly, she’s saying to the German Jewish Aid Committee: “Can you put my child on the entry cards that we hope are coming?”. And I just think when I read that, I can hardly contain my own [laughing] anxiety. Because obviously, this is only… this is the reason I’m alive.
Daphna: Yeah, of course.
David: Right? And so it feels really weird to read her in July and not in… to read letters in July 1939 to my grandparents saying, yes, we’ve just managed to put your baby on the entry cards to Britain. So you now need to take these to somewhere in Berlin to get them ratified. My God, how did they get out? So all that is very interesting.
And then with my mother, it’s mainly just more poems. I do a whole thing about her erotic poetry, which is hilarious. But it’s like, there’s so many poems, there’s so many letters. She was a very obsessive woman.
Daphna: And she kept everything.
David: Well, she not only kept everything, she copied everything. That’s one of the things, is, my mother was a hoarder, especially of her own life. And so she kept everything and she would send poems to this guy, but she would then keep copies of them or she would make copies of them, which by the way, just shows how flagrant she was about the affair. Because one thing you don’t want to do if you don’t want an affair to be discovered is make copies [laughing] of your erotic poetry to your lover.
Daphna: [laughing]
David: But she would, and you’d find them, you know, anywhere in the house. She also, which I didn’t know before, she… Well I did know she did this, but I never listened to them, is… there are loads of cassette tapes, because she had an answer phone and she would record her conversations with the guy. And I’ve listened to quite a few [laughing] of those, and they’re quite hard to listen to because they get quite sexy. But also, there’s lots of, sort of, my brother phoning from, like, Polytechnic [laughing] in Manchester in 1983 and saying: “I’m going to be home in a bit”, or whatever, [laughing] and so it’s weird, it’s like an oral time machine, listening…
Daphna: You can exchange the word “sexy” for the word “vivid” and think of your mother…
David: Yeah.
Daphna: …as being full of life, which is easier.
David: [laughing] Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is. Although one thing that the book, and indeed the show, does not shy away from is just how graphic my mother’s eroticisation of herself and golf and this guy was. It’s very, you know…
Daphna: [laughing]
David: Full-on. Which I love, by the way. I love that. I mean, that’s the thing. I got invited, I mean, this is not… Actually, I think it’s probably quite important. I got invited on a podcast called “The Guilty Feminist”, which is [not clear] at that point, it had no men on it, ever. And I got invited on by the person who runs that, who’s called Deborah Frances-White, after she saw “My Family, Not the Sitcom”, because she said she’d never seen a man, a son, talk about his mother’s sexuality and sexual desires in such an un-judgmental, free and easy way.
And that is true. I mean, there’s something about me, which is that I… I just have no gene for shame and judgment and all that stuff. For me, it’s all copy. I mean, that’s what Nora Ephron says: “it’s all copy”. And it is all copy. But also, it’s funny. If it’s funny, I am utterly, like, overridden. That overrides everything.
Daphna: The cliché is that comedy is supposed to deflect real emotions or complicated emotions.
David: Yeah, and it’s a tragedy plus time and all that. Yeah. But I also think comedy can take in real emotion, actually. I don’t completely agree with that. I think it can take in real emotion and also process it. So if you peek in the book… but also the show, the show is a complicated show in its own way. But the book particularly, it moves between, you know, very-very funny things and very-very complicated things. And that’s what life is like.
Daphna: So you basically had two options. Either you run away from home as a teenager, or you become a comedian.
David: Yeah, well, I did both.
Daphna: Oh, you ran away from home as well?
David: I didn’t run away from home, but I left quite early. I mean, I went to university and never really came back after that. Umm… And I was pretty distant from my parents when I was young.
Daphna: So you didn’t have intimate conversations with your mother about all of this?
David: She would tell me. It was more her telling me and me listening [laughing] and nodding and sometimes not wanting to hear them when I was young. Umm… It wasn’t really me, no, but there was a moment in the book, which is not in the play, in the stage production, where I talk about how my parents have had a row, which they often did. And it’s hard to know whether my dad really knew about the affair because he never spoke about it. But there was obviously, you know, undercurrents that were bad between them. And he was an angry man. And so I remember arriving at their house once, and I’m probably by then about 20 or something. And they’re having a stand-up row in the front garden. And then he storms off. And then she turned to me and said: “It’s so tiring living without an emotional life”.
And I remember thinking, what’s happened to my mother? Has she turned into Anita Bruckner or something like… That’s an unbelievably, you know, clever, you know, self-aware thing to say. And she was not a self-aware person. That felt, that feels to me at some level, the most intimate moment I had with my mother about the whole thing.
Daphna: Was it difficult for you to do the show and repeat the stories, see the films, the pictures, all that, night after night?
David: Yeah, it was only difficult because I am obsessed with truth. This is also part of why I’m doing this. It’s the same thing. It’s in the same basket, emotionally, you know, I don’t want my mother to be idealized because it’s not true. Whatever. I don’t want my dad to be imagined as a sort of sad dementia guy because that’s not true.
At some level, what I felt doing the show when I was doing it for two years, is - this doesn’t feel true anymore, the emotion of it, because I’m doing it too often. So, you know, I would… I hated it, for example, that sometimes towards the end, I would be showing some films that are quite moving. And I wasn’t being moved by them anymore, because I’d seen them too often, right? And I couldn’t bear that, because I felt like I can’t pretend to be moved by this, right? So that was difficult. I don’t think it’ll be difficult when I redo it, and it hasn’t been, in fact, any more, because I’ve been away from it for so long.
Daphna: Do you feel that your grief has been changing over the years?
David: Yeah, I mean… so with my mother, you know, the show was, to some extent, emotionally reparational for me, because she died so suddenly. I mean, she was 75 and she had been ill, but it was still unexpected and it was very brutal and it was very sudden, and the suddenness of it, the absence of my mother suddenly in my life, this very big figure in my life, I… It was very difficult to process. So I think with grief… There’s shock and then there’s grief, right? That depends on how the death is.
So I was very shocked by my mother, and I was actually in a state of shock, I think, for about three months afterwards. I could feel myself being, like, traumatized and confused, whereas my dad took a long time to die. [laughing] You know, essentially, particularly with the type of dementia he had, he has… You know, we were caring for him. We, me and my brother, organized his care at home, but we were constantly around him and watching him dwindle away [laughing], and that, when he died, was not a shock at all.
It’s interesting though, because even with him, I still felt the absence. Still… even though, you know, he’d been dwindling away and there was an absence already because of dementia, I still felt enormously, his absence.
I think I put on Twitter, and my dad became a bit of a figure on Twitter because I used to post pictures of him, partly because I refused to be ashamed of the fact that my father had dementia. But I said he leaves a huge hole in my sky. And it was true. You know, when these people go, however they go, I think you mainly feel - I think my brother said this - disorientated by their absence. You think, like…
Daphna: Yeah, it was something anchoring you.
David: Yeah, even if you’re not… And I wasn’t straightforwardly close to my parents. I’m closer to my older brother, in my family, than I was to either of my parents, there’s no doubt about that. But when they went, both of them, it felt very upending and confusing and not right about the world that they were not around anymore. But I think that’s something that you… Yeah, that takes years to… get used to, and maybe you never quite get used to, and that’s part of life.
Daphna: How long has it been since your mother died?
David: My mother died in 2014. I still occasionally… Well, a - I occasionally still feel traumatized, wake up in the middle of the night traumatized by how she died because it was so awful. And secondly - I think I sometimes feel guilty about my mother, because, I mean, that’s another story, but it’s to do with the fact that I feel that she was being weighed down by the… by my father’s dementia.
And to be honest, it was only when she died that me and my brother took on the full responsibility of, you know, coping with my dad’s dementia, we sort of left that to my mother beforehand, as his primary carer. But I think we should have done that earlier.
Daphna: How long has it been going on before she died?
David: She was probably… It was certainly well on the way, and he’d started behaving… My dad had this thing called Pick’s disease, which is a frontal lobe dementia whereby he was very antisocial and disinhibited, and he’d been behaving like that for about two or three years.
And also they hadn’t, they didn’t have a good rela… One of the things I like, right, [laughing] about my parents is how much they defy convention. So again, the convention is that a wife, or a spouse, but particularly a wife, I think, when their husband gets dementia, they’re there like an angel, caring, and they just hold his hand or whatever. She was just fucked off. She was angry and annoyed that he had dementia.
And she used to go to a, you know, a meeting with other, mainly, women, to talk about it. And she would say to us: “I say to these women, ’No, I’m really angry about…’. They’re all there saying, ’I really want to look after my husband’. No, I’m just angry”. I remember her saying once, brilliantly, that she had a friend whose husband was 90, and he was completely healthy. And get this, he was out playing golf every day. And she just said to us, “I just wanted to have a husband like that” [laughing]. So I love my mother, in a way, for her honesty in that situation.
Daphna: You did a show about your family. My parents died also in 2014. They were together from the age of 16 to the age of 90. My mom was the dutiful wife that died immediately after her husband. [smiling tone]
Daivd: Well, so… isn’t that dutiful? Right, well, my mom was not a dutiful wife.
Daphna: I couldn’t do a comedy show, so I did a podcast.
David: Oh, that’s good.
Daphna: There is some comfort in talking about death, and…
David: Of course, of course there is, yeah. I mean, I myself, which I haven’t talked about, I’m obsessed with mortality, and my own mortality, I mean, and, you know, hate the idea of death. One of the things that’s clear in the book is that I refuse, absolutely, to come to terms with death.
There’s one point at which I talk about… There was quite a lot of comedy when my dad died. First of all, I’ll tell this story. I told it at his funeral. He was on an electric mattress because he had bed sores, and the other… me and my brother are sitting in a room with his corpse, waiting for the doctor, for the death certificate, and he finally comes. It’s such a strange thing. And as he goes over to this bed, and my dad’s underneath a blanket, you know, his head underneath the blanket, I could see his bald head. It accidentally got switched on, I don’t know how, and it was moving and moving, and he couldn’t get hold of him properly, and eventually he said, “I’m sorry, I can’t pronounce him dead…”
Daphna: [laughing]
David: “…while he’s moving about.” And I remember wanting to say: “Yeah, I’m not a medical man, but I think that is normally… [laughing]”
Daphna: [laughing]
David: “…a contraindication of it”. And there’s another bit where then the undertakers came, and they found it very difficult to get him out on the death stretcher, and I could hear them saying: “Oh, turn around. No, no, oh, bang”, and stuff like that. I said, You know, there’s no dignity in death, but who gives a fuck about that?
The problem with death is - it has no life. So that’s my feeling about death. I don’t care about the indignity, and I don’t really care about what people might say about you afterwards. The problem… None of those are a problem. The problem is you’re not alive [laughing] anymore, and that’s… The great thing about life is - it is not dead.
Daphna: I think it’s optimistic that we have, like, a “sell-by” date.
David: Yeah. Well, obviously, life would be weird without it. I’ve got to go, and we can talk about so many things.
Daphna: Thank you very-very much.
David: Can I just tell you why I have to go, which you will be interested in? So later on this afternoon, I’m meeting Deborah Lippstadt. Do you know who that is?
Daphna: The historian.
David: Yeah, and also… so she wrote “Denial”. You know… She wrote… She was taken to court by David Irving, the Holocaust denier. She’s a friend of mine, but she’s now also the American Ambassador Special Envoy for anti-Semitism.
Daphna: I never knew something like that existed.
David: Well, I think they just created it, and she is that. So it’s an actual American government position, and I’m meeting her at a sort of vaguely secret location in London to talk about the present situation. I don’t know, it feels a bit silly to me, because I know her, and she’s a really nice woman. So I don’t know why, but it’s all been organised in a slightly…
Daphna: I think if you’re not careful, you will find yourself being proposed the position of being an honorary president of the state of Israel or something [laughing]. We’re running out of candidates.
David: Well, one thing you might know about me, I don’t know if you do know about me. I don’t know how it translates this in the book, but I don’t do this as much anymore, but I used to, when I always talked about Israel on Twitter, if it did come up, I would always describe it as “stupid fucking Israel”.
Daphna: Yeah, it is mentioned in the foreword.
David: Yeah, yeah. And I… You know, I still feel that way, I still feel I am… You know, as I say, it’s not really a big comment on the country, it’s just exhaustion at being a Jew, and how constantly having to deal with this thing that’s 4,000 miles away, that seems nothing to do with me, but everyone brings it up.
[background music]
So that’s why I say… but I think that would stop me becoming president.
Daphna: [laughing] Thank you very much, David.
David: Thank you, Daphna. That was really lovely. Thank you for having me on your podcast.
[מוזיקת סיום]
לעוד פרקים של הפודקאסט לחצו על שם הפודקאסט למטה
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