‘Why my Zionist novel shows the pull of the Jewish state and not the push of Jew-hate’

What good is a philosophy degree?” my father used to ask me.

“One day I’ll write a novel and reflect on what I’ve learnt,” I’d reply.

That novel, My Other Half, is set at a fictional university in the early 1980s amid the last throes of hippiedom, a time of anarchist philosophy students who questioned everything and did what they could to expand their consciousness. My protagonist, Jake Green, and his friends don’t trust academia, preferring to learn directly from their literary idols. When Nietzsche says, “Be cheerful” (in face of adversity) and Pascal says, “You must make yourself stupid” (to grasp the absurdity of existence), Jake and co take them at their word.

Nietzsche, circa 1875. (Credit: Friedrich Hermann Hartmann)[Missing Credit]

This autodidactic approach extends to the group’s LSD trips. On one such occasion Jake encounters God. At that age I had a similar revelation, which I thought I’d share with my father.

“I knew you were up to no good,” he said.

In terms of the counter-culture, we British Jews lag behind our American cousins. They have Bob Dylan; we had Marc Bolan. I was only five when I felt destined to become “an actor or an author”, and not much older when I first wanted to contribute to the Sixties’ zeitgeist. My counter-culture comedy, initially titled Wasted on the Young, had a long gestation.

By the time I got round to writing it, my reflections on what I’ve learnt had developed like particularly slow photographs. In my gap year I had a wonderful, formative experience volunteering at Kibbutz Na’an, so I decided to write about that too. Which meant writing about the Jewish attachment to Israel. Subconscious nostalgia for our ancestral home joined personal nostalgia for a misspent youth. Two for the price of one.

Meanwhile, in real life, active Palestinianism had taken to the streets, which intensified my determination to portray Israel as the essence of our heritage and faith.

At the start of My Other Half, Jake rejects his Jewish identity. “What was I, a spokesman for my ancestors?” he asks himself. “Judaism was a backward, superstitious cult.” His journey of self-discovery takes a step in the right direction during a tutorial on Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain. Overwrought as ever, Jake detects a sinister Judeophobia lurking under the mountain, which sends him into a tailspin. For the first time, Jake acknowledges that, before being English, he’s Jewish.

German novelist and philosopher Thomas Mann, circa 1930. (Credit: Getty)Getty Images

A reader of an early draft wanted more explicit antisemitism as the driving force of Jake’s nascent Zionism. But I didn’t want to show our enemies defining us. I wanted to show the pull of Israel, not the push of antisemitism.

Jake abandons university and decamps to a kibbutz after being dumped by Diana, the blonde girlfriend with whom he’s infatuated. He’s only in Israel to recover from a broken heart and he’s hardly cut out to be a banana farmer, but once there, he feels a deep connection. “You belong here,” said the land. “At last you have come home.”’

“Coming home” used to be the essence of Zionism. It wasn’t about supporting Israel on social media or making a political case vis-à-vis the Palestinians. It was about a spiritual awakening. And the best place for that is Jerusalem.

On arriving in Jerusalem, Jacob, as he now is, heads straight for the Western Wall. Just as Jake took Western literature to heart, so Jacob finds his new life guided by the Bible. On meeting Rachel, a religious Sephardi girl, his infatuation is instant. And it’s in this lovestruck state that he starts showing symptoms of Jerusalem Syndrome.

My Other Half takes the form of a series of letters, in which Jacob confesses his sins to Rachel. A psychiatrist might say the book as a whole is a confession to my late father.

My wife is not impressed by my hero’s two infatuations. Not in a nakedly autobiographical novel. My daughters, both in their twenties, are amazed I had a life before I met their mother. As for my son, whose student days have just ended, he hasn’t got as far as the intimate scenes. “Nobody my age reads books.”

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My Other Half is published by Ace of Swords and is available from Waterstones and Barnes & Noble