THE ENGLISH COUNTRY COTTAGE

The English Country Cottage

- by Ruth Fainlight

A Jewish poet in an English village:
incongruous and inappropriate
as a Hindu in an igloo, a Dayak in
Chicago, a giraffe at the South Pole.

That shadowy yew in the churchyard, only
a few steps away from this cottage door,
was planted in the centuries between
the Lincoln pogrom (when little St Hugh,
they claimed, was murdered by the Jews, and all
Christ-killers left alive were banished)

and the year when Oliver Cromwell changed the law
to grant honourable men of Israelite persuasion,
with their prudent wives and obedient children,
the privilege to be legally present in England.

As a youth, my father was a patriot,
a Labour-voting true blue. But though
he felt entirely English, the problem was:
to certain natives of whatever class
he was a wily, greasy Levantine
and always would be. His solution was
to leave the country, go far enough away
to ‘pass for white’, somewhere he could play
at being pukka-English through and through.
(Yet still more proud to be a Jew.)

Maybe because she came from Bukovina,
my mother had no illusions. She was used to
rejection, born to it. First, the shock
of Ellis Island: another world, another
language (I knew how hard she tried). Then
further uprooting; though the nineteen thirties
were not exactly propitious, her restless husband
— handsome, dreamy, unpolitical —
felt the lure of home, dragged her to England.

I ran straight into the fire’s centre,
towards the focus of trouble, glamour, danger;
danced, like Esmeralda, on the Round Table
as desperately as if to save my life.

Such were my tactics in those distant times.
Now (though mimicking the locals dutifully),
thatch and cruck-beams cannot camouflage
the alien. The carillon rings mockery.

Sometimes I wonder if I should have known better:
to sweetly smile and eat the mess
of pottage — but never sell my birthright
for an English country cottage.

* * *
Ruth Fainlight was born 1931 in New York City of Jewish parents, and has lived mostly in England since the age of 15. Her father was born in London, and her mother in a small town on the eastern borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Ukraine). She was educated at schools in America and England, and at Birmingham and Brighton colleges of art, and married the writer Alan Sillitoe in 1959. She was Poet in Residence at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, in 1985 and 1990, and received a Cholmondeley Award for Poetry in 1994. Ruth Fainlight lives in London.