Luke Ford

Shabbat dinner at the home of Rabbi Claudia Rubin in London.

"Which is?" asks Robin Buckley, a journalist at the Times (of London).

"Drinking the blood of Christian babies…"

I’m reading a great new novel by Charlotte Mendelson — When We Were Bad.

It’s the best book I’ve read by a British Jewish lesbian all year.

This is the stuff of a proper novel — the interior life. If you want exteriors, watch a movie.

Don’t let the Jewish sounds dissuade you, it’s got lots of sex and stuff that even goyim can enjoy.

I can’t believe that it takes a dyke on the other side of the ocean to understand me. But dear sweet Charlotte does.

It is surely just a coincidence that she has failed to see my blog before now, that she is keeping her body so firmly turned from mine. Unless I attract her attention, I will be doomed.

I command myself to be a man.

It’s 2 p.m. I’m a little light-headed because I forgot to eat lunch and the turning of the leaves outside my hovel and the Cowboys headed to NFC supremacy…

Literature must come first.

From Publishers Weekly: "With humor and panache, British writer Mendelson (Love in Idleness) presents London’s Rubin clan, presided over by matriarch Claudia, a brilliant, charismatic London rabbi blessed with zaftig curves and a will of steel. Claudia seems to have molded nebbishy husband Norman and their four children into the perfect family. But as the plodding eldest, Leo, leaves the altar to run off with his mistress, the fault lines are exposed: next-eldest Frances eventually admits to her despair about her dutiful marriage and her lack of maternal feeling, and even colorless Norman turns out to have a guilty secret. Claudia, however, must preserve the myth of a perfect family because it’s the basis of her about-to-be published memoir, a moral and ethical handbook for families of the new millennium. What makes Mendelson’s novel especially naughty are her candid observations about the crouching, self-loathing way that many English Jews try to fit into Anglo society while simultaneously maintaining their traditions: Claudia’s seder, for example, is a comic set piece of frantic preparation and grim hospitality."

According to Wikipedia:

Her maternal grandparents were, in her words, "Hungarian-speaking-Czech, Ruthenian for about 10 minutes, Carpathian mountain-y, impossible to describe", who left Prague in 1939.

She was born in 1972 in west London, in a flat on the Queensway. When she was two, she moved with her parents and her baby sister to a house in a cobbled passage next to St John’s College, Oxford, where her father taught public international law.

She took up the French horn because it has a reputation for being the hardest instrument to play.

She studied Ancient and Modern History at the University of Oxford, even though she knows now, with great regret, that what would have suited her best was English literature at somewhere like Leeds.

She says she became a lesbian suddenly. "It was boyfriends up to 22 or 23. Not a whiff of lesbianism. Not even a thought. But I’m very all or nothing. It was all that, and now it’s all this. There was about a 10-minute cross-over period of uncertainty, but it was really not that bad."

She has two children with the journalist and novelist Joanna Briscoe.

She wrote her first short story, ‘Blood Sugar’, at the suggestion of, with the encouragement of, submitting to the insistence of her tutor Craig Raine. It was published in Granta‘s New Writing 7 and twice broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

Her first novel, Love in Idleness followed in 2001.

She won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 2003 and the Somerset Maugham Award in 2004 for her second novel Daughters of Jerusalem. She was shortlisted for the Sunday Times ‘Young Writer of the Year Award in 2003.

Her third novel, When We Were Bad, was published in May 2007.

References:

• Interview with Charlotte Mendelsonin which she discusses the release of her new book "When We Were Bad", the difference in English and American reactions to her book, and her struggle to write books that are not all "tweed and repression" with Kelly Hewitt on Loaded Questions. September, 2007
• Guardian interview
• Somethingjewish.co.uk interview