The Only Joel In The Room

There are very few Joels in any room at any given time. I have arrived at parties before and been told immediately, “Oh, we have another Joel already here!” It is a thing understood that if you have an uncommon name, then you must be used to the experience of feeling that unspectactular sense of uniqueness. The last time I met a Joel, I challenged him to leave the party because “there’s only one Joel allowed — and I’m not leaving.” He didn’t laugh, but not all Joels are hilarious. You learn these things.

I have, since I was a teenager, been acutely aware of the singularity of my name. It’s Jewish (I have a book in the Bible to prove it) and it means ‘YHWH is God.’ And that pleases me, not only for the gentle irony of me being an unbeliever, but also for the fact that even the explanation barely explains anything. The Tetragrammaton isn’t meant to be pronounced anyway — nor written for that matter — and who can argue with a little mystery around them? But the Jewish name is no mistake, those before me in the Jewish line are Judith, daughter of David, and before him Baruch, and before him Yakob. Predictably, Baruch was anglicised to Ben, and that I would later be born to the middle name of Benjamin in his honour, a lengthening of a name that wasn’t real in the first place, is an unintentionally very Jewish sort of joke.

My name does not beckon antisemitism, it’s oddness is also its endearing quirk, it seems. However, the casual antisemite has never been too far away. To be clear: my nose is typically that of a young Rabbi in training, aquiline with the hint of a hook, framed by two eyes practised in looking both knowing and self-deprecating beneath a heavy, fuzzy brow. My face is long, my cheeks are generally flat and a little gaunt, and my hair is thick and was, for a couple of years in my teens, capable of a ‘Jew-fro.’ I have been smiled at on occasion, in that wonderfully melancholic fashion, by Jews on the street, I like to imagine acknowledged as one of their own, mishpocheh. But more often have I been shouted at, challenged and actually assaulted for ‘being a Jew’ than anything else.

And yet I fail to distinguish between my name and the ancestry for which it carries a flame. I cannot, now that I am considerably more aware of the world than hormonally-overloaded teen me was, detach the stories and the history from my own emerging identity. After escaping Russia in the 1800s, my Hasidic ancestors settled in Poland, where the Warsaw Riots of the 1900s forced the family to split, some remaining in the country whilst Yakob travelled to England. It is lore that, after being told by his father that ‘the first bite of pork’ would rob him of his Jewish identity, he would always cut off the first bite-sized piece of pork and leave it to the side of his plate, before contently eating the rest. And Yakob begat Baruch. Baruch drove a crane onto the beaches at Normandy on June 6th 1944, he owned some hotels and a tailoring factory, and, as family legend has it, in his youth told Jack Cohen that his shops were a silly idea and he would not do business with him. And he begat David, who can no longer tell these tales because Alzheimer’s has stolen everything but his humour.

For my looks, I was attacked with antisemitic remarks, spat on in school, chased and hit. But for my name, I have inherited immortal histories, full of struggle, of humour and a little hope. Although I have no firm claim to Judaism in any way other than tribute, I no longer deny it or try to shrug it off like an inconvenience. My grandmother (the Gentile who married the part-Jew) keeps Halvah in the cupboard, my mother buys kosher from time to time; we know it doesn’t mean very much in real terms, but it is a recognition of that which came before. And it may be no better than a fairytale I tell myself to feel part of something, but those fairytales of a now tiny family spread across the globe give identity, a sense of self, drawn from those before me and those still living, all engraved into a given name. It’s a tribute. A tribute to being chased, to those who were caught, and to those who got away.