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Eva Tucker: her mother’s accent in London was the ‘language of the enemy’ |
Asylum seeker who became English
As a young refugee, Eva Tucker dreamed of waking up one morning as Virginia Woolf, writes Ruth Gorb
Becoming English. By Eva Tucker
Starhaven,
A great deal has been written about the arrival of German Jews in the 1930s to this part of London. Intellectuals, all of them.
They came from wealthy, professional Berlin to bedsits in Belsize Park and an uncertain future. A large proportion of them prospered, and contributed hugely to cultural life here. As they had assimilated to German life – although feeling more German than Jewish had not helped in the Nazi catastrophe – so they assimilated to life in Britain.
But when they arrived, they were called refugees. They would be called asylum seekers now, says Eva Tucker. “I wanted to drop the label “refugee” as soon as possible. But do you know, I have a friend who still introduces me as someone who came over from Germany. And I have spent 70 of my 80 years here.”
She came to live in Belsize Park the 1960s, and cannot imagine living anywhere else – “No, not because it was full of German Jews!” And while she may deny it, there is something about the gracious, high-ceilinged rooms of her flat that must have some nostalgic resonance, a memory of her grandparents’ Berlin apartment with its 10 huge rooms, its heavily elegant furniture – she could still draw you the pattern on their carpet, she says.
She wrote about her grandparents, and about the generations that preceded and followed them, in her novel, Berlin Mosaic, published in 2003. Why had it taken so long for her to explore her roots and to bring her past into the open? It is, she says, an odd story.
“For 10 years I have been running an Interfaith group here in Belsize Park. I wanted to experience other faiths. I joined the Quakers, and I spent 10 silent nights in a Buddhist monastery. The first night I was there I had a vivid dream of my grandmother.
“There was a clock that said five minutes to midnight. It was telling me to get on with it – that it was time I spoke about my background.”
The book starts in 1891, and ends in the 1940s in London. A little girl, Laura (Eva) and her flighty mother have escaped the rounding up of Jews in Germany, but the beloved grandmother has died in the gas chambers.
“Laura, as yet ignorant of what has happened, has won a prize for English literature at her English school. “I must write and tell Granny,” she says.
It is a heartbreakingly poignant ending, and Eva Tucker thought she would leave it there. But readers kept asking her, “What happened to little Laura?”
She began to write her own story. She thought it might hurt, but it poured out of her and as she wrote she realized that this time she could write a book with a happy ending. She has called it Becoming English .
She has, indeed, become English, with the look of bookish Hampstead Bloomsbury – “When I was very young I wanted to wake up one morning and be Virginia Woolf.”
A respected novelist and critic, she owes her passion for English literature to the time she spent as a child with three Quaker ladies who sent her to a select and academic girls’ school and who instilled in her a love of all things English.
It was a strange life for the little German girl, divided between the Quaker ladies’ genteel tea parties and country living in Somerset, a strict and archetypal English boarding school, and school holidays spent with her rackety mother – “let’s say she was generous with her favours.”. They lived in a series of depressing rented flats round West Hampstead, and there was always a different man installed when Eva/Laura came home. And for the child struggling to become English, her mother’s thick accent was a source of deep embarrassment. “It was the language of the enemy.”
For her mother it was hard for a different reason. She was of the generation who were more German than Jewish. They were part of the establishment, of elite Berlin life. Now they were not only poor, but looked upon as outsiders. “In one neighbourhood where there were a lot of German refugees, a petition was sent to the council complaining of the influx of so many ‘foreigners’.” It is all distressingly familiar to 21st century ears.
The relationship between Eva and her mother is at the heart of the book. There was always uneasiness: “She was ‘economical with the truth.’ She was very sparkly and charming but her love didn’t feel real, and at crucial moments she wasn’t there.”
And she remained German. Eva, on the other hand, felt English as soon as she put on her navy-blue gymslip. She married an Englishman, her three daughters were born in this country; there is nowhere else she wants to be. Has she been back to Berlin, and do any memories linger there? “It is completely different now. Only the wooden seats in the little railway, the Stadtbahn, are still there. And the special smell.”
There has been a huge change in attitudes since she arrived here 70 years ago. “People now find it odd that it was embarrassing not to come from an established English family or to have an accent. Everyone now carries their ethnicity with them, and everyone has a peculiar name. I never pretended to be anything I wasn’t but I didn’t want it to obtrude. My name then? Steinicke – a hard one to hide.”
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