On Marriage

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And I will certainly say that this is perhaps one of the reasons why, for all its faults, I think a kind of openness, fluency, and willingness to describe things is necessary. Why, then, she wonders, has there been so little serious intellectual engagement with the idea of marriage? Joking, then, is a form of common language that can also offer its speakers a degree of privacy, by creating a kind of outsider discourse within the dominant discourse, one that speaks for the jokers’ own lack of definition or certainty. Often you find they’re very funny, and then the moment they’re not being funny, you find that they’re awfully serious – a little bit too serious. Baum brings this sharp self-awareness to her book; as she reflects with the analytical eye of an academic on different iterations and meanings of matrimony, she also frequently illustrates her points with scenes from her own marriage.

Baum looks at marriage from multiple angles, legal and political, social and narrative, its interminability and its dailiness . So, the notion – that we had 27 other countries we could go to, and now we don’t – feels absolutely existential for many Jews in this country. I'm an Associate Professor in English Literature and Critical Theory at the University of Southampton. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian View image in fullscreen ‘Marriage is unknowable to anyone outside it’: Devorah Baum and husband Josh Appignanesi with their children in 2016. From Freud to Ferrante, and One Thousand and One Nights to Fleabag , she looks at marriage in all of its forms – from act of love to leap of faith, and asks: what are we really doing when we say ‘I do’?That really impressed me, because, you know, you read something about feelings, and that was a complete turn-over in my head. But the answer isn’t that everybody gets to have power, but that everybody gets to feel the degree to which power is a fantasy. It was left to me, therefore, to point out that Shakespeare’s Jew was an anti-Semitic stereotype and that Shylock was in fact not an accurate depiction of how I generally acted, nor how my family acted and nor how my ancestors acted, even when faced with persecution and prejudice. Devorah, who happens to be Lisa's daughter-in-law, draws on some related tropes of memoir and psychoanalysis in her writing and film-making. The feeling of being European has arisen, I think, in particular amongst Jews in this country, partly because some of them, since the Referendum, have discovered that they can go and get passports – from Germany, Poland.

It’s the plot that drives much of western literature and drama; it is presented to successive generations (especially women) as both the highest goal and a yoke of oppression. DB: Feelings are contagious – you can be a winner in a society, and still be caught up in envious feelings. If somebody tells you a joke well and fresh, and you get a laugh out of it, that’s a real relief – and it’s a strengthening moment, as well.

What I’m really interested in is the way in which all feelings split us – and how we cope with that, what we do with that.

And for me also it’s about the shared nature of feelings – they’re not private, and they shouldn’t be bound up with an ideology of privacy and property. But at the end of all her analysis, a definitive understanding remains elusive: “Having thought so much about marriage, the truth is that I still don’t know what I think about it. In this conversation, Lisa and Devorah will discuss Losing the Dead and then, more generally, the role played by familial stories in their work. AH: Also, making fun of yourself… At the conference “Contemporary British-Jewish Cultures” at Bangor University this month (March 2018) many speakers described this idea as something inherently Jewish, too.She is the author of three books: On Marriage (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Random House; Yale University Press; CITIC; others) which came out in 2023, Feeling Jewish: a book for just about anyone (Yale University Press) and The Jewish Joke: an essay with examples (less essay, more examples) (Profile), which came out in 2017. So, that would be a question: Have you ever experienced antisemitism in London, either blatant, or low-level?