WHO'S BEEN EATING MY BAGEL?

I’m not proprietorial about much. Mi casa es tu casa. I grew up in a busy, boisterous, democratic family. There was no time to stand on ceremony. If my father had to run out before his food was ready for him, he’d reach across me and take mine. I’d do the same to my younger brother’s. And he’d do the same to my grandfather who was living with us and had slow reflexes. Thus did a sort of justice prevail. The only person to miss out was the baby of the house and she was given lashings of love to compensate for all the food we stole from her.

We were the same about clothes. If it fitted, we took it. The same with cars and, in the case of my younger brother and me, girl friends. He was in a pop group, I was studying English Literature at Cambridge. No prizes for guessing who got the girls. I’d come back from university and find them lined up disconsolately on the garden wall, dangling their legs and with their new autograph albums open on page one. My mother brought them out tea and biscuits. ‘I’m afraid Stephen’s away on tour,’ she’d say. ‘But this is his older brother, Howard. He has good conversation.’

‘What’s your favourite biscuit?’ I’d ask.

I didn’t go out with all of them. But I hit it off with a few. ‘What’s it like being the brother of someone drop-dead gorgeous and famous?’ they’d ask.

‘It’s all right,’ I lied.

I mention this only to show that possessiveness wasn’t in our natures.

Wasn’t, that is, until now. . .

I am surprised by myself. Of all the mock-offences that an over-sensitive society has dreamed up to spoil everybody’s party, the most preposterous is Cultural Appropriation, no matter that in most cases it’s a compliment. It’s because I was a sympathetic student of the sufferings of the American Indian that I bought a headdress made of eagle feathers when I was fourteen and sang along to the ‘Indian Love Call’ in the musical Rose Marie. It was out of a similar impulse - in this case a passion for the choreography of the Middle East - that in later years I treated my wife to belly-dancing lessons in a school for the performing arts in Putney. To call such adventures in internationalism invasive or appropriative is to miss their generosity of spirit. What good can possibly come from putting one’s curiosity on ice and one’s imagination in chains?

There is, I have always thought, not a thing about me - my appearance, my family, my history, my lapsed religious rituals, my headgear - that is out of bounds for anybody who wants to make free with it. Generous is better than mean, but do your worst. Be me if you choose to. After all, I haven’t exactly hidden myself away.

But there is something I have recently grown touchy about. The bagel.

How it is that bagels have suddenly become the new fast-food in non-Jewish areas of London I have no idea. The whereabouts of bagels - especially night-bagels - was once a closely guarded secret. The first time I was taken to an all-night bagel shop in Brick Lane I had to wear a paper-bag over my head, so I wouldn’t know how I’d got there, and later sign a non-disclosure notice. It wasn’t that the night-bagel contained contraband substances. They were filled with all the usual delights - smetana mixed with cream cheese, sweet and sour cucumber, chopped liver, chopped herring, egg and onion, and sometimes salt-beef (though, strictly, salt-beef should only be served on rye bread) and I’ve known people who will not spoil the pristine taste of bagel with anything more invasive than a knife-edge of unsalted butter. There was, in short, nothing in the bagel that had to be hidden from the local constabulary; the reason for keeping the whereabouts of a bagel shop secret was simply fear of publicity, crowds, commotion, and the possibility that by three a.m there’d be no bagels left.

That the surreptitiousness of the bagel added to its specialness I won’t deny. Medieval Christians believed that Jews kept company with the devil who, as you don’t need me to tell you, liked nothing more on Walpurgis Night than a trip to Brick Lane with a paper bag over his horns to get a bagel filled with salmon smoked in sulphur. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, among the clandestine caches of spells and recipes hidden away by fourteenth century Jews are non-disclosure notices signed by Satan.

I don’t claim that every Jew recalls these diabolical forays into dark alleys to find a bagel every time he shops at a deli in St John’s Wood or Prestwich. That’s not how cultural memory operates. Something tugs at my arm, though, whenever I pass the bagel counter on the way out of a deli - something more powerful than an after-thought or whim, something more like the urgent recall of responsibility, as though, at the very last moment, I remember to buy medicine for an ailing relative or a candle to burn for a dead one.

There is, in other words, nothing unassociated or casual about a bagel. Not only is it a bearer of centuries of superstition, it carries the history and consequence of the Jewish diaspora. A New York Bagel is not a London bagel and a London bagel is not a Manchester bagel. I have written elsewhere about the subtle differences, in the matter of chewiness and texture, between the bagels of the world. In a blind tasting I was once able to dismiss from all consideration the bland bun which New Yorkers call a bagel (a pretzel made with soggy dough) and successfully differentiated between the bagel of the north of England and the bagel of the south (the north managing to be at once crisper on the outside and sweeter in the middle); but a real bagler - which I’m not - can identify to within a quarter of a mile, which part of Manchester - Hale, Didsbury, Altrincham, Cheetham, Prestwich, Whitefield - any given bagel was boiled.

Don’t misunderstand me - the bagels with outlandish fillings that are appearing in bagel bars all over London are not in themselves all that bad. I suspect a Manchester baker is behind most of them. But the shops selling them can’t duplicate the requisite atmosphere for their consumption, as neither can the people consuming them, which is where the argument against cultural appropriation becomes relevant. I notice an affectation of manner in the bagel cafes near me. A certain wolfishness is creeping in, as though, by virtue of the bagel, Soho has become Fifth Avenue. Similarly, a cod-vitality of gesticulation assumed to be Jewish - faster talk, the rat-a-tat-tat of Jackie Mason style joke-telling and Curb Your Enthusiasm rudeness. With a new production of Oliver on in the West End a roguish Jewish musicality is also making itself felt. Only yesterday, a very English gent in a Newmarket trilby sauntered out of the newest bagel bar in Soho singing ‘If I Were A Rich Man’ and, seeing me, tapped his nose and said ‘Know what I mean?’

It is as though. to some people’s sense, consuming a bagel makes them instantaneously Jewish, which in itself I don’t mind - I’m not an exclusivity Jew - but the Jew they think it makes them has his origins in Vaudeville, not real life. Precisely because bagels conjure up such a long and troubled history, eating them should be a slow, contemplative, even tragic business. We eat the bagel in memory of those we’ve lost, chewing slowly, careful not to spill contents our ancestors could never have afforded. We start at one side and then rotate the bagel to begin again on the other, each time getting closer and close to the hole which is a symbol of the desolation of the years.

So, to be clear - I don’t mind the appropriation, I just want to be appropriated in the right spirit and for the right reasons. The next time you buy a bagel, see if you can eat it, without rush or wise-cracks, on a park bench - outside a synagogue ideally - imagining that Moses ate a bagel just like this one for his lunch before ascending Mount Sinai to receive the Commandments from the Lord.

Imagine, in other words, that civilization itself waits upon every bite.

End