When Roger Bennett’s great-grandfather left the Ukrainian mega-shtetl of Berdichev, he had planned to make his way to Chicago, where he hoped to ply his trade as a kosher butcher in a thriving city with a sizeable Jewish community. But as fate would have it, he instead settled in Liverpool, a city long past its Industrial Revolution-era boom years—a story not unlike those told by many Liverpudlian Jewish families. Bennett describes how that family history shaped his conviction that he was “born an American trapped in an Englishman’s body” in 1970, after his family had reached the middle class:
My older brother, Nigel, was already two years old. I was given the birth name Roger. There is perhaps no greater sign that we were still a family in search of acceptance than my parents anointing us with the least Jewish names possible. Their unspoken hope was to help us fit in by choosing what they perceived to be the English-est, most Christian identities. Yet they were either too eager, oblivious, or willing to overlook that my name . . . had long faded out of fashion by the time I was of schooling age. Thus, I was always the only, lonely Roger in a classroom sea of Waynes, Garys, and Jeremys, or as Liverpudlian naming conventions dictated, “Wazzas,” “Gazzas,” and “Jezzas.”
Isolated from his Catholic peers, young Roger felt himself an “outsider,” leading him to form a close relationship with his grandfather:
My nightly goal was to relax my grandfather sufficiently so I could coax him into telling me the stories of his life as an infantryman during the war. Startling tales about shooting at, or being shot at, by Germans, whom he referred to as “Jerries,” during the Siege of El Alamein, an experience he generally preferred to keep to himself. But by far his favorite topic of conversation was the United States of America. Or rather, recounting random memories born of his frequent pilgrimages to the American shores.
Pride of place [among other souvenirs from these trips] was reserved for a miniature Statue of Liberty replica made of die-cast metal, which sat on the mantel above the fireplace alongside a similar souvenir of the Empire State Building. My grandfather treated it with the pride I imagine the explorer Francisco Pizarro afforded to the first potato he had sailed back from the Americas to present to the Spanish court in 1532. Such was its power that even though my grandpa carried some girth—an adorable potbelly stomach honed over many hours spent watching television on the couch—one look at Lady Liberty would compel him to spring up to his feet so we could marvel upon her together. After sweeping it off the mantel into his meaty hand, Grandpa would shunt his spectacles back onto his forehead, squint his eyes, and read the inscription on the base in a unique English accent that combined inflections of both Yiddish and [the local dialect]. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” he’d slowly intone. “The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” We would then stand together in a reverent silence. A grandparent, a grandson, and a cheap tourist souvenir, contemplative until my grandfather would inevitably whisper, “We should have lived there.”
More about: American Jewry, British Jewry, Immigration
