Sixteen years into a stop-go production saga, I got a call from the director of The Song of Names with a suggested script change. What, said François Girard, if one of the two protagonists was perhaps, er, not Jewish? My reply cannot be repeated. I was, for a minute or so, completely speechless.
My novel, winner of a 2002 Whitbread Award, is the story of two boys bonding in wartime London. One is a refugee violinist from Poland, the other a middle-class kid of average abilities. ‘I am genius,’ says Dovidl to Martin. ‘You are — a bit everything.’ Beyond bomb sites, their friendship is rooted in a common heritage. The bond is savagely betrayed when Dovidl vanishes. Martin spends the rest of his life obsessively in pursuit.
To recast Martin as a non-Jew would, to my mind, undermine the symbiosis and weaken Martin’s desperate search. If they are two peas in a pod they must surely be broadly similar. Reconnecting tongue to brain, I argued for hours against changing Martin’s faith identity. What the hell difference does it make, I shouted, if he is Jewish or not? Why would an audience empathise more with Martin if he was not one of them? Is being Jewish suddenly a no-go on a multiplex screen?
As I heard myself ranting, I knew that my case was more emotional than rational, more about current politics than fictional coherence. The script fix I finally accepted can be seen when The Song of Names premières at the London Film Festival on 6 October but the issue remains raw within me.
While the film was shooting last year in London, Budapest and Treblinka, I was writing a book, Genius and Anxiety, against a rising tide of anti-Semitism. In Paris, a Holocaust survivor was found tortured to death. Jewish men were beaten up on the streets of Berlin and Warsaw.
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