Uncomfortable home truths

In a large house in north London, thick with the fug of kosher cooking and unspoken secrets, lives a lopsided family. The Rubins are envied — and enviable, surely? Claudia Rubin is a rabbi. She is also a writer, media personality and, par excellence, mother. She dominates her gentle, disappointed biographer husband Nor- man and their four ill-assorted children: an emotional, intellectual, motherly leviathan. Her standards are exactingly high — ‘For Claudia, good enough has never been good enough’ — but the veneer of family perfection Rabbi Rubin takes pride in sharing with the outside world is built on shaky foundations. The obligations and responsibilities of love have ousted simple affection.

Could her children have forgotten the belief for which she is most famous, that happiness has many parts? That romantic love is but a fraction of what really matters: professional recognition, financial security, moral probity, spiritual nourishment, family life? Stability, in a word.