You can take the boy out of Glasgow…

16th April 2022

There’s a street in Glasgow called Otterburn Drive. It’s a road lined with big old sandstone houses built at the start of the last century in the posh bit of Giffnock, a suburb in the south side of the city. The house at number 3 Otterburn Drive has a special place in my family mythology — it was the home where my siblings and I grew up. Before that, our grandparents owned it, so our mother Maxine and her sister Charlotte also spent their childhood there. As the story goes, our father Nigel, 17 years old and keen to investigate how the other half lived, gatecrashed a party there, met our mum, and set in motion the events that led to all of us.

Our childhood home was just a few miles but a world and three generations away from the Gorbals slum where our great grandparents lived on arrival from Eastern Europe. As the community prospered, families left the Gorbals and generally moved into the southside. We were fortunate indeed, growing up in the comfort of that home, and our parents ensured that 3 Otterburn Drive was a hub of activity, where community meetings were hosted, youth movement activities took place, and a constant stream of our friends were welcomed by our parents, no matter the number or the hour.

One of my earliest childhood memories is of a family holiday in England in which an older gentleman (also Jewish) interrogated me,

“So where are you from?”

“I’m from Glasgow.”

“What? You’re Scottish?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve heard of Scotch whisky, but never Scotch Jews.”

I’m sure he never thought about his little joke again, but here I am quoting it in a piece nearly half a century later. I don’t suppose I’d given my identity much thought until that moment, as I’d assumed that most people in the world were Scottish and Jewish. It was only then that it began to dawn on me that we Glasgow Jews are a very particular thing.

The community has rapidly shrunk over the past 50 years, but when I was born in Glasgow in 1970 it was around 10,000 strong. Large enough to sustain all the key institutions and activities that make for a vibrant Jewish life, but small enough that people knew each other and really felt part of a community.

Central to my Glasgow Jewish experience was attending Calderwood Lodge, the only Jewish primary school in Scotland. It was a special school, a happy place where the teachers, all women back then, were like second mums tasked with imparting a stimulating mesh of maths and modern Hebrew and history — with the Battle of Bannockburn as crucial a part of our past as the siege of Masada.

I came out of Calderwood with a strong sense of identity as a Scottish Jew, and an utterly delusional sense of my sporting prowess derived from my status as the fastest boy in my primary school class, and captain of the school football team. On joining Hutchesons’, a big grammar school in the southside, I was dismayed to discover that being the finest athlete out of a class of ten small prepubescent Jewish boys was not a reliable indicator of future sporting greatness. Immersed for the first time in a non-Jewish school environment, I found it on the whole to be a pretty tolerant place for us, the odd bit of low level antisemitism aside — in our city, the real divide was all about your football team.

You’ve got to be careful in certain parts of Glasgow. As the old joke goes, a man gets accosted in the street and asked,

“So are you a Protestant or a Catholic?”

“Neither, I’m a Jew,” he answers.

“Aye. So are you a Protestant Jew or a Catholic Jew?”

I guess I’m a Catholic Jew, having chosen Celtic as my team at an early age. Most Glaswegians are born into Rangers or Celtic, based on their religion, so we Jews are among the few with free will on that front. As my dad had no interest in football, I followed the lead of my best friend in primary school, and went for the Hoops. It’s been a lifelong passion, though awkward at times — the club was founded as the team of Irish immigrants in Glasgow, with a left leaning section of Celtic’s fans strongly supporting Irish republicanism, and with that, a bundle of other causes. As with a segment of the left in general, this has led to a disproportionate focus on Israel, rampant anti-Zionism from a small part of the support, and a stadium where Palestinian flags are always flying. On the other hand, the club itself has consistently signed Israeli players through the years, with Nir Bitton and Liel Abada current first team regulars. Few things in life give me more pleasure than seeing Abada, a 20 year old new signing, race past an opposing defence and slot another one away on behalf of Catholic Jews everywhere.

Though Giffnock Synagogue was a two minute walk from our house back in the day, we were not regulars. At least, not until my brother and I found ourselves press ganged into the shul boys’ choir. My brother Tim, pitch perfect with the voice of a (rude scruffy) angel was an obvious recruit. Me — not so much. I’d already failed my school choir audition by then, and can only assume that I was a special project taken on by Chazan Ernest Levy, who ran the shul choir, part of his mission to give everyone in life a chance.

This meant that for several years until I was 14, I had choir practice and singing in synagogue most weeks. Looking back, it was one of the great privileges of my life. Chazan Levy was extraordinary in two respects. A survivor of several Nazi concentration camps including Auschwitz, he shared the stories of his horrific experiences with his boys, with his community, and with the wider Scottish world, as a passionate humanist preaching tolerance and inter-faith dialogue. He was also a magnificent singer, training for opera before choosing instead a life as leader and cantor in our small community, where we were fortunate to enjoy his wonderful singing every week. But even the great Ernest Levy’s tolerance had its limits. The highest compliment the boys in our choir could receive was to be given a solo on shabbat, and you could tell where your singing ranked in his estimation by the number of solos he gave you. In my entire choir career, I was awarded one. On the day of my bar mitzvah.

There was a strong youth movement scene, with FZY, Habonim, RSY and Bnei Akiva all running busy groups, and no communal event was complete without JLGB marching straight from band camp to add a bit of bagpipe and tartan flourish. We all had our own tribes, but worked together successfully under the umbrella of our youth council. In the early 90s, a group from all the youth organisations spent a weekend on a leadership seminar in the Highlands. A quintessential Scottish Jewish experience. I can picture us there, sitting in the sun in the valley under Ben Nevis, talking dugma and Jewish identity. As the midges ate us alive.

I was involved in FZY, for which we organised the legendary Glasgow seminar. Once a year kids from all over the UK flocked to our fair city on the promise of top notch educational activity, snogging and underage drinking. That weekend always ended with a wide game around the southside of Glasgow, then everyone crammed into our front room in Otterburn Drive for bagels and farewells.

My folks moved out of that house eventually. I was the first of us to leave Glasgow, moving to London initially to work for FZY, and one by one my siblings followed. In 2017, my parents figured that as they were spending most of their time waiting for their next chance to see their grandchildren, they were best joining us, and began their own next chapter in London. And so, our family’s direct connection to life in Glasgow came to an end. It’s a familiar story for provincial communities, losing numbers as younger and older generations gravitate towards London.

We’ll always be Glasgow Jews though, and we do have a small family legacy of our lives there. In 1991, the Scottish Jewish Archive Centre commissioned a video called Growing up in Scotland, telling the story of the Scottish Jewish experience, still used until this day as an educational resource for the wider community. It opens, of course, with Chazan Levy’s glorious voice, then introduces the narrator — my sister Olga, aged 15 at the time. She tells the tale of all Glasgow Jews through our own family’s story — from our arrival in the Gorbals, through the move southside, to Friday night dinner at 3 Otterburn Drive. A poignant reminder of where we are from, of how far we have come, and of all that Glasgow has given us.