Will Self

My mother used to say that the difference between American and British anti-Semitism was that in the States they hated you because you were a Jew, whereas over here they hated you personally and it was only incidental that you happened to be a Jew. On the whole I think she preferred the British brand of prejudice, which slipped bigotry under the carpet together with other crumbs they couldn’t quite exercise themselves to clean up properly.

English Jews I don’t think she could get a handle on – we lived at the unfashionable end of the Hampstead Garden Suburb (the Wilsons, the Mandelsons et al were on the other side of the North Circular) surrounded by Jews, but Mother thought them a pretty colourless lot compared with the New York variety she’d grown up with.

On the whole, though, my mother was not much given to either exalting or denigrating her Jewish heritage (which is how she thought of it, ethnicity – or race – being somewhat of a troubling ascription in the first few decades after the Holocaust), rather, she sought to sideline it. Nobody knew she was Jewish, so there was no need to make a song and dance about it. Neither I nor my brothers were raised in the faith – I wasn’t even circumcised, for Christ’s sake! On the few occasions I went to the synagogue with friends, I was preoccupied not by the bearded weirdos with the scrolls, but by the insubstantiality of my paper yarmulke, which I felt was in danger of being wafted up from my head by hot air from a hidden grille, leaving me exposed to the full judgment of Jehovah (or whatever his name is).

Certainly, I suspect Mother’s being American did rather trump all other perceptions for the Little Englanders of the 1950s and 1960s, but that they were unable at least to suspect a touch of the Jew-brush about my mother, I doubt. The sallow-dark skin, the curly hair, the – yes, why not concede it – large and flat-bridged nose, surely these were giveaways? They’re all characteristics I’ve inherited and I’m always struck by how, when I say I’m half-Jewish, people look at me first one way and then – as if adjusting a 3D postcard – another, before saying: “Oh, yes, of course, I thought. . .” before repressing the rest of the thought, which is, “ . . . you had a big nose and dark skin for an Englishman.”

While my mother definitely did, I can’t say I’ve experienced a great deal of anti-Semitism in my life. Up until the late 1980s, I can recall a few occasions when I’d find myself among people in tedious work contexts who’d begin expressing some low-level animus – remarking on how this institution or that business was “run by Jews” – and I always used to enjoy calling them out, using the great prow of my Semitism, as it were, to break through their prejudicial pack ice. But the truth is that, not being acculturated or contextualised by my Jewish heritage (wrong name, most obviously) I could pass – and still do, although it does say at the bottom of my Wikipedia page “British Jews”. British Jews? Puh-lease! Anything but that. Next they’ll be calling me a “British writer”.

Still, people are convinced of my Jewishness – Gentiles and Jews alike. Almost always, following the squint that reveals me – like Woody Allen at the Hall family’s Wasp table – to be a davening frummer with luxuriant payess and a phylactery the size of a rhino horn, they always ask, “Was your mother or father Jewish?” When I concede that it was my mother, they pronounce, “Aha! That means you’re Jewish.”

They may not realise it – these self-appointed judgers of ethnic purity – but their assertion is, in its own insidious way, a small but significant piece of anti-Semitism. I always counter them by snapping back: “It’s only the Jews themselves who say that, so why do you? You wouldn’t tell a woman whose mother was French that it meant she was French.” It’s not that I mind being Jewish – it’s just that given my upbringing, my religious convictions and my blood (yes, Semitism is to some extent genetically defined), such a claim would be, well, bogus – indeed, flat wrong. No, I am half-Jewish by blood, and any inclination Gentiles have to return me to the Jewish fold is a wilful capitulation to some sort of bizarre restorative justice – as if, in compensation for all that hatred in the past, it were possible to propitiate the Jews by offering them up all the souls and bodies they may lay claim to.

The latest Real meals column in the New Statesman:

I emailed my friend Zee who is half German, half Pakistani, but was raised in Britain and now lives in Cologne. “I’ll be on your hof next week,” I wrote. “What’s the most typical Berliner fast-food outlet?” His answer came back faster than the projectile vomiting of vindaloo and lager: “Currywurst – you’ll find one in any of the main railway stations, but mind out for extreme indigestion.” That was good enough for me, but a day or so later there came a much longer communication. Zee had talked to his brother Nav who lives in Berlin, and Nav had recommended a whole raft of other eateries – kebab joints in Kreuzberg, soup stops in Charlottenburg, a Red Rooster in the Reichstag (actually, I made that one up), but it was too late: I knew Currywurst was the place for me.

At Alexanderplatz I was winched up from the U-Bahn into the station plaza feeling about as much like a curried sausage as is possible: I’d had to get up at 4am to make my flight, and now it was a sunny, chilly mid-morning. Out on the plaza a Joseph Beuys lookalike was flogging fake-fur Red Army hats coated in what appeared to be goose fat.

Nobody I spoke to in Berlin could give me the lowdown on Currywurst. To hear them speak, you’d imagine that it had always existed in these parts – that when the Teutonic knights knife-and-forked their way east into what would eventually become Prussia, they encountered whole tribes dining on oblong Styrofoam platters mounded with discs of stinky bratwurst that in turn were mounded with still stinkier curry sauce.

Natürlich, wurst is to the Germanic belly as worst is to the Britannic. Nietzsche, who was a spirited critic of his native cuisine, said that nothing could be expected of a nation “whose bellies are full of beer and sausage”. He fled south to Tuscany, where he lapsed into insanity while trying to devise a canapé that could be eaten by horses while standing on their hind legs. I know how Nietzsche felt.

Inside the station concourse, I came upon a branch of Currywurst open for business. It was indistinguishable from any fast-food stop in any nation with a sovereign debt crisis: glass-topped counters, drinks coolers, cooking apparatus linked to a thick and silvery duct that either sucked out the smoke and cooking odours, or else possibly pumped the curry sauce in.

I could have the Bratwurst Menu for €4.80 (bratwurst, chips, Coke) or the Bockwurst Menu for the same; there was something called a “Hänchen Spezial” that weighed in at €4.50 and, in the lurid photo, looked like a quarter of particularly couch-bound chicken (plus chips and Coke, natch). As for the Frikadellen Menu at €4.99, I had no frame of culinary reference available for this glistening blob of meaty stuff. It could have been a scale model of the soused brain of Heinrich von Kleist, for all I knew.

I ordered the Currywurst Menu and then took my slathered discs to a countertop and propped myself on a stool. The smell was bizarre: pungently chemical – almost acrid – and as I dug in my white plastic tines saliva welled up into my mouth. I’ve heard of aftertastes but currywurst is one of those foods that has a pre-taste. Chewing on the rubbery wurst while trying not to gag on the sauce – which bore about the same relation to real curry as coronation chicken does to an absolutist monarchy – I pondered the mystery of what it was that the Currywurst experience resembled. Then it hit me: the foodstuffs were completely different, but the way they finagled the palate was exactly the same. Currywurst is the homologue of stewed pinkish eels in sage-green liquor sauce.

And with this intestinal London-Berlin linkage established, I was suddenly at home. That shaven-headed character in a tight brown felt hat at the counter was no alien, but Günter Lamprecht playing the role of Franz Biberkopf in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s TV adaptation of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. As for me, greedily shoving down the bad after the wurst, I was reminded of Kafka’s immortal Hunger Artist, whose dying words must surely haunt the consciousness of all restaurant critics:

“I had to fast, I can’t help it. Because I couldn’t find the food I liked – if I had found it, believe me, I should’ve made no fuss and stuffed myself like you, or anyone else.”

Ask not what your country can do for you – instead, go to yet another chain Italian restaurant and order some farinaceous foodstuff that will make your stomach swell up like that of a cow that’s gorged on clover; not, you understand, that I believe you to be fashionably wheat intolerant – it’s just there’s so much wheat intolerance in the air, it’s difficult not to pick up on it. So, ask rather what you can do for your country and the answer is clear, in order to promote growth-through-increased consumption: go to Ask, which seems to have a preposterous 135 outlets nationally, from Ashby de-la-Zouch to Truro and back again.

How did that happen? How did this Triffid-like horde of identical eateries rustle up on us, all – presumably – with the same green-and-cream colour schemes, all with the same sense of being conservatories writ large and foodie (hence the ducts snaking across the ceilings from their let-it-all-flop-out kitchen areas), all with white laminated-MDF tables, all with varnished wooden floors and wooden chairs, all with bars behind which there’s a map of the Italian boot fetishised out of wine bottles thrust into plaster, and all with plump, slightly buck-toothed waiters, who, as you push through the glass doors ask, “How’re you today?” their intonation rising into that meaningless interrogative swoop so beloved of the Antipodeans.

Yes, how did it happen – because, frankly, until I walked through the doors of Ask, I had never put to myself a single question about the chain, this empire of bruschetta being as alien to me as a walking plant, while also, paradoxically, blindingly obvious?

I mean, were Ask not to exist, it would be necessary to invent it; and if not with this name, then one called “Hint” or “Allude” or “Quail”. I say this, but when I inquired of Andreas, my waiter, why Ask was so called, he explained that it was an acronym of the names of the three founders. “English, were they?” I essayed, and he conceded that they almost certainly were. At that point I realised the futility of naming an Italian restaurant chain Perché, and gave up on the whole business of human interaction.

I was eating alone. At the next table, an older woman in a wool appliqué top discussed something with a younger woman with her hair in an Alice band. The older woman’s info-tool was an iPad, the younger one’s was a spiral-bound notebook. Andreas returned with my San Pellegrino and green olives. I sipped and nibbled moodily while consulting the menu. (Ridiculous expression, really, implying as it does that I paid the menu a fat fee in order to justify my own pathetic act of professional closure . . . except that when I stop to think about it, that’s precisely what I was doing.) I wanted to have the agnello brasato (shoulder of lamb with tomato sauce on risotto), or the pappardelle, which came with chunks of Tuscan sausage, but it wasn’t that sort of a day – it was a ruminant day, a green day, a mean’n’moody methane day, so instead I ordered the risotto verde and a rocket salad.

Waiting for it to arrive, I looked up at the tight formation of unshaded light bulbs dangling from the ceiling high overhead. I looked to the kitchen area and saw a white coat withdraw a pizza from the wood-burning oven. I thought of Sylvia Plath and how back in the days of British Gas, its advertising slogan was “Don’t you just love being in control?”. A reference to the “cookability” of gas stoves, not their suitability for those who become felo de se. My salad and my risotto arrived. The former looked like a half-digested meal, the latter like a fully digested one that had been thrown up. But then that’s risotto for you, isn’t it? I mean, if you order a risotto you cannot complain that it looks like puke, because that’s part of the contract: “I want some food that seems to be vomit” translates into catering lingua franca as, “Bring me risotto.”

Andreas came back and asked me how my food was, and I told him it was bland and he looked nonplussed, so I expanded: “Y’know tasteless, dull, uninteresting, obvious . . .” but that didn’t seem to help and his face crinkled up with pained incomprehension.

“Listen,” I snapped, “I don’t mind my bland risotto, in fact, I positively wanted such insipid fare.” At last this seemed to satisfy him and he went away. The bill was 20-odd quid, plus service – as you asked.