On having a name we can’t pronounce

As much as anything, 'othering' is a Jewish trope. For me, growing up in multicultural London has helped me to understand racism and identity, but perhaps only a little about myself.

British Jews sit somewhere between 'white' and 'other': not passing for white, but not entirely accepted by the majority. Either way, Jews are afforded a certain degree of privilege compared to many minority groups, making it that much harder to feel placed, particularly as a secular Jew.

I am regularly ascribed as foreign, though it is through the process of migration. In attempting to become ‘un-foreign’, Jews, like me, have tried to segway into the mainstream. The erasure of cultural identity is what eventually happens to everyone in the diaspora. Migrants are all strange, we must all give something up in order to survive. Just like me, most Jewish people my age will not speak the languages of their ancestors: Yiddish, Ladino, German, Polish, Arabic. This forceful forgetting has meant that for decades my family has been pronouncing our surname wrong. Saltiel, said by my cockney grandfather like salt – as in salt and pepper – and eel, like the animal.

Not only is it a variation of a surname from the ancient Hebrew Shaltiel (I asked of God), but it should be pronounced sal-t-iel, with an a as that in the word apple and tiel like tee-ehl. So has something important been lost here?

Because we are a diaspora people, I have always sensed that despite owning a British passport, nationalism would never have the power to hold me. Such an idea is, at least for now, empowering, but as a teenager in this bordered world I felt unmoored. During interactions with other Londoners I maintained my country of origin was England until asked, "But where are you really from?" To this there is no correct answer. Besides my mother’s Austrian father, all my grandparents were born here.

This experience of being unidentifiable is especially painful when Jewish is too often misread as a synonym for Israel. In this way, whiteness and the fortification of Israeli nationalism has only placed diaspora Jews in a sort of limbo. Of course, the structuring of identity is always political. As the academic Ella Shohat has explained, the "whitening of the Jew" was a geopolitical event. Something so far away, yet it ripples: discordance here, so much more there.

With these competing narratives nuance has been lost. I am either unknown or exoticised to the point of erasure. When to so many of my friends I am ‘Salted Eel’, whilst to the wider world – on a government form or an ethnicity check – always ‘Other’. And to myself? Still a question mark.

By Bella Saltiel

This essay was longlisted for the JR Young Journalist Prize 2020. Follow Bella on Twitter: @Bella_Saltiel.

Read the other prize entries on the JR blog.