Known today to millions of listeners around the world as the presenter of Newshour, Tim Franks was, for many years, the BBC's award-winning Middle East Correspondent. During that time, he was accused of being a self-hating Jew, an Islamophobe, and an unthinking adherent to several mutually exclusive world-views. Franks pragmatically responded to it all with a reporter's detached curiosity - refusing to disclose any of his own personal views or beliefs.
In this book, Tim Franks asks himself what does it mean to be Jewish and to report on the world as it is today? It's a question that requires all of his journalistic skill and persistence, taking him on a journey that begins in 17th-century Portugal, where the Inquisition obliterated all signs of Lisbon's once thriving Jewish community, and ends with the realization that his Jewishness and his journalism cannot be separated - they inform each other.
Tim Franks looks back through his family history. As a child in 1970s Birmingham, a place where anti-Semitism and racism ran deep, he had no sense at all of his lineage - growing up, he had hardly any relations. It was at cheder, Sunday school, where he first learnt about the history of diaspora Jews and the reasons why his family history was so difficult to trace.
His research takes him from Constantinople to the Caribbean, via Cadiz and Auschwitz, Lithuania and even Downing Street. The ancestors he discovers each speak to a part of the Jewish story, from the risk-taking rabbi who founded a multi-cultural newspaper in the 19th century to Benjamin Disraeli, an Anglican convert who became the Conservative Party's "unlikeliest" ever leader. Throughout Franks' rich storytelling and assortment of characters, he returns to the perennial question - where do Jews belong and how should they act?
This book is a moving, almost literary memoir written with deep empathy and great nuance. It will fascinate readers of family saga, as Franks traces a genealogy that intersects with so many of the great moments in history. It will also interest readers of Jewish history. Each story that he uncovers highlights the value of one of his journalistic traits (or troubles it), so in searching for what it means to be Jewish, Franks ends up discovering more about his identity as a journalist as well.
