Chaim Bermant

Chaim Icyk Bermant (26 February 192920 January 1998) was a British-based journalist and author. He contributed regularly to The Jewish Chronicle and occasionally to the national press, particularly The Observer. An Orthodox Jew and supporter of Israel, he was freely critical of both. He wrote several novels and non-fiction works, mostly on the quirks of British Jewish society.

Biography Early life Chaim Icyk Bermant was born on 26 February 1929 in Braslaw, then in Poland but now in Belarus. He grew up in Barovke, Latvia, until moving to Scotland at the age of eight. He was educated at Queen's Park Secondary School in Glasgow, spending much of the Second World War as an evacuee at a farm near Annan, Dumfriesshire. After leaving school he sought to become a rabbi like his father, attending the Glasgow Rabbinical College (yeshiva), but then decided to work on the land as a pastech (shepherd). However, a short and disappointing spell on an Israeli kibbutz put paid to this idea, and so he returned to read politics and economics at Glasgow University and economics at the London School of Economics, where he wrote a master's thesis on Independent Members of the British Parliament under the supervision of Reginald Bassett.

Writing career Aside from teaching at a "crammer" school in Tunbridge Wells and at a secondary modern in Ingatestone, Essex, Bermant wrote for economics journals and other periodicals throughout the late 1950s before eventually turning his hand to scriptwriting, first at Scottish Television for John Grierson and later at Granada in Manchester, where he and his fellow Glaswegian Jeremy Isaacs were involved in launching World in Action. He also criticised ultra-Orthodox religious parties in Israel for their reactionary tendencies and figures such as the Lubavitcher Rebbe for encouraging messianism. Probably his most contentious claim, however, was that the Holocaust had become excessively memorialised, leading (in his words) to a "perverse view of Jewish experience". He was also, at that time, an opponent of Britain's membership of the European Economic Community, on the grounds that he did not wish to see British national identity consumed by a larger polity.

Personal life Bermant married Judith Rose Weil on 16 December 1962 at Adath Israel Synagogue in Stoke Newington, London. They had four children: Aliza, Evie, Azriel and Daniel Bermant.

Bermant died on 20 January 1998 in Hampstead Garden Suburb, London from a myocardial infarction.

Works

Fiction Jericho Sleep Alone (1964) Ben Preserve Us (1965) Berl Make Tea (1965) Diary Of An Old Man (1966) Swinging In The Rain (1967) Here Endeth The Lesson (1969) Now Dowager (1971) Roses are Blooming in Picardy (1972) The Last Supper (1973) The Walled Garden (1975) The Second Mrs Whitberg (1976) The Squire Of Bor Shachor (1977) Now Newman Was Old (1978) Belshazzar (1979) The Patriarch (1981) House Of Women (1983) Dancing Bear (1984) The Companion (1987) Titch (1987)

Non-fiction Israel (1967) "New Nations and Peoples Library" series Troubled Eden: An Anatomy of British Jewry (1969) The Cousinhood: The Anglo-Jewish Gentry (1971) Point of Arrival: A Study of London's East End (1975) The Jews (1977) Contributed a chapter to Joan Abse (ed.), My LSE (1977) Ebla: An Archaeological Enigma (1979) co-authored with Michael Weitzman On The Other Hand (1982) What's the Joke: A Study of Jewish Humour through the Ages (1986) Lord Jakobovits: An Authorized Biography of the Chief Rabbi (1990) Murmurings of A Licensed Heretic (1990)

Autobiography Coming Home (1976) Genesis: A Latvian Childhood (1998)