Dickinson College Humanities Program in Norwich

Family. I’m not part of a particularly close one. This summer I was fortunate enough to stumble into Issi’s Place where I was adopted into an incredibly quirky and close-knit family of Hasidic Jews in Beechwood, Ohio. At Issi’s- a pizza parlor that keeps kosher- we got into each other’s way in the tiny kitchen, sweated through humid summer days next to the oven, stressed out over wrong orders, yelled at each other for taking too long to close the store, and then sat around for hours afterwards chatting the night away about Israel, Judaism, my life story, their life stories, life in general…It was truly fantastic. I’ve never before really had a home that I yearned for when traveling but the lack of Issi and my co-workers in my everyday life has definitely shown me just how difficult the feeling of homesickness can be to handle. With every kippah-wearing gentleman that passes here in England, I am reminded of the family I have back in a small pizza parlor in Ohio.

Enter the happy part of this story. Yesterday, a friend and I stumbled upon a concert of Klezmer Music that was happening in a beautiful area of Regent’s Park. Upwards of a hundred Hasidic Jews were gathered around a gazebo listening and dancing together. Instantly, a sense of nostalgia that I’ve never experienced before just hit me. In a corner of a park in London, England, a community much like the one I so love in Beechwood, Ohio collected in a preciously familiar fun-loving, care-giving way.

Now, the sentimental part of me can only go on so long before the liberal arts college student in me starts to analyze situations. Many of our readings on London’s history have addressed how immigrant communities are viewed in the city. A few of those readings have compared today’s “outcast” immigrant culture to yesterday’s “outcast” Jewish community. While this may not be the most politically correct of comparisons, it supports an optimism that London will accept the cultures that it seems to be ‘outcasting’ currently. If the same Jewish community that once was separated from the majority of the city can now celebrate a music form that has close ties to its culture in one of the most heavily visited parks in the city then clearly the city can accept what it once rejected so fully. Assuming this progression remains in place, today’s immigrant cultures that seem to be outcasts in London’s society would seem to have light at the end of the tunnel to look forward to. That being said, the hope is that London doesn’t actually continue on in the same vein as it has been. While we should celebrate the fact that the city can and eventually usually does recognize and attempt to better its mistakes, we should actively push for a change to take place to make sure that such segregation never happens in the first place. Yes, it’s great that the city can apologize but wouldn’t it be better if it didn’t have to apologize at all? Wouldn’t it be best if the mistake wasn’t made in the first place?

By birth, I’m not a part of a Jewish community whether it be a secular or incredibly orthodox branch of the religion. This summer showed me that one does not need to be born into a family in order to be a part of it though. Like a family, a city cannot hose whom its members are. Maybe at one point in time this could have happened, ut- thankfully- we are past those days. We now live in an age in which cultures of all different roots are living in the same area. We need to do more than that though. We need to bump into each other, tell a few jokes with one another, and invite each other over for dinner. This may sound a little naïve or wishy-washy but I think the parallel is there. Issi accepted me into a community this summer that I could not have differed more from. He didn’t make me sit in a corner by myself and only speak when be spoken to. I went to the pizza parlor to do more than just work. An outsider both culturally and religiously, I was accepted despite our differences into their conversations and they into mine. London would do well to start doing the same.

Even though I am one, I rarely feel like a tourist in London. Perhaps the fact that there are hundreds of other tourists makes me feel a bit less conspicuous when I snap photos of St. Paul’s and Big Ben, or perhaps it’s because I truly feel like I’m getting to know this city bit by bit (I have a good chunk of the Tube map in my head now, which amazes me). I readily call London, Bloomsbury, and the Arran House “home” in a way I adamantly refuse to label Carlisle and Dickinson, and when I helped an American couple from California find their way on the Tube the other day, they asked if I lived here, and I automatically answered yes but didn’t realize what I had said until ten minutes later. Despite the fact that we’re often looked at on the Tube or the street for being loud and having different accents, and even though we will probably all be known as “the American” in our various social circles in Norwich, I feel more at home in London than I have ever felt outside of my Connecticut bubble.

Yesterday, however, I felt like a tourist and an outsider for the first time in a while. Southall immediately felt foreign the second I got off the train. Perhaps this is because of my relative lack of experience with England outside of greater London, or perhaps it was because of the street signs and advertisements in Urdu, but Southall only felt more foreign the farther we got into it. Even just walking down the street, I felt that we were being looked at and wondered about much more closely and obviously than we often are around Tottenham Court Road, for example. From what I’ve paid attention to, many Brits will hear a bunch of loud young adults with American accents walking down the pavement, and they seem to give us a cursory glance when they’re sure we’re not looking before walking on. In Southall, on the street as well as in the gurdwara itself, people didn’t seem to hide their blatant staring at our group. This didn’t feel unfriendly, necessarily, or undeserved: Southall isn’t exactly an area that sees a lot of tourists, especially young, mostly white Americans, and I bet many were wondering why the hell we had reason to come to Southall. In the gurdwara, people didn’t seem to hide their curiosity whatsoever, but this time I felt a slight embarrassment: even though we were all being respectful and obeying their customs, I wondered what they thought of us being there and if they felt mocked by our curiosity, our sometimes comical scarf-wearing, and our close observation. I felt as though we might be intruding into their sacred space, perhaps one of the few places in Britain where they are among their own kind and NOT the outsiders, simply by being there and treating the gurdwara like it was another tourist stop on the tour of England and as a space that does double-duty as a museum as well as a space of worship like Westminster Abbey or St. Paul’s.

As we discussed in class today, for many of us, being an outsider is an infrequent and uncomfortable experience, but I wholeheartedly agree with such experiences being beneficial, educational, and healthy. However, after feeling like a complete outsider for the first time in a while, I found myself reflecting on how the gurdwara is probably one of the only places in the area where the Sikhs aren’t the outsiders and aren’t given strange looks for having turbans and beards. For the hour or however long they’re in the gurdwara, they are able to be themselves and focus on what matters most to them, but in the outside world, where they’re not even allowed to participate fully in the requirements of their religion (since they aren’t allowed to carry knives/swords, and in some professions, might not be able to have long hair or beards), they are constantly bombarded with strange looks and being “foreign” just because of the way they look. I wonder what this does to a Sikh’s identity, especially through the various generations and levels of devoutness. We have read several books on the concepts of being an immigrant and a permanent outsider in England, but since Sikhs can perhaps stick out even MORE due to the physical markers of their religion. I also think that identity varies from individual to individual, even though two might come from the same place at the same age and live in the same new environment, and I regret not asking our guide more about the Sikh identity in a secular, western community.