{"id":283132,"date":"2025-10-07T03:45:16","date_gmt":"2025-10-07T03:45:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/283132\/"},"modified":"2025-10-07T03:45:16","modified_gmt":"2025-10-07T03:45:16","slug":"emma-forrest-wrote-a-seminal-jewish-novel-and-was-quietly-ghosted-for-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/283132\/","title":{"rendered":"Emma Forrest wrote a seminal Jewish novel\u2014and was quietly ghosted for it"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The latest novel by British author Emma Forrest, Father Figure, is arguably the greatest work of Jewish literature in decades\u2014at least, that\u2019s according to The CJN\u2019s opinion editor, Phoebe Maltz Bovy, who gave a <a href=\"https:\/\/thecjn.ca\/opinion\/perspectives\/proud-jewish-schoolgirl-meets-tycoon-of-jewish-background-in-emma-forrests-father-figure\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">glowing review to the new release<\/a> on Sept. 29.<\/p>\n<p>But across the pond, the book has received a muted reaction. It hasn\u2019t been spotlit in any British book fairs; it\u2019s been largely ignored by domestic literary awards; professional friends who\u2019ve helped promote, and even written forwards for, her past works have largely ignored this one.<\/p>\n<p>What makes this latest book different? It is unmistakably, idiosyncratically Jewish. Combine that with the growing antisemitism that\u2019s erupted in the United Kingdom since Oct. 7\u2014which culminated in a <a href=\"https:\/\/thecjn.ca\/opinion\/perspectives\/the-manchester-synagogue-attack-inspires-her-skirt-was-too-short-antisemitism\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">lethal terror attack in Manchester on Yom Kippur<\/a>\u2014and it\u2019s hard for Forrest not to think her apolitical work of fiction has suffered from her personal cultural identity and a broader political climate.<\/p>\n<p>Forrest joins Maltz Bovy on the latest episode of The Jewish Angle to discuss her novel, along with its deep inception and quiet reception. Forrest describes the real-life inspirations behind her boarding school setting, including her own encounters with Harvey Weinstein, how they influenced her characters, before discussing the recent tragedy in Manchester and how her country\u2019s small Jewish community is reacting.<\/p>\n<p>Transcript<\/p>\n<p><strong>Phoebe Maltz Bovy: <\/strong>This is Phoebe Maltz Bovy, and you\u2019re listening to The Jewish Angle, a podcast from The CJN. Very, very Jew. So today we are going to have a little bit of a diversion into the world of fiction. So Emma Forrest, who\u2019s my guest today, is an English author, filmmaker, and most importantly, per her website, podcaster, amazing.\u00a0 Her latest book, Father Figure, is really the best Jewish novel that has appeared in decades. It\u2019s like something where I\u2019m thinking like the publishing term comp titles, so similar books. I\u2019m thinking like Portnoy\u2019s Complaint or Fear of Flying. Like, it\u2019s that kind of Jewish novel. I want North American readers to know about this because it\u2019s like this is the Jewish novel that I personally have been waiting for. But it\u2019s also set a decade ago and very much of this world. So it doesn\u2019t feel like it\u2019s some sort of historic thing that feels dusty and of another time. It\u2019s very much of this moment. Emma Forrest, welcome to The Jewish Angle.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Emma Forrest:<\/strong> Thank you so much for having me.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Phoebe Maltz Bovy: <\/strong>So how did you come up with the idea of a story about an\u2014I don\u2019t want to say ordinary, because Gail is not ordinary, but\u2014of an everyday Jewish schoolgirl crossing paths with an oligarchy-type figure?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Emma Forrest:<\/strong> Because when I moved back to\u2014I lived in America for a long time. So I lived in California, I lived in New York. I was away for 20 years. And my mom\u2019s American, and when I came back to the UK, I walked past my old school, which was a private girls\u2019 school that I had had a bursary scholarship to, and it looked completely different. And I called my sister and said, what happened to\u2014I\u2019m not gonna name the school\u2014what happened to it? And she said, hadn\u2019t you heard?\u00a0 And then she named an oligarch, whose name you would know, and said he started sending his daughter there, and he\u2019s bought all the buildings that surround the school, and he\u2019s put an armed guard on the gate of the school. And I was like, oh, my God, this is a novel. Because if I had been there at 16, I would, knowing myself at that age, have tried to inveigle my way into his life via his child, obviously.\u00a0\u00a0 And I\u2019ve always had a real interest and soft spot in any book or film, any piece of art that uses the archetype of the stranger who arrives and disrupts an entire family\u2019s life. A novel I really love in that vein is The Accidental by Ali Smith. And a film that\u2019s incredibly important to me, and actually I keep finding now from quite a few novelists, is Teorema by Pasolini, which I guess is Teorema in Italian by Pasolini starring Terence Stamp, who recently died. And it\u2019s about a stranger who arrives and makes love to each member of the family and drives each of them crazy. And you don\u2019t know if he\u2019s God or the devil. And then he leaves.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Phoebe Maltz Bovy: <\/strong>So I should say listeners have not maybe necessarily yet read Father Figure. They should go do that. Gail is this teenage girl who encounters, via the child, the teenage child of Ezra Levy. She, you know, encounters this oligarch-type guy, but she also brings out something to do with his Jewishness in him in this complicated kind of psychosexual way that\u2019s hard to\u2026 like, I can\u2019t describe it. I mean, I just want to talk a little bit about Ezra. Just because the Western canon is full of men like that, right? These, the Jew, you know, how did you decide to take somebody like that and make him, like, a man?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Emma Forrest:<\/strong> I looked up how many of us there are here. It is tiny. It\u2019s like 250,000 Jews in the United Kingdom, 4 million Muslims in the United Kingdom. We\u2019re microscopic. So hyper-aware. Probably the way people were when Summer of Sam happened. Like where you find out David Berkowitz is Jewish and you\u2019re like, for Frigg\u2019s sake, like, this is not helpful.\u00a0 So there kept being these British figures through my childhood of whom I was very aware, who just felt profoundly unhelpful, like Robert Maxwell, Philip Green, who owned Topshop. There\u2019s a very famous figure here, I don\u2019t know if he translates there, called Sir Alan Sugar, who owned one of the big football\u2014I think he did, was chairman of Tottenham Football Club. And these just like awful sort of Nazi caricatures of Jewish billionaire, like hideous Jewish billionaires.\u00a0\u00a0 And the only comfort I\u2019ve had recently is the only person who looks remotely like them. I noticed, and this really struck me, is Mohammed Hadid, the father of Bella and Gigi Hadid. If you want to tap into the idea that we come from the same place. Right. You know, the only one who\u2019s presented such an archetypal, like, gross Nazi figure as those men is him. And so humanizing. All the Jewish men I know are so benign and beta, so the idea of like an alpha Jewish male is anathema for me anyway. Pretty much the men closest in my life were my dad and, I don\u2019t know if you know, the great investigative journalist John Ronson, who wrote The Psychopath Test and The Men Who Stare at Goats. I grew up with him. So those are the two guys I knew, and they\u2019re very, very gentle.\u00a0\u00a0 So I\u2019m fascinated by, what if a Jewish man was tough? I\u2019m like, what? What are you talking\u2014how could that be? You know, the Israeli Cabinet would disprove that image. But yeah, it certainly. I grew up with this very sort of beta idea of the Jewish male. So I think that\u2019s why I wanted to know what are the layers and the ribbons and the flavors? Insights. Someone who presents as very alpha but whose main vulnerability is wanting to be part of the British establishment.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Phoebe Maltz Bovy: <\/strong>I just\u2014the girls\u2019 school stuff. I went to a girls\u2019 school in Manhattan when I was quite young and it all just\u2014it felt just so beautifully described. I mean, the stuff about everybody having at least a bit of an eating disorder seemed pretty true. But also\u2014but I wanted to ask you\u2014so Dar is Gail\u2019s mother in the book. She and Gail are both such full characters and it\u2019s such a realistic mother-daughter relationship. I especially like the part where Dar thinks she\u2019s going to help out by getting Gail invited to a party, and it just turns out she\u2019s read everything wrong.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Emma Forrest:<\/strong> Oh, yeah, yeah.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Phoebe Maltz Bovy: <\/strong>So talk a little bit about how you write the mother-daughter, getting both sides so\u2026<\/p>\n<p><strong>Emma Forrest:<\/strong> Well, I guess because I\u2019ve been both. You know, I\u2019m a single mom, and my daughter\u2019s coming into the cusp of adolescence. I always write about the things that are scaring me in order to make them safe. And it usually works. And there was just an incredibly bad decision when my sister and I were kids that we would be moved from the state school, which in Canada. Is that public school?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Phoebe Maltz Bovy: <\/strong>You know, public school, yeah.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Emma Forrest:<\/strong> Right. Where we would be moved from a state school by my grandfather, who was able to afford to put us in a private primary school, which I guess is\u2014What do you call it when you\u2019re little? When you\u2019re like, elementary school? 8, 9, 10. Elementary.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Phoebe Maltz Bovy: <\/strong>I\u2019m probably getting it wrong, but yeah, go on. Yeah.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Emma Forrest:<\/strong> He paid for us to go to elementary school privately, and we were the only Jews. And there was one black kid who I think was the son of the Nigerian diplomat to England. And my sister\u2019s class was okay. My class was really anti-Semitic. And they were so young. They were like 8, 9, 10. It was coming from the parents, which you figure out, but also explicitly, they would say. My mother says it was actually the school that Catherine and William, the now King\u2014almost King\u2014ended up sending their kids to. In my class, Winston Churchill\u2019s great-granddaughter was in my class with me. One of Lady Diana\u2019s bridesmaids was in the class.<\/p>\n<p>It was the wrong place for us, and it really scarred me. I remember there was a particular bully who was the daughter of a Greek shipping magnate. She would do all this stuff about, you know, \u201cDon\u2019t you feel bad for killing Christ?\u201d And she would call me the N-word. Someone has to really want to say the N-word to say it to someone who, like, has curly hair and that\u2019s it. It took, honestly, until I was in my mid-20s and one day just sitting on a bus and thinking, hang on. On the ethnic scale from, like, Nubian to Swedish, Greek and Jew fall in the same place. So what? This wasn\u2019t even appropriate bullying. This is just crazy.\u00a0 I think I realized quite late how deeply ingrained that period and that mistake of sending us there was\u2014of trying to make us sit alongside the British Establishment. With my daughter, I\u2019ve gone completely the other way. She\u2019s only been in state schools. In public schools, they\u2019re completely mixed. They\u2019re heavily Muslim and Jewish. Her local school\u2014because we\u2019re in North London\u2014and it\u2019s been night and day.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Phoebe Maltz Bovy: <\/strong>That\u2019s interesting. I have so much to say on this. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. I also went to a school of that sort until high school, from when I was 5 to when I was 13. I don\u2019t think it was quite the same in terms of Jewishness as it would have been in England. But it wasn\u2019t entirely different. I did hear the \u201cJews killed Jesus\u201d thing.\u00a0 I remember thinking that to be attractive, you had to basically look like Claudia Schiffer. I was shocked when I went to college in Chicago that women who looked like me were not considered repulsive for not looking like Claudia Schiffer. Men who had grown up around women who looked like that found women who looked like me exotic in a good way. It was a very confusing time.\u00a0 There are a couple of connections to Father Figure that I want to talk about. There\u2019s this one amazing moment where Gail is in a police car with a man, and it feels like you\u2019re in this very modern novel, where people are from marginalized identity groups. There\u2019s a gay man who\u2019s been picked up for public sex, and he says he wouldn\u2019t, though, with George Michael. And why is that?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Emma Forrest:<\/strong> He\u2019s too far.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Phoebe Maltz Bovy: <\/strong>It\u2019s just like this amazing punchline. I was thinking about that when you were talking about the Greek shipping magnate.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Emma Forrest:<\/strong> You\u2019ve mentioned your writing, and you\u2019re completely right. It was absolutely significant that George Michael actually talks about his Jewishness on Desert Island Discs, finding out fairly late that his mother was Jewish. It explains to me a great deal about what we love about George Michael. Despite his very traditionally macho, almost Tom of Finland look, this anxiety, he has a vulnerability to his work, like a neurosis.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Phoebe Maltz Bovy: <\/strong>Yeah.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Emma Forrest:<\/strong> I found it very moving to realize that someone I love that much had realized that about himself. He\u2019s there for a reason.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Phoebe Maltz Bovy: <\/strong>The scene that is going to be like anybody who\u2019s doing any kind of Jewish Book Awards\u2014not that you shouldn\u2019t get the Mainstream Book Awards too, but the Jewish Book Awards, specifically\u2014is that scene in the Anne Frank House.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Emma Forrest:<\/strong> Yeah.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Phoebe Maltz Bovy: <\/strong>Are you familiar with the Seinfeld, Schindler\u2019s List make-out?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Emma Forrest:<\/strong> Yeah. I took my daughter to Anne Frank House, and I didn\u2019t know if I had the courage to write this down. So I wrote it down in a sort of satirical way in the book. I was struck by what a lovely place it was with a lovely view and light, if it wasn\u2019t being used for what it\u2019s been used for. The shiksa stepmother verbalizes that she wants to make an offer on it. But as you walk through it single file, you can\u2019t really tell what\u2019s going on with the people behind or in front of you. I thought this would be a really good place to have an illicit touch.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Phoebe Maltz Bovy: <\/strong>I found the kiss aspect very subversive. It subverts two different tropes: the Jewish man aroused by the shiksiness of a non-Jewish woman, which you get in things like Woody Allen, Philip Roth, Seinfeld. It\u2019s old and hasn\u2019t gone anywhere. There\u2019s also the 19th-century trope where a non-Jewish man is going for the exoticness of a Jewish woman. This subverts both, and it\u2019s another part where Ezra is saying that a certain type of man would find Gael attractive, but he doesn\u2019t. He\u2019s telling himself, yeah, this is a pretty big one to drop.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Emma Forrest:<\/strong> One of my good friends who I\u2019ve known for decades grew up with Georgina Chapman, who was the wife of Harvey Weinstein. There were times I was around Harvey, and he just had no idea how to interact with me because of my Jewishness. I knew that\u2019s what it was about. He could not make any sense of me. There are slivers of those experiences with Harvey in how I thought Ezra might react to Gail.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Phoebe Maltz Bovy: <\/strong>I wanted to ask you\u2014Father Figure is not a political book promoting any party or ideology, but it doesn\u2019t shy away from contentious topics. What was it like writing a book that deals so directly with Jewish identity and British Jews\u2019 differing views about Israel in this moment?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Emma Forrest:<\/strong> When you said all the wonderful things about this book, it brought tears to my eyes because this book has been rejected. It\u2019s the first book I\u2019ve written that hasn\u2019t been accepted into any British literary festival. None in England; I did one in Scotland. There\u2019s no foreign translations; it\u2019s not on any of the tables in bookstores. People who blurbed my other books or supported my other books publicly, who aren\u2019t Jewish, have not responded. It\u2019s been very dispiriting.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Phoebe Maltz Bovy: <\/strong>Do you think it\u2019s just the amount of Jewish content, or is it the fact that it is not taking a side in some unambiguous way?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Emma Forrest:<\/strong> I think people are really scared. One of the great supporters of it is a wonderful writer called Naseiba Yunus, who wrote a great book called Fundamentally a Great Novel.\u00a0 And she was not just a practicing Muslim but a very seriously practicing Muslim until she sort of moved away from religion entirely. She wrote a novel that\u2019s comedic about being sent to Iraq to de-radicalize ISIS Brides. It is the most brave, amazing book, and she has the bravery and the complexity to have read Father Figure and gone, \u201cI love it.\u201d\u00a0 And people are scared. I\u2019ve had friends, and these are all people who are not Jewish. I\u2019ve asked, you know, when they\u2019re fundraising for Gaza, \u201cIs it possible to mention the hostages?\u201d Certainly, the one time a famous person mentioned the hostages, they got so many death threats that they were scared, which I understand.\u00a0 A public figure told me straight, her management said she can\u2019t speak about them because it will damage her career. That\u2019s where we are. People like things to be black and white. If you want to start at a really basic level, the way I try and go in is with all the things you could say legitimately to criticize Israel, and there are a lot of them.\u00a0 The idea that Palestinians are brown and Israelis are white is crazy. That\u2019s not the truth. I\u2019ve said over and over, publicly on my Instagram, that in my opinion, the reason those hostage posters keep getting ripped down is that when you have 250 faces, you\u2019re going to have to guess that\u2019s a fairly accurate representation of Israeli society.\u00a0 A couple of them are white or white-passing. Those are brown people because they either come from roots that were always there or they come from the places they were expelled from for being Jews, you know. That completely unanchors them and confuses them, and yeah, it\u2019s been dispiriting but not unexpected, but that doesn\u2019t make it easier.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Phoebe Maltz Bovy: <\/strong>I think something so interesting in Father Figure is that it\u2019s Gail, the younger person, who is sort of taking the. I don\u2019t want to say pro-Israel position. She\u2019s not pro-settler, but she\u2019s taking more of a\u2026<\/p>\n<p><strong>Emma Forrest:<\/strong> That\u2019s the influence of Hanif Qureshi, who has written a lot in his books about the immigrant experience. The next generation being more conservative than their parents. Also, we all, as much as we love our parents, hate a part of our parents. So you react and are whatever they are not. That\u2019s where that comes from for Gail.\u00a0 But yeah, I think the archetype of, especially with single parents, the younger generation being more conservative, is fairly accurate, actually.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Phoebe Maltz Bovy: <\/strong>I just want to talk to you about your reactions to the horrific attack at a Manchester synagogue. And also just to\u2026 yeah, what has changed, really, maybe since October 7, 2023, in British Jewish life?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Emma Forrest:<\/strong> Oh, my God, it\u2019s so much worse. It\u2019s so much worse. Again, a really good friend, and when I say a good friend, I mean people who check in with me, not just on the anniversary of October 7th, like to see how I\u2019m doing, but who\u2019ve been very open that they cannot say anything publicly.\u00a0 A friend who was like, \u201cOf course I wanted to post something on Instagram after the synagogue attack, like the way you would if it happened to any other group, but I just feel like people decide it means something, and that it would damage my work.\u201d And she\u2019s not wrong.\u00a0 We were in services, and we all had our phones off, obviously. Then we came out and were told, \u201cMove, move, move. Do not congregate. Keep going.\u201d My daughter was right on the cusp of. She\u2019s 12, so she\u2019s right in the place of, like, \u201cI\u2019ll do what I like.\u201d And she\u2019s like, \u201cWhy do I have to move?\u201d And I remember I looked around, I was like, \u201cBecause people come to synagogues to kill Jews.\u201d\u00a0 And then we headed home and turned on the phones, and there it was. Life\u2019s been really bad. When October 7th happened, my kids were just at the end of elementary school. I remember a white Irish family who never spoke to us ever again. Not only did nobody say, \u201cThis is awful. Are you okay?\u201d We just wanted that. There was never that beat.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure this happened in, not just in the UK, everywhere. Everyone in my publishing life, only my book agent is Jewish; no one else is. The woman who started my career, who first published me on October 7th, was on Instagram organizing a fundraiser for Gaza. There just was no beat or moment where she or anyone said, \u201cWe\u2019re really sorry this happened. This must be incredibly traumatic.\u201d\u00a0 There were two British feminist writers who did go out of their way on their Instagram and said, \u201cThere is no historical context that makes rape as a tool of war acceptable.\u201d Not another person that I can think of. No other female writer said that.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Phoebe Maltz Bovy: <\/strong>Do you remember which writers that was?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Emma Forrest:<\/strong> Yeah, I do. And the awful thing is that I want to name them because I\u2019m so grateful to them. I also wonder if me naming them harms their career. It was Terry White, who\u2019s a great writer, and Polly Vernon.\u00a0 I remember a couple of months after October 7th, I was nominated for a literary prize for the first time. Weirdly, for the first time in my career. It was so exciting. Now, four judges and waiting to see. I didn\u2019t win, but in the process of waiting, I went on the Instagram of one of the four judges.\u00a0 She was not just posting anti-Israel stuff, which is, you know, par for the course. She was posting, you know, \u201cIsraelis are doing this to harvest the organs of Palestinians.\u201d She was posting recipes she would use if Hamas ever came to her house so she could cook them all dinner.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Phoebe Maltz Bovy: <\/strong>Oh, boy.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Emma Forrest:<\/strong> And that was one of the judges of my work, in which, you know, my Jewishness is always part of the story. I talked to my agent and said, \u201cIs there anything we can do?\u201d And we just kind of, there\u2019s nothing. There\u2019s nothing that can be done.\u00a0 We didn\u2019t say anything; we didn\u2019t want to be. We get told every single time that we\u2019re playing the victim. All I can say is that there\u2019s a lot of very left-wing, white English people who\u2019ve been terrible, and probably the people who\u2019ve checked in on me the most have been my Muslim friends. They\u2019ve really gone out of their way, so that\u2019s meant something for sure.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Phoebe Maltz Bovy: <\/strong>On an upbeat note about your book, is it going to be a movie?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Emma Forrest:<\/strong> So, that\u2019s an interesting thing too. It\u2019s actually, it\u2019s been optioned as a television series by the people who make Slow Horses as a miniseries. That fascinated me because. So the book, when it was optioned, the book hadn\u2019t come out yet. Of all my books, it\u2019s the one that got the most offers. There was a bidding for the screen rights to this book.\u00a0 I\u2019m fascinated, too, given the experience I then had with publishing it being so different and having no support or feeling like I had no support, even though it got tremendous reviews. I had, you know, The Guardian wrote it was amazing. The author, Jonathan Coe, picked it as his book of the summer.\u00a0 There was something in it that didn\u2019t actually. The woman I ended up going with was Greek, and she told me that she recognized in the book, like, all the dynamics were stuff she understood and could relate to. I think that\u2019s also true in the United Kingdom, that it kind of doesn\u2019t matter what minority you\u2019re from. Ethnic minorities in Britain recognize a lot of the same stuff, you know, about being here.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Phoebe Maltz Bovy: <\/strong>Yeah, it\u2019s interesting. I mean, being American and in Canada, and now on paper, Canadian, culturally, probably pretty American. I do sometimes think just that it has nothing to do with. Well, a little to do with my personality, because I\u2019ve chosen to become an opinion writer. But, like, I just. And the whole sort of, like, thing of being evasive, whispery, apologetic about Jewishness\u2014just. I wouldn\u2019t even think to do this. But I don\u2019t think it\u2019s so much about my character. I think it\u2019s more about, like, I grew up in New York City, where this was just not a remarkable thing about me. And in Canada, I see the British way a bit like, it\u2019s a. It\u2019s somewhere in between, maybe.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Emma Forrest:<\/strong> Yeah.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Phoebe Maltz Bovy: <\/strong>So I know what it is. I more often see it in some British Jews. Like, that\u2019s sort of like what Ezra does of the sort of, like, not wanting to draw too much attention to the Jewish. It\u2019s like, I see it a little bit in Canada, it would be hard for me to imagine it in the States. It\u2019s just not something. It\u2019s not a way of being that really exists in the States.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Emma Forrest:<\/strong> Well, there\u2019s also, like, you know, I don\u2019t know, off the top of my head, two incredibly rarefied British Jews would be the director Sam Mendes and Stephen Fry. And you wouldn\u2019t. You just. You wouldn\u2019t know that because that they\u2019re Jewish, because what they read as is very upper class, you know, very, very rarefied. So that stuff that. Having an American Jewish mother and an English Jewish father, I always see that divide over and over. My dad was sent to boarding school when he was really little, in order specifically to become less identifiably Jewish.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Phoebe Maltz Bovy: <\/strong>I could ask you questions about all of this, truly, all day and for weeks and years on end because I have so many things to talk about. It is Hillerford podcast, so I\u2019m going to have to thank you so much for coming on The Jewish Angle. I\u2019m going to have to again recommend Father Figure. And where can people find your work apart from your book?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Emma Forrest:<\/strong> Well, so Canada\u2019s been a good market for me with my memoir, Your Voice in My Head, which came out 10 years ago and has always sold pretty well there. So you can get that. And if you\u2019re ordering from the UK, Father Figure Blackwell\u2019s deliver for free. So I recommend Blackwell\u2019s.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Phoebe Maltz Bovy: <\/strong>Excellent. Thank you so much for coming on.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Emma Forrest:<\/strong> Okay, thank you for having me.<\/p>\n<p>Show Notes<\/p>\n<p><strong>Credits<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>Host:<\/strong> Phoebe Maltz Bovy<\/li>\n<li><strong>Producer and editor:<\/strong> Michael Fraiman<\/li>\n<li><strong>Music:<\/strong> \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/imlcollective.uk\/product\/gypsy-waltz\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">Gypsy Waltz<\/a>\u201d by Frank Freeman, licensed from the Independent Music Licensing Collective<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Support our show<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The latest novel by British author Emma Forrest, Father Figure, is arguably the greatest work of Jewish literature&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":283133,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1022,171,939,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-283132","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-trending","11":"tag-united-states","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115330831199996679","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283132\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/283133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}