On Marriage

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And that self-seriousness is very often a kind of annoyance that nobody notices, when they’re being funny, that they’re also being deep, that they’re also saying things nobody has ever thought or dared to say before. With Josh Appignanesi, her spouse, she is both co-director and performer in the documentaries The New Man and Husband.

And I feel this is the case with all feelings – that they need to be admitted, even if only to yourself. But my case studies are predominantly American because Jews did really go for it there, culturally, in the post-war period – in a way that they never have here.Marriage is unknowable to anyone outside it’: Devorah Baum and husband Josh Appignanesi with their children in 2016. Unlike her films, On Marriage turns away from the personal in pursuit of a more far-reaching understanding of marriage as a philosophical, cultural and political phenomenon.

Just because if you read, for example, Nina Raine’s Tribes, there are the most hilarious jokes in there.The argument in the book is that envy is nearly always caught up with envy of expressivity, of another person’s ability to be creative, and to get their voice out. The point, of course, is that a marriage is unknowable to anyone outside it (and often to the people in it), so that only the couple themselves know where the lines between autofiction, truth and comedy blur in these retellings. So that wasn’t a direct experience of aggressive, hostile antisemitism, but it was implicit in the acceptance of Shylock as staged Jew. So, the notion – that we had 27 other countries we could go to, and now we don’t – feels absolutely existential for many Jews in this country. The feeling of being European has arisen, I think, in particular amongst Jews in this country, partly because some of them, since the Referendum, have discovered that they can go and get passports – from Germany, Poland.

EV: We wondered if this idea of the joke in your book The Jewish Joke (2018) could be linked to theatre. I think there’s a tendency, when you use words like ‘resentment’, to adopt a severely moral, judgemental tone.So, this is an extraordinary piece of family history – the survival of my family has to do with my ancestor being such a loser [laughs]. EV: I think it’s really interesting, this idea of feeling different, but also belonging, in a way, this double-bind. And that’s not just a secular idea: that idea of sanctifying or desecrating the name of God through your behaviours in public really belongs to the religion, as well. That, at least, is her stated intention, though by the time she reaches her epilogue, she finds herself questioning her own motives: “I’m married to someone I feel I can’t live without.

Baum herself has tackled the subject before, in a different medium; together with her husband, Josh Appignanesi, she is the co-creator of two films, The New Man and Husband, documentary (mockumentary?

It has often been regarded as the most bourgeois and conservative of institutions, while proving flexible enough to accommodate radical reinventions. Devorah Baum is the author of Feeling Jewish and The Jewish Joke: an essay with examples (less essay, more examples).