Tim Franks begins The Lines We Draw by observing that any good news organization does not hire reporters who know the truth before they investigate it. In this book, Franks — a longtime BBC correspondent — uses his reporting skills to delve into his ancestry and examine the age-old question of what it means to be a Jew.
Franks grew up in Birmingham, England in the 1970s and 1980s, where “Jews were a minute minority” and “anti-Semitism, like racism, ran bone deep.” From an early age, a somewhat circumspect Franks found himself with a curiosity that is fundamental to any journalist. In The Lines We Draw, he discovers an extraordinarily rich family history that he unravels all the way back to the Portuguese and Spanish Inquisitions. He begins with his great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother, Esther, a Marrano born during the Inquisition; and stretches all the way to the renowned congregation Bevis Marks Synagogue in London and to Birmingham. Along the way, he discovers that his family ties run through the nineteenth-century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. Franks’s enormous family tree spreads across centuries and across Europe, augmented by a haunting mapping of family members who perished in the Holocaust. Franks benefits from a rich cast of ancestors, as does the reader.
“The history of the Jew tells us that even if we choose to disengage, others may still be all too keen to tell our stories on our behalf,” Franks observes. That’s why he wrote this book: to write his own history. In doing so, he seeks connection, not only to his ancestors and to Jews across the world. For him, the link between journalism (especially investigative journalism) and Jewishness is “the need to be defiant, outward-looking, questioning, self-questioning, risk-taking, tickled by the beauty of things, troubled — really troubled — by the wrongness of things.”
Each of our identities is bound up in stories — the ones we research, the ones we tell ourselves. The key becomes who narrates the story, and this is where the reporter and the searching Jew come together in a fascinating narrative.
