Jewish History Inside the Camphorwood Chest: Jay Prosser’s “Loving Strangers”

I have often thought about how different my parents’ upbringings were. My dad began middle class: private school, multilingual, summers on the coast near Alexandria. Then in 1948 his family lost everything; suddenly he was a refugee living in the ma’abarot, education cut short, his only prospect manual labor. My mother, conversely, began life as a refugee—born to Holocaust survivors in a DP camp—but hers was a story of ascent. She was a keen student. She went to university. Became a teacher.

And it wasn’t only upbringing that was different. My dad was, in my mother’s mother’s eyes—or so he claimed—a Yiddish word that rhymes with quartz. An “intermarriage,” people called it, though they were both Jewish. But call it what you will, they had 50 years together, happy, loving, until my father’s death. 

I thought about my parents as I read about Jay Prosser’s parents in his new memoir, “Loving Strangers: A Camphorwood Chest, a Legacy, A Son Returns.” Prosser’s parents similarly came from different worlds: one Singaporean, the other white, British, working-class. The Singaporean, his mother, was the daughter of a Chinese mother and Iraqi father. Racialized as “Asiatic,” she was the colonial subject of empire. His father, an army man, played a violent role in the maintenance of empire. And yet, it was only because of the roles they played in history that they met. They didn’t even share a religion. Nonetheless, as Prosser depicts it, well over half a century after meeting and falling in love, they’re still happily married, exemplifying, as the title indicates, “loving strangers.” In fact, “loving strangers” is the pattern throughout Prosser’s family history—and throughout, he argues, Jewish history. In fact, perhaps it is Jewish history itself.

Prosser’s subtitle gives away the location of many of his primary sources: a camphorwood chest his mother toted from home to home, a chest filled with love letters, photographs, a diary, and news clippings. It is a chest that reveals many, almost conflicting, parts of his inheritance.

Because there are so many “loving strangers” comprising his family, Prosser is able to take us through a series of different geographies and histories. After we learn about the courtship of his parents, who met in Singapore in 1960—Keith Prosser was a lieutenant in the British Army who went to serve in the Malayan Emergency; May Elias was a model, among other things, and Secretary of the Menorah Club, the social club for Singapore’s young Jews—we travel further back in time. We are with May as a young girl, evacuating Singapore when the Nazi-allied Japanese invade and intern the island’s Jews. May’s family made it safely to India, where they stayed in the neighborhood of Byculla in Bombay, the old Iraqi Jewish area where you can still see beautiful synagogues and the name of the “Rothschilds of the East”—the Sassoons—everywhere. This was, in fact, where May’s father Jacob was born. But we’re not there yet. First, we’ll learn not only of May’s fate but also that of her cousins Hilda and Zaida, Jews forced to wear armbands with a red stripe and the word “Utai” (Jew). These are the Jews who do not escape Singapore and instead are taken to a prisoner-of-war camp on Sumatra for three and a half years.  

Back, back, we go. Back to the story of Jacob and Esther—Esther, who was Koh-wei and Sim Jua and Sim Kua, a woman of uncertain provenance who left her first child behind in China and found herself caring for someone else’s children. Jacob’s children. And who became Jacob’s legal wife—eventually, after decades of being his wife in all other ways—and who became Esther, a Jew, and a mother to May and May’s siblings. Esther carried her conversion certificate in her handbag, her own little camphorwood chest that travelled with her from place to place.

As for Jacob, his story is complicated, too. And much of it was not found in a family handbag or chest, but in the newspapers. Here we find the stories May beseeches her son not to tell. But Prosser tells us, anyway, sharing the salacious headlines and even the image of one clipping. “An Unsavoury Case,” reads one headline, and “Trouble in a Jewish Family”; the stories are “pure soap opera melodrama,” Prosser tells us. But he doesn’t pull the stories from the archives merely to air his dirty laundry—or upset his mother. “I have to do something to write back at these reports,” he tells us. And so, he reimagines the stories he pieces together from the perspective of the Elias family, who committed misdeeds, yes, but were also subject to antisemitism in the law, in their social environments, and in the newspaper reporting.

In the last section, Prosser draws some conclusions from his family’s stories, compiled in this memoir. He begins to realize that Jewishness did not lie dormant, waiting for the return to homeland, for over two thousand years of diaspora; it was made in that crucible. His family’s Jewishness was forged among strangers (some loving, some not) in Babylon, Syria, Iraq, India, Singapore—and in England, where Prosser lives, a member of a synagogue in York, which last year got its first rabbi in 800 years (after the massacre in 1190, rabbis placed a herem on the city, long observed). It’s not an anti-Zionist screed, but more of a gentle reminder that many families, like Prosser’s, are about “celebrating and singing the distances, rather than mourning home and seeking singularity.”