Artist’s Corner: Leo Mercer - Blogpost 3

Follow Leo Mercer's journey into the 50 Jewish Objects, through his own words.

2 More Jewish Objects: A Personal Story

I grew up in the Jewish community of North Manchester, but I’ve never spent all that much time thinking about my family history. Spending the last few months investigating the 50 Jewish Objects collection, I’ve found myself looking into how my own story fits in.

My family’s story in England began in the 1880s, with several immigrants from what is now Lithuania, settling at first in towns like Blackburn, Blackpool and Liverpool. We don’t know exactly why they came over (my grandpa remembers asking his grandpa, who wouldn’t talk about it it - the past doesn’t matter, he’d say, it’s the future that counts) but the dates imply it was to do with the anti-Jewish pogroms of the 1880s Russian Empire.

On both sides, there are stories about them coming over without speaking English, and with almost nothing - and yet, we still have a single object from both sides: a paternal great-great-grandmother brought over a set of brass candlesticks that would have been used for lighting the Shabbat candles; and a maternal great-great-grandmother brought over a jewellery box that my mum still uses as her sewing box. Many Jewish families will have a couple of telling heirlooms like this, buried away in a forgotten cupboard. (See pictures).

I can barely make sense of the sprawling family tree that has sprouted from those initial immigrants (partly to do with their having families with 14 and 16 children). The first generation showed their entrepreneurial streak: on my father’s side, a raincoat business in Liverpool; on my mother's, three of my great-grandfather’s 16 siblings started a mail-order business (which I like to think that’s the early 20th century equivalent of having an internet shopping start-up). Interestingly, that business was Universal Stores, which after some years Isaac Wolfson took over, becoming Great Universal Stores, and giving rise to the Wolfson Foundation.

By the time my grandparents were born in the 1920s, both sides of the family lived in the large Jewish community of North Manchester. I still have one grandparent on each side, at 92 and 95 respectively. (Bizarrely, they were both born on the same road - Bellott St - in Cheetham Hill. They even went on a date together, before finding their eventual partners!) My parents were the first university-educated generation (other than a great uncle, Harold Meek, who read architecture at the University of Manchester back in the 40s). And then there was us, me and my five siblings.  Those objects - the brass candlesticks and jewellery box - are the only physical things that connect us to our past pre-1880s.

Now, I don’t really know what to do with all this information. Having spent a lot of lockdown running round Manchester, and seeing its diverse communities afresh, it definitely makes you wonder what exhibitions, parallel to the 50 Jewish Objects, there could be, sharing the back-stories of other of Manchester’s varied immigrant communities.

I know, for my family, we’d all love to know about our ancestors before the 1880s, but the trail ends there. It’s at that point that collections like the 50 Jewish Objects let you see artefacts from the broader cultural story we're part of instead.