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Jay Prosser

My Camphorwood chest 

A remarkable family legacy

A beautiful and moving story
Reclaiming a Jewish identity
 Journeys across China, Iraq, India and Singapore

Jay Prosser teaches and researches at the Centre for Jewish Studies and the School of English at the University of Leeds. Loving Strangers was winner of the Hazel Rowley Prize (US, 2020) for the best proposal for a first-time biographer and shortlisted for the Tony Lothian Prize (UK, 2019) for the best unpublished biography.

Opening his mother’s camphorwood chest, Jay Prosser discovered a remarkable family legacy. In the last days of the British Empire, Iraqi Jewish spice traders intermarried with the Chinese women who worked for them. These unfamiliar Asians didn’t speak each other’s language and were raised in completely different cultures and religions. But they were drawn towards the possibilities for radically transforming self and the world that loving strangers brings.
 

In Loving Strangers, Jay Prosser unravels his ancestors’ lives. Together with his mother – and with a growing sense of urgency as she ages – he unpacks the camphorwood chest, travelling backwards through possessions belonging to previous generations. An unfinished quilt holds the secret of how his grandmother was abandoned as a baby by the side of a river in China. A crackly recording follows the trail of his grandfather, who sings of his travels across India and Singapore. Characters who seem to have stepped out of the Arabian Nights manifest on a family tree.

‘A beautiful and moving story that brings to life a fascinating part of Jewish history.’ 

- Claudia Roden, CBE