"My mother was very agnostic. She would never set foot in the synagogue, she couldn't be doing with it"
About this Quote
Suzman’s line lands with the sly economy of someone who’s spent a lifetime making character out of what people refuse to do. “Very agnostic” isn’t just a belief position; it’s a temperament. The follow-up details aren’t philosophical, they’re physical: “never set foot in the synagogue.” Faith here is measured in doorways crossed or avoided. That concreteness makes the agnosticism feel less like abstract doubt and more like a practiced boundary.
The phrase “she couldn’t be doing with it” is doing double duty. On the surface it’s a brisk, almost comic dismissal - the sound of a woman waving away something tiresome. Underneath, it signals that the synagogue represented not only religion but community expectations: rituals, social policing, the unspoken demand to perform identity correctly. Suzman lets us hear the class and generational texture in the idiom: a certain Britishness that turns refusal into good sense, as if piety were an inconvenience like bad weather.
Contextually, it also hints at Jewishness in 20th-century Britain as something you could inherit without consenting to its institutions. For an actress, that’s a charged backdrop: identity as costume versus conviction, belonging as performance. The mother’s stance reads less like rebellion and more like self-protection, a refusal to let a communal space define her inner life. The intent isn’t to dunk on religion; it’s to sketch a household where skepticism was normal, and where personal sovereignty mattered more than tradition’s choreography.
The phrase “she couldn’t be doing with it” is doing double duty. On the surface it’s a brisk, almost comic dismissal - the sound of a woman waving away something tiresome. Underneath, it signals that the synagogue represented not only religion but community expectations: rituals, social policing, the unspoken demand to perform identity correctly. Suzman lets us hear the class and generational texture in the idiom: a certain Britishness that turns refusal into good sense, as if piety were an inconvenience like bad weather.
Contextually, it also hints at Jewishness in 20th-century Britain as something you could inherit without consenting to its institutions. For an actress, that’s a charged backdrop: identity as costume versus conviction, belonging as performance. The mother’s stance reads less like rebellion and more like self-protection, a refusal to let a communal space define her inner life. The intent isn’t to dunk on religion; it’s to sketch a household where skepticism was normal, and where personal sovereignty mattered more than tradition’s choreography.
Quote Details
| Topic | Mother |
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