Motherhood Quote by Janet Suzman

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.