‘Jewish Cricket’: Black-Jewish Relations in Wondrous Oblivion (2003)

This article explores Black-Jewish relations as presented through the prism of the 2003 film Wondrous Oblivion, directed by Paul Morrison. The period which the film revisits is that of the transition between the 1950s and 1960s when Britain was starting to become a multicultural society. Set in South London in 1960, Wondrous Oblivion is a coming of age story focusing on David Wiseman (Sam Smith), an eleven-year-old, second-generation Jewish boy who aspires to be a first-class cricketer. David lives in an England still unmarked by significant racial difference and in a world of casual anti-Semitism in which his family straddles the boundary between being immigrants and white English. Through cricket, David is able to mimic the dominant norms of English society and successfully integrate but on his own terms which simultaneously resist the dominant values.