Eugene Levy Understands Why the Royal Family Loves Scotland
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Many Ashkenazi Jewish immigrant stories start in Eastern Europe and end somewhere in the Americas or Israel. It's rare in Jewish family histories to hear of a stopover in Glasgow, Scotland—so you'll imagine my surprise as I started watching the second season of The Reluctant Traveler with Eugene Levy.
In episode two, "My Mother's Country," Eugene Levy—the actor, comedian, and reluctant traveler himself—travels to Scotland, where his Jewish mother Rebecca Kudlatz was born before her family moved to Canada. After spending time at Candacraig House, a hotel near Balmoral (the royal family's favorite vacation spot, we'll get to it), he explores Glasgow, and visits the Garnethill Synagogue and Gorbals, a working class neighborhood where many Jews lived. "I came to Scotland feeling like a stranger. But I leave here knowing that this country is part of who I am. And I think my mum would be proud," Levy says during the episode.
"It was a trip I'm glad I got to experience," Levy tells Town & Country. "There was something very cathartic about it, because I just wouldn't have experienced that, or felt it, at all, had I not gone." He adds, "It was never a country that was really high up on a list of places to go."
Unlike Levy, I've never visited Scotland, nor have I been to any place my family hails from—well, actually, I have been to Brooklyn—but the sentiment moved me, as someone with a similar background to his. I'm a proud third-generation New York Jew, with various great-grandparents immigrating from Eastern Europe. I'm not sure where they're all from, but what I do know is that my great-grandmother, Hannah, was born in Glasgow, Scotland, before her family made the trip to New York when she was a girl.
I don't know much about Hannah, who passed away before I was born; I know her father was a rabbi, and she was one of eleven siblings. I know she lived in Yonkers for most of her life, where she raised my grandfather. Most importantly: I know I was named for her, so I've always felt a special connection to my Scottish Jewish namesake.
Levy, too, had never really explored his mother's heritage. In season one, he says, producers initially put Scotland on the list. "I said, 'mmm yeah, I don't know, Scotland, the weather is really not that good.' That was in the very beginning, when I was actually making decisions like that; it was based on 'how comfortable it is gonna be for me?'" When Scotland was back on the list for season two, he agreed to do it. "I didn't really have any expectations," he says. "It was just another country to me, even though I knew that's where my mom was from."
It soon became something much more. He recalls feeling a tug to the country when they arrived, even though the first stop was Balmoral, "which is royals country!" he jokes. And then, when they went to Glasgow, he got emotional. "When we got to Glasgow, things started really hitting home to me just seeing the city," Levy says. "Crossing the bridge into the other side of the river, where the Gorbals once stood before it was taken down, but just standing on the ground over there was kind of, 'This is was [my mom's] neighborhood when she was a kid."
His next stop was a museum, which recreates a tenement apartment similar to the one where his mother grew up. "I was really blown away," he says. "Just to see how so many people—there were 12 of them!—staying in three tiny little rooms. She never talked about how hard or difficult it was. She never talked about how many people were sleeping in a bed, how people were sleeping in the kitchen, how people were sleeping in the hall—I mean, there were 12 people in basically two rooms in a kitchen, with the bathroom outside."
Levy continues, "Oh my god, she never talked about it. And that's what I think got to me: Seeing exactly what it was like and never really hearing how bad it was from her. It hit a chord with me that I honestly wasn't expecting. And then, making the trip out to the cemetery just to see the gravesites of my great-grandparents, who I didn't know anything about, but obviously the patriarch and matriarch of her side of the family."
In the episode, he also discusses the juxtaposition of his mother's experiences in Glasgow to the Scottish Highlands beloved by the late Queen Elizabeth and the rest of the royal family. "Two ends of the spectrum, in the same country, couldn't be further apart," he says, an understatement.
However, Levy loved visiting the Highlands. "Candacraig in Balmoral was crazy! There was something like, 'oh, wait a minute, I'm in the same river that goes through the Balmoral Castle!'" He says he totally understands why the royals love the spot. "Listen, if I was into deer hunting, which I'm not, I totally get it," he says. "It's beautiful, beautiful countryside and there's probably nothing that takes them out of Buckingham Palace better than sitting in this beautiful countryside and taking the Jeep out and looking for deer. I don't know that much about it but the country was absolutely beautiful."
He admits to a fascination with the royal family, and the fact that he was staying just around the corner from their estate. "In Canada, we grew up with that [fascination]. We grew up singing 'God Save the Queen' in the classroom. We have more of a finger on the royals than you guys do in the States." (Well, maybe not this week...)
One thing Levy doesn't get about the royals, however: A love for fishing.
In the episode, he joins some men in fishing in the River Dee, and jokes it could be his new favorite sport, over golf. But, on the record, Levy would like to retract that: "I know I said this could be my new sport, I did say in the episode because I felt—I liked the guys I was fishing with so much, I didn't want to hurt their feelings, but I'm not a fisherman! I just don't enjoy it. I find it just a little boring. I don't like handling fish. I don't mind eating it—if it's grilled. Never grew up fishing, it's not one of those things that's passed down from father to son. We just didn't fish. I don't personally get it, but it was a lovely river."
The first two episodes of The Reluctant Traveler with Eugene Levy are now streaming. Watch now
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