I grew up in Brighton thinking I was a Church of England Christian like my lovely, quiet English father. He was a chartered accountant. I was encouraged to go to Sunday school and a Christian prep school. My mother, Cornelia, was Austrian. When relatives from her side came for Sunday lunch, they spoke German. I'd get stroppy, saying: "Come on, this is England!" I'd never been encouraged to learn German, so I had no idea what they were talking about.

My mother was extraordinary. At the end of the war, when there was a great shortage of fabrics, she made beautiful coloured leather gloves. Vogue christened her "the Colour Queen", and the couturiers Hardy Amies and Norman Hartnell bought her gloves. When she was asked to make the going-away gloves for Princess Elizabeth, after she married Prince Philip, there was huge publicity. By the early 1950s she had 500 people making gloves for her.

In 1962 I went to Charterhouse school. I'd been there a week when 10 boys, sitting on a wall, shouted at me: "Jew! Jew! Jew!" The next day they did it again. I rang my mother, asking: "Am I a Jew?" She said: "Not really, but there's Jewish blood way back." The next day the boys shouted it again. This time I beat the crap out of one of them. I couldn't report it because one of the masters once shouted to me: "Come here, Jew boy!"

I left Charterhouse in 1967. Two years later a Turkish Airlines DC-10 went down outside Orly airport in Paris, killing 380 people. I remember reading the passenger list and seeing the name of one of the boys who'd sat on that wall. I said: "Thank you, God." That's how I felt. Even now, I don't regret the feeling. If you're the victim of race hatred, it does something that affects your whole life.

After Charterhouse I went to film school. When I graduated I went to anada, to stay with my mother's eldest brother for a couple of weeks. I arrived in Toronto on a Friday night. The table was set with sabbath candles. There was gefilte fish. My family were astonished that I didn't know any of the prayers. They couldn't believe I didn't know my family history, or even that I was Jewish.

Within 48 hours, my uncle's friends were calling up to ask how they could help me get into the film business - "And by the way, we have a lovely girl called Rachel we'd like you to meet..."

I was 22 and in paradise - caught up in the warmth and love of a Jewish family. Aunt Lilly, my uncle's wife, told me that my mother had left Vienna with her parents and six siblings because of anti-semitism. Her father had owned a chain of grocery stores and it cost him one store to get each child out. My grandparents settled in Leeds. They thought it was safer to be far away from the English Channel. A younger sister had been raped by a German border guard. Years later she committed suicide by throwing herself off Niagara Falls.

I stayed in Canada and America for six years, coming home to visit my parents. When my father became ill, I decided to stay in England and write. Possession went to No 1 on the bestseller list, and during a newspaper interview I told a journalist that my mother had been a Jewish refugee. My mother was furious. "Why did you tell them I'm Jewish?" I said we needed to have it out: "You're Jewish, which makes me Jewish. Whether you want it or not, I'm proud of you and our family. It's part of who I am." She'd kept quiet about being Jewish because she was so scared that anti-semitism could happen again.

My mother had a long battle with cancer. In 1999, by which time she was terminally ill, I asked her if there was somewhere she'd like to go. She wanted to take me and my sister to Vienna, to show us where she grew up. We spent a weekend together, seeing her old flat, listening to the Vienna Boys' Choir. Then we drove to where the family owned a country house. My mother was like a little girl again, as though she'd been able to rid herself of those shackles. Just before she died, she said: "I want to apologise to you for being Jewish." I almost burst into tears, because being Jewish has been such a positive force in my life.

One of the films I co-produced recently was The Merchant of Venice, starring Al Pacino. A critic in Toronto wrote that the director, Michael Radford, had turned an anti-semitic play into a play about anti-semitism. Unquestionably, because of those 10 guys sitting on a wall shouting "Jew! Jew! Jew!", there's a part of me which has always felt like Shylock must have felt when he was spat at. But the experience gave me the will to succeed - to show those bastards that a Jew boy can do quite well.

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