Howard Jacobson

by Kalooki Nights (v5)

  Jew Jew, Jew Jew.

  What my father tried to do was ditch the J-word as a denomination of suffering altogether. Not to forsake all those who’d travelled on that train, but to reinvent the future for them. A kind of muscular Zionism of the mind, without the necessity of actually establishing a Zionist state and going, as he put it, ‘beserk in someone else’s country’. Without, indeed, the necessity of going anywhere at all. Or at least, now that he was out of the puke of Novoropissik and safe in the North of England, not going anywhere else. But you never know what’s waiting to spite you in your genes. My father wanted a new start, and had me.

  It could have been worse. He could have had Manny Washinsky.

  He could have had Manny Washinsky and been murdered in his bed.

  Only had my father been his father, who knows? Manny might never have turned into a murderer at all.

  TWO

  Draw, you bastard!

  R. Crumb, The R. Crumb Handbook

  1

  When we weren’t refusing to divulge our names or religion to SS men, or choking to death on Zyklon B, Manny and I met in the Second World War air-raid shelter which had become our play space and discussed God.

  ‘You don’t ask Elohim to explain Himself,’ Manny, not yet a teenager, not really ever a teenager, told me, fingering the squiggly ear-locks which made his new-moon face appear as though someone had scribbled on it.

  I’m cartooning him. He didn’t have ear-locks to finger. Sideburns turned to fluff were what he had, hardly even sideburns, little curls of unsportive fuzz run wild, which, in the event of trouble – the trouble we all half feared was only round the corner, the Crumpsall Park Pogrom which would one day come out of a clear blue sky – he would be able to conceal quickly under his school cap. These were the golden days of Jewish secularity, before the Orthodox found the effrontery to blaze their fanatic retrogression on their faces. What there was of medieval Jewishry was confined to a couple of streets of teeming five-storey houses in Lower Broughton on the Manchester/Salford borders where, for a while, Sir Oswald Mosley ran a provocative office, and through which my father occasionally walked me, holding me firmly by the hand, so that I should see, but not be inveigled into, what the long march to emancipation was emancipating us from. Frummers was how we referred to these out-of-time Talmudicliteralisers among ourselves, from frum meaning devout. Not a pejorative exactly, but not approving either. I could never decide whether my father’s interpolations – from frummers to frummies, and then from frummies to frumkies – were designed to diminutise them or diminutise their offence. But frumkies was the term we settled on finally. The Washinskys, to be fair to them, were not like those we saw in Lower Broughton. They did not wear long black coats or high black hats which seemed to float on a current of spirituality above their heads. They were not in the same hurry when they were out of doors, as though late for an appointment with the Almighty. And their house was not a gypsy caravan of trumperies and trinkets to protect it from the evil eye. No, the Washinskys were not living in the Middle Ages, but to us they were the halfway house on the journey back.

  And they were still frumkies.

  ‘I’m not asking Elohim,’ I’d say, usually while gouging out the mortar between the bricks of our air-raid shelter – a peculiarly wanton impulse, to pull apart what sheltered us – ‘I’m asking you.’

  To tell the truth, I wasn’t asking Manny anything. I was needling him. As though to pay him back for my own shortcomings as a friend, for making me ashamed to acknowledge him in such polite company as Errol Tobias’s, I pestered him to distraction. Why this, Manny? Why that? When Manny or either of his parents went through their front door they put a finger to their lips and then to the mezuzah on the door frame. I knew about mezuzahs; we had one at our front door, put there by the Jewish family who had lived in the house before us, but now painted over and ignored. I knew what a mezuzah contained: words, words from the Torah, including the Shema, the holiest words of all – ‘Shema Yisrael, Hear, O Israel, the Lord is one . . .’ But precisely because the Lord was one we did not tolerate idols. In which case why did we kiss words? A word too could be an idol, couldn’t it?

  Why, Manny? Why the food hysteria? Why all the salting that went on in his house, salting the flavour out of everything? Why,when they bought kosher meat from a kosher butcher did they have to kosher it again when they got it home? Had the Christian street unkoshered it? And why the obsessive keeping this from that? So a crumb of cheese the size of mouse bait fell on to a thrice salted, petrified slice of chicken breast from which the flavour had already been extracted to make soup, was that so terrible? Did Elohim have nothing else to do, was he so smallminded that he would notice and punish a transgression as negligible as that? And why the obsession with Saturday? How can a day be holy?

  ‘It’s a commandment,’ Manny told me. ‘Remember the Sabbath day to—’

  ‘I know all that. But next to “Thou shalt not kill”, remembering the Sabbath day is a bit unimportant, isn’t it? We don’t say “Remember not to kill”. Because forgetting wouldn’t be any excuse. “Remember the Sabbath day” is more like a nudge than a commandment.’

  ‘The Ten Commandments are all equally important,’ he replied. ‘The rabbis say that if you break one you might as well break them all.’

  I had reason to recall that in later years. But at the time all I wanted to do was break him. All right, all right, so his family chose to do as they were told and remember the Sabbath day, but why did that stop them from making their own fire on it? Why, though they had no money, did they employ a Gentile – a Shabbes-goy, or as we called her in our neck of the woods, a fireyekelte – to make it for them? Why didn’t they light it themselves the day before and leave it smouldering behind a fire guard? Or, if that was out of the question, if Elohim thundered ‘No!’ to prior preparation and a further ‘No!’ to a surreptitious blow into the embers on Shabbes itself, why didn’t they just go without a fire for one day out of seven altogether? They could always come and warm themselves in front of ours if it was really cold, unless ours was unacceptable having been lit on the Sabbath by Jews who didn’t cover their heads, didn’t keep a kosher house and didn’t otherwise give a shit.

  Not true that. We did give a shit about treating Gentiles as skivvies. Particularly we gave a shit – or at least my father did – about calling someone a fire-yekelte, a yekelte being a coarse non-Jewish woman of the lower orders, in other words a person with whom we, having been worse than beasts of burden in Novoropissik, should have felt some affiliation. That the fire-yekelte in question didn’t mind making the fires, and considered herself fairly remunerated for it – just as Elvis Presley was said to have performed a similar service for Rabbi Fruchter and his wife in Alabama Avenue, Memphis, refusing to take a penny in recompense, just so long as no spark from the fire landed on his blue suede shoes – was neither here nor there. What did it do to us to demean in the name of our religion – that was the issue. ‘Social relations come first, remember that,’ my father used to lecture me. ‘Man and man will always be a more sacred connection than man and God.’ So what kind of God, Manny, would hand us out a code of conduct which of necessity entailed condescension to people of another faith, neighbours who had carved crucifixes on the bricks of this very shelter when the bombs were falling, even as our parents, who shared their terror, were carving Stars of David? A God of Love, a God of Contempt, or a God who didn’t give a shit?

  He had a way of closing down his face – Manny, I mean, not God – as though he could make himself deaf by sheer force of will. He ought to have repudiated the condescension charge with a flick of his fingers. ‘What’s demeaning to either party in a favour asked for and delivered? Show me the injured Gentile. Did Elvis mind? No. The King was only too pleased to be of service. All you have to show on your side of the argument is yourself – a Jew injured by all things Jewish. It’s not we who are guilty of fanaticism, it’s you, the fanatics of disavowal and self-revulsion.’


  But that, for Manny (leaving aside what could reasonably be expected of a twelve-year-old boy), would have been to enter the lists on behalf of a God who needed no defending. Not for him to interrogate, or to hear another interrogate, the laws of Elohim. He was not called Emanuel – meaning ‘God is our protector, God is ever with us’ – for nothing. Emanuel Eli Washinsky, Eli also meaning God, as in Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? So I should have known something was wrong when, three or four years later he suddenly began to worry at that very question. Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? Where were you, Elohim, in our hour of calamity?

  An unmistakable cry for help, that, wouldn’t you say, from someone with two Gods in his name?

  But a cartoonist isn’t there to help. Not in the conventional sense, at any rate. A cartoonist is there to make the complacent quake and the uncomfortable more uncomfortable still. So to Manny, who had been the one and was now the other, I said, ‘You don’t ask Elohim to explain Himself.’ And was mightily pleased with the echo. I felt it was a blow struck for my poor father whose memory I feared that I traduced whenever I talked God with Manny.

  It also pleased me, in some disreputably aesthetic way, to see my friend’s certainties under pressure. The refuser of all questions returned to questioning. It was shapely.

  But then of the two of us, I was the artist.

  And I was forever looking for an excuse not to be his friend.

  2

  ‘Why do you have to look so Jewish all the time?’

  Zoë talking. Zoë, catching me with my people’s woes on my shoulders. Zoë, my flaxen Übermadchen Gentile second wife in our itchy seventh year of marriage.

  Zoë, Chloë, Björk, Märike, Alÿs, and Kätchen, little Kate . . .what does it say about me that the only people with whom I am able to enjoy intimacy must have diaereses or umlauts in their names?

  That I’m a Shmoë – that’s what Zoë said it says.

  Good job I never met Der Führer at an impressionable age.

  With Zoë I wasn’t ever unimpressionable. I bore the impress, visibly, of her harrying. And because I lowered my head and shouldered it, there was no inducement for her to stop. Grow a moustache, shave your moustache; wear a tie, don’t wear a tie; try being sweeter to people, try having the courage of your own belligerence; come live with me in the country, why can’t we have a flat in town; get a mistress, how dare you even look at another woman; fuck me hard, fuck me gently, and finally don’t fuck me at fucking all.

  But it was about Jews that she harried me the most. She had been badly treated in her life by Jews. Only the once, not counting her treatment by me, but once can be enough. She had grown up next to a family of them on one of those high-blown scraps of wood and coppice you find between cemeteries and golf clubs in North London, taking ‘growing up’ to mean from the age of nine or thereabouts, that crucial hormonal period when, as Zoë herself fancifully explained it, she was poised to ‘change from a plant into a person’, a period not to be confused with that she spent in my company, during which she changed, again in her own words, ‘back into a plant’. The horticulture was more than a figure of speech. Jews interfered with the natural growing process, were not themselves natural – that was what she intended by it. When Zoë was depressed she sat under a tree. When we fought she gardened. In soil she found the antithesis to me. And presumably, also, to the Krystals, the family who had stunted her. I knew the drama of their treachery by heart, she told it me so often. They came and she adored them, in her innocence drawing no distinction between the love she bore the senior Krystals, Leslie and Leila, and the love she bore the two boys, Selwyn and Seymour. Important I understood that: she loved them all, and loved them without design – played with them, ate with them, learned with them, progressed from late infancy to adolescence with them, then out of an unclouded powder-blue sky received her marching orders from them. When Zoë turned fifteen – ‘the very next day, she couldn’t even wait a week’ – Leila Krystal took her to one side and told her that with her looks and figure she’d make a fine living as a whore in the cafés of Berlin. Wanted her out of the way, you see. Wanted her far from where she could light any fires (some fire-yekeltes we want, some we don’t) in the hearts of either Selwyn or Seymour or both. At fifteen – so Zoë sobbed to me in my bed – she overnight became an anathema. ‘They looked at me as though they’d never seen me before. The minute I became a woman, in their eyes I became filth. A prostitute. Nothing else. That’s why,’ she explained, ‘I am in love with you.’

  ‘Because you have reason to hate Jews?’

  ‘Because they deprived me of my right to love Jews.’

  It seemed a fair enough deal to me. Thank you, Leila Krystal. I’d get Zoë and in return be the Jew whom Zoë could love.

  But it seemed I’d overdone it. Now Zoë was wondering why I had to look quite so Jewish quite so much of the time.

  ‘Because I am fucking Jewish,’ I reminded her.

  ‘All the time?’

  ‘Every fucking minute.’ ‘Stop swearing,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll stop fucking swearing when you stop asking me why I look so fucking Jewish.’

  ‘Why is everything a negotiation with you? Why can’t you stop swearing and stop looking Jewish?’

  ‘What do you want me to do, have a fucking nose job?’

  She thought about it. Showed me her impertinently undemonstrative Gentile profile, every feature segregated from the other. My features, whatever else you thought about them, were on good terms, enjoyed a warm confabulation, each with each. Zoë’s face was a species of apartheid.

  ‘Good idea,’ she said at last. ‘Have it off.’

  ‘You used to like my nose.’

  ‘I used to like you.’

  ‘Then why do you want me to stop at the nose? Why don’t I have everything off?’

  She pushed her mouth at me approvingly, one lip at a time, making little stars of fucking Bethlehem (nothing I could or can do about the swearing when proximate to Zoë) dance in her frosty fucking eyes. Always Christmas, always the birth of her saviour when she looked at me. Never a minute when a theological squabble two thousand years old was not present between us. Just as my mother and Tsedraiter Ike – though separately and of course unbeknown to my father while he was living – had predicted. ‘She ’ll call you dirty Jew,’ Tsedraiter Ike had warned me, whistling the prognostication around his single tooth. ‘She ’ll accuse you of killing Christ,’ my mother said. ‘They always do in the end.’ They didn’t get that last part right. Zoë never did accuse me of killing Christ. Only of behaving as though I were Christ, which is a subtly different charge. But ‘dirty Jew’, yes, or at least ‘Jew’ with the dirty – meaning heated, meaning tumultuous, meaning unrefreshed and unrefreshable – implied. And now she wanted me to have my nose cropped.

  Why did I so far entertain the idea as to get in touch with a plastic surgeon – who, incidentally, wouldn’t touch my nose, but tried to make me a Christian by the theological route, pushing smudgy pamphlets onto me about Christ’s mission to the Jews? Why didn’t I gather myself to my full height, push out my profile, and leave the marriage?

  The sex partly. One-time fuck me fuck me women who lie there straight as toy soldiers when their ardour cools, eyes squeezed, mouths puckered like dried figs, wondering How long O Lord, How long, exercise a fatal fascination on men of my sort. You go on labouring in the hope that one day, like a princess in a fairy story, they will become reanimated in your arms. In the fairy stories which Jewish men tell themselves, the princesses are always Gentile. So that’s your task when your mother releases you into the world: to warm back into life the chilly universe of shiksehs.

  Beyond that, I was sorry for her. Partly because of the Krystals who had treated her so contemptuously. But also because I’d been brought up to be sorry for any woman (this is, of course, the shadow-image of the previous fairy story) who was married to me: a Jew with the stinking waters of Novoropissik in his veins. And this regardless of whet
her she accused me of killing or appropriating Christ.

  The other reason I didn’t walk out on her when she suggested plastic surgery was that the idea answered to some extremity of exasperation in myself. You can get sick of looking like a Jew. And you can get sick of being looked at like a Jew as well. It would be interesting to see how it felt not to be forever earmarked for something or other. They regard you oddly, the Gentiles, whether they mean you harm or not. You give rise to some expectancy in them. As though, for good or ill, you’ve got the answer about your person to a question they can’t quite find. It would be nice not to be the cause of that any longer. And – because whatever the question, you don’t ever have the answer – nice not to be regarded as a disappointment. What would it be like, I wondered, not to feel I’d raised a curiosity I couldn’t satisfy? Maybe I’d wake up happy instead of fucked off. Maybe I’d find a wider market for my cartoons. Maybe I’d get on better with my lozenge-stiff Hitlerian wife. With a smaller nose they say you give better cunnilingus. In fact Jews give the best cunnilingus in the world precisely because they have the nasal cartilage to give it with; though I grant you that in that case what they’re giving isn’t strictly cunnilingus. So maybe, pedantry aside, I’d give worse cunnilingus. That too was a consideration. Cut off my nose to spite the bitch.

  3

  The truth is, not everybody needs a white supremacist superwoman, or a missionary plastic surgeon, come to that, to do the prompting. You can wish away being Jewish, looking Jewish, thinking Jewish, talking Jewish, all on your ownio, to borrow one of Zoë’s mother’s, no, Chloë’s mother’s, cute locutions.

  (As in ‘Well, there, I have to say, you’re on your ownio, Sonny Jim’ – whenever she disagreed with something someone said to her. Which was most of the time. All of the time, if the someone happened to be me.)