Howard Jacobson

by Kalooki Nights (v5)

  Over a faux English sandwich at a faux English club he tried explaining to me what made Thurber humorous.

  ‘Desperation,’ I interrupted him.

  ‘I beg yours?’

  ‘What made Thurber humorous was desperation. Only I don’t think the word for it is humor exactly. It’s not humor when you’re at the end of a rope. What makes Thurber funny is that you smell death in every sentence he wrote and despair in every line he drew.’

  Since Irving didn’t think anything made me funny I reckoned I was lucky to get the sandwich out of him. But for everyone being jittery about flying anywhere in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, I’d have caught a plane back to London that night. Instead I went to a peep show on 42nd Street, paid a girl five dollars a second to let me fondle her through a couple of holes in the wall, and asked her to guess what I did with my hands. ‘You fondle broads,’ she guessed. ‘Wrong,’ I told her, ‘I draw cartoons.’ ‘Like Disney?’ ‘No, like Thurber.’ ‘Who’s Thurber?’ ‘A great and very desperate man.’ ‘Did he like fondling broads?’ ‘I suspect he never tried.’ ‘His loss.’

  My point exactly.

  Before she’d relieved me of every dollar in my wallet, she wondered if I ever did cartoons for Playboy. ‘Little Annie Fanny – something tells me you’d be good at that.’

  The minx!

  Uncannily prescient of her, though. In a desperate hour I’d tried sending some of my work to Hefner, only to be told by one of his editors that they had their team and that I was too English for it anyway. A man should count his blessings. Little Annie Fanny broke the balls of Harvey Kurtzman, the great American illustrator who founded Mad. Kurtzman, I happened to know, had cut his teeth as an assistant on the Classics Illustrated Moby-Dick, a picture book I had especially loved as a boy. Boys get the symbolism of that maddened pursuit, the White Whale’s infernal aforethought of ferocity, and all that spumescence. So it was painful, however low my opinion of Mad, to think of Kurtzman selling his soul to Mammon and not even being happy in the process. A fastidiousness around money I must have picked up from my father and his trade union pals. And maybe a fastidiousness around American Jewish cartoonists as well. I cared for them without knowing them. Probably because I knew I had denied them in my English Jewish heart, and wished – for my own sake as much as theirs – I hadn’t.

  That I had gone to New York in order to deny Manny in my heart, is a charge I would have repudiated at the time, but I am not so certain now. The line I spun myself was that he had been the friend of that period of my life from which few friendships survive. No one remembers the kids they collected stamps or exchanged cigarette cards with, why should I remember Manny? But in fact I did remember Manny, even if the memory was an embarrassment to me. And there, I guess, lay the dishonesty. I did not want to have been the friend of a nutter. Criminal I could have coped with, religious nutter, no. So I closed my ears to the conduct and the outcome of his trial. I chose not to know. In that, I was no different from the rest of our community. He was for all of us – the Orthodox no less than the secular – the Jew we didn’t want to acknowledge as our own. He was a throwback, and we were moving on. As time itself was moving on. The crime had been committed more than a year before. Sensational when it first broke, it was stale news now, and had been superseded by more interesting events. Enough. ‘Enough,’ as Tsedraiter Ike put it, ‘with giving satisfaction to the anti-Semites. Just lock the meshuggener away.’ And it wasn’t as though there was any uncertainty as to the trial’s outcome. By his own confession, Manny had done what he had done and would go to prison or a lunatic asylum for it. He had told the police he was following the example of the Austrian-born euthanasiast and flautist Georg Renno, deputy director of the SS gassing institution at Hartheim. On his belated arrest in 1961, Renno, wondering what all the fuss was about, had made a statement for which his name would always be remembered. ‘Turning the tap on,’ he said, ‘was no big deal.’ It was in order to verify this claim that Manny had turned the tap on while his parents were asleep. Renno was wrong, he said in his statement. Turning the tap on was a big deal. These were the grounds on which Manny’s lawyers successfully argued that his mind must have been impaired by abnormality. No normal person, however engrossed in the history of the Holocaust, would have taken research to quite such lengths.

  In secular Crumpsall we had our own layman’s understanding of what was wrong with Manny. I am not talking about the specific circumstances, or what we assumed in a gossipy sort of way to be the specific circumstances, leading up to the murder: the unhappiness which Asher had unloosed on his family when he took up with the fire-yekelte all those years ago; the rows so violent they could have raised the dead; the ignominy that seemed to stain the Washinskys for ever after, even though Asher himself vanished from the neighbourhood and not a word of the fire-yekelte was heard again; the shame that emanated from their very house, as though it too hung its head and shrank from any form of discourse with the world; the sense we had of their morale rotting away from the inside, so that the final catastrophe felt like the operation of inevitability, fate or nature exacting its price, a tragedy which, when it happened, we all could say had been waiting to happen. These were the incidentals, or even, if you like, the trigger for Manny’s monumental act. But they didn’t explain what was wrong with Manny – what ailed his soul – only why what was wrong with him happened to take the form it did. And what was wrong with Manny was that he was Manny. His abnormalities were intrinsic to his religious observance. To believe as the Washinskys believed was itself a derangement. They had visited this derangement on both their sons who visited it back on them. One ran for it, the other stayed. No other enquiry into cause or motivation was necessary. The mystery wasn’t why Manny had done what he had done but why all Orthodox Jewish boys positioned as he was – Jewish boys who hadn’t run away – weren’t doing the same.

  In all my Crumpsall years I never once met a Jew, however sceptical, who didn’t – as it were for special occasions – believe a bit. Even Big Ike, who was rumoured to have flirted with satanism, became a believer for his daughter Irene’s wedding, wearing a yarmulke inside the house and taking Hebrew lessons so that he could read grace-after-meals (the long version) at the ceremony. By the time Irene came back from her honeymoon in Rimini he was – to everyone’s relief – rumoured to be dancing round a goat on Pendle Hill again. We looked indulgently on such flirtations with the faith, so long as they were fleeting. It made perfect sense that when it came to the big events – birth, marriage, death – everyone should believe a little. But believing a lot – only madmen did that.

  Thus the conviction of religion’s inherent lunacy in which I was cradled.

  2

  Behold then, as we beheld him, the late Selick Washinsky, humped at his sewing machine in the front window of his house, mole blind, white as a worm, sewing furs. Indulge my genius for racial stereotypy. See him bent, airless, avid, not a light shining behind or above him, saving money – better to ruin his eyes than pay an electricity bill – his body wrapped in shawls, his lips moving silently to intone the God in fear of whom he lies himself down to sleep each night beside his mostly ritually unclean wife (twice a month, is it, that she’s permissible? twice a month, and the rest of the time a river of polluted blood), a stunted growth of perturbations not a man, the ruination of his sons to whom he bequeathed not a single grace, a blot on the clean sheet my father imagined for us, a stumbling block on the route of our great march westwards, a shame – a shande – to our people.

  Piffle, all of it, but that’s how I was brought up to see him and continue to remember him.

  He was pale, no more. Pale and poor. As for the greedy blindness of him, a sewing machine does that. It makes you pinched of sight, it makes you peer and stoop and count. Put any man behind a sewing machine and he will resemble an old myopic Jew stitching furs for profit. The mistake was to stitch them in his window. But it could have been that he was lonely and wanted to see the world.r />
  Wouldn’t that be sad, if all along old man Washinsky had wanted nothing more than to look out upon the varied life he had taught his family to go in fear of?

  I don’t believe I invented the furs. Nor the big car with tinted windows, blacker than a hearse, which slunk into our street to collect them each morning, a needlessly surreptitious exchange, as though there was no relish in the activity unless it appeared illicit – so many lined pelts smuggled out like human remains in unmarked Rexine travelling bags, so many waiting to be lined smuggled in through Selick Washinsky’s back door. As for the other stereoJew behind the wheel, evil-looking, extortionate, puffing at his cigar, I never saw him. But our socialist visitors must have. Or at least they deduced him from his hush-hush Wotan’s chariot motor vehicle. ‘Sweated labour’ they called the transaction, shaking the words from their fingers as though they were the poisoned perspiration beads of Capital itself.

  What dandies they were, these commie cronies of my father, in their long coats and white scarves, their wavy hair combed back from their foreheads, their handsome faces shown boldly to the world, their moustaches bristling with universalist ambition, boulevardiers (never mind that there were no boulevards in Manchester) and brigadiers (for some had actually fought with the International Brigade against Franco’s fascists before they signed up again to polish off Hitler’s), men of intellect and bohemianism in the week, who on Saturdays and Sundays turned up to collect my father, and incidentally eye up my mother, sporting knee-length shorts and knapsacks, the living proof that Jews too could hike and ramble and love the country. What lungs they had, these all-talking, all-walking, un-Asianised, de-Bibled Jews. There was scarcely air left for me to breathe when five or more of them were gathered in our house, so much of it did they inhale. The new Jew, straight of back and undevious of principle, with pollen in his hair.

  Of these, the straightest-backed and most weather-beaten of them all was ‘Long John’ Silverman, ex-infantryman and now upholsterer, unexceptional in having left school when he was fourteen and breathing in his politics on the shop floor, a functionary of the Young Communist League whose Cheetham Hill headquarters were just around the corner from us, as was his workshop, which made it handy for him to pop in whenever he felt that too much of the flock with which he stuffed his cushions had gone into his chest and he needed tea to break it down. ‘Thank you, Comrade,’ he would say to my mother from his great height, taking the teacup from her as though they were both giants playing house, dunking a biscuit into it, then slowly unfurling himself on to our leather couch, or better still into one of the deckchairs in our backyard no matter that snow lay all about – at six feet four-and-a-half inches an irrefutable demonstration of how tall a Jew could grow if only allowed the space. No sooner settled, ‘Long John’ Silverman would read aloud from the diaries he’d been keeping since his fourteenth year, diaries which he would sometimes subpoena me to illustrate – now with a humpbacked rabbi, now with a paunchy plutocrat or snarling blackshirt – the whole point of his jottings being that it was the former who softened up the Jewish people for the latter, a nexus between religion, finance, appeasement, fascism and exploitation which was as clear to me as day so long as Silverman spoke, but which unwound like the speaker himself the minute he was gone.

  Silverman had two brothers, one older, one younger. A third – ‘Long John’’s identical twin – had died at Normandy. Too big a target. Not my joke, ‘Long John’ Silverman’s. It was either joke or put your eyes out. Bunny, the younger, had his own band, The Silver Lining Trio, which had once played at every Jewish wedding in Manchester, from the lowest to the highest, until one Sunday evening in the ballroom of the Midland Hotel, hired to provide musical accompaniment to the engagement of the daughter of the backward-looking Director-General of the Board of Deputies to the son of hyphenated Jewish Tory MP who rode to hounds with the South Herefordshire hunt, Bunny followed the loyal toast with the ‘Red Flag’ played to ragtime.

  They all worked on the same principle, the Silverman men. It was either joke or put your eyes out. In this case it was both. But the Trio still operated, and gave pleasure, at the more modest end of the market.

  Bunny Silverman visited us less often than his oldest brother Rodney, who, as a librarian, was the nearest to a scholar of all my father’s friends. He had boxed a little in his time, which was partly what endeared him to my father, but his chief claim to everybody’s respect was that the Manchester Guardian published his letters. He wore spectacles like Trotsky’s and one day took me into a corner to show me that they served no magnifying purpose whatsoever.

  ‘So they’re just plain glass?’

  ‘Correct, Comrade.’

  ‘Why?’

  He was a staccato man with a machine-gun laugh. When he took hold of your arm, which he did often, he rattled you to your soul.

  ‘Why do you think, Max?’

  ‘Effect?’

  ‘Exactly. You’ve got to scare the bastards, it’s the only way.’

  ‘Do they work?’

  ‘You tell me. When were you last beaten up by fascists, crypto-Nazis, choirboys, girls from the convent down the road, or other roving bands of anti-Semitic thugs?’

  I pretended to think about it. ‘Not for a very long time,’ I said.

  ‘Well, there you are then – they work!’

  Another time, after he’d been in America on union work, he warned me against taking up comic-book illustrating as a career. ‘I’ve seen what it’s like over there,’ he said. ‘You might as well be on a conveyor belt sewing buttons. The bastards work you all hours, they pay you what they want to pay you, and you don’t even hold the copyright of your own drawings.’

  ‘I don’t want to do comics, I want to do cartoons,’ I said.

  He put his glasses on my nose. ‘What do you see?’ he asked me.

  ‘I see you.’

  He took them off me and returned them to his own nose. ‘I’ll tell you what I see,’ he said. ‘I see penury, starvation and loneliness.’

  Then he gave me sixpence from his pocket.

  I worshipped the Silvermans but I can’t pretend it wasn’t confusing, having to remember from one minute to the next who the bastards were, the anti-Semites who were hell-bent on beating up every Jew they could lay their hands on, or ourselves for being so Jewish that the anti-Semites noticed.

  It was the Silvermans who introduced Elmore Finkel, mountaineer and Christmas decoration manufacturer (mainly crêpe paper), to my father, thereby adding something elfin to an otherwise largely muscular and broad-shouldered group. Elmore Finkel was dainty, light on his feet – much lighter than my mother with whom he liked to dance in the living room to the radio, regardless of the direction of the conversation. He sang semiprofessionally in the first half of the year, when the crêpe paper and Christmas decoration business was slow, usually with The Silver Lining Trio, a sweet Al Bowlly tenor which, in the days before sophisticated amplification, you could barely hear. This made him especially popular at Jewish events where, though people wanted music, they didn’t care to have it interfering with their food. As a youngester, Elmore Finkel had accompanied the legendary Benny Rothman on his famous Kinder Scout mass trespass, sharing the beliefs of many Manchester Jewish communists that the issue of access to moorland and mountains was crucial to their fight against the ruling classes. In the course of his assault on Kinder Scout, Elmore Finkel received a blow on the head from a gamekeeper’s stick, twisted his ankle in a fall, was arrested by a member of the Derbyshire constabulary, and only didn’t face trial because of his age. ‘And a good job too,’ he told me countless times, though the trespass predated me by a decade at least, ‘given that the jury comprised three captains, three colonels, two majors, two brigadier generals, and a partridge in a pear tree had they been able to find one who owned land. Be pleased your father wasn’t there, I’m telling you – he’d have flattened the lot of them.’

  He smiled all the time, Elmore Finkel, which was one of the rea
sons I liked him. Everything amused him, including his own boy-soprano features – something of the cup-bearer to Jove about him – which he exploited shamelessly, flashing his baby teeth and forever tossing a lock of chrome-coloured hair from his face. Since the Kinder Scout trespass, he had confined his climbing (and his leg-breaking, he joked) to Switzerland from which he always seemed to return with splinters of glacier in his eyes, and where – as I understood it from him at least – he sat on the top of mountains and read Wordsworth and Lenin aloud to extravagantly beautiful shikseh waitresses with golden pigtails down to their tocheses (no one ever said arse in this gathering, it was always toches) who repaid him with free Glühwein and he wasn’t prepared to tell me what else.

  ‘You want to to take the Jewishness out of a Jew – stick him on a cold mountain,’ was Elmore’s philosophy. ‘There ain’t no Yahweh when you get to the top of Mont Blanc.’

  ‘Ain’t no Yahweh, ain’t no Yahweh,’ I remember Bunny singing to the tune of ‘Hold that Tiger’, beating the rhythm out on my mother’s cello-shaped walnut display cabinet.

  ‘Yes, but just don’t stick him with other Jews,’ my resolutely argumentative father said. ‘You know what happens when you get ten Jews together . . . they form a minyan and start davening.’

  (Like here, I thought.)

  ‘Not on Mont Blanc, Jack.’

  ‘Even on Mont Blanc. Especially on Mont Blanc. Break them up, that’s the only way.’ Rodney, the librarian, had recently lent him the memoirs of some Jewish army chaplain serving in the First World War in France and he was full of the chaplain’s observations about Jews quickly losing their Jewishness in the company of non-Jewish soldiers. ‘Do you know what they missed when they got back to their families? Not danger. Not excitement. Not even camaraderie. What they missed was bacon sandwiches.’

  ‘It’s what we all miss when we come here,’ ‘Long John’ Silverman laughed. ‘Excellent cup of tea, but not a bacon sandwich in sight.’