Kalooki Nights

by Howard Jacobson

  Hardly surprising that Jews of their sort, positioned where they were and of their age, warmed to Holocaust literature only slowly. Ilse Koch? Who was Ilse Koch when she was at home?

  I, on the other hand, was starting from scratch, with Manny as my tree of knowledge and Errol Tobias as the snake. Ilse Koch! I reddened and hoped to God they hadn’t noticed.

  ‘“The Witch of Buchenwald”,’ Ike said. Ike, of course, as a medieval man himself, was full of reading on the subject, though my father never permitted his books to spill out of his room into the twentieth century where the rest of us lived.

  I knew Ilse Koch had two names, ‘The Witch of Buchenwald’ and ‘The Bitch of Buchenwald’, and I knew which I preferred. But I wasn’t letting on I knew of either.

  ‘Oh, is she the one who made the lampshades?’ my mother asked. It’s the obvious joke, but she made it sound like an interior design query. And even if she hadn’t, it’s my obligation as a cartoonist to make out that she had.

  My father got up and began to pace the living-room floor in the opposite direction to Tsedraiter Ike. Anyone would have thought a decision had just unfairly gone against him. Another referee counting him out because of a few spots of blood on the canvas. ‘We’ve done all this,’ he said. ‘We’ve said all we have to say on this subject.’

  Tsedraiter Ike began to make heavy breathing noises, like someone imagining a heart attack. ‘You don’t believe she made the lampshades? You don’t believe she lined up the Jews of Buchenwald to see who had the most unusual tattoos, because the most unusual tattoos made the most unusual lampshades? You don’t believe what the Americans found when they liberated the camp? All lies was it?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what I believe. It’s history. Let it rest, Ike.’

  ‘Forget it ever happened, you mean?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. I said let it rest. It happened. But it happened to gypsies and homosexuals and communists as well.’

  ‘And that makes it better?’

  ‘Nothing makes it better. It happened, now leave it.’

  ‘Easy for you.’

  There was an exchange of bitter looks, Tsedraiter Ike’s face shrunken to the size of a rat’s, the way Ilse Koch the head-shrinker would have liked it, my father’s pinched and pugilistic, as though he was about to land one on the referee. ‘Like it’s hard for you, Ike!’ he said, witheringly. ‘Like anything’s hard for you! I don’t see you at anti-fascist demonstrations getting a bloody nose. You’re here, where you always are, hiding behind women’s skirts. Talk’s cheap, Ike, talk’s cheap.’

  My uncle turned on his heels. For what was left of the evening we could hear him pacing up and down his room, singing ‘It’s only me from over the sea, said Barnacle Bill the sailor’. If you could call that singing.

  Between my father and my mother (who was hurt on Ike’s behalf ) a silence prevailed. Call it the ‘lampshade moment’. Every Jewish family had it when I was growing up. I am told they still do, and probably always will. Never again. But which is the true freedom – saying never again in the hope that never again, or never again saying never again?

  I made a cartoon of it once. Two old Jews arguing. One with a bubble coming out of his mouth declaring ‘Never again’, the other with his fists in the air and an answering bubble, ‘If I have to hear you saying never again ever again . . .’ But I was unable to place it. I gave it away in the end to the plastic surgeon who wouldn’t touch my nose. Hard to get people to laugh at the Holocaust.

  Meanwhile revisionists make a startling point. Those lampshades Ilse Koch was reputed to have fashioned for her personal use, featuring outlandish Jewish tattoos – pause for a moment and tell us when you last saw a Jew with a tattoo. Proscribed, is it not? Leviticus 19:28 – ‘Ye shall not make any cutting in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the Lord.’ True, the proscription applied in the first instance to funeral rites, separating the Children of Israel from those who practised blood cults, those primitives who believed that flowing blood would keep the dead alive, as would bearing memorials to them cut into your flesh; but when was there a Jewish proscription that didn’t supersede its original application? No marks – that’s the ruling whose origins have been long forgotten – no marks upon the body. The prohibition become aesthetic finally, as though God knew in advance that tattoos and navel piercings wouldn’t suit the chosen people – a fastidiousness in the matter of adornment, however, which didn’t make Him think again about tzitzis, sidelocks, wigs, and shapeless dresses like Mrs Washinsky’s.

  There is an intriguing contradiction in the position of those who question whether anything as terrible as Ilse Koch and her lampshades ever happened, in that they invariably let you know they wished it had.

  And that’s not all that’s intriguing about them. In order to give credence to their denials and demonstrate mastery of the culture of the Jews whose lies they must refute, many of them become scholars not just of Jewish history but of the Jewish religion, making fine distinctions between the authority of Torah Judaism and Rabbinic Judaism, becoming learned in Mishnah, which constitute the oral law, and Gemara, which are commentaries on Mishnah, not to be confused with the Agadah, which are the parables and homilies derived from or illustrative of both; in short devoting their lives to study of the people they cannot abide.

  Thus the Tenth Circle of Hell, where the Revisionists and Deniers and Libellers are to be found, not wailing or gnashing their teeth, not trapped for ever in rivers of boiling blood or buried face down in the mud, their torn parts exposed to the never-to-be-satisfied gluttony of Cerberus, but soberly dressed at library desks, surrounded by Babel Towers of Hebrew texts which grow whenever a volume is removed, not a single word of a single page of which must they except from meticulous study, lest that is the very word which will prove the falseness of the Jewish people and their prophets at last.

  Consigned in their Jew-hating to an eternity of Jew.

  FIVE

  You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks. Tragedy is something un-Jewish.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  1

  I was never bar mitzvah’d. My father wouldn’t hear of it. ‘You become a man when you’ve performed a manly action,’ was the beginning and the end of the subject for him.

  ‘What, like punching someone in the face?’ my mother said.

  Taking her at her word, my father bought me boxing gloves for my thirteenth birthday and sparred with me in the garden.

  ‘Hit him!’ my sister urged from her bedroom window. Unusual for her to open her window and look out upon the world. Even more unusual for her to come down into the actual garden, a place which would only have had existential meaning for her had she been able to grow shoes in it. Because she couldn’t find a single item to wear that suited her, she was wrapped in a sheet. Nothing on her feet. Nothing that would fit or become her feet. ‘Go on,’ she said, holding the sheet in at her middle, ‘hit him!’

  In the heat of battle, neither my father nor I bothered to enquire who she was cheering on. Anybody hitting anybody would have done her.

  Seeing her sitting there in her bedclothes, calling for blood, my mother came out with four or five decks of cards and a duster. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘while you’re watching, shine these.’

  She never had enough to do, my sister. My mother likewise. It wasn’t that they were lazy, they were simply never pointed at any activity beyond kalooki. My father’s fault, partly. Though a modern man as far as belief systems went, he retained something of the temperament of Abraham in his tabernacle. He liked the idle prettiness of women about him.

  I’ve told this story a hundred times, of me boxing with my father on what should have been my bar mitzvah, always changing it according to the expectations of my audience, now having my father knock me out, now having me KO him, now having my mother piling in to separate us, now having my sister putting on the gloves and flattening us both. But always, of course, in the spirit of comic-b
ook exaggeration. KERPOW! BAM! YEEEEKS! YI-IIII!

  In fact I remember it as one of the saddest afternoons of my life. A son doesn’t hit his father, not even when it’s sport. And though my father had often lashed out at me in temper, actually landing a punch with one of those big stinging leather gloves was out of the question for him too. So we went into a bear hug and lumbered around the garden like that, sideways, with our arms around each other’s backs and our heads on each other’s chests. What he was thinking I had no idea, but I couldn’t get past the sensation of unfamiliarity – how little I knew him, how alien and even off-putting the smell of him was, how uncomfortable I felt being this close to him, as though even a clinch was an infringment of the laws of family. I was upset, partly, on my own account, that my father was a stranger to me; and upset on his account as well, that he had a son who was unable to relax and enjoy a bit of man-to-man knockabout in his company; but I was also sad because I could tell he wasn’t well. Nothing he said. Nothing in his breathing or in the way he held himself, or in the way he held me for that matter. Just something he gave off, something you see in old dogs sometimes, a weariness to the bone, a disappointment beyond melancholy, as though you accept now that you will never live the life you always hoped you’d live – a lack of interest, finally, in your surroundings, in the company you keep, and in yourself.

  And who knows? Maybe he suspected I would have liked a bar mitzvah.

  2

  It was considered scandalous, where we lived, my not having a bar mitzvah. It was only one up from marrying out.

  People invented the most far-fetched explanations for it. My mother wasn’t really Jewish and therefore I wasn’t really Jewish either. My father had killed someone in a fight years before and no rabbi would bar mitzvah the son of a murderer. My sister was pregnant and the family feared that the excitement of my bar mitzvah would either terminate or bring on the pregnancy. My father was so desperately poor, thanks to the money my sister lavished on a wardrobe she never wore and the huge amounts my mother was known to spend hosting and having her hair done for her kalooki evenings, that he simply could not afford to give me a bar mitzvah.

  Not far wide of the mark, that last explanation. Brought up to be a free spirit, with a hearty contempt for the usual Jewish professions of medicine, banking and the law, my father had drifted into local politics, serving as a Labour councillor for the ward of Red Bank for a short time, in the course of which he’d campaigned without much success to turn places of religious worship into gyms and snooker halls, and then drifting out again when he was suspected of promoting, or at least assisting in the promotion of, an illegal bare-knuckle contest between the Irish prizefighting lightweight Colin McReady and the Jewish kick-boxer Shlomo Grynn in a disused warehouse plumb in the middle of his constituency. ‘That sound like me?’ was how he dealt with the accusation, and he was never prosecuted for it. Otherwise he scraped a living teaching above-board boxing at various Jewish boys’ clubs – strictly speaking a charitable activity – supplemented by a little public speaking at sporting dinners – they liked hearing about Maxie ‘Slapsie’ Rosenbloom the back-pedaller, and the time Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis, born Gershon Mendeloff, landed a humdinger on that mamzer Mosley’s jaw, and for all I know the beating Shlomo Grynn handed out to Colin McReady – further supplemented by occasional work as a driver, dogsbody and odd-job man, even finding employment briefly at the Ritz, where he stood in as a bouncer until they discovered his susceptibility to nosebleeds.

  So it’s a question, had he wanted to give me a bar mitzvah, where he would have found the money for it.

  You didn’t have to be rich to be bar mitzvah’d. Not then, anyway. A new suit, preferably with long trousers, for the man-to-be; some fortifying whisky and hard biscuits for the celebrants before they left the synagogue to walk home; and that, not forgetting the cost of tefillin, concluded the affair. Concluded it religiously, at any rate. But a bar mitzvah wasn’t just about religion. It was also about giving the family a party. And the party, assuming it to be black tie, was where it started to get expensive. I wouldn’t have minded a party. I liked the way, as soon as you became a man, your uncles felt they could slide a cheque from the inside pockets of their dinner suits to the inside pockets of yours. You turned thirteen and all at once you’d become a hoodlum. You’d return that night to the little cot in which you’d been a boy and one by one slit open the envelopes. Hooch money. Numbers-racket stash. You felt – my friends who were bar mitzvah’d told me – like Bugsy Siegel.

  Party aside, I had a vague sense I should have been put to a religious test as well. It wasn’t that I wanted to stand up in synagogue and read the portion of the law specific to the Saturday, measured by the Jewish calendar, on which my birthday fell – I could have lived cheerfully without the davening and the sententiousness, especially I could have lived without the moment when the rabbi pointed his weekly parable (always a parable for simpletons as far as I could tell) to make it somehow relevant to you: ‘Once, a group of Polish acrobats came to Mezhibezh to perform at the bar mitzvah of the son of a notorious unbeliever . . .’ – but I feared that the not doing it would always leave me with a sense of unfinished business, cast me outside the clan, even identify me with those enemies of the Jewish people I spent so much time drawing and discussing. Not an excommunication exactly, but on the road to one.

  Tsedraiter Ike felt the same. At first he said he would coach me in my portion of the law and throw a service à deux for me in his room. At least that way I would be doing my duty in the eyes of God. But over time he let this suggestion lapse, perhaps because he too noticed the decline in my father’s health. He did, though, on what should have been my big day, present me with a secret gift of a tallis in a red velvet bag. ‘Today,’ he said, enfolding me in his arms, ‘my old palomino becomes a man – mathlltuf!’

  The other person who wanted me to have a bar mitzvah with the works was Shani. So great was her disappointment when she discovered there wasn’t going to be a party, she took to her room and threw shoes about for upwards of two hours. This could explain her hankering, the afternoon my father boxed me in the garden, to see someone get punched. She had been earmarking a dress for my bar mitzvah for years, and now where was she going to get a chance to wear it?

  ‘Show me,’ my mother said. And when she saw it she said, ‘Do you think I’d have let you go to my son’s bar mitzvah in that!’

  Causing Shani to return to her room and pull her wardrobe off the wall.

  Wonderful that when it came to clothes they were able to argue in the past-conditional mode, falling out over what it would have been appropriate to wear at an event had that event only taken place and had Shani worn what she had intended to wear which she hadn’t because it didn’t.

  Not wanting me to miss out on everything, my mother offered to throw me a kalooki night.

  I pulled a face. Big deal.

  ‘All right, a gala kalooki night.’

  I still didn’t look excited.

  ‘You won’t have to play,’ she said. ‘You can be guest of honour.’

  ‘And what will that entail?’

  ‘Darling, I don’t know. Being made a fuss over and things.’

  I thought about it. ‘All right then,’ I said, ‘but only on condition you invite Gittel Franks and Simone Kaye.’

  My mother looked at me with feigned disapproval. ‘And sit you in the middle, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll give the matter my consideration,’ she said.

  Gittel Franks and Simone Kaye were our most glamorous relations, that’s if they really were relations, and though they had occasionally played kalooki at our house, they had never played on the same night. This could have been because they knew better than to dim each other’s radiance; or it could have been because my mother, as a beautiful woman herself, could not take on more than one of them at a time. Gittel was Dodgy Ike’s wife. I envied the proud, possessive way, whenever they came to c
all, he led her in, supporting her under her elbow, as though she too was another gift of doubtful propriety or provenance he meant to leave with us. But then if Gittel looked genaivisheh it was because she was. Ike had ganvied her from another man. As a divorcee – something barely heard of in the Jewish community in those days – Gittel Franks had a reputation if anything even dodgier than her second husband’s. I liked her because she wore her hair up in a style which I think was called ‘pompadour’, a vertiginous tower of rolls and pleats that forced her to carry her head in an imperious manner very much at odds with the rest of her demeanour to which the adjective most frequently applied was demonstrative. She laughed loudly, touched everyone she met, could not describe an event without knocking over a vase, and ever since I could remember had regarded me through the narrow slits of her amber eyes – a Persian cat was what her eyes reminded me of – as though to promise me (on condition I didn’t tell my mother) that she would be my present when I grew to be a man.

  If Gittel Franks was demonstrative then Simone Kaye was cyclonic. ‘That woman!’ my father would say, hearing her from the other end of no matter how long a room, and clapping his hands to his ears. ‘She looks like a wedding,’ he once said to me in an aside. ‘Which part?’ I asked him. ‘All of it – the chuppa, the table decorations, the band, the dancing, the cake, everything.’ The secret of Simone Kaye, as I’d discovered, was to encounter her when she was not in the company of other women, to choose an hour in which you had nothing else to do, and to allow her to trap you in a corner for the whole of it. She was a woman who did everything up close. Tough, if you didn’t like the smell of wedding cake, but I did. Marzipan in particular. An extravagance of almonds and sugar and egg whites. Of all our ‘relations’, Simone Kaye was the one who took the greatest interest in my schooling. ‘And English? And history? I know I don’t need to ask you about art. And geography? Don’t talk to you about geography – why not, Maxie, tell me why not?’ With every question,her lovely, always somewhat startled face finding more and more fantastical contortions of vitality, her orange eyes seeming to start from their sockets, first one and then the other of her nearly Negroid nostrils flaring, her mouth so full and expressive that sometimes you would have sworn that in her need for volubility she had found an extra lip. When I was young enough to be petted with equanimity, Simone Kaye used to pull me to her in order to pinch my cheeks, and would keep me there by trapping me between her knees. Though her legs were not as long as Gittel Franks’s or anything like as elegant as my mother’s, Simone Kaye always wore stockings that were silkier than theirs, which meant that she whooshed like curtains when she walked. It was almost more than I could bear, as a boy in short trousers, the voluptuousness of this silkiness upon my skin.