Howard Jacobson: The Mighty Walzer

He knew about nerves, my grandfather. Not as much as my mother’s side knew about nerves, but he knew specifically about stage nerves, which they didn’t. He had once auditioned to be a Midget Minstrel for the Children’s Black and White Christy Minstrel Troupe. It’s been said of all the men in my family — father’s side, father’s side — that we are built like brick shithouses. The shit part I take to be gratuitous; the house, however, gets something about our rectilineal outline. Even as a boy my grandfather was well on the way to being that hugely comical hexahedral shape, like a walking sugar cube (except, of course, that as a Christy Minstrel he was expected to be black), which he subsequently bequeathed to my father and indeed to me. That was what failed him his audition. You can’t be a Midget Minstrel at five feet nine and three-quarter inches in all directions. He could have made it as a lyric tenor maybe, but for my grandfather these were the Jolson not the Caruso years. What he wanted was to jerk around, to be loose-limbed, not to stand like a shlump in a monkey-suit and hit high notes. He liked blacking-up, rolling his eyes, playing the banjo, telling Mr Interlocutor jokes and tap-dancing. Photographs still in my possession suggest that his glove work must have been excellent and that he could have out-horripilated anyone in the business. No small mastery of Western ways for someone who had been carried all the way from Zvenigorodka tied in a shawl like a leaking picnic lunch only a dozen years before.

No doubt, as he put his arms around my father and wished him mazel, he was remembering the day mazel had deserted him. ‘You’re too big, son,’ they’d told him. ‘You’ve got a kid’s voice in a man’s body. Come back and try the seniors when you’ve got a voice that goes with your build.’ But who could afford to hang around in those days? Many years later, when it no longer mattered, he was able to make light of it. ‘You don’t understand, Charlie. I coulda had class. I coulda been a shvartzer.’ But in 1933 he was less philosophical. In 1933 he was a machinist with a bad back and olive hollows round his eyes, grafting in a poorly lit raincoat factory in Strangeways, next door to the prison. (‘Me and God together — He works in strange ways, and so do I.’) His head wasn’t filled with darky melodies any more, only the sound of sirens. Sometimes he would switch off his machine, thinking that the siren he heard was signalling knocking-off time, whereas it was still only four o’clock — pitch-black outside but still only four o’clock — and the siren was coming from the prison, warning of a break-out.

He womanized. What was he supposed to do, sweating in the shadow of a phallic prison six days a week? He was built like a prison himself — a brick shithouse — entertained grandiose illusions, wore a wicked Rupert of Hentzau moustache, was full of juice and jokes, and loved to look down and see appreciation swimming in the eyes of another man’s unclothed wife — what else was he ever going to do with his life except womanize it away?

And since he womanized, my grandmother tyrannized. Isn’t that how it goes?

He chases skirt, so she gives what for.

Her giving what for embraced her children as well as her husband. Whether it extended to her grandchildren too I can’t remember. I was scared of her, I know that. But that was mainly because she was swarthy and reminded me of a gypsy. Of all of us she was the only one who looked as though she still had mud from the Bug and the Dniester on her. And some of the old religion mixed in with it. Every Passover and Yom Kippur, according to my father, she’d box the family’s ears. Every Succoth and Shevuoth the same. Every Chanukkah and Purim. Good yomtov, klop! ‘But at least that way,’ he said, ‘we got to know the festivals.’

This was why there was so much whispering afoot on the morning my father confided to his father his intention of competing in the World Yo-Yo Championships — August 5, 1933, was a Saturday, and Saturday, by my grandmother’s reckoning, was meant to be a day of rest from everything except her.

It’s my understanding of the thirties that when it came to observance we Walzers were essentially no different from most other families who’d made it over from some sucking bog outside Proskurov the generation before. We’d done it, that’s where we stood on the question. We’d done observant, now we were ready to do forgetful. If a Cohen wanted to change his name to Cornwallis, that was his affair. It was no mystery to any of us how come Hyman Kravtchik could go to bed one night as himself and the next morning wake as Henry Kay De Ville Chadwick. Enough with the ringlets and the fringes. Enough with the medieval magic. But we still bris’d and barmitzvah’d — klop! — and the seventh day was still the seventh day. Nothing fanatical; no sitting nodding in the dark or denying yourself hot food; no imaginary pieces of string beyond which you didn’t dare push the pram; and if you had to travel to see someone sick, you travelled — and you bought them fruit. All else being equal, though — which was where my grandmother put her foot down and k’vitshed and klogged and cried veh iz mir! and tore her hair and clutched her heart and tore everyone else’s hair — you rested. And even my father could see that competing in the World Yo-Yo Championships on a Shabbes wasn’t resting.

But that was not the reason, not the primary reason he slipped out of the house with his Yo-Yo concealed inside a holdall. Naturally, unless he meant for his mother to burst a couple of blood vessels — his, not hers — he wouldn’t have wanted her to see what he was carrying. But he didn’t want anyone to see what he was carrying. His Yo-Yo was a secret weapon which no one at all knew about and which he would unveil for the first time only at the World Championships themselves. It might cross your mind, in that case, to wonder whether his trouser pocket wouldn’t have served just as well as a hiding place, better even in that it wouldn’t have attracted anything like so much notice. Have I not said that my father was grandiose? The truth is, the Yo-Yo with which he was planning to storm the World Championships, the Yo-Yo he had not simply gone out and bought from a toy shop like every other competitor but had spent weeks constructing, taking sheets of plywood and a fretsaw and a pot of glue to bed with him, working at night under his blankets so that not even his brothers should know what he was about, was on a scale utterly disproportionate to anything we normally associate with the contents of a boy’s trouser pocket.

This was why he was so confident. He had read and re-read the rules of the competition. (The last big piece of reading he ever did.) Nowhere did it say that a Yo-Yo had to approximate to the size of a cricket ball. Nowhere did it say that you couldn’t walk the dog with a Yo-Yo as big as a bicycle wheel.

When my father died, almost sixty years to the day after he’d competed in the first ever World Yo-Yo Championships, and in a house still not much more than a twenty-minute walk from where the River Irwell tries to hang itself on Kersal Dale — people I didn’t recognize stopped me in the street to tell me how much they’d loved him. ‘He had a big heart, your father,’ they all wanted me to know. They looked at me in a peculiar and personal way when they said this, as though his big-heartedness might have been lost on me, not a virtue I valued, or as though it was the one thing I hadn’t inherited from him. Grandiosity yes, big-heartedness no.

One of his old friends, Merton Bobker, to whom my father had lent money before Merton won the pools and was in a position to pay the loan back (which he didn’t do), actually held me by the sleeve and wouldn’t release me until I gave him tangible proof I’d grasped the difference. ‘There are plenty of big dealers around,’ he said. He was dripping at the eyes and mouth, like an abandoned labrador. ‘You understand? In this town big dealers come cheap. But your father was a big man. Get me?’