Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

On his ownio, without the word of God at his shoulder, Manny himself liked my cartoons. They made him laugh. A pretty sickly laugh, but still a laugh. Our studio was the disused air-raid shelter in which we had talked of God and choked on poison gases. I thought of it as my air-raid shelter because you could only get to it by hacking your way through the hedge at the bottom of my garden or other gardens on my side of the street, but Manny considered it his by spiritual right — a dank, disused, overgrown underground space to which one fled to escape the irreverent light of day. Here, working with the help of those Second World War torches which everyone had lying around in those days, we would sit for hours on end, he rattling his chest asthmatically (there was a chemicals factory close to the shelter, which didn’t help), chewing his pencil and trying to think up adjectives to match the wickedness of one oppressor of the Jewish people after another; oppressors, I have to say, who didn’t only trip off his tongue but sprang from his ears and eyes, grew out of his hair and fingernails — Pharaoh, Amalek, Haman, Torquemada, Goebbels, Goering, Oswald Mosley — mamzers, bastards, the lot of them — I clicking my tongue and making Donald Duck noises as I sought for features grotesque enough to suggest their inner ugliness. Not easy when you can’t employ big noses, those having to be reserved, of course, for our own people, the eternally oppressed. In life, a button nose becomes a tyrant well enough, as witness Zoë, but it looks a lot less menacing in a cartoon. Big nose bad, small nose good — that’s just the way of it, in caricature as in race relations. Something, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, to do with the sense of smell and its embodying archetypal longings for the lower forms of existence. The nose a disgrace because the sense of smell a disgrace, a hankering after lowly origins, a refusal to embrace the liberating separateness of civilisation. Hence, presumably, Zoë’s wanting me to rid myself of mine. My solution as far as cartooning went, anyway, was the ruse of giving all the anti-Semites through the ages a Hitler moustache. Manny laughed like a drain at that. A field of Philistines with Hitler moustaches and their right hands in the air. The Pharaoh with a Hitler moustache. The Romans with Hitler moustaches. Ditto the Spanish Inquisition and the Roman Catholic Church and the Cossacks. Only Hitler himself — which seemed to me a novel concept — without. But then, as Manny observed — laughing like the dead, laughing as though his laughter were the ghost of laughter passed — how would anyone know it was Hitler if he didn’t have a Hitler moustache?

Good point. So in the end I drew him just as a moustache. Which also made Manny do his drain thing. A disembodied moustache screaming ‘Heil!’ and banging on about the Final Solution.

Had I painted rather than cartooned, I’d have been a surrealist. Which is peculiar because I’ve never liked surrealism. Another argument I might have had with myself.

While I had grown up with knowledge of Hitler and extermination from an early age, thanks largely to Tsedraiter Ike, it was Manny who introduced me to the phrase ‘Final Solution’. We had just moved in to the opposite side of the street (part of my family’s downward social spiral), and as he was the only kid in the immediate vicinity my age — immediate vicinity meaning within my mother’s melodic shouting range — I was persuaded to make a friend of him. I wasn’t keen. He looked too historically Jewish for my liking. Too persecuted and unhealthy, his skin yellow and waxy, the colour of old candles. Farshimelt. I wasn’t exactly an athlete in the Benny Leonard mould myself, but I didn’t have that Asiatic blight on me that goes with being Orthodox. Or that fluffy moustache, which there was no explaining because Manny was otherwise physically immature, not to say underdeveloped. Was there a moustache you could go grow at that age which denoted the opposite of precocity? His chronology was all wrong, whatever the physiology. You couldn’t locate him satisfactorily in time; he was old too soon, and younger than he should have been.

Whether it was his anachronistic moustache I was unknowingly alluding to every time I drew Hitler’s, is a question I have gone back and pondered — fruitlessly, I must say — many times since. But maybe I am just looking, in retrospect, for signs. He made my flesh creep, let’s leave it at that. He made me embarrassed for Jews, and therefore for myself. Which is probably the way it worked for my father too. ‘Where do they get the idea from,’ I remember him expostulating, with a gesture designed to take in not just Manny, and not just Manny’s family, but every household which allowed the noxious weed of Orthodoxy to take root, ‘that to be frum you have to look as though you’ve been lying in your own coffin all day? If the God they believe in had wanted us to look like death, why did He blow life into our nostrils in the first place?’

But my mother thought it was a good idea for me to have a friend.

‘Swap comics with him,’ was her suggestion.

I hung back. ‘He doesn’t look like a boy who reads comics,’ I said.

But then I didn’t look like a boy who read comics either, and read them at first only to conform to my parents’ idea of what a normal boy ought to have been doing. There was something about the Dandy and the Beano , the mishaps of Dennis the Menace or Roger the Dodger, that depressed me. It was the look of them, partly: the skanky paper, the low-mirth smudginess of their production; but also the dismalness of the schoolyard world they portrayed: discipline versus cheekiness, small victories, practical jokes, jeering, every teacher undernourished, every kid drawn as though he had rickets. And then one day, Dodgy Ike, who was always dropping in on us with gifts of doubtful propriety and provenance — genaivisheh was my father’s word for them: knocked off, but somehow innocently, knavishly, ge knavishly knocked off — turned up with a cigar in his mouth and a stash of contraband American comics under his arm. Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, Dick Tracy: a brave new Technicolor world of momentous, universe-changing action and teeming metropolises, even the ejaculations, SHAZAM! and BLAMM! and ZOKK! a thousand times more heroic than the small-time COO!s and CROAK!s of the meagrely illustrated, miserly minded Beano . I fell in love with them at first sight, not just because they were from somewhere else, and shouldn’t have been in my possession at all, but also because of the architecture of their design — the sculpted bodies, the masses of colour, the dynamic sense of movement, boldly futuristic and yet as classical in their density as any of the Renaissance paintings of annunciations and miraculous births whose reproductions hung in our art room at school. How did their artists achieve that? How were they able to appropriate everything, apparently so effortlessly? What was the secret of their pictorial plunder? Although I wouldn’t have put it to myself in quite this way, I recognised (correctly, as it turned out) something Jewish in them — Dodgy Ike Jewish, a bit genaivisheh in the knavish sense, full of spirited immigrant johnny-come-lately razzamatazz, and thus the antithesis to what the English expected of an illustrator of comics.

Did that explain the anti-American sentiment of the careful Gentile world in which I grew up? Was that why our teachers were always warning us off American movies and music and bubblegum, and would have confiscated my Superman comics had I brought them to school — because what they really didn’t like about America was its Jewishness?

Without doubt, some of this anti-Americanism rubbed off on me. Even though I was so smitten by Lois Lane I would draw her in the arms of someone bearing a striking resemblance to me just before I went to sleep, and so envied Superman his X-ray vision that for a while all my heroes had two yellow cones of light pouring from their eyes, I little by little rebelled from the extravagantly optimistic fantasy of it all. English culture called. If not the English comic book, then the English cartoon. Moralistic. Suspicious. Dour. Savage. Reductively ribald. Everything that I was not.