Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

‘Cartoons aren’t my department,’ she told me, meaning she would if she could.

Yolanda was what we call a farkrimteh. A sourpuss. Try any sort of play in the company of Yolanda and she turned so nervous — sometimes going as far as to shield her face with her arm — she made you feel you’d opened a window and let a bat in. Even over the phone you could hear her covering her head.

But at least she honoured our old connection by fixing me an introduction to a junior editor who, like so many New Yorkers in the arts, got his dress sense from the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett. Irving, he was called. Mellifluously spoken, over-shaved, and in the custody of his polka-dot bow tie. Where it led, Irving followed. Like Yolanda, Irving also looked anxious when someone released a joke into the room. But being a man, he didn’t hide his face.

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

‘Desperation,’ I interrupted him.

‘I beg yours?’

‘What made Thurber hum or ous was desperation. Only I don’t think the word for it is hum or exactly. It’s not hum or 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.