Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

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.

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.