Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

I worshipped the Silvermans but I can’t pretend it wasn’t confusing, having to remember from one minute to the next who the bastards were, the anti-Semites who were hell-bent on beating up every Jew they could lay their hands on, or ourselves for being so Jewish that the anti-Semites noticed.

It was the Silvermans who introduced Elmore Finkel, mountaineer and Christmas decoration manufacturer (mainly crêpe paper), to my father, thereby adding something elfin to an otherwise largely muscular and broad-shouldered group. Elmore Finkel was dainty, light on his feet — much lighter than my mother with whom he liked to dance in the living room to the radio, regardless of the direction of the conversation. He sang semiprofessionally in the first half of the year, when the crêpe paper and Christmas decoration business was slow, usually with The Silver Lining Trio, a sweet Al Bowlly tenor which, in the days before sophisticated amplification, you could barely hear. This made him especially popular at Jewish events where, though people wanted music, they didn’t care to have it interfering with their food. As a youngester, Elmore Finkel had accompanied the legendary Benny Rothman on his famous Kinder Scout mass trespass, sharing the beliefs of many Manchester Jewish communists that the issue of access to moorland and mountains was crucial to their fight against the ruling classes. In the course of his assault on Kinder Scout, Elmore Finkel received a blow on the head from a gamekeeper’s stick, twisted his ankle in a fall, was arrested by a member of the Derbyshire constabulary, and only didn’t face trial because of his age. ‘And a good job too,’ he told me countless times, though the trespass predated me by a decade at least, ‘given that the jury comprised three captains, three colonels, two majors, two brigadier generals, and a partridge in a pear tree had they been able to find one who owned land. Be pleased your father wasn’t there, I’m telling you — he’d have flattened the lot of them.’

He smiled all the time, Elmore Finkel, which was one of the reasons I liked him. Everything amused him, including his own boy-soprano features — something of the cup-bearer to Jove about him — which he exploited shamelessly, flashing his baby teeth and forever tossing a lock of chrome-coloured hair from his face. Since the Kinder Scout trespass, he had confined his climbing (and his leg-breaking, he joked) to Switzerland from which he always seemed to return with splinters of glacier in his eyes, and where — as I understood it from him at least — he sat on the top of mountains and read Wordsworth and Lenin aloud to extravagantly beautiful shikseh waitresses with golden pigtails down to their tocheses (no one ever said arse in this gathering, it was always toches) who repaid him with free Glühwein and he wasn’t prepared to tell me what else.

‘You want to to take the Jewishness out of a Jew — stick him on a cold mountain,’ was Elmore’s philosophy. ‘There ain’t no Yahweh when you get to the top of Mont Blanc.’

‘Ain’t no Yahweh, ain’t no Yahweh,’ I remember Bunny singing to the tune of ‘Hold that Tiger’, beating the rhythm out on my mother’s cello-shaped walnut display cabinet.

‘Yes, but just don’t stick him with other Jews,’ my resolutely argumentative father said. ‘You know what happens when you get ten Jews together. . they form a minyan and start davening.’

(Like here, I thought.)

‘Not on Mont Blanc, Jack.’

‘Even on Mont Blanc. Especially on Mont Blanc. Break them up, that’s the only way.’ Rodney, the librarian, had recently lent him the memoirs of some Jewish army chaplain serving in the First World War in France and he was full of the chaplain’s observations about Jews quickly losing their Jewishness in the company of non-Jewish soldiers. ‘Do you know what they missed when they got back to their families? Not danger. Not excitement. Not even camaraderie. What they missed was bacon sandwiches.’

‘It’s what we all miss when we come here,’ ‘Long John’ Silverman laughed. ‘Excellent cup of tea, but not a bacon sandwich in sight.’

‘Nor will there be,’ my mother said, her voice ringing like little bells. Little burnished bronze bells was how I imagined them, the colour of her skin. She loved these afternoons of men as much as I did, a party that neither of us ever wanted to end. ‘We draw the line at pig,’ she went on. ‘Outside the house is one thing. Inside is another. Don’t tell me it’s illogical. I know it’s illogical. But that’s just how it is.’

At which ‘Long John’ Silverman would have inclined his courtly head. No contradicting my mother, for one smile from whom he’d have hiked a thousand miles.

My father, as always, grew impatient. ‘Forget the bacon sandwich. Take my point. What does the fact that those Jewish soldiers became less Jewish in a goyisher regiment prove — less Jewish even though they were facing death, think of that — what does it prove if it isn’t that Jewishness is tenacious only as a consequence of isolation and confinement? So if we aren’t from the egg Jewish and nothing else. .’

‘Is that the egg that goes with the bacon we don’t get, Jack?’ Bunny again.

‘Be serious a minute. If Jewishness is in us only so long as we huddle together, and we huddle together only out of fear of persecution, then we are Jewish only by virtue of that persecution. That’s the glue. We’re Jews because Jewishness is what’s been done to us. It’s a religion of victimhood.’

‘That’s a lot of logic, Jack,’ Elmore laughed, ‘to arrive at where I put you at the beginning of this conversation, sitting on Mont Blanc.’

‘Yes, but to get us to Mont Blanc you have first to open the gates of the ghetto.’

‘So why are you here, Jack, surrounded by the Jews who confirm you in your unredeemed Jewishness?’ It doesn’t matter who asked that. It was a rhetorical question which they all regularly asked of one another. What were they doing in Cheetham Hill and Crumpsall Park? How come, given everything they believed, they all still lived within wailing distance of synagogues and delicatessens and one another? Why weren’t they gone their separate ways, settling into the genteel undulations of Cheshire, or breathing the bracing air of the Peaks, among the white folk?

‘Because it’s too late for me. It’s the future I’m looking to. Shani’s future. Maxie’s future. Though a fat lot of thanks they’ll give me.’

It was always around about this point that someone or other would look at a watch and suggest that we go for a walk while there was still future left. But for all the hiking boots and rucksacks and moorland expectation, people rarely left. It was too comfortable where they were, opening the gates of the ghetto, imagining Jews without Jewishness, dunking biscuits into tea, and looking at my mother.

3

Not true that I wouldn’t in the future give thanks to my father for hurrying me out into the Gentile light.

I thought of him and thanked him frequently when I was older, going to art school in South London, dressing like a goyisher housepainter, throwing warm beer down my throat and wooing the likes of Chloë Anderson, the college beauty with the Slavic cheekbones who, on our first date, confused me with an Aaron Blaiwais in the print department, and on our second with an Arnie Rosenfield who sculpted.

‘Do you think we are all one person?’ I asked her on our third. ‘Do we all look the same same to you, or do you just like Jews generically?’

Chloë Anderson’s finely etched brows arched further from her eyes than most people’s, which gave her a look of perpetual disapproval. Her nose, too, was constructed on a disdainful tilt. Everything on her face wanting to be somewhere else, or with someone else. ‘To be honest with you,’ she said, ‘I don’t like Jews at all.’