Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

‘So what are you doing with me?’

For a moment I thought her brows might come away from her face altogether. ‘Penance,’ she said.

Was she joking? When I ask myself why I took her to wife, given her hostility to me as a representative of my people (and excluding the obvious: that it was because of her hostility to me as a representative of my people), that’s the only answer I can come up with — to discover once and for all whether she was joking. And of course (because in my heart I knew she wasn’t joking) to see if she would remember on the day which of the Jews she didn’t like she was marrying.

I thought of my father on my wedding night, when Chloë told me that though she wasn’t Catholic she had spent some time at a Catholic school where they had taught her to pray for all the Jews they knew as they were earmarked for eternal damnation. ‘Do you mind if I pray for you tonight, darling?’ she asked me.

Darling ! Was that darling Aaron, darling Arnie, or darling me?And did it matter?

As for the praying, well, yes, that I did mind, actually. She was already on her knees by the bed, her hands folded together like a small child’s, her hair tied in a ribbon, naked but for the ring I had bought her and the startlingly explicit silver crucifix with which her mother had presented her to mark our nuptials. It was a shame to interrupt her in her quiveringly voluptuous orisons — her white flesh cathedraled in solemnity, even her breath stilled so as not to offend the silence — but yes, yes I most decidedly did mind.

‘Couldn’t you leave it until tomorrow night?’ I wondered.

‘Please yourself,’ she said, getting up and blowing out the great white cathedral candles she had bought (presumably from some Catholic book and expiation emporium) especially for the occasion. ‘I was only trying to be nice. You’ll burn in hell whether I pray for you or not.’

Thank you, Dad, I would say to myself on these and similar occasions. Thank you for the Jew-free start you gave me.

4

Not his fault. And not the fault of the Silvermans and Finkels either. They did what needed doing. They threw open the windows of our closed world, brought Europe into our homes, Europe with its chest out, the grand parades and parks and coffee houses, not the sweatshops of ancient superstition and obedience which my poor friend Manny had been born into, or the airless hovels which it was Tsedraiter Ike’s function to remind us of until his dying day.

They were the children, most of them, of venerable anarchist or trade unionist families, heirs to the Jewish strikes of 1880s London, inheritors of the high hopes of revolution that had engulfed Poland, Lithuania, Russia, in the 1880s and 90s, reaching at last even as far as Novoropissik. Some of the older ones, including Rodney Silverman, remembered being carried on the shoulders of strikers — marching the length of the country they would have me believe — their baby voices raised in the cause of higher wages, better working hours, more considerate and less divisive practices, a fairer deal altogether for just such sweatees in the tailoring and cap-making industries as Selick Washinsky. My father’s father had been present as a Manchester delegate or observer — spying, stirring, who can say? — at the Great Boot Strike which had broken out in the East End in 1889, ten thousand Jewish journeymen coming out of their cellars and garrets ‘like the rats of Hamelin’, as he had famously reported it, to protest the sweating system as a crime against ‘the ineffable name of Elohim’. A crime also (and to my grandfather a far more serious one) against the indigenous British workers whose jobs were daily being put in jeopardy by alien outworking Jews who wouldn’t think twice before undercutting and overtoiling their fellow Hebrews, to say nothing of Gentiles to whom they acknowledged no bond of amity or solidarity. The words of Beatrice Potter, one day to be Beatrice Webb the illustrious Fabian, were embroidered on a pillowcase, like a sampler, by my father’s mother and mounted in a flimsy walnut frame which frequently fell apart but which my father always repaired and replaced where we could read it on a wall above the bath — a monument more to Beatrice Potter’s research into late-nineteenthcentury Jewish immigration than my grandmother’s skill with the needle.

We need not seek far for the origin of the

antagonistic feelings with which the Gentile inhabitants

of East London

regard Jewish labour and Jewish trade.

For the Immigrant Jew, though possessed of many

first-class virtues,

is deficient in that highest and latest development of —

SOCIAL MORALITY

Those last two telling words, the badge of our ethnic deficiency, had been picked out by my grandmother in what at the time must have been the reddest of red threads; now, in the humidity of our bathroom, they looped limply in faded pink, like pressed roses found in a spinster’s book of commonplaces.

So why over the bath? I never asked him. I think I didn’t want to hear the answer. Didn’t want to hear him say that it wasn’t just the body’s daily toll of grime we were to wash away, but something in our natures too.

My family had mixed feelings about this embroidery. That the frame fell apart as often as it did I put down to my mother’s hatred of it. It’s only a pity that she never had the courage to destroy it altogether, or to form the words that would make my father understand what her hatred of it was about. ‘I don’t think that’s very nice, Jack, I don’t think that’s a very nice thing to have said about us, not at this particular time in our history anyway,’ was the best she could do, and that wasn’t good enough to shake my father’s resolution.

Tsedraiter Ike despised it too, but he knew better than to express an opinion. Who was he to complain about what hung above the bath? He was lucky to be allowed a bath! What my sister Shani thought I never knew. As an object that wasn’t a mirror or a wardrobe, it can hardly ever have fallen within her purview. And as for me, well, I came home from school one afternoon not that long before my father died, found him repairing the frame for the hundredth time, and told him what I thought. ‘You know Hitler said something pretty similar, Dad. Why don’t we get Shani to embroider a selection from Mein Kampf ?’

I did well to escape a backhander. I am unable to remember whether he drew the distinction for me between the measured thoughts of a benevolent socialist who kept company with people (my grandfather, for example) who wanted to emancipate the Jews, and the rantings of a psychopathic little bastard who wanted only to annihilate them, but the distinction blazed in his unwell eyes. Wrong son for him, I was. Shame — I’d have liked to be the one he wanted before he died. But the truth of it is that although I loved the socialists and Fabians and Bundists and the rest of them who came to do their exercises in our garden at weekends (and to listen to my mother shout ‘Kalooki!’ midweek), in my soul I was never much smitten by their philosophies. There was always too much of the excitement of apostasy about them for my taste. Their boldness was the boldness of public self-abuse. I am not saying I can come up with anything better, but then as a cartoonist I don’t have to. Ask me, though, as the author of Five Thousand Years of Bitterness , who are the greatest enemies of the Jewish people today, as bad as the Nazis in their hearts, as indurated in their detestation of us, however short they fall in practice — ask me who I fear the most and I will whisper to you, looking up and down the street, ‘socialists, Fabians, Bundists and the rest of them’. A Jewish socialist or Fabian the worst of the lot.