Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

No going back into the Garden, we say. And no return to nature. Life — now that we have been expelled from Paradise — life, as an activity of the mind and not the sexual organs, begins in earnest.

For which devotion to intellect and conscience they cannot forgive us.

That was that as far as Tom of Finland went, explain it how you like. Max of Muswell Hill in accommodating flannel pants looked a nice enough guy but he wasn’t going to make a killing in the sex shops of Soho.

It wouldn’t surprise me to learn I was the first and last Jew — the first and last English Jew, at any rate — to be employed in the homoerotic copycat business.

Jew, Jew, Jew. Why, why, why, as my father asked until the asking killed him, does everything always have to come back to Jew, Jew, Jew?

2

He was a boxer whose nose bled easily, an atheist who railed at God, and a communist who liked to buy his wife expensive shoes. In appearance he resembled Einstein without the hair. He had that globe-eyed, hangdog, otherwise preoccupied Jewish look. Einstein, presumably, is thinking E = mc 2when he stares into the camera. My father was thinking up ways to make Jewishness less of a burden to the Jews. J ÷ J = j.

Had he seen me with my head buried in The Scourge of the Swastika he’d have confiscated it without pausing to find out whether it was mine or someone else’s. Let the dead bury the dead, was his position. The way to show them the reverence they were owed was to live the life that they had not.

‘When I die,’ he said, unaware how soon that was going to be, ‘I expect you to embrace life with both hands. Then I’ll know I’ve perished in a good cause.’

‘When you’re dead you won’t know anything,’ I cheeked him.

‘Exactly. And neither do the dead of Belsen.’

This wasn’t callousness. Quite the opposite. It was our deliverance he sought — from morbid superstition, from the hellish malarial swamp shtetls of Eastern Europe which some of us still mentally inhabited, and from the death-in-life grip those slaughtered five or more million had on our imaginations.

He didn’t live to see me sell my first cartoon, which was probably a blessing. It showed Gamal Abdel Nasser and other Arab leaders looking out over an annihilated Israel on the eve of what would become known as the Six Day War. ‘Some of our best friends were Jewish,’ they are saying.

The Manchester Guardian wouldn’t take it but the Crumpsall Jewish Herald did, publishing it alongside a leader article warning of another Jewish Holocaust.

Jew, Jew, Jew.

Like many atheists and communists, my father never quite got the joking thing. He couldn’t understand why, if I was joking, I didn’t look more cheerful. And if I couldn’t look more cheerful, what I found to joke about.

It’s a mistake commonly made with cartoonists. People confuse the matter with the man. Since you draw the preposterous it is assumed that you are the preposterous. Everyone thinks you must be joking all the time, and in the end, if you are not careful, you come to believe you must be joking all the time yourself.

Jew, Jew, Jew. Joke, joke, joke. Why, why, why?

You can have too many of all three, as Chloë, my first flaxen Übermadchen Gentile wife, told me in explanation of her wanting a divorce.

‘Why’s that?’ I asked her.

‘There you go again,’ she said.

She thought I was trying to get under her skin deliberately. In fact it was just bad luck. With Chloë every word I said came out differently from how I meant it. She rattled me. Made me speak at the wrong time, and in the wrong tone of voice. I felt that she was interrogating me and in fear of her interrogation I blurted out whatever I thought she wanted me to say, which was always the opposite to what she wanted me to say, that’s if she wanted me to say anything.

‘Do I frighten you?’ she asked me once.

‘Of course you frighten me,’ I told her. ‘That very question frightens me.’

‘And why is that, do you think?’ But before I could answer she held her hand up in front of my mouth. ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘I know what’s coming. Because you’re Jewish. And you can’t ask a Jew a question without him thinking you’re Gestapo.’

Since I wasn’t permitted to speak, I turned my face into a question mark. So wasn’t she Gestapo?

Hence her wanting a divorce.

We’d just been to a St Cecilia’s Day performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion in St Paul’s Cathedral — Chloë, to spite me, cramming in as many saints as she could muster. If she could have sat me next to someone with St Vitus’s Dance — say St Theresa — she would have.

‘I’d call that the last straw,’ she said as we were coming out.

‘What are you telling me, Chloë, that our marriage is dashed on the rocks of Christ’s immolation?’

‘There you have it,’ she said, still holding my arm, which I thought was odd given the finality of the conversation. But then again, the steps were icy. ‘You call it an immolation, everyone else calls it the Passion.’

‘That’s just me trying to keep it anthropological,’ I said.

‘Trying to keep it at arm’s length, you mean. What are you afraid of, Max? Salvation?’

I turned to face her. ‘I don’t think what we’ve seen offers much salvation for the Jews, Chloë.’

‘Oh, Jews, Jews, Jews!’

‘Well, they do figure in the story.’

‘They figure in your story!’

‘I’m afraid my story is this story, Chloë. Would that it were otherwise.’

‘You see! We can’t even go to a concert without your bleeding heart coming with us.’

‘Then you should be more careful which concert you choose for us to go to.’

‘Max, there isn’t one that’s safe. They all come back to the Nazis in the end.’

‘Have I said anything about the Nazis?’

‘You don’t need to say anything. I know you. You’ve thought of nothing else all evening.’

Not quite true — I loved and had thought about the music — but near enough. I had wept — as I always weep — at the desolation of Christ’s cry to a God who wasn’t answering. Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?But I’d also joked sotto voce (that’s to say, so that only Chloë could hear) — as I always joke sotto voce at this moment in this greatest of all liturgical works — that it was something else having the question put in German. Mein Gott, mein Gott, warum hast du mich verlassen? ! A bit rich, a plummy German baritone ‘why’,when the God who last forsook the Jews did so, as one might put it — no, as one is duty bound to put it — under German auspices.

Warum? You are not, mein kleines Brüderlein , the ones to ask that question. Just you go about the business of building Holocaust memorials and making reparation to your victims and leave the whys to us.

Jew, Jew, Jew. Joke, joke, joke. Warum, warum, warum?

For which Chloë, weary with all three, was leaving me.

But it behoves a man with a story of perplexities to tell to put his whys on the table early.

Such as:

Why did God, having once chosen us, forsake us?

Why did my friend Emanuel Washinsky — from whose lips I first heard God accused of dereliction (in our house we accused God of nothing except not existing) — forsake his family and beliefs and commit the most unspeakable of crimes against them?

Why, if I call Emanuel Washinsky my friend, did I keep my friendship with him separate from all my other friendships — a thing religiously apart — and why did I wash my hands of him when it was reasonable to surmise that he needed friendship most?