Howard Jacobson: Kalooki Nights

There was a song he sang, too, my Uncle Ike, whenever he felt himself to be under pressure from my father, made to feel unwelcome, or otherwise humiliated. ‘It’s only me from over the sea, said Barnacle Bill the sailor.’ An apology for his existence which was clearly an expression of the sense of worthlessness my father instilled in him, though why the nautical reference I had no idea. But it all added to the domestic cacophony, whatever it meant.

So yes, had there been anything I badly needed to get off my chest in those early years I might well have taken the option of sketching it on paper.

Whatever the reasons, I was a mournful, withdrawn, apparently biblical-looking baby — Mendel, Tsedraiter Ike called me when my father wasn’t listening, Mendel which he tried to persuade me was biblical Hebrew for Max, and which he went on using secretly in preference to ‘my old palomino’ when the Jewishry in which he sought to enmesh me darkened — and I remained biblical and withdrawn throughout the chrysalidal stage after that, until one afternoon, sitting on my mother’s lap in a train bringing us back from an afternoon on a cold New Brighton beach with Liverpool Ike ’s family, my nasal cousins Lou and Joshua twice removed, I said Jew Jew, Jew Jew, Jew Jew. .

‘Sounds to me that he was imitating the train,’ my father guessed when my mother excitedly told everybody about it later. ‘Am I right, Maxie? Was that the sound the engine made? Choo choo, choo choo?’

‘Jew Jew,’ I said, clamping my teeth around the Js. ‘Jew Jew, Jew Jew. .’

‘What about the whistle, then? ‘Whoo whoo! Whoo whoo!’

I shook my head. ‘Jew Jew,’ I said. ‘Jew Jew, Jew Jew.’

He gave me a cold stare. As though I’d informed him I wanted to be a rabbi when I grew up. Or that it was my ambition to return to the Russia we never talked about. Novoropissik, as he called it, a Nowhere place of piss and sick. Near where the Danube spilled its shit into the Black Sea. Spiritual if not actual home of Tsedraiter Ike.

‘Your doing,’ he told my mother.

‘My doing?’

‘Kalooki this, kalooki that. Kalooki’s the only word the kid ever hears.’

‘What’s kalooki got to do with anything?’

‘How do you expect him to grow up in a world free of all that shtetl rubbish if you won’t stop reminding him of it? Kalooki, kalooki, night and day kalooki! We live in Crumpsall in the twentieth century, not Kalooki in the Middle Ages.’

‘Jack, kalooki isn’t the name of a shtetl.’

‘Isn’t it? Well, that’s what you say.’ Whereupon he stormed out of the house.

Years later I looked up Kalooki in an atlas, to see whether there was such a place within spitting or sicking distance of Novoropissik. I couldn’t find one. But there was a Kalocsa in Hungary, and a Kaluga one hundred miles to the south-west of Moscow on the left bank of the Oka, and a Kalush in the Ukraine where Jews had lived and been submitted to the usual indignities, so maybe he was confusing kalooki collectively with those — the marshlands of our hellish past.

It’s possible I imagined it, but after the Jew Jew, Jew Jew incident I thought my father shrank from me a little, as a man will shrink in fear and loathing from the ghost of someone he thought he’d murdered and disposed of long ago. And it’s not impossible that his socialist friends shrank from me as well, the little cancer in the body of their hope for change.

They needn’t have worried. I have not become a rabbi. Nor have I been back to Novoropissik. Or gone the way of Tsedraiter Ike. Unless hearing Jew Jew, Jew Jew, Jew Jew, whenever a train goes through a tunnel, amounts to the same as any or all of those.

To that hypersensitivity, at least, I plead guilty. I am one for whom a train can never again be just a train. First I have to enquire whom the train, please, is carrying. Then who commissioned it. Then where its ultimate destination is.

Jew Jew, Jew Jew. .

The Auschwitz Express.

I could not of course have known anything about Auschwitz at the time I sat like a precocious Hebrew prophet on my mother’s lap and blew the horror whistle. But footfalls echo in the memory, and who’s to say what footfalls, past or future, a child’s memory contains?

For what it’s worth, I believe we would be able to hear Adam’s tread if we knew which part of our memories to access. And Abraham coming out of his tent to receive the Covenant. And Moses the lawgiver, in all his years, climbing to the top of Pisgah. And the Jews of Belsen and Buchenwald crying out to be remembered.

Jew Jew, Jew Jew.

What my father tried to do was ditch the J-word as a denomination of suffering altogether. Not to forsake all those who’d travelled on that train, but to reinvent the future for them. A kind of muscular Zionism of the mind, without the necessity of actually establishing a Zionist state and going, as he put it, ‘beserk in someone else’s country’. Without, indeed, the necessity of going anywhere at all. Or at least, now that he was out of the puke of Novoropissik and safe in the North of England, not going anywhere else . But you never know what’s waiting to spite you in your genes. My father wanted a new start, and had me.

It could have been worse. He could have had Manny Washinsky.

He could have had Manny Washinsky and been murdered in his bed.

Only had my father been his father, who knows? Manny might never have turned into a murderer at all.

1

When we weren’t refusing to divulge our names or religion to SS men, or choking to death on Zyklon B, Manny and I met in the Second World War air-raid shelter which had become our play space and discussed God.

‘You don’t ask Elohim to explain Himself,’ Manny, not yet a teenager, not really ever a teenager, told me, fingering the squiggly ear-locks which made his new-moon face appear as though someone had scribbled on it.

I’m cartooning him. He didn’t have ear-locks to finger. Sideburns turned to fluff were what he had, hardly even sideburns, little curls of unsportive fuzz run wild, which, in the event of trouble — the trouble we all half feared was only round the corner, the Crumpsall Park Pogrom which would one day come out of a clear blue sky — he would be able to conceal quickly under his school cap. These were the golden days of Jewish secularity, before the Orthodox found the effrontery to blaze their fanatic retrogression on their faces. What there was of medieval Jewishry was confined to a couple of streets of teeming five-storey houses in Lower Broughton on the Manchester/Salford borders where, for a while, Sir Oswald Mosley ran a provocative office, and through which my father occasionally walked me, holding me firmly by the hand, so that I should see, but not be inveigled into, what the long march to emancipation was emancipating us from. Frummers was how we referred to these out-of-time Talmudicliteralisers among ourselves, from frum meaning devout. Not a pejorative exactly, but not approving either. I could never decide whether my father’s interpolations — from frummers to frummies, and then from frummies to frumkies — were designed to diminutise them or diminutise their offence. But frumkies was the term we settled on finally. The Washinskys, to be fair to them, were not like those we saw in Lower Broughton. They did not wear long black coats or high black hats which seemed to float on a current of spirituality above their heads. They were not in the same hurry when they were out of doors, as though late for an appointment with the Almighty. And their house was not a gypsy caravan of trumperies and trinkets to protect it from the evil eye. No, the Washinskys were not living in the Middle Ages, but to us they were the halfway house on the journey back.