Howard Jacobson: Kalooki Nights

And they were still frumkies.

‘I’m not asking Elohim,’ I’d say, usually while gouging out the mortar between the bricks of our air-raid shelter — a peculiarly wanton impulse, to pull apart what sheltered us — ‘I’m asking you .’

To tell the truth, I wasn’t asking Manny anything. I was needling him. As though to pay him back for my own shortcomings as a friend, for making me ashamed to acknowledge him in such polite company as Errol Tobias’s, I pestered him to distraction. Why this, Manny? Why that? When Manny or either of his parents went through their front door they put a finger to their lips and then to the mezuzah on the door frame. I knew about mezuzahs; we had one at our front door, put there by the Jewish family who had lived in the house before us, but now painted over and ignored. I knew what a mezuzah contained: words, words from the Torah, including the Shema, the holiest words of all — ‘Shema Yisrael, Hear, O Israel, the Lord is one. .’ But precisely because the Lord was one we did not tolerate idols. In which case why did we kiss words? A word too could be an idol, couldn’t it?

Why, Manny? Why the food hysteria? Why all the salting that went on in his house, salting the flavour out of everything? Why,when they bought kosher meat from a kosher butcher did they have to kosher it again when they got it home? Had the Christian street unkoshered it? And why the obsessive keeping this from that? So a crumb of cheese the size of mouse bait fell on to a thrice salted, petrified slice of chicken breast from which the flavour had already been extracted to make soup, was that so terrible? Did Elohim have nothing else to do, was he so smallminded that he would notice and punish a transgression as negligible as that? And why the obsession with Saturday? How can a day be holy?

‘It’s a commandment,’ Manny told me. ‘Remember the Sabbath day to—’

‘I know all that. But next to “Thou shalt not kill”, remembering the Sabbath day is a bit unimportant, isn’t it? We don’t say “Remember not to kill”. Because forgetting wouldn’t be any excuse. “Remember the Sabbath day” is more like a nudge than a commandment.’

‘The Ten Commandments are all equally important,’ he replied. ‘The rabbis say that if you break one you might as well break them all.’

I had reason to recall that in later years. But at the time all I wanted to do was break him . All right, all right, so his family chose to do as they were told and remember the Sabbath day, but why did that stop them from making their own fire on it? Why, though they had no money, did they employ a Gentile — a Shabbes-goy, or as we called her in our neck of the woods, a fireyekelte — to make it for them? Why didn’t they light it themselves the day before and leave it smouldering behind a fire guard? Or, if that was out of the question, if Elohim thundered ‘No!’ to prior preparation and a further ‘No!’ to a surreptitious blow into the embers on Shabbes itself, why didn’t they just go without a fire for one day out of seven altogether? They could always come and warm themselves in front of ours if it was really cold, unless ours was unacceptable having been lit on the Sabbath by Jews who didn’t cover their heads, didn’t keep a kosher house and didn’t otherwise give a shit.

Not true that. We did give a shit about treating Gentiles as skivvies. Particularly we gave a shit — or at least my father did — about calling someone a fire-yekelte, a yekelte being a coarse non-Jewish woman of the lower orders, in other words a person with whom we, having been worse than beasts of burden in Novoropissik, should have felt some affiliation. That the fire-yekelte in question didn’t mind making the fires, and considered herself fairly remunerated for it — just as Elvis Presley was said to have performed a similar service for Rabbi Fruchter and his wife in Alabama Avenue, Memphis, refusing to take a penny in recompense, just so long as no spark from the fire landed on his blue suede shoes — was neither here nor there. What did it do to us to demean in the name of our religion — that was the issue. ‘Social relations come first, remember that,’ my father used to lecture me. ‘Man and man will always be a more sacred connection than man and God.’ So what kind of God, Manny, would hand us out a code of conduct which of necessity entailed condescension to people of another faith, neighbours who had carved crucifixes on the bricks of this very shelter when the bombs were falling, even as our parents, who shared their terror, were carving Stars of David? A God of Love, a God of Contempt, or a God who didn’t give a shit?

He had a way of closing down his face — Manny, I mean, not God — as though he could make himself deaf by sheer force of will. He ought to have repudiated the condescension charge with a flick of his fingers. ‘What’s demeaning to either party in a favour asked for and delivered? Show me the injured Gentile. Did Elvis mind? No. The King was only too pleased to be of service. All you have to show on your side of the argument is yourself — a Jew injured by all things Jewish. It’s not we who are guilty of fanaticism, it’s you, the fanatics of disavowal and self-revulsion.’

But that, for Manny (leaving aside what could reasonably be expected of a twelve-year-old boy), would have been to enter the lists on behalf of a God who needed no defending. Not for him to interrogate, or to hear another interrogate, the laws of Elohim. He was not called Emanuel — meaning ‘God is our protector, God is ever with us’ — for nothing. Emanuel Eli Washinsky, Eli also meaning God, as in Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? So I should have known something was wrong when, three or four years later he suddenly began to worry at that very question. Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? Where were you, Elohim, in our hour of calamity?

An unmistakable cry for help, that, wouldn’t you say, from someone with two Gods in his name?

But a cartoonist isn’t there to help. Not in the conventional sense, at any rate. A cartoonist is there to make the complacent quake and the uncomfortable more uncomfortable still. So to Manny, who had been the one and was now the other, I said, ‘You don’t ask Elohim to explain Himself.’ And was mightily pleased with the echo. I felt it was a blow struck for my poor father whose memory I feared that I traduced whenever I talked God with Manny.

It also pleased me, in some disreputably aesthetic way, to see my friend’s certainties under pressure. The refuser of all questions returned to questioning. It was shapely.

But then of the two of us, I was the artist.

And I was forever looking for an excuse not to be his friend.

2

‘Why do you have to look so Jewish all the time?’

Zoë talking. Zoë, catching me with my people’s woes on my shoulders. Zoë, my flaxen Übermadchen Gentile second wife in our itchy seventh year of marriage.

Zoë, Chloë, Björk, Märike, Alÿs, and Kätchen, little Kate. .what does it say about me that the only people with whom I am able to enjoy intimacy must have diaereses or umlauts in their names?

That I’m a Shmoë — that’s what Zoë said it says.

Good job I never met Der Führer at an impressionable age.

With Zoë I wasn’t ever unimpressionable. I bore the impress, visibly, of her harrying. And because I lowered my head and shouldered it, there was no inducement for her to stop. Grow a moustache, shave your moustache; wear a tie, don’t wear a tie; try being sweeter to people, try having the courage of your own belligerence; come live with me in the country, why can’t we have a flat in town; get a mistress, how dare you even look at another woman; fuck me hard, fuck me gently, and finally don’t fuck me at fucking all.