Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

‘If what you’re telling me is true, and I’ve no reason to doubt you, it sounds like you’ve been unlucky. I’ve been a doctor in this town for more than thirty years and I have never once treated an unmarried Jewish woman for what you’ve got. Very occasionally a married one who’s contracted it from her husband, and who isn’t pleased about it, I can tell you — but a single Jewish girl—’

‘From Didsbury,’ I put in.

He closed his eyes so he could continue. ‘But an unmarried Jewish girl — never! Well, there’s always a first time you’ll tell me, and there’s a bad egg in every batch. And you’ll be right. Just a pity you had to find her. But this I can tell you, young man — and I’m telling it you out of the respect I bear your father, olovhasholem, and your mother who I hope is well — don’t go fancying yourself as some Lothario. What she did with you, whoever she is, this nekaiveh, she’d do with anyone.’

‘No one would have sex with me who didn’t want sex with everyone, is that what you’re saying?’

‘Max, no decent woman has sex until she’s married. And there’s a joke that no decent Jewish woman has sex even then. You’ve been given a warning. Or at least part of you has been given a warning. Respect your body, and women will respect you. Yes?’

No, I said in my heart. But I wanted my prescription. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, doctor.’

As I was leaving he called out ‘Max!’, then when I turned he winked at me through a fog of tobacco. ‘Don’t forget,’ he said, ‘stay away from those shiksehs.’

In fact I have exaggerated what was wrong with me. It wasn’t the clap, it was crabs. But the clap sounds better. More artistic. More Hogarthian.

I don’t otherwise exaggerate Alvin Shrager. He was round, brown, boiled, evil-smelling, florid, smug, religiose, a disgrace to medicine, a shame on my mother and father who had stayed with him because he was ‘our doctor’, a shame on me who continued to see him for the same reason — because he was ‘our doctor’ and therefore ‘had’ something on me or owned me in some way — and an offence to Judaism. Many years later, I gave him a whole page to himself in No Bloody Wonder , my follow-up to Five Thousand Years of Bitterness , among the enemies of the Jewish people who happened to be Jewish, not with the self-haters and the apostates and the Jews who changed their names, but alongside the Jews who harmed Judaism by being overzealously Jewish where Jewishness had no business showing its face. Needless to say, this page didn’t go down any better than the others, especially with Shrager’s daughter Toyba who threatened to sue my publishers unless they promised to remove the caricature from future editions. An empty threat, but one which my publishers were of course only too delighted to take seriously, knowing there would be no future editions.

As a satisfactory addendum to this episode — and it will explain Toyba Shrager’s hypersensitivity as to her family’s good name — Alvin Shrager’s other daughter Lipka enjoyed a period of notoriety for a while, even appearing for two weeks running on the front page of the News of the World , wearing a belted leather coat, dark glasses and a hunted look. She was denying all charges, of course, but you could tell from the leather coat, which she wore as a second skin, and from that prioressy air which women at her end of the market often carry, that she was lying. She was the one all right, she was the Mayfair call girl in the kisses-forsecrets scandal, whispering information garnered from high-ranking Arab clients into the ears of Israeli diplomats, and, I am afraid to say, vice versa.

Some nice Jewish girls give you crabs, some croon to you of troop positions — as Dr Shrager said, it’s just a matter of luck which you fall in with.

As a further satisfactory addendum to that episode, the public disgrace hurried Shrager into a grave nothing like as early as I’d have wanted, but certainly much earlier than he did.

5

I presented Manny with a signed copy of No Bloody Wonder on our second attempt at reunion. Better that, I thought, than Five Thousand Years of Bitterness which had originated in a joint endeavour, never mind that he had washed his hands of it so many years before. I had nothing to apologise to him for — not in the matter of publications anyway — but people can behave strangely in the presence of a book, especially a book they had once had a hand in but which doesn’t bear their name. Fortunately, he wasn’t the publication junkie I am. He appeared indifferent to my authorship at any rate, and barely thanked me for the gift. Summarily, as though performing a duty he couldn’t himself see the point of, he looked the front cover over, licked his lips, then idly, even rudely, flicked the pages. Unimpressed is one word. Contemptuous is another. ‘I would have expected you to have moved on from this kind of thing,’ he said, without any challenge in his voice, as though I must already have come to such a verdict about myself without his help.

‘I’m a better drawer than I was when we sat and planned the predecessor to this in our shelter, Manny,’ I pointed out. Miffed was one word for how I felt. Fucking furious were two others.

A better drawer was I? As a courtesy to that assertion he flicked through a few more pages, but obviously didn’t see it.

‘They’re still cartoons,’ he said.

‘You mean not realistic?’

‘I mean not serious. Not considered.’

I pedalled backwards from the punch. Maxie ‘Slapsie’ Rosenbloom would have been proud of me. But where had Manny learned to hit like that?

Don’t answer.

‘The lines could not be more considered,’ I said, catching my breath. ‘If you look, you’ll see that the lines are highly formal. And my intention could not be more serious. For a cartoonist I am serious to a fault.’

‘Then maybe you should stop being a cartoonist.’

Oooof!

‘What is it you don’t like, Manny? The hyperbole? The extravagance? Surely you still don’t find this stuff blasphemous.’

He did me the justice of thinking about it, though it was hard for him: his attention wavered, his eyes were always halfway to somewhere else. ‘You seem to have embraced ugliness,’ he said at last.

‘Ugliness has its way with all of us,’ I said. And let him take that how he liked.

‘Isn’t that all the more reason to try to find beauty? You seem to be in an argument with beauty.’

‘How can I not be in an argument with beauty? I’m a cartoonist. More to the point, I’m a Jewish cartoonist. As an Orthodox Jew yourself, or as a one-time Orthodox Jew — I don’t presume to know what you are now — you should approve of this. Leviticus 26, Manny, “Ye shall make you no idols nor graven image.” I happen to take that prohibition very seriously. Not in its sensuous applications but in its ethical ones. It is not good to lose oneself in art. It is idolatrous. Lose yourself in art and you end up not knowing where you begin and end. It is a mistake to fuse with the image. Well, you can’t fuse with mine, Manny. It won’t let you. It won’t allow it. If by ugliness you mean the ceaseless mockery, through a visual medium, of all the seductions of visual media, then yes, OK, have it your way, my drawings are ugly.’

Not that I wanted him to think I was passionate about what I did. .

We were in a kitchen, I wasn’t sure whose and didn’t think it was appropriate to ask. He had invited me there, somewhat obstinately and with a certain degree of domestic pride, I thought, in the face of my offering an outing to any bar or restaurant he fancied. It was as though he felt that I needed to understand his needs — neither to underestimate nor to overestimate them — and to see the manner in which they were satisfied. It was a terraced house, modest, but well kept, furnished with stripped pine and inexpensive third-world rugs, situated in those heights looking out over Heaton Park, not all that far, if my Manchester geography hadn’t deserted me, from where Asher would first have met his German mishpocheh. I took it to be a small home, perhaps paid for by the social services and local Jewish charities, for Jewish men who had killed their parents and served their time in prison. A quiet act of consideration, not to be bruited abroad, at once of benefit to the men themselves and to the Jewish community they’d disgraced.