Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

So there it was. They wanted me to Jew it up for them, put some Yiddler angst and colour on the page for Christopher Christmas to draw around when he was next free. A writer whose own knowledge of Jews, needless to say, extended not a bowshot beyond Anne Frank’s diary.

Uncanny, but she seemed to know what I was thinking. Who are you, Francine Bryson-Smith? ‘Chris might or not stay with this, ’ she said. ‘He ’s very busy. And he might not be the person for it anyway. There are no egos here. We can discuss all that as we get further in.’ Meaning: play your cards right and the job, the whole project, could end up being yours, Max. One of the unspoken advantages of which, I took it, was any number of lunches being peered at by Francine Bryson-Smith.

We shook on it. I only knew Manny a bit, and couldn’t swear that he ’d admit to knowing me. But I’d give it a go. Here’s to Lipsync.

And here’s to you, Max.

Here’s to Manny, no one thought of saying.

Before I left, Francine did a strange thing. She came to my side of the table, stood behind me, produced a camera from her bag, and got the waiter to take our picture.

4

But I had done a strange thing too. I had lied about how well I knew Manny. Though he had changed his name to Stroganoff and was almost certainly an entirely different person from the one I had known, and known well, I had disowned him again before people I didn’t know at all.

Why did I do that?

Where was the necessity for it, now ?

And why, if I’d convinced myself we hadn’t been close friends, was I so troubled to hear of him again, and so rattled — no, not rattled, so pierced — to learn he ’d changed his name to Stroganoff?

Why, why, why?

Some things you think are dead and buried, as the shitty shtetls of Mother Russia were meant to be for my father. Stroganoff was the absurd nom de plume, or in my case nom de caricaturiste , which Manny and I came up with after we’d grown out of playing concentration camps. The Brothers Stroganoff we thought we’d call ourselves, under which pseudonym we were going to publish works that would change the world. Five Thousand Years of Bitterness was our first, a comic-book history of the sufferings of the Jewish people over the last five millennia. We had argued over the title. Manny believed it should be Two Thousand Years of Bitterness , the sufferings of our people dating from the destruction of the second Temple in 7 °CE. As an Orthodox Jew he didn’t, of course, acknowledge the Christian calendar. Even 7 °CE was a concession to me. Between themselves, Orthodox Jews put the date of the destruction of the Second Temple as 3829. My own view was that our afflictions began from the minute we showed we couldn’t be natural in nature. We did a Jewish thing, we ate of the tree of knowledge, and didn’t know a day’s happiness thereafter. Five Thousand Years of Bitterness was already concession enough to creationists — Five Thousand Million Years of Bitterness more like — but if we believed that God made the world only five thousand years ago, then that was how long we’d been bitter. And I got my way. I was the one with the coloured pencils.

Manny provided the research and what you might call the background information, I did the comic illustrations. If drawing is what you turn to when the words won’t come, then drawing of the comico-savage sort is what you turn to when the first word that does come is the J-word. That or shmaltz, but shmaltz was not an option in our house. Any chicken-fat sentimentality attaching to our Novoropissik origins had long been burnt off by the white fires of my father’s secularity. We were a team, Manny and I, anyway. The better, we both thought, for our ill-assortedness. And in no time we had produced fifty pages. We got as far as paying to have them cyclostyled and showing them to our parents. But in their view they weren’t going to change the world. Not for the better, anyway.

‘Get yourself another subject,’ my father told me.

‘Like what?’

‘Boxing.’

Boxing was his subject. He’d been a champion boxer himself before I was born. Jack ‘The Jew’ Glickman. Not a soubriquet he chose for himself. Jack ‘Drop the Jew’ Glickman would have suited him the better, but his opponents knew the J-word riled him into lowering his guard. Only amateur, though by all accounts he could have made it big as a professional had it not been for a predisposition to nosebleeds. Epistaxis as I now know it’s called. My father’s nasal membranes dried quicker than other people ’s. As do mine. Quick to dry, quick to rupture. Though in my case it doesn’t matter quite so much. I don’t have to go twelve rounds with anybody, unless you count Zoë and Chloë and the rest. And in those circumstances a nosebleed can be a blessing in disguise. There’s always the faint chance it will upset them and cause them to repent. But it never upset or planted the idea of repentance in any of my father’s opponents. Once the secret of his weakness was out, they went straight for the nose, and it was all over. ‘It’s just blood,’ he used to complain to the referee standing in front of him with his arms flailing, counting him out although he hadn’t so much as touched the canvas, ‘you’ve seen blood before, haven’t you?’ Indeed he had. Just never as much as spilled from my father’s nose.

As it happened, this debility was a blessing in disguise for him. It meant that he was never sent to fight the Nazis on their territory. No point having a soldier who would bleed all over the regiment before a single shot was fired. So they kept him in a barracks in South Wales for the duration of the war, and let him run the gym.

Though he was no longer boxing himself by the time I was old enough to know anything about it, he retained his passionate devotion to the sport. He organised the boxing club at the local lads’ brigade, acted as a sort of personal trainer before there was such a thing to boys with pugilistic promise, kept his gloves in my mother’s display cabinet along with his cups, subscribed to every conceivable boxing magazine, drove up to Belle Vue every Friday night to see a bout, and could recite the past and present holders of every title at every weight. British Jewish boxers like Jackie ‘Kid’ Berg, otherwise known as ‘The Whitechapel Whirlwind’, and Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis, born Gershon Mendeloff, and Jack Bloomfield, he revered, and hung pictures of them above the stairs — one per step — where otherwise my mother would have hung photographs of Shani as a bridesmaid, or portraits of great kalooki players of the past, if such exist. But it was the American Jewish boxers who really fired my father up. I have never known why. Maybe they were more brutal in their despatch of opponents, or maybe it was just his idealising of America, American Jews having made their escape from humility and trepidation more finally than my father believed we had, or ever would. Barney Ross, for example, he admired as much for his rejection of his origins as for becoming lightweight champion of the world. Born Barnet Rasofsky, he had planned to be a rabbi like his father until thieves broke into the family grocery store and shot his father dead. Vowing revenge — a phrase my father relished — Barnet Rasofsky renounced the faith, changed his name, became a numbers runner and street-fighter, and eventually took up boxing. My father’s idea of making good. But even more of a favourite was Benny Leonard, originally Benjamin Leiner, the greatest lightweight, he assured me, who ever lived. Myself, I think the real reason he admired Benny Leonard was that he too had been a bit of a nosebleeder, actually losing his first fight that way, after being stopped in the third round by the sort of squeamish referee who ruined my father’s career. Thereafter he developed a defence so impregnable that between 1912 and 1932 he shed not a single drop of blood, losing only one bout, and that by disqualification.