Howard Jacobson: Kalooki Nights

‘Think of that,’ I remember my father saying. ‘Twenty years without being beaten, twice the time you’ve been alive.’

Impressive, I agreed, but not so impressive that I wanted to do the same. Already my fingers were too important to me to risk them boxing. Break your fingers in the ring and where does that leave you as an artist? And I was a particularly fingery artist, a maker of fine satiric lines which sometimes worried me, so like needlecraft were they, so like little daggers of derision and selfhurt.

The only boxer in my father’s pantheon to capture my imagination was Maxie ‘Slapsie’ Rosenbloom, partly because he was what was known as a hit-and-run fighter, that’s to say he no sooner landed a punch than he back-pedalled round the ring so that he couldn’t be punched back (a tactic I could see the point of); partly because he wasn’t much of a puncher anyway and resorted in the end to slapping his opponents (hence his nickname); but chiefly because I was named after him. Whether I have my mother to thank for it, I don’t know, but to this day I count myself lucky that I didn’t end up being called Slapsie.

In fact no one would have been more surprised than my father had I developed an active interest in boxing. Or, I suspect, more dismayed. He would not have wanted to see me knocked around. There was a sense in which he felt he ’d done that for the pair of us. In so far as the Jewish boxers whose pictures lined our stairs were intended as an example to me, they did not go beyond showing what we could do when we tried, that’s to say when we gave up believing that we drank physical cowardice in with our mothers’ milk. They were the obverse of those streets of medieval Jewishry through which, holding on tightly to my hand, he made a point of escorting me. They proved that we could live in the world without fear, go toe to toe with it, embrace what the daylight showed us in strong clear outlines instead of shrinking into the shadows, praying to what was unseen and unseeable. Fists were of the essence. He made fists of his own hands while he told me this — ‘Grab at life, Maxie! Grab what you can see!’ That lesson punched into me, he was happy for me to go to school and become a solicitor. Anything so long as I stayed away from Judaism, which he considered, somewhat illogically, to be a curse on the Jews. Farshimelt was one of his favourite words for the Orthodox. Farshimelt, meaning mouldy, mildewed. The consequence of being hidden from the air and light. What happened to you — to your skin and to your mind — when you refused the visible world.

Farshimelt. You can hear the maggots at work.

Significant, I always thought, that he, the great progressive secularist and fist-fighter, the most Aryan Jew in Manchester, needed a Yiddish word to express his contempt.

Perhaps I was looking for some equivocation in his heart to match the equivocation in mine. Yes, when it came to despising the farshimelt I was my father’s son; on paper — and I worked on paper — no one could have despised them more; but there were hours when I found myself rebelling against my father’s teaching. Despite myself, a lonely sensation sometimes overcame me, a longing for some of the family intimacy that Manny seemed to enjoy. Intimacy might not even be the word for it. Our family was intimate enough, God knows, shouting at one another, interfering in one another’s business, our house thrown open to anyone who wanted to talk boxing, atheism, kalooki, or anything else for that matter. But the Washinskys, though more formal and reserved, were somehow hotter, darker, a consequence, perhaps, of being as a family concentrated upon a purpose from which, until the first of their family tragedies befell them, there was no divergence of view. The few times Manny invited me home I felt a peculiar privilege, as though a wild animal had let me into his lair, so packed and dense was it among the Washinskys, so bound were they by the watchful rituals of survival. Seeing Manny out with his father on their way to the synagogue, both of them spruced up darkly to attend on God, urgent on their errand, two men engaged in what never for a moment occurred to them was not the proper business of men, joined as I was never joined with my father, bonded in abstraction, but also bonded in the activity of being purposefully out and about, traversing the community, going from home to the house of worship, as though devotion wore a civic aspect — on such occasions, though it was an act of treachery to my father to be feeling such a thing, I wished my life were more like Manny’s. I would then secretly envy Manny his mother, too, Channa Washinsky on the doorstep looking out for their return, haloed in cooking fumes, her head covered by a scarf, weaving spells from under it, or so it seemed to me the one Shabbes dinner they asked me to share with them, making those welcoming motions with her hands, as though to call on the angel of light to bless their bread and ignite their candles, before covering her eyes and delivering the blessing. True, my mother wove spells over her playing cards, but when she blew on her fingers and shuffled the decks my mother was commemorating the unbroken sameness of things, another night of kalooki in a life given over to kalooki.

Whereas Channa Washinsky was not only marking the Shabbes from what was not the Shabbes, she was honouring the concept of separateness itself, the beauty of one time not occurring simultaneously with another, ourselves not existing forever and unchangingly as ourselves. What the woman ushers in on the eve of the Sabbath, the man bids farewell to at its close, pouring out a glass of wine, lighting a single candle, perhaps shaking a spice box whose aromas symbolise the additional soul to which the Sabbath has given him access, and reciting the Habdalah benediction — a thank you to the Almighty for drawing a distinction between the holy and the profane, between light and darkness, between the six days of creation and the seventh day of rest. For that, simply, is what Habdalah means: separation. And whether you light the candle and shake the spices or you don’t, you cannot call yourself a Jew unless the concept is written on your heart.

In its way, Habdalah is a justification for the idea of art. Here is the daily world of fact, there is the other-worldly domain of the imagination. Here is the tongue we are obliged as responsible citizens to mind, and there is the outlandish language we speak when we are otherwise possessed. So you would think the Orthodox, who thank Elohim for dividing this from that, would be hot on the separation which is art. But you’d be wrong.

5

Manny blamed the failure of Five Thousand Years of Bitterness to get beyond our respective houses on me. ‘You and your cartoons,’ he said.

‘It’s the cartoons that make it,’ I told him.

‘Yeah, that make it blasphemous.’

That was his father talking. Blasphemy, impurity, uncleanness. Everything a sin against the Law. Everything an infringement. Leave aside the content, which Selick Washinsky was not the first and no doubt will not be the last to be repelled by, the mere fact that I drew a likeness at all offended him. Who was it — Feuerbach, Hegel, or simply every German philosopher there has ever been — who accused the Jews of being aniconic to their soul, eschewing the concrete because they would not envision God other than abstractly? Well, though I take no pleasure in their being right about anything, they were right about Manny’s father. In his eyes I was an idolater. I pause before that thought, because in my eyes I was an idolater too. The difference being that idolatry frightened Selick Washinsky whereas, primarily I suppose because I confused the word with iconoclast — and you can’t really be the second until you’ve been the first — it energised me.