Howard Jacobson: Kalooki Nights

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Once when no one was buying my cartoons I took a job ripping off the Tom of Finland books for an unscrupulous pirate publisher of gay eroticism. Deltoidal, no-necked, peach-bottomed sadists and cock-suckers wearing leather caps and curiously benign expressions, romping in a spunky never-never sodomitic kindergarten unimpeded by the needs or interdictions of wives and mothers. For a straight man who couldn’t see what Tom of Finland had to offer, other than the clean lines of the illustrations and the absence, beyond twenty-four-hour on-tap buggery and fellatio, of any supererogatory fantasy or fuss, I reckon I made a reasonable fist of copying his creations. It was good for me too, I thought, inhabiting this alien demi-Eden for a while. It relieved some of the stress I was under. The stress of a failed marriage and a failing career — the usual — but also the stress of coming from an ethno-religious minority, or whatever you call us, whose genius doesn’t extend to irresponsible recreation. Jews don’t do Paradise Regained. Once you’re out you’re out with my people. The gates swing shut behind you, the cherubim flash their flaming swords, and that’s that. This is what it means to be Old Testament. You’re always conscious of having blown your chance of a good time. Now here I was enjoying a proxy frolic in the Garden again.

Where I messed up professionally was in the straining bulge all Tom of Finland’s characters carried in their trousers. To begin with I failed to notice there was a bulge there at all. But even when the bulge was brought to my attention I couldn’t copy it with conviction. I couldn’t capture the anticipatory strain. Couldn’t render the explosive tension between the glans penis and the denim. In the end I had to admit that this was because I had never worn denim or leather myself, and didn’t understand the physics of the pressure from the inside. Jewish men wear loose, comfortable trousers with a double pleat. And maybe, in chilly weather, a cardigan on top. It is considered inappropriate by Jews to show strangers of either sex the outline of your glans penis.

No commandment against it that I know of. Just not what you do.

And for this, as an uncle of mine used to say, apropos anything Jewish, the Nazis tried to exterminate us.

My father’s response, if he happened to be around, reminded me of someone swatting a fly. ‘Since when did any Nazi try to exterminate you , Ike? You personally? Had I thought the Nazis were after you I’d have told them where to find you years ago.’

Upon which my uncle, who had lived with us for as long as I could remember, would turn white, accuse my father of being no

better than Hitler himself, and flee to his room to hide.

Were they playing? Did they go on repeating this exchange because they thought it was amusing? Hard to decide when you’re small whether people twice your size are joking or not. Sometimes everything they do looks like one big joke. But Hitler didn’t sound a funny name. And ‘exterminate’, as I discovered from the little dictionary which my mother kept in her display cabinet, as though it were as precious as her china or my father’s boxing cups, meant to destroy utterly, to put an end to (persons or animals), to drive out, to put to flight, to get rid of (species, races, populations, opinions). From which I inferred that no, my father and my uncle could not have been playing, but must have intended their jousting as a sort of magic, to ward off evil. To keep us from being driven out, got rid of, and the rest of it.

Thus did I grow up in Crumpsall Park in the 1950s, somewhere between the ghettos and the greenery of North Manchester, with ‘extermination’ in my vocabulary and the Nazis in my living room.

So when Manny Washinsky swapped me his copy of Lord Russell of Liverpool’s The Scourge of the Swastika: A Short History of Nazi War Crimes for a bundle of comics, I was already softened up, though I couldn’t have been much more than eleven at the time, to receive its contents. ‘The murder by Germans of over five million European Jews,’ Lord Russell of Liverpool wrote, ‘constitutes the greatest crime in world history.’ A conclusion which electrified me, not because it was news exactly, but because I had never before seen it written down. Over five million ! So that was what being put an end to meant! The figures conferred a solemn destiny upon me. For it is not nothing to be one of the victims of the greatest crime in world history.

By any of the usual definitions of the word victim, of course, I wasn’t one. I had been born safely, at a lucky time and in an unthreatening part of the world, to parents who loved and protected me. I was a child of peace and refuge. Manny too. But there was no refuge from the dead. For just as sinners pass on their accountability to generations not yet born, so do the sinned against. ‘Remember me,’ says Hamlet’s father’s ghost, and that’s Hamlet fucked.

Manny wasn’t the only boy in the street who knew The Scourge of the Swastika . Errol Tobias, a year or two older than us, was also a reader. Not that we were any sort of study group or book club. Because I felt ashamed of being Manny’s friend when I was with Errol, and ashamed of being Errol’s friend when I was with Manny, I was careful not to bring them together or otherwise to intimate our shared experience. Left to their own devices, neither existed for the other. Manny too devout, Errol too profane. They weren’t simply chalk and cheese, they were the devil and the deep blue sea. Not a fanciful comparison: in Manny there were unfathomable depths, in Errol a diabolism that was frightening to be near. When he went into one of his lewd playground rages, Errol’s eyes boiled in his head like volcanoes; you could smell his anger, like a serpent turning on a spit; a translucency upon his skin, as though God were trying to see through him. Yet it wasn’t the devilish one of the two who ultimately did the devilish thing. Unfair, but there you are. It would seem that it isn’t necessarily your nature that determines your fate. Incidentals such as spending too much time listening to your fathers’ fathers’ ghosts can do it just as well. But in that case all three of us should have grown up to be murderers, not just Manny Washinsky.

As for Jews not showing strangers the outline of their glans penis, Errol Tobias was either a changeling or the exception that proved the rule. A genitally besotted boy, he grew into a genitally besotted man. Manny and I were more in character. For which demureness I have not the slightest doubt that the Nazis — to borrow my uncle’s favourite locution — would have tried to exterminate us. As a cartoonist I am given to travesty and overstatement, but this is not an example of either. There are serious causal connections to be traced between the Jew’s relation to his body — modesty, purity, the dread solemnity of the circumcision covenant — and the Jew-baiting practised by the Germans. For reasons that will bear deep scrutiny, the world hates and fears a man who makes a palaver of his private parts. I think that’s the issue: not the foreskin, the palaver. Whenever anti-Semitism is mobilised from an itch into a movement it takes flight into some ideal Sparta — a Finlandia of square-jawed analisers skylarking in the gymnasia or the baths, at ease with both their own and others’ genitalia. And what is that but nostalgia for a time before the Jews imposed seriousness upon the body?