Howard Jacobson - Shylock Is My Name

“Yes,” said Shylock. “I’ve seen a few.”

Strulovitch opened his eyes wide. “Such as?” he still more inanely said.

“You don’t have the time,” Shylock told him.

“And you presumably don’t remember.”

“On the contrary I remember everything.”

“So go on, humour me, what’s the biggest change?” Shylock closed his eyes and pretended to take something — a straw, a raffle ticket — from an imaginary hat. “They used to spit on me, now they tell me Jewish jokes.”

“Good jokes?”

“Not the way they tell them.”

“But kindly meant, presumably.”

“Tell me a joke that’s kindly meant.”

Strulovitch didn’t try, but made a weighing motion with his hands. “Well, on balance I’d say joking, kindly or otherwise, has to beat spitting.”

Shylock peered deep into his glass. When he concentrated, his eyes seemed to recede and close over as though they contained more of darkness than of light. Strulovitch knew he could appear stern himself, but the deep shadows cast by Shylock’s eyes unnerved even him. Was this look another of his reprimands, he wondered. Have I trespassed in some way? Is it for me to decide for him whether joking beats spitting?

“What strikes me as more interesting,” Shylock said peremptorily, as though to make it clear to Strulovitch that he was not keeping up conversationally, “is that they can’t see a Jew without thinking they have to tell him a joke. Do they sing ‘Suwannee’ every time they meet a black man?”

Strulovitch wished he knew the answer to that. “They might under their breath. But I take a joke to one’s face to be the equivalent of a little white flag. Look, we come in peace.”

“And when they joke about my unbending, mercenary nature?” He was evidently unmoved by Strulovitch’s pacifism. “When they finger banknotes in my face, when they jeer at my separatism, wondering that I consider myself favoured when everything about my existence declares the opposite, when they question my morality — though until we taught them they didn’t know morality existed — when they dispute the principles by which I live, the things I believe, the food I put in my mouth, and when they expound their theories on where, given my faith, I should be living — are they still waving a little white flag?”

Strulovitch remembered boys at school making fun of his name — Strudelbum — and telling him to go back to where he came from. Where did they think that was? Ur of the Chaldees?

“So where are they sending you?” he asked.

“To hell, eventually. But in the meantime to nowhere in particular — that’s their point. We had a chance at a Homeland and we blew it. Belonging was never what we were good at anyway. Being a stranger is what we do. It’s the diaspora, they are at pains to assure me, that brings out the best in us. Which neatly sidesteps the question of what brings out the best in them . But they feel no embarrassment in proclaiming that the proper Jew is a wandering Jew. Citizens of everywhere and nowhere, dandified tramps subsisting wherever we can squeeze ourselves in, at the edges and in the crevices. Precarious but urbane, like flâneurs clinging to a rock face, expressing our marvellously creative marginality.”

“My daughter thinks the same.”

“I could speak to her…”

Strulovitch risked an ironic expression.

Shylock’s face gave nothing away. His olive skin was polished to a mirrored bleakness, reflecting all that there was of sorrow. “Who’s to say I won’t make a better job of speaking to yours?” he said. “Since I’m here I might as well give you the benefit of my experience.”

“ That ’s why you’re here?”

“I’m here because I’m here. What other explanation could satisfy an unbeliever such as you?”

—

The men sit in silence for half an hour, neither looking at the other. Finally, Strulovitch does the unhostly thing and rubs his eyes.

“You can choose any bedroom you fancy,” he says. “But the best are at the back of the house looking out over the Edge. If you stay up late or wake early you might see one of the wizards come tobogganing down.”

“Ah, so it’s a magic place,” Shylock says, sniffing paganism.

Strulovitch remembers the sketch in which the Italian comedian Dario Fo attempts to eat himself. Shylock looks as though he means to eat Alderley Edge.

Strulovitch laughs with deep appreciation. Nothing beats my people’s disdain for folklore.

He regrets he doesn’t have more Jewish friends with whom he can exchange black thoughts and scoff at nature.

This pang of cultural loneliness might explain why he suddenly asks what book Shylock was reading to his wife earlier in the day. One last convivial conversation about literature before sleep.

“You should be able to guess,” Shylock says.

“It looked well worn. If it’s the Bible, I’d be honoured if you’d read to her from one of mine. I have a Geneva Bible that’s beautiful to hold and opens easily.”

“Thank you. But we are giving the Bible a rest. We fear we have exhausted Jacob and his sheep. And besides, these days Leah prefers a novel. Last week we finished Crime and Punishment for the second time. I’ve promised her Karamazov . But for the moment she is disposed to laugh, and takes heart from hearing me read to her from Portnoy’s Complaint . Some of the chapters are embarrassing but I feel it would be wrong to leave them out.”

—

Needy or not, Strulovitch would have liked those to be the last words exchanged between them for the night. He felt he could sleep soundly on them. Sad, that he had no wife capable of taking heart from what he read to her. But sometimes it’s possible to feel pleased for the hearts of other people.

Shylock, however, showed no signs of wanting to retire. Strulovitch was beginning to feel crowded by him. He was a guest one needed all one’s energy for. Though his eyes leaked no light, and his mouth was resolutely unplayful, he still suggested a sort of irascible sociability, as though conversation, however desolate, were his medium and he dreaded its cessation. Or was it just sleep he dreaded? Did he ever turn in, Strulovitch wondered. Was this to be the price of having him here — that there would be no more sleep for him either? Only talk of daughters and identity, anger, betrayal, monkeys…?

To keep himself awake, he asked if Shylock could remember the last joke the Gentiles had told him.

“Do you want it how I tell it or how they tell it?”

“How you tell it.”

“Then I’ll tell it how they tell it. ‘G rr eenberg goes to the doctor because he’s not feeling vell…’ As a matter of interest have you ever met anyone who talks like that?”

“No…except maybe the occasional rabbi.”

“It seems more likely that they’re aping what frightens them.”

“Let me tell you that no one’s frightened of us any more.”

“You must speak for yourself. I can still scare dogs.” Strulovitch didn’t say that his own dogs hadn’t been scared. But then they were used to keeping company with an inordinate Jew.

“I don’t doubt,” he said, “that you, personally, still have the power to terrify. I meant ‘us’ collectively.”

“I’m not sure that the distinction between ‘I’ and ‘us’ quite works. The individual Jew brings the collective Jew with him into any room. It’s the collective Jew that Christians see. Person to person, I grant you, they can be very nice. I have received proposals of marriage from Christians sincerely wanting to make amends. I’ve had my portrait sympathetically painted. A German apologised to me in a cemetery once. But when I extended my hand he seemed afraid to take it. Why? Because at that moment it wasn’t the individual Shylock’s hands, it was the hand of the collective Jew. And collectively, we still connect to the uncanny.”