Howard Jacobson - Shylock Is My Name

“ Get thee gone, is no proof of anything. Get thee gone is simply what those in power like saying to Jews.”

“But they didn’t only want you gone from their presence, did they? They wanted you gone from yourself, stripped of your faith and your self-worth…”

“And my money, don’t forget my money.”

“So they did know what their prize was.”

“Who can say? What if it wasn’t time alone that closed its fingers before I could be Christianised? What if, having said what they’d said, they were now content themselves? Content to have saved one of their own and be seen to have swindled me out of my money. It was all about appearances, as show trials often are. And make no mistake, no matter how it began, this became a show trial in the end. How to Jew the Jew. And thereafter, what if they didn’t much care whether I followed the conversion procedure or not? Though the order was malignantly meant, once having restored the status quo ante Iudaeus they had other things to think about, honour was satisfied, the merchant had won while briefly enjoying the masochistic ecstasy of losing, and ultimately it was my loss if I stubbornly went about Jewing it as before, hobbled as to cash, humiliated, orphaned either end, and without the intercession of Christian grace to save my soul. You can’t suppose they really cared about the state of my soul.”

Strulovitch thought about it. “They might have cared to the degree that they could boast of having changed its complexion.”

“There you have it! — cared for how it reflected on them. But they’d had their victory. And their own souls were evidently in good shape. They’d spoken of pity and exacted a cruel revenge. Very Christian of them.”

“But would they have believed such a conversion of you, anyway, given the contempt you’d always shown for Christianity?”

“Who can say? On the one hand Christians considered Jews too immured in obstinacy ever to convert, on the other they didn’t see how we could resist the light of Jesus once we beheld it. They were right on the first count about me. I hope I’d have taken a knife to my own throat rather than kneel abjectly in front of a painted mannikin.”

“So when you declared yourself ‘content’ to be converted you didn’t mean it?”

“I was answering a question in the form it was presented to me. ‘Art thou contented, Jew?’ If that was not a sneer, what was it? I had no fight left in me, but my reply—’I am content’—at least returned the compliment.”

“It was never your intention, then?”

“I only say ‘I hope’ I’d have taken a knife to my own throat. I can’t pretend to know what I’d have done had they summoned the energy to do more than congratulate one another and actually drag me off to church. But ‘content’ I would never have been. Do I strike you as a contented man?”

—

Strulovitch was sorry Shylock had not chosen to wear the gown and slippers he’d left him. He would have liked him to feel at home. Stay a while. Try a little of that contentment he scorned. Explore the area. Admire the winter landscape. Exchange reminiscences. Or just go on talking about Jews, a subject of which Strulovitch tired in principle but not in fact. The heat with which Shylock discussed it shocked and fascinated him. I the Jew, they the Christians — no two ways about it, no weasel words. Was it better like that, he wondered. A naked antagonism. No pretending that fences could be mended. An unending, ill-mannered, insoluble contrariety. Did it mean that all parties at least knew where they stood? That at least you knew your enemy. And would go on knowing him until the end of time.

Until the conversion of the Jews.

Such extremity of thought and language. Such eternities of mistrust and hostility. If Shylock does stick around he will need to learn to moderate himself in Beatrice’s company, Strulovitch thinks — Strulovitch a man frightened for and of his daughter.

—

Shylock had gone on a short walk and was looking down at Strulovitch’s fish. “Do you ever eat these?” he asked.

“They’re strictly ornamental,” Strulovitch said. The thought occurred to him that such a concept could be foreign to Shylock. If Strulovitch left him in the house, would he steal one for his lunch? Grab it from the pond with his hairy fingers and stuff it, wriggling, down his throat? I really don’t know who this man is, he thought. He could hear his mother saying “You invited him into your home? Just like that?” His wife, when she had been his wife, the same. And Beatrice. “Who is he, Dad?”

Were men generally more incautious than women when it came to who you let into your house, or was it just him?

“Would you like coffee?” he asked at last

Shylock smiled. “Tea is probably better, thank you, given how you English make coffee.”

“My coffee is good,” Strulovitch said. “I import the beans myself.”

Shylock put his hands together and then opened them. This was not the first time he had struck Strulovitch as making the sign of a man consenting quietly to arrest. “Shall I come in for it?”

“I could set a table out here.”

“Too cold,” Shylock replied, drawing his coat around him as he moved into the house.

The gesture was theatrical, the closing of a scene. Again Strulovitch thought, I do not know this man.

“I’m not sure how you breakfast,” Strulovitch said once they were inside.

“The usual way. At a table, with cutlery.”

“I’ll rephrase. I’m not sure on what you breakfast.”

“Toast will do me,” Shylock told him.

“I should have asked you last night what you would like,” Strulovitch said. “And whether you are…”

“Particular in what I eat? This side obsessiveness, yes I am. You are not, I gather.”

“It is not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man,” Strulovitch said with pomp, “but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.”

“You consider Jesus the best authority on the subject of kashrut ?”

“He lets me off the tedium of observance with a noble sentiment.”

“You think it noble, I find it sophistical. Why cannot we be defiled by what goes out and what comes in?”

“Why do we have to talk of defilement at all?”

“I don’t.”

“Then if there’s no defilement…?”

“Why bother with the distinctions? Because it is always worth distinguishing. Life, to be valued, should not be random and undifferentiated. I no more want to stuff everything down my mouth regardless than I want to experience every sensation. When I fell in love with Leah, I knew I did not want to love another woman. I distinguished her from other women, as she distinguished me from other men. To keep a kosher kitchen is to practise morality in the same way that keeping a faithful marriage is. The habit of conscientiousness in itself ministers to goodness.”

“You are sure you don’t confuse morality with neurosis?”

“There is less neurosis in observing than there is in lapsing. You secular Jews are more punctilious in your non-observance of the law than the Jew of faith is in his performance of it. You have as many things to remember not to do. As many festivals to miss, as many mitzvahs to forget, as many obligations to turn aside from.”

“That assumes I lapse meticulously. I am less deliberate than that. I simply don’t notice.”

“Somewhere along the line you made a choice to lapse. And that’s where your neurosis comes in. That original choice of yours must have been highly principled, whatever you say, because you are, in so many other ways, cut out to be the full Jew. Diet aside, look what a fanatic separater you are. You separate ideas. You separate people. You have separated yourself. You separate your daughter—”