Howard Jacobson - Shylock Is My Name

“She doesn’t go a bundle on Maimonides.”

“It doesn’t have to be Maimonides. Do you have any Roth on your shelves?”

“Joseph, Cecil, Henry, Philip? I have walls of Roth.”

“Philip will do. Do you have the one where everyone is leading someone else’s life?”

“That’s all of them.”

“A shame Leah isn’t here. She’d know which I’m thinking of. It’s the one where Roth lets the anti-circumcisionists have it with both barrels. Circumcision, he or someone like him argues, was conceived to refute the pastoral.”

“Christ! And you think that would make it all right with my daughter? What in God’s name does refuting the pastoral mean?”

“You ask me that! You who venture into your own garden as though it’s snake-infested. Do you even own wellingtons? My friend, you are a walking refutation of the pastoral.”

“And that’s because I’m circumcised?”

“You were circumcised in order that you shouldn’t, in the first days of your life, when you were still in a womb-swoon, mistake life for an idyll.”

“Then it’s worked. In fact I’d say it’s worked too well.”

“You’re bound to think that. It’s what you were circumcised to think. The heavy hand of human values, in our friend Roth’s words, descended on you early. As it should.”

“That’s not going to convince anyone who sees precisely those values as inhuman.”

“Those who are sentimental about being human will never be convinced.”

“Worse and worse, Shylock.”

“Look. The mohel’s knife acts mercifully, to save the boy from the vagaries of nature. I don’t just mean the monkeys. I mean ignorance, the absence of God, the refusal of allegiance to a people or an idea — especially the idea that life is an obligation as well as a gift. We are not born free of loyalties and oaths. The mohel’s knife symbolises what we owe.”

“Subdues us, in other words.”

“Is that so terrible if the alternative is running lawless in the wilderness?”

Strulovitch was the wrong one to ask. What struck him as terrible one day, didn’t strike him as all that terrible the next.

“We can’t be saved from nature a little bit,” Shylock went on. “It’s all or nothing, it’s human values or the monkeys.”

Strulovitch’s mind turned from abstractions of duty to the living daughter in whom, at the hour of her birth, he’d glimpsed the meaning of covenant. “Well that might fix it for the boys,” he said, as though Shylock had both won and lost the argument, “but what help is there for the girls? There’s no mohel’s knife to subdue a daughter. Not in the civilised world, there isn’t. In the civilised world, men who talk of subduing daughters are stoned to death.”

“And that,” said Shylock, in a tone of steely quiet, “is why daughters are a byword for disloyalty.”

Were they a byword for disloyalty? I used to think I was an extremist, Strulovitch thought.

Shylock read his reservations. “You wouldn’t anyway dispute,” he said, much calmer now, “that it’s because her footballer is a ‘natural’ man that Beatrice loves him. At least if you have described him to me correctly.”

“He is not the question. She is. Does she love him? Who knows, but I’m pretty sure she’ll give it a good try now. And my telling her that life isn’t meant to be a womb-swoon won’t deter her.”

“She’s a bright young woman.”

“She’s sixteen! That’s too young to be giving up on life as an idyll.”

“Then it’s too young to be Jewish.”

“Perhaps you should have thought of that before you gleefully proposed this course of action.”

“Did I propose a course of action?”

“In a dumbshow, yes.”

“I mustn’t have realised you were so impressionable.”

“As to take you at your word?”

“I uttered no word.”

“Call it what you will. But I must ask you what you meant by it.”

“Mischief.”

“Is that what you’re here to cause me?”

“Cause you? No. The very opposite. But all isn’t yet lost. By your own account, if you can hear her silence, she hasn’t gone.”

“And what do you propose I do to keep her?” He chanced a long look into Shylock’s covert eyes. “Bar the doors?”

He let his words hang in the air, let the shutters to Shylock’s windows swing open, let the sweet disgusting smell of goats and monkeys enter.

Two could play at mischief.

—

But he didn’t bar his own door.

When Strulovitch has things to consider he considers them, if he can, in the presence of Kay.

If he could pretend they were still able to discuss what mattered to them, one of the things he would not have to consider was his part in her disintegration. Never mind that a doctor had told him he was not the cause, he knew he had made life intolerable to her, not just on account of Beatrice, but on account, quite simply of him — who he was, what he was like, what he believed one minute and then disbelieved the next, his inflamed Jewishness that blew hot and cold but was always in the way, like a deranged and disreputable lodger, disturbing their domestic quiet.

Yes, his father had welcomed him back into the fold when he married Kay, but she wasn’t Jewish beneath her fingernails as he was even when he thought he wasn’t being Jewish at all. She taught religious studies in a non-denominational school — respect for other people’s beliefs, respect for yourself, respect for your body, respect for the environment. She happened to be what she was, others happened to be something else. End of story. She didn’t start when she saw an Arab in the street. She didn’t start when she saw a Hassid in the street either. She wasn’t beset by enemies outside the faith or fanatics within it. Strictly speaking she had no faith. Strulovitch — or Strulo as she called him — insisted that he too had no faith. And maybe he was telling the truth. What he had was stronger than any faith she had encountered. He had a madness, a frenzy. Had she been forced to teach what he had she’d have called it Judaeolunacy.

Judaeolunacy for A2 Year students.

“You couldn’t be more wrong,” he told her. “I’m indifferent.”

But even his indifference, Kay thought, was a sort of delirium. He didn’t go to synagogue because going to synagogue irked him, but not to go irked him just as much. “Look at them,” he’d say if they happened to be driving past a synagogue on a Saturday morning. “Look at them in their fucking yarmulkes! What are they doing remembering to go every fucking week? Don’t they ever just forget? Don’t they have anything else to think about?”

“Leave them alone,” Kay would tell him. “You don’t want to go to shul, they do. It’s not your business. What do you care?”

“I don’t care.”

“Then why are you swearing?”

“Because they’re praying.”

“So?”

“Being Jewish isn’t just about praying.”

“For you no. For me no. For them yes.”

“It’s not Jewish,” he’d shout, “saying for me no, for them yes . That’s Christian talk. We are a people who value x above y because x is true and y isn’t. This is called ethics, Kay. It’s what we’re famed for. For me no, so for them no! ”

“Strulo, why does it matter to you so much what’s Jewish and what isn’t?”

“It doesn’t. I don’t give a shit about Jews.”

The next day he’d be throwing the Guardian in the bin, saying that Jews were on the brink of extermination and it was the Guardian ’s fault.

Kay wondered why he had never gone to Israel and enlisted with the IDF.

“Israel? What’s Israel got to do with anything?”