Howard Jacobson - Shylock Is My Name

“I thought you were a Zionist.”

“A Zionist, me! Are you mad?”

“So why are you burning the Guardian ?”

“I’m not burning it, I’m binning it. Interesting, though, that you said ‘burning.’ I’d call that a Freudian slip. You’re remembering the ovens. That’s what reading the Guardian does to you.”

“Why would reading the Guardian make me think of ovens?”

“Because the Guardian hates Israel and Israel is the only place that will save us when they start the ovens up again.”

“So you are a Zionist!”

“Only when I read the Guardian .”

And then Beatrice came along, Beatrice the child of their early middle age, their belated gift, in Strulovitch’s words, from God. Like Isaac, miraculously born to a laughing, unbelieving Sarah. Isaac — laughter. Beatrice — joy.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Strulo,” Kay said. “It’s not as though we’re both a hundred. Can’t we leave God out of this.”

But she agreed to the child being called Beatrice.

It had been a precarious pregnancy and a difficult birth. Strulovitch saw that it took strength from his wife which she never fully regained. It fell to him, he thought, to keep Beatrice on the straight and narrow, to ensure that the high purpose he discerned in her delivery would be honoured.

Not a Jewish education — heaven forfend! — just a Jewish consciousness, or at least a Jewish consciousness sufficient to a Jewish wedding. And not so much a Jewish wedding as a Jewish lineage. And even that was overstating it. Not a not Jewish lineage — that was closer to what Strulovitch meant.

“I agree with you it would be nice if she found a boy we could all approve of,” Kay said. “But beyond that—”

“Beyond that! Beyond that, Kay, is everything that makes us serious.”

“You’re a Judaeolunatic,” she reminded him.

Beatrice, when she was old enough, cheered her mother on. “Tell him, Mummy. The man’s off his rocker.”

“Don’t call him ‘the man,’ darling, he’s your father.”

“Is he? Do you know what he said to me last night? He said I was letting Hitler win.”

“What were you doing?”

“Nothing. Snogging — not even that. Just pecking someone goodnight.”

“Where?”

“Outside our front door.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know his name. Feng, I think. A Chinese boy.”

Aha, Kay thought. Feng not Fishel. She wanted to know if her husband really was telling their daughter that by going out with a Chinese boy she was letting Hitler win. She would divorce him if that were true.

Strulovitch knew to back off. “You should have seen what she was doing…”

“I don’t care what she was doing. Did you say she was letting Hitler win?”

Strulovitch knew to back off even further. “Not exactly win . More…”

“More what?”

“Kay, it was in the heat of the moment. You don’t know what it’s like out there. You don’t know who she’s mixing with.”

“I’m prepared to bet Feng isn’t a Nazi stormtrooper.”

“Feng!” Strulovitch wasn’t so sure. He had seen Bridge on the River Kwai . But he kept his counsel. Feng was better than Fritz.

Shortly afterwards he dragged Beatrice home by her hair. Shortly after that Kay was felled.

Strulovitch wondered if he should mourn her as one mourns the dead, but knew he had to go on loving her as one loves the living. The trouble was, he couldn’t. Open the heart and it would break. But the forms of a domestic life — the greetings, the expressions of tenderness and concern, the passing on of news — those he thought he could manage. He fell into the habit of talking to her about what bothered him, quietly, without any excitement, much as Shylock talked to Leah, keeping all hint of Judaeolunacy out of his voice, censoring the news. When her face found repose she was still pretty, still recognisably the woman he had loved, the wife who called him Strulo, but ravaged by whatever had struck her down: disruption of the blood supply to her brain, a terrible tiredness, and him.

On this occasion, though, all that bothered him was bound to be disruptive of calm. He had a number of matters to consider but there wasn’t one of them he dared disclose to her, for fear — just in case: for who knew? — she understood. So he sat with her for an hour, holding her hand, wiping her mouth, kissing her cheek, feeling very lonely but trying to imagine how much more lonely she must have been, locked inside wherever it was to which he and fate together had consigned her.

Which left him with a number of matters still to consider, and these he considered in his office, taking time off, occasionally, to look at Solomon Joseph Solomon’s lovely study for Love’s First Lesson .

—

The first and most pressing: whether to let Beatrice go unhindered for the time being, allow her her moment of outrage and then follow her — but follow her where?

The second: whether there was any compromise possible in the matter of circumcision; whether there was such a thing as demi-circumcision, a halfway house acceptable to Jew and Gentile alike.

The third: how brutish was circumcision — no half measures but the whole shebang — anyway? Were Roth and Shylock and the other Jewish sages right, was circumcision an act of the highest human responsibility, a badge not of backwardness but enlightenment?

The fourth: if Shylock was not here to cause him mischief — but had caused it all the same — why was he here?

Unable to decide what to do about Beatrice, since anything further from him would only make things worse, and wanting to clear his head of Shylock, he decided to start with circumcision. Shylock had said it all started with circumcision—“it” being the ancient grudge Jew and Gentile bore each other — but would it all finish with circumcision?

“I can’t promise you,” Strulovitch’s first wife, Ophelia-Jane, had told him early in their courtship, “that if we marry and have a son I will be able to consent to your mutilating him.”

It wasn’t so early in their courtship that Strulovitch couldn’t ask her, in return, “Would you call me mutilated?”

“In appearance, do you mean?”

“I mean however you mean. ‘Mutilated’ is your word. But what other yardstick for mutilation is there?”

“There is the yardstick of psychology.”

“You think I might be psychologically mutilated?”

“Well, scarred at least. I don’t see how it could be otherwise.”

“I have a few things to say to that. The first is that ‘scarred’ is not the same as ‘mutilated.’ Do I take it, therefore, that you withdraw the mutilation charge? The second is that ‘how could it be otherwise’ is not an argument in proof of what you say, it’s just another way of saying it. You think I must be scarred because you abominate the ritual. Could it simply be that because you abominate the ritual you wish me to be scarred?”

She put both hands to her head and pushed her hair back, as though she needed more brain space to deal with his logic chopping.

“Let’s leave it for now,” she said.

But it was always present between them, like the fear of illness or an unresolved infidelity, and a week before they married she brought it up again.

“I really don’t think I can go along with it,” she said.

“The wedding?”

“The mutilation.”

“Then let’s agree to bring forth girl children only.”

“And how do we do that?”

“We can’t. But we can agree to bring forth neither.”

“Is what I’m asking so much?”

Was it? Wasn’t it? Strulovitch wasn’t sure. Had he known how the birth of a child would affect him — how powerfully he would be struck by the concept of covenant, and even then in relation to a girl, where there was no question of ratifying it with circumcision — he might have decided that what Ophelia-Jane was asking was indeed too much. But he was young and ignorant of the sensations that can assail a father. He didn’t fully know his own mind and suspected that if need be he would always be able to change hers. Besides which, his own father had talked of burying him, which made him not well disposed to the faith his father had talked of burying him in. To hell with the whole business. So no, she wasn’t asking too much.