A novel of despair that brings hope

Published in the Jewish Chronicle 1 September 2006

Just back from holiday, where I rigorously enforced my vacation rule: no newspapers. Like a cabbie who refuses to drive on holiday, I and plenty of other journalists can only truly relax when we put aside the rituals of the day job. Of course, it’s hard to escape the habit - I found myself examining the inside pages of the Cornish Times one afternoon, so intense is my addiction. But for two weeks, I pretty well went cold turkey.

Which meant the JC of August 11 remained unopened until my return the other day, its front page assemblage of anti-Jewish quotes and cartoons from around the world a nasty surprise.

It would always have been hard to stomach, but it carried an extra punch because of the book that ended up dominating my August: Howard Jacobson’s new, Booker-longlisted novel, “Kalooki Nights”.

Broadsheet reviewers had praised it as “a work of genius” - and they were right. The book is Jacobson’s masterpiece. The writing is flawless, with the author’s trademark blending of tragedy and comedy. A ferocious intelligence courses through it, reminiscent of Philip Roth at his “Counterlife” best.

On page after page, dilemmas of Jewish life - down to the scintilla of discomfort when a non-Jew uses the word “kosher” - are teased out with dazzling precision. Not that this is just some meditation of the intellect. The novel also unfurls a gripping, affecting human story - of an orthodox Jewish family destroyed from the inside.

That would be enough, but the ambition of “Kalooki Nights” goes further even than those laudatory reviews revealed. The book is not just concerned with evoking post-war life in Jewish Manchester or even the Anglo-Jewish condition. It wrestles instead with the timeless, deepest questions of the Jews. It is almost biblical in its reach, daring to seek the meaning behind five thousand years of Jewish suffering. Have we brought this on ourselves or has a stubborn, unbending God chosen us for unending pain? Elohim, as Jacobson has him, is all but a character in “Kalooki Nights” and the novel is a kind of argument with the Creator. In that sense, it reads like the story of Jonah in contemporary dress - if not a latter-day Book of Job.

The book should also ignite an argument with Jacobson’s fellow Jews. His narrator, Max Glickman, suggests that the concept of havdalah, separation, captures the very essence of Judaism. Milk from meat, kosher from treif, us from them. We, the Jews, are meant to live apart from them, the gentiles. Max marries two non-Jewish women and both marriages fail: each wife is an antisemite. Yet, when he marries a Jew, that relationship too is doomed: this Jewish bride is weighed down with depression. Max ends up alone.

“Kalooki Nights” offers the bleakest conclusion: that we Jews have been so damaged by our persecution, especially the Holocaust, which looms over every page, intruding into the deepest corners of the characters’ psyches, that we have become impossible. We cannot live with ourselves and we cannot live with others. The final line carries the heaviest weight: a non-Jewish, half-German woman declares that it is not she who has suffered. “It’s your lives that are ruined.”

This is a counsel of deep despair. And yet it is not wholly eccentric. An unstated version of it is implied by plenty of Jews, even, in a way, by that JC front page. It is the belief that antisemitism is constant, ubiquitous and ineradicable.

Several Jewish commentators describe Jew-hatred as “protean,” a virus that may change shape, but which is permanent. Historical events may give it this form or that, but antisemitism is a force outside history - as much a part of the human essence as love or jealousy. And yet, if the Jews live alone, that hardly brings a reprieve: Israel remains loathed and vulnerable to external assault.

This could be the conclusion one draws from “Kalooki Nights”. Push them hard enough, and even the book’s philosemites lash out with a “you people.” Yet no cosy Jewish enclave is possible either.

Despite all that, I did not come away from this novel in despair, not least because I don’t take that most pessimistic view of antisemitism. I do not believe that every non-Jew ultimately carries a hatred of Jews, though I know that anti-Jewish prejudice is sunk deep into the soil of European and other cultures. Nor do I believe that Jews’ association with each other is doomed to melancholy and darkness: there is a humour and vitality about us which is truly irrepressible. For evidence of both, one need look no further than “Kalooki Nights” - a book so profoundly good it is, in itself, an affirmation of life.

Posted on September 1, 2006 12:13 PM

---