Kalooki Nights by Howard Jacobson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Rosenhead Gambit

I had a Jewish colleague during graduate school whose parents had emigrated from Germany to London in the 1930’s. Unsure of the state of anti-Semitism in England at the time, they changed their surname from Rosenkopf to Rosenhead to create what they thought would be ethnic anonymity. Mr. & Mrs. Rosenhead could easily be characters in Kalooki Nights in their move to disguise, but not really, their Jewishness.

Howard Jacobson doesn’t so much create characters as a world in which characters work in a certain way. That world is one of Being Jewish, or as he puts it: Jewishry. It’s a world with the same physics but with different initial conditions than the world within which it exists in parallel. Therefore, it is permanently out of sync. It grates, it irritates. Often it mirrors but it’s never quite comfortable with either itself or the larger world. And despite its relatively small size, Jewishry has a strong claim to being the original and authentic world. This is of course a mixed blessing. No one likes a smart ass neighbour who thinks he knows more than you do, especially when he does know more than you do.

A fundamental conceit of Christianity is a presumed transformation of the soul through baptism, allowing entry into membership of a self-defined chosen people. This is a clear attempt to establish a metaphysical equivalence to Jewishry. We might conclude that, after 2000 years, this attempt has failed, largely because nobody thought the thing through to the longer term: Easy in also means easy out. Christians can annul their Christian being, and do so at an increasing rate, simply by repudiating and walking away from the sacraments.

This is an essential problem created by the somewhat unbiblical Christian doctrine of supercession, that the Church is the real Israel. This doctrine of course relies on large-scale rejection of much of the Hebrew scriptures concerning the destiny of and divine promises to the progeny of Isaac, a task initiated by the Jew, Paul of Tarsus without much real analysis and no foundation in the recorded opinion of Jesus. And doctrine of course is a matter of belief. Belief suspended is special status out the window. But Jews can never opt out, escape being Jewish - neither the world nor their Jewish past will let them (“…there was no refuge from the dead,” Jacobson writes).

Even the rejection by other Jews can’t destroy the fact of being Jewish. The atheistic, unobservant Jewish father of Jacobson’s narrator sets his theme early on: “Jew, Jew, Jew. Why, why, why, as my father asked until the asking killed him, does everything always have to come back to Jew, Jew, Jew?” Why indeed? There are millions of lapsed Catholics, Methodists and even Mormons, not to mention unobservant ex-Hindus, ex-Buddhists, ex-Muslims. But there are no ex-Jews. There are pious, secular and atheist Jews, but they are all Jews, if not recognised as such among Jews then always among Christians who provide a timely reminder in the event of any sort of social tension. No abstruse, wishy-washy, theological claptrap about transformed spiritual states. Jewishry is in the blood, from whence it reaches the soul, not vice-versa.

Christians are simultaneously jealous and scornful of the reality, the physicality of Jewish identity. It threatens and annoys them at the same time that it attracts and confirms them. Without Jews, Christians have no real identity. ‘Without us there is no you’ is not a bad answer to the Christian (or Muslim) who asks the Jew, Jew, Jew question. This gets under Christian skin - like Hillary does Donald, in fact exactly like Hillary does Donald. And then they, the Christians, act badly indeed.



"Goyim do that. They get upset, see red, hit the roof, and take it out on you anally." To be fair, Trump has a Jewish son in law. Perhaps that's reason enough.

Jewishry is not a herd of musk-oxen, acting jointly against the world which periodically tries to exterminate it. “We are psychologically at war with ourselves, that’s what it comes down to. One half of us would destroy the other half if it could…” Jewishry is permanently dialectical: “…that’s what I’m paid for - excoriating my people when I’m not shielding them from harm.” Its inhabitants exemplify what the Calvinist theologian Karl Barth identified as the essential paradox of God revealing himself as he conceals himself: “He was my tree of knowledge but he was also my angel of oblivion…illuminator and expunger. But I suppose that’s what we’re all doing, making people remember what we would wish them to forget.” Like a burlesque fan dancer, Jewishry has its anti-Semitic aficionados who are fascinated by its revelatory concealment and are effectively seduced by it: “Consigned in their Jew-hating to an eternity of Jew.”

Meaning is not stable within Jewishry in which there is an inherent and arbitrary divine nominalism. Names, especially proper names have no fixed denotation but float as if directed by a deity that only is paying attention intermittently. Ilse Cohen, a suburban lady, player of cards, becomes Ilse Koch, the Bitch of Belsen; the more well-known Isadore Demsky is “transmogrified” to Kirk Douglas. Even the meaning of Jewishry is questionable: "To a Jew there is no acceptable way of being Jewish. Every other Jew does it wrong."

But it is perhaps in sexual politics that meaning is most ambiguous. Jewishry is a mysterious world that attracts adventurous women, to whom adventurous Jewish men are attracted for the same reason. At least that’s the story of Jacobson’s Max Glickman who ‘marries out’ four times. Each time mistaking the female intention as well as his own. The symbolism of Jew and Gentile are mutually misconstrued. Max summarises the situation neatly, “When the devil seeks to make trouble in a Jewish family, he does it as a blonde.” Why this should be so is a further enigma which baffled even Sigmund Freud, a Jew who knew more than most about hidden meanings.

Comedy, at least comedy created with the skill of Jacobson, is probably the only effective vehicle for describing the complexity of Jewishry in situ, as it were, the casual passing references to non-events at the intersection of two worlds:

“Noseless, it’s possible that I could have got away with being merely Slavic and depressed. Whereas where Asher walked, the whole of the Old Testament walked with him. Seeded like a pomegranate he was with the sorrows and tribulations of his people, but juicy with the wine of pomegranate, too, spicy with spikenard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, his lips like a thread of scarlet. And people notice when you look like that. Especially people from cold countries”

Who else could get a laugh out of a joke based on ancient Hebrew poetic tropes? I doubt even Stanley Elkin. In any case, Jacobson is undoubtedly right, "Only mockery keeps you on the right side of idolatry." Perhaps that is what Mr. & Mrs. Rosenhead had in mind after all.

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