A willing victim
Kalooki Nights, by Howard Jacobson

Maria Borland
posted 13 March 2008

‘I'm not by any means conventionally Jewish. I don't go to shul. What I feel is that I have a Jewish mind, I have a Jewish intelligence. I feel linked to previous Jewish minds of the past.’ - Howard Jacobson

The above could just as easily been written by Max Glickman, the Jewish and Jew- obsessed narrator of Kalooki Nights, who believes the Jewish mind is essentially ‘a dialectic mind’, as by its author. Max is a cartoonist, Jacobson a novelist. Their artistic achievements are aptly described by Harvey Kurtzman’s (creator of Mad magazine) assertion (also quoted in the novel): 'The style I developed was necessarily thoughtful under a rowdy surface'. Such a style, refined in its crudity, coupled with Jacobson’s ability to create a convincing doppelganger of himself in his fiction, are two traits that have led to comparisons with Philip Roth. In fact, Kalooki Nights, especially in its caustic humour, so resembles Roth’s early work that I began to wonder if the novel itself wasn’t a bit anachronistic, or if it even mattered given the novel’s preoccupation with the palimpsestic nature of historical and personal narratives. And that seems, overall, an appropriately conflicted response to a work whose story is constantly filtered through the ‘dialectic’ (Jewish?) mind of its narrator/author.

Although anecdotal in style, the novel hinges on a high stakes plot: Max’s best friend Manny (troubled, asexual, orthodox Jew) gasses his parents. Max is then commissioned to write a ‘treatment’ on Manny post-incarceration for a production company. The second half of the novel concerns a re-establishment, on vastly different terms, of their boyhood relationship, which leads to the revelation why he committed this ‘unholy’ crime.

Other important milestones in Max’s life include the publication of his two epic works: Five Thousand Years of Bitterness and its sequel No Bloody Wonder. Together they make up a history of the suffering of the Jewish people told through the medium of caricature. As Max tells his homicidal friend: ‘Abstraction doesn't solve it, Manny. Abstraction's a con. Only ridicule solves it. Only mockery keeps you the right side of idolatry’. The belief that caricature reveals a greater truth is upheld by Jacobson in his characterisation of many of the figures that inhabit Max’s world, including a string of ex-girlfriends and wives: anti-Semitic ‘shiksehs’ and one pathologically depressed, self-hating Jewess. ‘Zoë, Chloë, Björk, Märike, Alÿs, and Kätchen’. They are unified by the umlaut into a monstrously seductive agent of destruction, whose palms reveal 'no warm accommodating pouches of skin, no life or love lines, just a vexed criss-cross of Judeaophobia like the railway tracks going in and out of Auschwitz'.

Equally, Jacobson’s dialogue would not be out of place in an absurdist drama. A conversation between Zoë and Max where they disagree on how they first met is Pinter-esque in its comic depiction of the human tendency for revisionist narratives, unable to decide if the man they saw who didn’t jump off the roof was in fact Chinese or African, or if Zoë was ever a kiss-o-gram.

Jacobson displays a linguistic playfulness that, as with perhaps all elements of Kalooki Nights, is inextricably tied to Jewish belief and tradition: ‘we did not tolerate idols. In which case why did we kiss words?’. Talking of ‘the shitty shetls’ of ‘Novoropissik’ he exploits both the Hebrew and English languages for conflicting connotations and homophones whilst revelling in alliteration. This is frequently accompanied by a remarkably visceral metaphor: ‘Any chicken-fat sentimentality attaching to our Novoropissik origins had long been burnt off by the white fires of my father’s secularity’.

The ‘fine satiric lines’ with which Max draws his cartoons are ‘like little daggers of division and self-hurt’. The pencil lines may be fine but the lines Jacobson draws between mental and physicality cruelty are always smudged. A particularly disturbing manifestation of this involves a short story running somewhat parallel to the main narrative involving a young Buchenwald inmate who has erotic fantasies about Ilse Koch - ‘She-Wolf of the SS’. This is clearly a reflection of Max’s masochistic tendencies, and perhaps even a fantasy he has indulged in. Yet it has its basis in fact.

Events from Max’s childhood find their place in the overarching narratives the narrator has fused in adulthood: his liberal Zionist leanings, the separation of man/woman, gentile/Jew, are re-affirmed as he reappraises events in his life and the lives of others. Fortunately he does this whilst vividly recording incidental details of the cloth, skin, stone, and food of Jewish north Manchester in the 1950s that litter his memory and have yet to find a symbolic place in his Judeo-centric worldview. I would include among these the 'Kalooki Nights' of the title, Max’s mother’s social gatherings (Kalooki being a Jewish form of the card game Gin Rummy) that provide a vivid background to his formative years.

Amid the caricatures, the intellectual debate and the shock humour there is the fragile figure of Manny Washinsky, whose gassing of his own parents could easily have been the highest pitch of irony, the ultimate metaphor for living through the past. The repulsion and suspicion Manny evokes in others, the analysis, exploitation or wishing away inspired by this essentially insubstantial collection of bones and neuroses combine to create a painful image of tenderness. Much of the second half of the book is devoted to the gentle teasing out of Manny’s story. But who is Max to tell his story? What right has he? These are questions the narrator continues to ask of himself. The fact is, he has told Manny’s story and it is this story that surpasses the tortuous mind of the narrator himself and concludes the narrative on a subtle note of pathos.

Kalooki Nights is a pugnacious novel that employs bigotry, Jewish and gentile stereotypes, misogyny, and holocaust jokes in order to arrive at some kind of equilibrium, if not conclusion. It is unflinching in its revelation of cruelty and of vulnerability. I was provoked and thrilled by such provocation. Max’s masochism, it appears, is contagious, and I found myself a willing victim.