Kalooki Nights (10 page)

‘Because it’s too late for me. It’s the future I’m looking to. Shani’s future. Maxie’s future. Though a fat lot of thanks they’ll give me.’

It was always around about this point that someone or other would look at a watch and suggest that we go for a walk while there was still future left. But for all the hiking boots and rucksacks and moorland expectation, people rarely left. It was too comfortable where they were, opening the gates of the ghetto, imagining Jews without Jewishness, dunking biscuits into tea, and looking at my mother.

3

Not true that I wouldn’t in the future give thanks to my father for hurrying me out into the Gentile light.

I thought of him and thanked him frequently when I was older, going to art school in South London, dressing like a goyisher housepainter, throwing warm beer down my throat and wooing the likes of Chloë Anderson, the college beauty with the Slavic cheekbones who, on our first date, confused me with an Aaron Blaiwais in the print department, and on our second with an Arnie Rosenfield who sculpted.

‘Do you think we are all one person?’ I asked her on our third. ‘Do we all look the same same to you, or do you just like Jews generically?’

Chloë Anderson’s finely etched brows arched further from her eyes than most people’s, which gave her a look of perpetual disapproval. Her nose, too, was constructed on a disdainful tilt. Everything on her face wanting to be somewhere else, or with someone else. ‘To be honest with you,’ she said, ‘I don’t like Jews at all.’

‘So what are you doing with me?’

For a moment I thought her brows might come away from her face altogether. ‘Penance,’ she said.

Was she joking? When I ask myself why I took her to wife, given her hostility to me as a representative of my people (and excluding the obvious: that it was
because
of her hostility to me as a representative of my people), that’s the only answer I can come up with – to discover once and for all whether she was joking. And of course (because in my heart I knew she
wasn’t
joking) to see if she would remember on the day which of the Jews she didn’t like she was marrying.

I thought of my father on my wedding night, when Chloë told me that though she wasn’t Catholic she had spent some time at a Catholic school where they had taught her to pray for all the Jews they knew as they were earmarked for eternal damnation. ‘Do you mind if I pray for you tonight, darling?’ she asked me.

Darling
! Was that darling Aaron, darling Arnie, or darling me?And did it matter?

As for the praying, well, yes, that I did mind, actually. She was already on her knees by the bed, her hands folded together like a small child’s, her hair tied in a ribbon, naked but for the ring I had bought her and the startlingly explicit silver crucifix with which her mother had presented her to mark our nuptials. It was a shame to interrupt her in her quiveringly voluptuous orisons – her white flesh cathedraled in solemnity, even her breath stilled so as not to offend the silence – but yes, yes I most decidedly did mind.

‘Couldn’t you leave it until tomorrow night?’ I wondered.

‘Please yourself,’ she said, getting up and blowing out the great
white cathedral candles she had bought (presumably from some Catholic book and expiation emporium) especially for the occasion. ‘I was only trying to be nice. You’ll burn in hell whether I pray for you or not.’

Thank you, Dad, I would say to myself on these and similar occasions. Thank you for the Jew-free start you gave me.

4

Not his fault. And not the fault of the Silvermans and Finkels either. They did what needed doing. They threw open the windows of our closed world, brought Europe into our homes, Europe with its chest out, the grand parades and parks and coffee houses, not the sweatshops of ancient superstition and obedience which my poor friend Manny had been born into, or the airless hovels which it was Tsedraiter Ike’s function to remind us of until his dying day.

They were the children, most of them, of venerable anarchist or trade unionist families, heirs to the Jewish strikes of 1880s London, inheritors of the high hopes of revolution that had engulfed Poland, Lithuania, Russia, in the 1880s and 90s, reaching at last even as far as Novoropissik. Some of the older ones, including Rodney Silverman, remembered being carried on the shoulders of strikers – marching the length of the country they would have me believe – their baby voices raised in the cause of higher wages, better working hours, more considerate and less divisive practices, a fairer deal altogether for just such sweatees in the tailoring and cap-making industries as Selick Washinsky. My father’s father had been present as a Manchester delegate or observer – spying, stirring, who can say? – at the Great Boot Strike which had broken out in the East End in 1889, ten thousand Jewish journeymen coming out of their cellars and garrets ‘like the rats of Hamelin’, as he had famously reported it, to protest the sweating system as a crime against ‘the ineffable name
of Elohim’. A crime also (and to my grandfather a far more serious one) against the indigenous British workers whose jobs were daily being put in jeopardy by alien outworking Jews who wouldn’t think twice before undercutting and overtoiling their fellow Hebrews, to say nothing of Gentiles to whom they acknowledged no bond of amity or solidarity. The words of Beatrice Potter, one day to be Beatrice Webb the illustrious Fabian, were embroidered on a pillowcase, like a sampler, by my father’s mother and mounted in a flimsy walnut frame which frequently fell apart but which my father always repaired and replaced where we could read it on a wall above the bath – a monument more to Beatrice Potter’s research into late-nineteenthcentury Jewish immigration than my grandmother’s skill with the needle.

We need not seek far for the origin of the
antagonistic feelings with which the Gentile inhabitants
of East London
regard Jewish labour and Jewish trade.
For the Immigrant Jew, though possessed of many
first-class virtues,
is deficient in that highest and latest development of –
SOCIAL MORALITY

Those last two telling words, the badge of our ethnic deficiency, had been picked out by my grandmother in what at the time must have been the reddest of red threads; now, in the humidity of our bathroom, they looped limply in faded pink, like pressed roses found in a spinster’s book of commonplaces.

So why over the bath? I never asked him. I think I didn’t want to hear the answer. Didn’t want to hear him say that it wasn’t just the body’s daily toll of grime we were to wash away, but something in our natures too.

My family had mixed feelings about this embroidery. That the
frame fell apart as often as it did I put down to my mother’s hatred of it. It’s only a pity that she never had the courage to destroy it altogether, or to form the words that would make my father understand what her hatred of it was about. ‘I don’t think that’s very nice, Jack, I don’t think that’s a very nice thing to have said about us, not at this particular time in our history anyway,’ was the best she could do, and that wasn’t good enough to shake my father’s resolution.

Tsedraiter Ike despised it too, but he knew better than to express an opinion. Who was he to complain about what hung above the bath? He was lucky to be allowed a bath! What my sister Shani thought I never knew. As an object that wasn’t a mirror or a wardrobe, it can hardly ever have fallen within her purview. And as for me, well, I came home from school one afternoon not that long before my father died, found him repairing the frame for the hundredth time, and told him what I thought. ‘You know Hitler said something pretty similar, Dad. Why don’t we get Shani to embroider a selection from
Mein Kampf
?’

I did well to escape a backhander. I am unable to remember whether he drew the distinction for me between the measured thoughts of a benevolent socialist who kept company with people (my grandfather, for example) who wanted to emancipate the Jews, and the rantings of a psychopathic little bastard who wanted only to annihilate them, but the distinction blazed in his unwell eyes. Wrong son for him, I was. Shame – I’d have liked to be the one he wanted before he died. But the truth of it is that although I loved the socialists and Fabians and Bundists and the rest of them who came to do their exercises in our garden at weekends (and to listen to my mother shout ‘Kalooki!’ midweek), in my soul I was never much smitten by their philosophies. There was always too much of the excitement of apostasy about them for my taste. Their boldness was the boldness of public self-abuse. I am not saying I can come up with anything better, but then as a cartoonist I don’t have to. Ask me, though, as the author of
Five
Thousand Years of Bitterness
, who are the greatest enemies of the Jewish people today, as bad as the Nazis in their hearts, as indurated in their detestation of us, however short they fall in practice – ask me who I fear the most and I will whisper to you, looking up and down the street, ‘socialists, Fabians, Bundists and the rest of them’. A Jewish socialist or Fabian the worst of the lot.

The day after my father died my mother threw Beatrice Potter’s words into the dustbin. Beating when she took up kalooki again by more than a week.

The point about ‘social morality’ anyway is that it hadn’t only been in order to protect the Selick Washinskys of the world from unscrupulous sweaters that agitators like my father’s father had encouraged Jewish tradesmen to go on strike; it had been to protect all Jews from themselves, to save them from an imputation which, true or not, threatened – as witness what eventuated in Germany – their very existence. For our failure to make connections we would pay a heavy price. But that was then. Who, other than a few of my father’s firebrand pals, cared about ‘social morality’ now? Let Selick Washinsky labour all the hours God sent if that was what he chose to do. His lookout if he sold himself cheap. His eyes to ruin. He wasn’t putting anyone else out of work. Dark little men in other socially amoral parts of the world were now doing that. You had, though, to call a spade a spade, and the spectacle of him bent over his sewing machine turned all our stomachs.

Why he was such a vexation to us, the kids of the street – not a one of whom was a communist or trade unionist – or such a trouble to our games which he never bothered to observe or threatened to disrupt, I don’t know. But so long as he was at his window he bugged us. When we dragged a bin into the road to be a wicket and took guard or ran up to bowl, there he was in the corner of our eye, not an incidental obstacle but the very thing we had to hit, the end and object of our game. Four runs
if we smashed the ball into the main road, six if we drove at Washinsky’s window, and eight (though that was normally the conclusion of the innings, tantamount to a declaration) if we managed to break it. Similarly with tennis. Traffic was light enough then for us to throw a line across the street and have to take it down only in the early evening, at rush hour when we could expect about three cars to want to come through. Almost peaceful but for disagreements as to whether a ball had gone over the net or under it, and Washinsky concentrating on his needle, ever-present like an umpire with his mind elsewhere. Fifteen-love if your first serve was an ace; thirty-love if you aced it into Washinsky’s garden. Game if you got him to look up.

Jew-baiting was what it was. And we were all Jews who were doing it.

And I, who was in a manner of speaking – as someone close to Manny – a friend of the family? I was worse than anybody. I would have goaded him to death had it been in my power to do so. But then I had an excuse. I was close to Manny.

I was the first, anyway, to hit an eight. I’d clattered his window a few times when I’d been at the crease and got him to glare and wave his hands at us, but that summer we’d graduated from a soft to a hard cricket ball – the fearsome corkie which stung your fingers just to look at it – and when you hit a corkie at someone’s window there was only one outcome. We heard the glass shatter, clean like a rifle shot at first, and then a sound like a whole city coming apart, whereupon we exchanged looks of triumph mixed with terror, cheered, then ran in different directions, all for none and none for all, leaving the bin in the middle of the road. I don’t know how Washinsky knew it was I who struck the ball, maybe he just guessed, maybe he understood the perverse logic that made me, as his son’s best friend, his worst enemy, but whatever his reasoning it was me he gave chase to, finally cornering me – no one locking their doors in those days – in the parlour of my own house.

I calculate that it was early summer, one of the long hot evenings of a northern June, because there were not many days in the year when we could have been playing cricket in the street at the same time as my mother was playing kalooki in the parlour. It was one of her quieter schools, no more than half a dozen of her friends plus my sister who had obviously been dragged in to make up the numbers. Shani was sitting at the card table when I made my unmannerly entrance, one leg up, taking advantage of a pause in the proceedings to effect running repairs to the paint on her toenails. She had my mother’s lovely narrow legs and ankles, fine as a giraffe’s. And the same burnished, aristocratic bearing, even when she was jackknifed in this manner, looking as though she was meaning to suck her own toes. Something of one of Degas’s self-absorbed dancers about her. Until the moment she opened her mouth, you would have picked Shani for an Abyssinian princess.

‘What’s he want?’ she said, the first to register me in a sweat and Selick Washinsky in hot pursuit, all the other women being engrossed in totting up their points.

‘Shani!’ my mother reprimanded her, looking up, ‘that’s no way to talk.’

Not expecting to have wound up at one of my mother’s kalooki nights, Selick Washinsky held up the palms of his hands, as though to stave off whatever irreligious thoughts crowd in on a pious man pursuant to a game of cards and a roomful of women with uncovered heads, all sucking on the little gold pencils my mother never omitted to provide.

‘My apologies, Mrs Glickman,’ he said, straightening his braces and worrying at the tails of his shirt which had come out of his trousers. ‘This is neither the time nor the place. Your boy Max has just deliberately broken my window – after several months of trying, I might add – but I will discuss it with your husband another time.’