Kalooki Nights (16 page)

What she was able to piece together, finally, was that he’d taken the opportunity while he was down there to join a few of his old communist friends in breaking up the headquarters of a Nazi organisation which had recently opened for business in Notting Hill. Jews weren’t the problem at the time, blacks were. But a Nazi is a Nazi is a Nazi.

My mother knew that. A Nazi is a Nazi is a Nazi – yes, Jack. But what about his old communist friends – did they too have bloody noses? What about ‘Long John’ Silverman and Elmore Finkel? Were their womenfolk catching trains from every corner of the country and having to miss kalooki?

As it happened, no, because when they were discovered climbing into the windows they ran for it, whereas my father, well, he didn’t get to London very often did he – be fair now, indulge him a little – and he felt like staying. If we thought he looked a mess, we should have seen the other guys . . .

This undignified event had taken place only a week or so before Ruth Ellis was hanged and explains why my father wasn’t holding a candle outside Holloway Prison. London was out of bounds. He’d been grounded by my mother who didn’t want him in another fight, nursing another bloody nose, and maybe worse.

No surprise, then, that he was more than usually tetchy with Tsedraiter Ike who had been pacing the living-room floor for hours, humming to himself, and driving us all to distraction.

‘Do everybody a favour and sit down or go to bed, Ike,’ he said. ‘Anybody would think it was you who was going to the gallows.’

‘Yes, well, we all know you’d like that,’ Tsedraiter Ike said. ‘And you wouldn’t be in any hurry to sign petitions to get me off either.’

My father pointed to his chest, protesting his innocence of any desire to see Tsedraiter Ike swing. Although for a moment, I suspect, that was all any of us could picture and long for.

‘The thing is,’ Tsedraiter Ike went on, ‘women are not always what we think they are. They’re supposed to be the weaker sex, but they can surprise you.’

We all looked up. Had any woman surprised Tsedraiter Ike? Was it a woman who had driven him tsedrait in the first place?

‘Take that Ilse Koch,’ he said.

My parents exchanged glances. Ilse Koch? Did Tsedraiter Ike have a girlfriend called Ilse Koch all of the sudden?

‘I hope you aren’t talking about my friend Ilse Cohen,’ my mother said. ‘I hope she hasn’t been surprising you.’

I could see what Tsedraiter Ike could see – that my parents had never heard of Ilse Koch in their lives. They were of the inbetween generation: too old to want to know the gory details, not old enough to know they had to. What had happened in Germany made a lie of the Jewish modernity they’d been cultivating in Manchester and Liverpool; threw them back, if they attended too closely, to a world from which it was essential they could believe they had escaped, woke them to anxieties it was part of their very survival plan never again to acknowledge. Here they had been, the brash, very nearly Gentile inabitants of the middle of the twentieth century – dancing, hiking, sitting out in deckchairs in all weathers, debating, trade-unionising, speechifying, playing billiards, playing cards, swinging punches, buying televisions, having children you couldn’t tell apart from the goyim, giving them goyisher names and even persuading them to cohabit with goys – while all along, only a few hours across the Channel, it was still the Middle Ages.

Hardly surprising that Jews of their sort, positioned where they were and of their age, warmed to Holocaust literature only slowly. Ilse Koch? Who was Ilse Koch when she was at home?

I, on the other hand, was starting from scratch, with Manny as my tree of knowledge and Errol Tobias as the snake. Ilse Koch! I reddened and hoped to God they hadn’t noticed.

‘“The Witch of Buchenwald”,’ Ike said. Ike, of course, as a medieval man himself, was full of reading on the subject, though my father never permitted his books to spill out of his room into the twentieth century where the rest of us lived.

I knew Ilse Koch had two names, ‘The Witch of Buchenwald’ and ‘The Bitch of Buchenwald’, and I knew which I preferred. But I wasn’t letting on I knew of either.

‘Oh, is she the one who made the lampshades?’ my mother asked. It’s the obvious joke, but she made it sound like an interior design query. And even if she hadn’t, it’s my obligation as a cartoonist to make out that she had.

My father got up and began to pace the living-room floor in the opposite direction to Tsedraiter Ike. Anyone would have thought a decision had just unfairly gone against him. Another referee counting him out because of a few spots of blood on the canvas. ‘We’ve done all this,’ he said. ‘We’ve said all we have to say on this subject.’

Tsedraiter Ike began to make heavy breathing noises, like someone imagining a heart attack. ‘You don’t believe she made the lampshades? You don’t believe she lined up the Jews of Buchenwald to see who had the most unusual tattoos, because the most unusual tattoos made the most unusual lampshades? You don’t believe what the Americans found when they liberated the camp? All lies was it?’

‘It doesn’t matter what I believe. It’s history. Let it rest, Ike.’

‘Forget it ever happened, you mean?’

‘I didn’t say that. I said let it rest. It happened. But it happened to gypsies and homosexuals and communists as well.’

‘And that makes it better?’

‘Nothing makes it better. It happened, now leave it.’

‘Easy for you.’

There was an exchange of bitter looks, Tsedraiter Ike’s face shrunken to the size of a rat’s, the way Ilse Koch the head-shrinker would have liked it, my father’s pinched and pugilistic, as though he was about to land one on the referee. ‘Like it’s hard for you, Ike!’ he said, witheringly. ‘Like
anything
’s hard for you! I don’t see you at anti-fascist demonstrations getting a bloody nose. You’re here, where you always are, hiding behind women’s skirts. Talk’s cheap, Ike, talk’s cheap.’

My uncle turned on his heels. For what was left of the evening we could hear him pacing up and down his room, singing ‘It’s only me from over the sea, said Barnacle Bill the sailor’. If you could call that singing.

Between my father and my mother (who was hurt on Ike’s behalf ) a silence prevailed. Call it the ‘lampshade moment’. Every Jewish family had it when I was growing up. I am told they still do, and probably always will.
Never again
. But which is the true freedom – saying never again in the hope that never again, or never again saying never again?

I made a cartoon of it once. Two old Jews arguing. One with a bubble coming out of his mouth declaring ‘Never again’, the other with his fists in the air and an answering bubble, ‘If I have to hear you saying never again ever again . . .’ But I was unable to place it. I gave it away in the end to the plastic surgeon who wouldn’t touch my nose. Hard to get people to laugh at the Holocaust.

Meanwhile revisionists make a startling point. Those lampshades Ilse Koch was reputed to have fashioned for her personal use, featuring outlandish Jewish tattoos – pause for a moment and tell us when you last saw a Jew with a tattoo. Proscribed, is it not? Leviticus 19:28 – ‘Ye shall not make any cutting in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the Lord.’ True, the proscription applied in the first instance to funeral rites, separating the Children of Israel from those who practised blood cults, those primitives who believed that flowing blood would keep the dead alive, as would bearing memorials to them cut into your flesh; but when was there a Jewish proscription that didn’t supersede its original application? No marks – that’s the ruling whose origins have been long forgotten – no marks upon the body. The prohibition become aesthetic finally, as though God knew in advance that tattoos and navel piercings wouldn’t suit the chosen people – a fastidiousness in the matter of adornment, however, which didn’t make Him think again about tzitzis, sidelocks, wigs, and shapeless dresses like Mrs Washinsky’s.

There is an intriguing contradiction in the position of those who question whether anything as terrible as Ilse Koch and her lampshades ever happened, in that they invariably let you know they wished it had.

And that’s not all that’s intriguing about them. In order to give credence to their denials and demonstrate mastery of the culture of the Jews whose lies they must refute, many of them become scholars not just of Jewish history but of the Jewish religion, making fine distinctions between the authority of Torah Judaism and Rabbinic Judaism, becoming learned in Mishnah, which constitute the oral law, and Gemara, which are commentaries on Mishnah, not to be confused with the Agadah, which are the parables and homilies derived from or illustrative of both; in short devoting their lives to study of the people they cannot abide.

Thus the Tenth Circle of Hell, where the Revisionists and Deniers and Libellers are to be found, not wailing or gnashing their teeth, not trapped for ever in rivers of boiling blood or buried face down in the mud, their torn parts exposed to the never-to-be-satisfied gluttony of Cerberus, but soberly dressed at library desks, surrounded by Babel Towers of Hebrew texts which grow whenever a volume is removed, not a single word of a single page of which must they except from meticulous study, lest that is the very word which will prove the falseness of the Jewish people and their prophets at last.

Consigned in their Jew-hating to an eternity of Jew.

You get tragedy where the tree, instead of bending, breaks. Tragedy is something un-Jewish.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

1

I was never bar mitzvah’d. My father wouldn’t hear of it. ‘You become a man when you’ve performed a manly action,’ was the beginning and the end of the subject for him.

‘What, like punching someone in the face?’ my mother said.

Taking her at her word, my father bought me boxing gloves for my thirteenth birthday and sparred with me in the garden.

‘Hit him!’ my sister urged from her bedroom window. Unusual for her to open her window and look out upon the world. Even more unusual for her to come down into the actual garden, a place which would only have had existential meaning for her had she been able to grow shoes in it. Because she couldn’t find a single item to wear that suited her, she was wrapped in a sheet. Nothing on her feet. Nothing that would fit or become her feet. ‘Go on,’ she said, holding the sheet in at her middle, ‘hit him!’

In the heat of battle, neither my father nor I bothered to enquire who she was cheering on. Anybody hitting anybody would have done her.

Seeing her sitting there in her bedclothes, calling for blood, my mother came out with four or five decks of cards and a duster. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘while you’re watching, shine these.’

She never had enough to do, my sister. My mother likewise. It wasn’t that they were lazy, they were simply never pointed at any activity beyond kalooki. My father’s fault, partly. Though a
modern man as far as belief systems went, he retained something of the temperament of Abraham in his tabernacle. He liked the idle prettiness of women about him.

I’ve told this story a hundred times, of me boxing with my father on what should have been my bar mitzvah, always changing it according to the expectations of my audience, now having my father knock me out, now having me KO him, now having my mother piling in to separate us, now having my sister putting on the gloves and flattening us both. But always, of course, in the spirit of comic-book exaggeration. KERPOW! BAM! YEEEEKS! YI-IIII!

In fact I remember it as one of the saddest afternoons of my life. A son doesn’t hit his father, not even when it’s sport. And though my father had often lashed out at me in temper, actually landing a punch with one of those big stinging leather gloves was out of the question for him too. So we went into a bear hug and lumbered around the garden like that, sideways, with our arms around each other’s backs and our heads on each other’s chests. What he was thinking I had no idea, but I couldn’t get past the sensation of unfamiliarity – how little I knew him, how alien and even off-putting the smell of him was, how uncomfortable I felt being this close to him, as though even a clinch was an infringment of the laws of family. I was upset, partly, on my own account, that my father was a stranger to me; and upset on his account as well, that he had a son who was unable to relax and enjoy a bit of man-to-man knockabout in his company; but I was also sad because I could tell he wasn’t well. Nothing he said. Nothing in his breathing or in the way he held himself, or in the way he held me for that matter. Just something he gave off, something you see in old dogs sometimes, a weariness to the bone, a disappointment beyond melancholy, as though you accept now that you will never live the life you always hoped you’d live – a lack of interest, finally, in your surroundings, in the company you keep, and in yourself.

And who knows? Maybe he suspected I would have liked a bar mitzvah.

2

It was considered scandalous, where we lived, my not having a bar mitzvah. It was only one up from marrying out.

People invented the most far-fetched explanations for it. My mother wasn’t really Jewish and therefore I wasn’t really Jewish either. My father had killed someone in a fight years before and no rabbi would bar mitzvah the son of a murderer. My sister was pregnant and the family feared that the excitement of my bar mitzvah would either terminate or bring on the pregnancy. My father was so desperately poor, thanks to the money my sister lavished on a wardrobe she never wore and the huge amounts my mother was known to spend hosting and having her hair done for her kalooki evenings, that he simply could not afford to give me a bar mitzvah.

Not far wide of the mark, that last explanation. Brought up to be a free spirit, with a hearty contempt for the usual Jewish professions of medicine, banking and the law, my father had drifted into local politics, serving as a Labour councillor for the ward of Red Bank for a short time, in the course of which he’d campaigned without much success to turn places of religious worship into gyms and snooker halls, and then drifting out again when he was suspected of promoting, or at least assisting in the promotion of, an illegal bare-knuckle contest between the Irish prizefighting lightweight Colin McReady and the Jewish kick-boxer Shlomo Grynn in a disused warehouse plumb in the middle of his constituency. ‘That sound like me?’ was how he dealt with the accusation, and he was never prosecuted for it. Otherwise he scraped a living teaching above-board boxing at various Jewish boys’ clubs – strictly speaking a charitable activity – supplemented by a little public speaking at sporting dinners – they liked hearing
about Maxie ‘Slapsie’ Rosenbloom the back-pedaller, and the time Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis, born Gershon Mendeloff, landed a humdinger on that mamzer Mosley’s jaw, and for all I know the beating Shlomo Grynn handed out to Colin McReady – further supplemented by occasional work as a driver, dogsbody and odd-job man, even finding employment briefly at the Ritz, where he stood in as a bouncer until they discovered his susceptibility to nosebleeds.