Kalooki Nights (3 page)

But there was more noise still in my young life in the form of an uncle, and in the continuous voicing of my father’s objections to that uncle – that’s if he really was an uncle – Tsedraiter Ike. The same uncle who was always saying that for this the Nazis wanted to exterminate us, though it was my father’s contention that it was actually for
him
, Tsedraiter Ike, that the Nazis wanted to exterminate us.

We had five Uncle Ikes in our family, taking family to include every Jew who shared our name, married into our name, or offered to be friendly, ours being a sort of Battersea Dogs’ Home for stray Jews. Big Ike, Little Ike, Liverpool Ike, Dodgy Ike and Tsedraiter Ike – called Tsedraiter Ike because he was the tsedraitest, that’s to say the most imbecile, of the five. Also called Tsedraiter mischievously, I fancied, because he could not himself,
with a single tooth, negotiate the word. Tsedraiter: the
Tse
to be pronounced sibilantly, with a sort of lisping hiss:
Tsss,
Tsss
; the vowel sound somewhere between a
sir
and a
sid
:Tsssirdraiter/Tsssidraiter; the second and third syllables to rhyme with hater.

Why Tsedraiter Ike lived with us, I never knew. Precisely what relation to us he bore, I never knew either and suspect I wasn’t meant to know. As with other family embarrassments, you just accepted and asked no questions. I think I assumed he was my mother’s brother because it was she who always defended him from my father’s scorn. In appearance, though, they could not have been more unalike. My mother – born Leonora Axelroth – as euphonious as her name, tall and tapering, legs and ankles if anything too thin, like an Ethiopian’s, her hair almost bronze in colour, her skin, the minute it was exposed to sun, the same. A burnish on her, which made her look expensive, of the highest quality. Whereas Tsedraiter Ike (who received letters addressed to Isaac Finster, not Axelroth) was flabby, one-toothed, wet about the mouth, discoloured, as though he ’d been dipped in ink at birth. I don’t think I ever knew what he did for a living, but it couldn’t have been much because he was almost never out of the house, at least in my early years, and, from what I gathered from the arguments about him, made no contribution whatsoever to his keep. ‘Keep?’ I recall my mother saying in his defence. ‘He isn’t an animal, he doesn’t have to be
kept
. But if we’re talking keeping, at least he keeps himself smart’ – ‘smart’ being a big accolade with my mother, a word she used almost as often as ‘Kalooki!’ To which my father – who was never smart – replied always with the same words: ‘Correction: at least
I
keep him smart.’

In fact Tsedraiter Ike wasn’t smart either, merely fallen-formal in the manner of some minor shtetl functionary, one of those embittered, jeering, half-demented clerks you read about in nineteenthcentury Russian novels, halfway to being rabbinical, in Tsedraiter Ike’s case, in a black, far too shiny gaberdine suit and a sort of
morning, or do I mean mourning, tie. It’s my sense that wealthy Russian and Polish families once retained such people talismanically, partly as jesters, partly to assuage their consciences, as though they could thereby pay their dues to learning or religion or the twisted life of the mind. My father tolerated Tsedraiter Ike, though he could ill-afford him, in a spirit that was the very obverse of this. ‘Look what we have left behind us,’ that’s what he was saying. ‘Behold our ignominious past. Learn from this human wreckage what we dare never allow ourselves to sink into again.’ In response to which unspoken motive, Tsedraiter Ike hummed loudly around the house, making sounds that were more a parody of Hebrew prayer, as far as I could tell, than prayer itself, rocking, rustling, moaning, wailing, whistling, choking, humming – humming Hebraically, yes, it’s possible – and, whenever he caught my eye, winking at me and interrupting his devotions or whatever they were to chuck me affectionately under the chin and call me, in reference to heaven knows what, his ‘old palomino’. Palomino being, by my calculation, one of the hardest words a person with only one tooth in his head could ever try to pronounce. Which could be why he never left off trying to pronounce it.

There was a song he sang, too, my Uncle Ike, whenever he felt himself to be under pressure from my father, made to feel unwelcome, or otherwise humiliated. ‘It’s only me from over the sea, said Barnacle Bill the sailor.’ An apology for his existence which was clearly an expression of the sense of worthlessness my father instilled in him, though why the nautical reference I had no idea. But it all added to the domestic cacophony, whatever it meant.

So yes, had there been anything I badly needed to get off my chest in those early years I might well have taken the option of sketching it on paper.

Whatever the reasons, I was a mournful, withdrawn, apparently biblical-looking baby – Mendel, Tsedraiter Ike called me when my father wasn’t listening, Mendel which he tried to persuade me was biblical Hebrew for Max, and which he went on
using secretly in preference to ‘my old palomino’ when the Jewishry in which he sought to enmesh me darkened – and I remained biblical and withdrawn throughout the chrysalidal stage after that, until one afternoon, sitting on my mother’s lap in a train bringing us back from an afternoon on a cold New Brighton beach with Liverpool Ike ’s family, my nasal cousins Lou and Joshua twice removed, I said Jew Jew, Jew Jew, Jew Jew . . .

‘Sounds to me that he was imitating the train,’ my father guessed when my mother excitedly told everybody about it later. ‘Am I right, Maxie? Was that the sound the engine made? Choo choo, choo choo?’

‘Jew Jew,’ I said, clamping my teeth around the Js. ‘Jew Jew, Jew Jew . . .’

‘What about the whistle, then? ‘Whoo whoo! Whoo whoo!’

I shook my head. ‘Jew Jew,’ I said. ‘Jew Jew, Jew Jew.’

He gave me a cold stare. As though I’d informed him I wanted to be a rabbi when I grew up. Or that it was my ambition to return to the Russia we never talked about. Novoropissik, as he called it, a Nowhere place of piss and sick. Near where the Danube spilled its shit into the Black Sea. Spiritual if not actual home of Tsedraiter Ike.

‘Your doing,’ he told my mother.

‘My doing?’

‘Kalooki this, kalooki that. Kalooki’s the only word the kid ever hears.’

‘What’s kalooki got to do with anything?’

‘How do you expect him to grow up in a world free of all that shtetl rubbish if you won’t stop reminding him of it? Kalooki, kalooki, night and day kalooki! We live in Crumpsall in the twentieth century, not Kalooki in the Middle Ages.’

‘Jack, kalooki isn’t the name of a shtetl.’

‘Isn’t it? Well, that’s what you say.’ Whereupon he stormed out of the house.

Years later I looked up Kalooki in an atlas, to see whether there
was such a place within spitting or sicking distance of Novoropissik. I couldn’t find one. But there was a Kalocsa in Hungary, and a Kaluga one hundred miles to the south-west of Moscow on the left bank of the Oka, and a Kalush in the Ukraine where Jews had lived and been submitted to the usual indignities, so maybe he was confusing kalooki collectively with those – the marshlands of our hellish past.

It’s possible I imagined it, but after the Jew Jew, Jew Jew incident I thought my father shrank from me a little, as a man will shrink in fear and loathing from the ghost of someone he thought he’d murdered and disposed of long ago. And it’s not impossible that his socialist friends shrank from me as well, the little cancer in the body of their hope for change.

They needn’t have worried. I have not become a rabbi. Nor have I been back to Novoropissik. Or gone the way of Tsedraiter Ike. Unless hearing Jew Jew, Jew Jew, Jew Jew, whenever a train goes through a tunnel, amounts to the same as any or all of those.

To that hypersensitivity, at least, I plead guilty. I am one for whom a train can never again be just a train. First I have to enquire whom the train, please, is carrying. Then who commissioned it. Then where its ultimate destination is.

Jew Jew, Jew Jew . . .

The Auschwitz Express.

I could not of course have known anything about Auschwitz at the time I sat like a precocious Hebrew prophet on my mother’s lap and blew the horror whistle. But footfalls echo in the memory, and who’s to say what footfalls, past or future, a child’s memory contains?

For what it’s worth, I believe we would be able to hear Adam’s tread if we knew which part of our memories to access. And Abraham coming out of his tent to receive the Covenant. And Moses the lawgiver, in all his years, climbing to the top of Pisgah. And the Jews of Belsen and Buchenwald crying out to be remembered.

Jew Jew, Jew Jew.

What my father tried to do was ditch the J-word as a denomination of suffering altogether. Not to forsake all those who’d travelled on that train, but to reinvent the future for them. A kind of muscular Zionism of the mind, without the necessity of actually establishing a Zionist state and going, as he put it, ‘beserk in someone else’s country’. Without, indeed, the necessity of going anywhere at all. Or at least, now that he was out of the puke of Novoropissik and safe in the North of England, not going anywhere
else
. But you never know what’s waiting to spite you in your genes. My father wanted a new start, and had me.

It could have been worse. He could have had Manny Washinsky.

He could have had Manny Washinsky and been murdered in his bed.

Only had my father been his father, who knows? Manny might never have turned into a murderer at all.

Draw, you bastard!

R. Crumb,
The R. Crumb Handbook

1

When we weren’t refusing to divulge our names or religion to SS men, or choking to death on Zyklon B, Manny and I met in the Second World War air-raid shelter which had become our play space and discussed God.

‘You don’t ask Elohim to explain Himself,’ Manny, not yet a teenager, not really ever a teenager, told me, fingering the squiggly ear-locks which made his new-moon face appear as though someone had scribbled on it.

I’m cartooning him. He didn’t have ear-locks to finger. Sideburns turned to fluff were what he had, hardly even sideburns, little curls of unsportive fuzz run wild, which, in the event of trouble – the trouble we all half feared was only round the corner, the Crumpsall Park Pogrom which would one day come out of a clear blue sky – he would be able to conceal quickly under his school cap. These were the golden days of Jewish secularity, before the Orthodox found the effrontery to blaze their fanatic retrogression on their faces. What there was of medieval Jewishry was confined to a couple of streets of teeming five-storey houses in Lower Broughton on the Manchester/Salford borders where, for a while, Sir Oswald Mosley ran a provocative office, and through which my father occasionally walked me, holding me firmly by the hand, so that I should see, but not be inveigled into, what the long march to emancipation was emancipating us from. Frummers was how we referred to these out-of-time Talmudicliteralisers among ourselves, from frum meaning devout. Not a pejorative exactly, but not approving either. I could never decide whether my father’s interpolations – from frummers to frummies, and then from frummies to frumkies – were designed to diminutise them or diminutise their offence. But frumkies was the term we settled on finally. The Washinskys, to be fair to them, were not like those we saw in Lower Broughton. They did not wear long black coats or high black hats which seemed to float on a current of spirituality above their heads. They were not in the same hurry when they were out of doors, as though late for an appointment with the Almighty. And their house was not a gypsy caravan of trumperies and trinkets to protect it from the evil eye. No, the Washinskys were not living in the Middle Ages, but to us they were the halfway house on the journey back.

And they were still frumkies.

‘I’m not asking Elohim,’ I’d say, usually while gouging out the mortar between the bricks of our air-raid shelter – a peculiarly wanton impulse, to pull apart what sheltered us – ‘I’m asking
you
.’

To tell the truth, I wasn’t asking Manny anything. I was needling him. As though to pay him back for my own shortcomings as a friend, for making me ashamed to acknowledge him in such polite company as Errol Tobias’s, I pestered him to distraction. Why this, Manny? Why that? When Manny or either of his parents went through their front door they put a finger to their lips and then to the mezuzah on the door frame. I knew about mezuzahs; we had one at our front door, put there by the Jewish family who had lived in the house before us, but now painted over and ignored. I knew what a mezuzah contained: words, words from the Torah, including the Shema, the holiest words of all – ‘Shema Yisrael, Hear, O Israel, the Lord is one . . .’ But precisely because the Lord
was
one we did not tolerate idols. In which case why did we kiss words? A word too could be an idol, couldn’t it?

Why, Manny? Why the food hysteria? Why all the salting that went on in his house, salting the flavour out of everything? Why,
when they bought kosher meat from a kosher butcher did they have to kosher it again when they got it home? Had the Christian street unkoshered it? And why the obsessive keeping this from that? So a crumb of cheese the size of mouse bait fell on to a thrice salted, petrified slice of chicken breast from which the flavour had already been extracted to make soup, was that so terrible? Did Elohim have nothing else to do, was he so smallminded that he would notice and punish a transgression as negligible as that? And why the obsession with Saturday? How can a day be holy?

‘It’s a commandment,’ Manny told me. ‘Remember the Sabbath day to—’

‘I know all that. But next to “Thou shalt not kill”, remembering the Sabbath day is a bit unimportant, isn’t it? We don’t say “Remember not to kill”. Because forgetting wouldn’t be any excuse. “Remember the Sabbath day” is more like a nudge than a commandment.’

‘The Ten Commandments are all equally important,’ he replied. ‘The rabbis say that if you break one you might as well break them all.’

I had reason to recall that in later years. But at the time all I wanted to do was break
him
. All right, all right, so his family chose to do as they were told and remember the Sabbath day, but why did that stop them from making their own fire on it? Why, though they had no money, did they employ a Gentile – a Shabbes-goy, or as we called her in our neck of the woods, a fireyekelte – to make it for them? Why didn’t they light it themselves the day before and leave it smouldering behind a fire guard? Or, if that was out of the question, if Elohim thundered ‘No!’ to prior preparation and a further ‘No!’ to a surreptitious blow into the embers on Shabbes itself, why didn’t they just go without a fire for one day out of seven altogether? They could always come and warm themselves in front of ours if it was really cold, unless ours was unacceptable having been lit on the Sabbath by Jews who didn’t cover their heads, didn’t keep a kosher house and didn’t otherwise give a shit.