Kalooki Nights (18 page)

Considering my devotion to Jewish women of a certain age and allure, it remains surprising to me that I never married one. At least not one who whooshed her stockings or fell off her stilettos into a display cabinet of precious china. I can only suppose it had something to do with their taste in music. But that can’t tell the whole story because Chloë adored
My Fair Lady
, and Zoë went to
Evita
at least once a month, and I married them.

3

My father found out about my mother’s gala kalooki night in aid of Israel. In a moment of inadvertent vainglory my mother had published the amount of money it had raised in the
Crumpsall
Jewish Herald
which, in a moment of inadvertent indolence, my father picked up and perused while he was queuing for delicatessen.

‘You don’t expect to have to read the Jewish papers to find out what’s going on in your own house,’ he said.

‘You don’t expect your atheist husband to be reading the Jewish papers,’ my mother said, laughing her most unconvincing contralto laugh.

‘It fell open.’

‘Just at the right page?’

‘In a Jewish paper there isn’t a right page. If it isn’t bar mitzvahs it’s Israel.’

‘There are the obituaries.’

‘Don’t be smart with me, Nora. You know my feelings on this subject. Couldn’t you have found another charity?’

She fell silent. At last she said, ‘It wasn’t for charity, it was for Max.’

‘Max? What did Max have to do with it?’

I was listening on the stairs, guilty but excited. It aroused me to hear my parents bandying around my name.

Did my mother know I was listening? Suddenly her voice went quiet. But my father’s reply was clear enough. ‘If the kid was so upset, you should have told me.’

‘He wasn’t upset.’

‘Then what was the problem? Has the Tsedraiter been stirring it?’

‘No, he hasn’t. There was no problem. Maxie’s fine about it. He hasn’t been complaining, I swear to you. But I thought it would be nice to give him a little something to make up for it.’

‘To make up for what?’

‘For it. For there not being an it.’

‘You just said he didn’t care.’

‘Just in case he cared.’

‘Without telling me?’

‘If I’d told you, you’d have stopped me.’

‘So you went behind my back?’

‘Jack, you were out.’

‘You don’t think I’d have stayed in had I known?’

‘In the circumstances, no, I don’t think you would have.’

‘The circumstances being the arming of Israelis?’

‘Jack, what we raised wouldn’t have bought a bullet.’

‘Even half a bullet can kill,’ he said, which made so little sense that I wanted to come running down the stairs and tell him so.

The next day he asked me if I was all right. He wanted to be certain that I understood he’d done it – that’s to say not done it – for my benefit. I would thank him when I was older. He knew people who were still ashamed of themselves, thirty, forty years after the event, for having acceded to a worn-out ritual in which they had never for a moment believed. When he’d asked them why they’d allowed themselves to be bar mitzvah’d, they all answered the same way – to please their parents. He didn’t want to place that burden on my shoulders. ‘You know how you’ll please me best, Maxie? By thinking for yourself.’

After which I could hardly say, could I, that for myself I was thinking I’d have liked a bar mitzvah.

He had his own doubts, anyway. Over the years I discovered that the family had put pressure on him to change his mind, both Big and Little Ike making separate attempts to shake his resolution, and even one or two of the comrades saying that he was giving religion more importance in the breach than it would ever have enjoyed in the observance. Isn’t that the great thing about Jews, Jack – that they can make room to accommodate religion without really meaning it?

Though my mother knew better than to pressure him, the gala kalooki night was a bitter reproach. ‘He’s eaten up by it,’ my mother called to me one evening from her room. She was doing her hair for cards, I was sitting on my bed, doodling Jews in a sketchbook.

‘Eaten up because you didn’t tell him?’

‘No, not eaten up by that, eaten up by you. In case he’s done the wrong thing.’

I understood why she was telling me this. She wanted me to
make it right with him. Show him I didn’t mind. Show him I was undamaged.

So I did. I skipped about the house whenever I thought there was a chance he might see me, like a child out of Wordsworth, oblivious to care and wearing an inane grin of what I took to be unrepining heathenishness. The boy who was happy to be un-bar mitzvah’d.

Hard to believe it worked. If anything I probably made things worse. By not giving me a bar mitzvah he must have thought he’d robbed me of my senses.

But it was the best I could do. Greater intimacy was beyond us. And had we achieved it I probably would have dissolved into tears. As it was, the idea that he was eaten up by what he’d done – his own deed become a devouring creature, like something out of the
Inferno
– distressed me unutterably.

I was sorry to my soul for him. Jew, Jew, Jew – he was sick and tired of the whole business. It was like an illness which he thought he’d beaten suddenly eating at his bones again. And he didn’t, to my eyes, look man enough for another fight.

As for me, it was as I’d feared: I became an oddity. The un-bar mitzvah boy. It was unheard of. Everyone had had, or was expected to have, a bar mitzvah, including Errol Tobias, though in his case the party had not been the black-tie affair that even the poorest families favoured, but was held at his home, among the washbasins and hairdryers, and without the services of an outside kosher caterer. What is more – though every Jewish boy knows this is the one thing above all others you must eschew on your bar mitzvah – he invited the inner circle of his onanist association up to his room for their own gala event long before the other guests had left. For which I then expected him, and frankly expect him still, to burn in hell.

A funny thing about Errol, though. For all that his mind was a sewer, he was highly principled, and highly educated in matters
of principle, where you would least have expected principle from him. No Jew could change his name or faith, for example, without Errol knowing about it and – in so far as schoolyard chit-chat could be called exposure – exposing him. I don’t just mean the Jew at the bottom of our street who went from Friedlander to Flanders overnight; or Montague Burton, tailor to shlemiels, who began his life as Meshe Osinsky; or even the Hollywood Jews whose original monikers everybody knew – Bernie Schwartz become Tony Curtis, Shirley Schrift preferring to be Shelley Winters, Isadore Demsky transmogrified, with the help of a goyisher cleft in his chin, into Kirk Douglas; not to mention Lilian Marks who, by that Diaghilevian
changement de pieds
for which she was renowned, became Alicia Markova – no, Errol had things to say about Heinrich Heine’s defections as well, and Gustav Mahler’s, and Bernard Berenson’s. When the school awarded me the third-form art prize in the shape of a leather-bound
Palgrave’s
Golden Treasury
languidly illustrated by Robert Anning Bell, Errol put pressure on me to give it back. ‘They mean it as an insult, Max,’ he told me.

‘I grant you the drawings are a bit soppy,’ I said, ‘but an
insult
!’

‘I’m not talking about the illustrations, you putz. I’m talking about Palgrave. Did you know his father was a Jew? Francis Ephraim Cohen. Met a woman called Palgrave, got baptised into the Church of England, married her, and changed his name to hers. Ten years later he’s Sir Francis Palgrave. Play your cards right, Maxie, and it could happen to you. You’re already halfway there.’

‘By accepting this prize? Don’t be a meshuggener. Anyway, you can’t blame this Palgrave for what his father did. It’s not his fault he was born a Palgrave.’

‘Yes it is, he could have changed his name back.’

‘Wouldn’t have sounded any good, though, would it –
Ephraim
Cohen’s Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language
?’

‘That’s because they’ve brainwashed you into believing a man
called Ephraim Cohen can’t be a reliable authority on the English lyric.’

A fair point, I thought. But, ‘I’m still keeping it,’ I said.

Which, I later discovered, Errol was going around saying was only to be expected from someone whose father wouldn’t let him have a bar mitzvah.

As for Manny, his bar mitzvah was still to come – some dark Byzantine event in an underground synagogue I’d never heard of, was how I imagined it would be, Manny folded in shawls, invisible among the beards of holy men, and no dancing afterwards, or that ghastly men-only Hassidic jigging behind screens erected to stop the women seeing what would arouse them into sexual hysteria if they did – a whirling blur of humpbacked scholars in their long black coats making old-country Jew Jew Hari Krishna circles around the bar mitzvah boy.

Manny said nothing to me about the fact that my thirteenth birthday had been and gone unheralded. Tact? Or disgust beyond expression? As it turned out, neither. While we were being gossiped about all over town and I was having to make do with an unwanted pair of boxing gloves and a clandestine tallis as my only presents, the Washinskys were having troubles of their own. Asher. Asher and the fire-yekelte.

4

Zoë, my Gentile second wife, a woman who was nothing if not humorous, once told me a joke just after lovemaking.

‘How many Jews can you get into a Volkswagen Beetle?’ she asked.

‘None,’ I said. ‘No Jew would get into a Volkswagen Beetle.’

I was lying. I had even owned a Volkswagen Beetle myself once, at the behest of Chloë. But now didn’t seem the time to mention that.

Over the bedclothes she hit me. ‘Why do you always do that, Max? Why won’t you let anyone tell a joke?’

Did I always do that? I wasn’t aware I always did that. ‘Tell the joke,’ I said.

‘I can’t now.’

‘You can. Tell the joke.’

She sat up in bed, knowing that the sight of her perfectly equiponderant hand-grenade breasts would always quieten me. Pale gold, her breasts, like melted butter; her nipples very precise, no spillage in the aureole, thus far and no further. We could have come from different planets, Zoë and I, so unalike in body were we. My limbs and members intermingled freely, I flopped about, bled contour into contour, hue into hue; not Zoë – between one of Zoë’s parts and another no continuity was discernible. One at a time they must have come into the world, one at a time and alone.

She was the same with words and sentences. Nothing was assumed already spoken. She had to start again from the beginning.

‘How many Jews can you get into a Volkswagen Beetle?’ she asked.

Tempting for me to do the same.
None. No Jew would get into
a Volkswagen Beetle
. But I was too good a sport to ruin a hilarious joke, and poor Zoë had, by her own account, suffered terribly at the hands of Jewish people already. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Tell me.’

‘One thousand and four. Two in the front, two in the back, and one thousand in the ashtray.’

5

Would that be funny to a Holocaust denier, I wonder, or would he see it – though emanating from a Jew-befuddled Gentile – as another example of Jewish overstatement? ‘We have done the research and can state categorically that it is impossible to get a thousand Jews, or even a quarter of that number of Jews, however passively disposed, into the ashtray of a Volkswagen.’

So we are an immoderate, overemphatic people, much given to exaggeration – so what? I call it giving value for money myself. You prick us so we bleed profusely. You put us to the torch and we burn well for you. Just don’t pretend that we invent the conflagrations that consume us.

If it felt like the end of the world to Mr and Mrs Washinsky when they discovered that their elder son was sleeping with the fire-yekelte, that is because it
was
the end of the world.

Not the sex: they could have dealt with the sex. But everything consequent on the sex: that sequence of events written at the start of creation in the book of Jewish time – the pregnancy, the betrothal, the village churchs bells tolling a wedding which is no less a funeral, the grandchildren baptised in an alien font (the dew of their baby-Jewishness washed clean away) – the depletion, the erasure, the annulment, the extinction in the arms of no matter how welcoming a Gentile future of their hard-won Jewish past. Not negligible, such concerns, when you consider how intrinsic to Christianity disparagement of Judaism has been. Marry a Christian and you marry into your own denial. In the eyes of Asher’s parents, he was sleeping with their negation. That it never bothered me, that I couldn’t wait to propose to every Gentile woman I met provided her name was suitably accented, does not mean it should not have bothered the Washinskys. I am the perversion here.

Just as Frances Ephraim Cohen, become Palgrave – whether or not I kept his son’s
Golden Treasury
– was the perversion before me.

It was the end of the Washinskys’ world, joke about it how you like. Yes, they would have said and felt the same had Asher been sleeping with the daughter of the Archbishop of Canterbury,
and then found some saving grace in it. It is not a sin to be pragmatic in the matter of miscegenation. If your offspring must stray, better they stray wisely. Instances are not unknown, when all is said and done, of apostatic sexual union not only not diminishing Judaism but actually enhancing it. Esther, for example, married the King of Persia, from which position of influence she was able to save the Jews from annihilation. But who was Asher going to save by sleeping with the fire-yekelte, the sooty person who knelt in front of the Washinskys’ grate on a Shabbes morning, tied newspapers into knots, tossed matches into coals, and was thus, since they were poor themselves, the nochschlepper to nochschleppers?

Himself?

Well, to get to that interpretation you need a more Christian conception of saving than is available to your average Jew.