Sex, comics and the Holocaust

Howard Jacobson has called Kalooki Nights ‘the most Jewish novel that has ever been written by anybody, anywhere’. What does this mean? It is a novel whose hero, Max Glickman, is Jewish. It is a history of two Jewish families living in Manchester, the Glickmans and the Washinskys, and a study of the degrees by which successive generations adapt to English society and English culture. It is a book full of Jewish words and phrases, Jewish customs and Jewish friends and relatives. In fact the only non-Jews in the book are either Max’s wives and girlfriends (a plentiful crew), his sister’s boyfriend Mick, and Dorothy, the half-German girlfriend of his neighbour Asher Washinsky. Oh, and a rather odd TV producer named Francine.

In a lecture he gave in January at the London Jewish Cultural Centre, Jacobson said, ‘For us [Jews] to be truly convinced we are reading Jewish literature, we must read about the Holocaust. To be interesting to ourselves as Jews, in short, we have to be in crisis’, but, he continued, ‘we have been in this country a while now. The story of our finely tuned accommodations to English culture is a fascinating one, sometimes tragic, often heroic, always funny … it is time we told it.’ So this is the mission of his latest novel.

Actually Jacobson combines both stories: Max Glickman grows up in Manchester, grows into English society, and is also obsessed by the Holocaust. At the impressionable age of 11 he swaps a stack of comics for a book called The Scourge of the Swastika: A Short History of Nazi War Crimes. He can’t get enough of it, reading it in secret because his father ‘was thinking up ways to make Jewishness less of a burden to the Jews’ — moving on from the Holocaust being one way.