Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“J” by Howard Jacobson (first published 2014)

Six or seven years ago on this blog, I reviewed Howard Jacobson’s travel book Roots, Schmoots, a wry view of his own Jewish heritage which questioned the whole idea of canonising a particular ethnicity.

At the time, I took the opportunity to remind readers that Howard Jacobson is a Jewish, Manchester-born, Cambridge-educated prolific novelist, columnist and writer of non-fiction, who won the 2010 Booker Prize for his novel The Finkler Question. I have a soft spot for Jacobson, a convinced and polemical atheist who can nevertheless call out the zealotry and potential bigotry of much current anti-religious rhetoric.

Jacobson has been known to criticise (as he did in Roots, Schmoots) what he called “the Holocaust industry”, meaning the way memorials of genocide are sometimes sentimentalised and misused for ideological purposes rather than simply being reminders of, and warnings against, mass-murder. But he has more recently spent time calling out insidious and pervasive modern versions of anti-semitism. Yes, there might be a “Holocaust industry”, but it is not as dangerous as this mental virus. In 2013, Jacobson gave a lecture which was turned into a pamphlet called When Will Jews be Forgiven for the Holocaust? Its essential argument was that non-Jews, feeling historical guilt for the Shoah, resent the Jewish people who make them feel guilty and therefore become anti-semites. The victim is blamed with ingenious justifications. (“I am anti-Zionist, not anti-Jewish.” “I am only criticising the state of Israel.” etc.). It is perfectly legitimate to criticise the state of Israel and its foreign policy, as it is to criticise any other sovereign state. But such justifications are often mere subterfuge.

Jacobson has never written a novel dealing directly with the Holocaust (his forte is satirical, and often very funny, novels about Britain’s Jewish community), but the year after When Will Jews be Forgiven for the Holocaust? appeared, his novel J was published. It was short-listed for, but did not win, the Booker Prize.

I approached J eagerly but, with the deepest of regret, I have to report that I was disappointed by it. I can see what Jacobson intended. He is attacking historical amnesia, the tendency to wipe away, not talk about and not directly confront historical realities – in this case the Holocaust. And part of his technique is to set his story in what is a strange sort of alternative version of Britain.

The novel opens slowly. We are in a country where everyone is aware of something designated “What Happened, If It happened”, but what this phrase really means is never discussed. Most of the novel is set in an isolated community, or village, Port Reuben, which reminds me very much of the sanitised, but still sinister, village in the 1960s TV series The Prisoner. People are soothed with syrupy music and only good news is broadcast on the radio. Things are not exactly banned, but they are no longer available. Sentimental ballads are fine, but rougher-edged jazz, with all its improvisations, has disappeared. Again, it could be seen as akin to the world of drugged, soothed people in Huxley’s Brave New World, except that, unlike Brave New World, characters are still able to think, even rebelliously, and there are sometimes outbreaks of violence.

Now what is the J of the title? It could be Jahweh or Jahuwa or Jehovah, the unseen but dominant and controlling god of the Jews - or some parody thereof. There is the convention in this novel that every time people utter a word beginning with J, they have to put their fingers to their lips, which sounds like an echo of the older Jewish convention that one should not speak the [tetragrammaton] real name of God.  Or could it be J for Jude (= Jew) as sewn on the yellow stars Nazis made Jews wear? Or is it simply  J for Jew and Judaism? Obviously it is all of these things, and we soon suspect that “What Happened, If It happened” is really Jacobson’s satire of those gentiles who accept the reality of the Holocaust, but still somehow want to deny it. And perhaps the tendency of some Jews to avoid the topic and be polite about it.

Characters all have Jewish-sounding names, or names that are odd conjunctions of Jewish and Irish, but it is uncertain if they are really Jews. Kevern Cohen, a wood-worker in early middle age, is thrown together with Ailinn Solomons, who doesn’t know who her parents were, has been raised by nuns, and doesn’t understand Kevern’s sense of humour. Esme Nussbaum is a researcher who is rebuked by Luther Rabinowitz for enquiring too much. Edward Everett Phineas Zermansky (“Phinny”) butts into the narrative every so often with reports on how Cohen and the other characters are behaving. Could these be official reports? Could he be part of the mechanism that keeps this community soothed and ignorant of recent history? After all, “Phinny” (= finny = slippery as a fish, maybe?) runs a Benign Arts Faculty which is in the business of ensuring that art is uplifting, anodyne and comforting. In this society “hoarding” is a crime (which chimes with a society not wanting reminders of the real past) and there are women who take courses in Credibility Fatigue, when they find it hard to cope with unpleasant realities should they surface anyway.

In this case, I will not burden you with one of my notorious plot summaries. Suffice it to say that at a certain point, Kevern Cohen is suspected of harrassing an eccentric woman called Lowenna Morgenstern and is interrogated. Kevern and Ailinn Solomons take off for a while to the larger settlment of Necropolis (is this a version of London?), and are uneasily aware of the cosmpolitan society there, so unlike the blandly homogenous Port Reuben. Later Kevern is investigated over the killing of Lowenna Morgenstern. The love of Kevern and Ailinn may be a sign of hope and something that breaks the pattern of denial of the past. But the arc of the narrative leaves plenty of room for the sense of a daunting and controlling authority in a society that is outwardly calm and peaceful. Death and suicide come into it.

I found this novel intriguing, but also very confusing with its tangled family relationships and the very vagueness of the way its imagined society is delineated. But of course this could be part of Jacobson’s intention. He is presenting a world in which a real view of the past is expunged and real history is smothered in euphemisms. Lack of common memory leads to the very vagueness and uncertainty of which I am complaining.

I would also take it that part of Jacobson’s inspiration was to make a British readership see the Holocaust in British terms. I’m reminded of Humphrey Jennings’ short film The Silent Village (made in 1943), which aimed to bring the Lidice massacre home by giving it a British setting. Jacobson is also taking on the corrosive effect of sentimentality. I have often thought about Keats’ line “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”. The sentimentalist takes it to mean that only beautiful things are true. Whatever the boy Keats may have intended, I personally take it to mean that only the truth is beautiful – and the truth includes the negative, nasty, sordid aspects of reality and history. You should not fetishize or wallow in these ugly things, but if you ignore them, the “beauty” you create is sentimentality, which is always a lie. In J, the professor purveying “Benign Art” is purveying escapism and sentimentality, as well as ignoring the violence that burns under the sentimentality…. And when he is thwarted, he himself turns psychotic. Also underlying the novel is the sad truth that class or racial or social or cultural antagonisms are necessary for some people’s self-esteem. Few things are as bracing as feeling superior to another group of people.

I think all these things are intended in the novel, and I have absolutely no quarrel with what Jacobson is saying. But I still found J an obtuse novel and therefore very difficult to read.

Sorry.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.

 

“ROOTS, SCHMOOTS” by Howard Jacobson (first published 1993)

            When I read a book that investigates the development of national identity, like Ron Palenski’s The Making of New Zealanders, I immediately wrestle with the question of what national identity is anyway. This in turn makes me think of ethnic and linguistic and religious identity. And my mind goes back to a book I read nearly twenty years ago, in which a witty author gives a vigorous drubbing to many of the pieties that are supposed to be honoured by his own ethnic group.

            A man, in other words, who knows that there’s more to being human than adhering to a particular ethnic (or national) group.

            The travel book Roots, Schmoots is a Jewish author’s scolding of a lot of received Jewishness.

            A few words on the author. Howard Jacobson is an English-Jewish Manchester-born Cambridge-educated novelist, columnist and writer of non-fiction. He’s written eleven novels and volumes of short stories and won the 2010 Booker for his novel The Finkler Question. Though definitely (and vocally) not American, his comic tone of voice has most often been likened to New York Jewish writers like Philip Roth. Jacobson is an atheist-inclined agnostic, but he is no bigot about it. He once appeared in a televised debate supporting the proposition “Stop bashing Christians – Britain is becoming an anti-Christian country”. Despite his satire and criticisms of aspects of Jewish life, Jacobson is also a vocal opponent of the anti-Israel lobby, especially the Jewish part of it. He has sometimes taken on Noam Chomsky for the dodgy scholarship and questionable knowledge of history behind Chomsky’s anti-Israel statements.

            For my peace of mind, I also have to add something peculiar. The English-Jewish novelist Howard Jacobson is no relation of the equally-talented South African-Jewish novelist Dan Jacobson. I say this because both men have written novels that put a modern interpretation on Biblical stories – The Rape of Tamar (Dan’s) and The Very Model of a Man (Howard’s). They sit side-by-side on my bookshelves.

            Now after all that, let’s return to Roots, Schmoots.

            The descendant of “Litvaks” (Eastern-European Jews – especially from the Baltic region), Howard Jacobson at the age of fifty was profoundly contemptuous of pious and overly sentimental books written by Jews seeking out their ancestors. He was determined not to write such a book himself. So Roots, Schmoots is as much a flight from, as a reconciliation to, his own roots.

            In this travel book, Jacobson for some of the journey leaves behind in England the (Catholic, Australian) woman he was married to at the time. (He has been married three times in all.) At first he travels among English Jews. He is clearly both amused and alarmed by the recent resurgence in very conservative Orthodox Judaism in England. His secular sympathies are always in evidence.

            The book really hits its stride, however, when he crosses the Atlantic. Over half of Roots, Schmoots gives his impressions of Jews in the United States.

           

            He goes to the Catskills, where traditional Jewish holiday camps of the “Borscht Belt” are now down on their luck as they are either taken over by (exclusivist) Orthodox Jews, or close down as their wealthier clientele make for warmer places like Miami. Even so, he still finds Jewish parents battling for places at table and trying to play match-maker with their eligible grown children.

            He goes to New York. The Lubavitcher cult wait for the Messiah in the person of an elderly rabbi. In the SoHo art-world set, Jews act out fantasies of being characters in a Woody Allen movie. Brighton Beach has become down-at-heel and shabby. Jews, newly arrived from Russia, have hopes of making it rich by selling Judaica to New Yorkers, but meet with complete indifference.

            Jacobson heads west. He looks at a Holocaust museum – and is unimpressed. He goes to a gay synagogue where they pray for those who have died of AIDS and women who died in illegal abortions (“the martyrs of the sexual revolution” as Jacobson puts it). He goes to a Protestant church where a Jew-for-Jesus is preaching. For no particular reason he also goes to a Mormon tabernacle. He visits Boot Hill in the hope that he can find some Jewish connections with the Wild West.

            In the second leg of his journey Jacobson goes (this time with his wife) to Israel. He has some strong and often unpleasant impressions. One is the anti-Arab extremism of the Jewish “settlers” on the Left Bank, who tend to be Orthodox and puritanically-conservative and who clearly hope for the construction of an exclusively Jewish theocracy. Another is his natural sympathy for the old-style Jewish socialists living in the dwindling number of functioning kibbutzim. And there is his discomfort at the shabbiness of tourist attractions in Haifa.

            Only in the last few chapters is he able to go where his more recent ancestors came from – Lithuania. He witnesses a chilly state, at that time just beginning to thaw out from Communism, but with all the Soviet-era discomforts still in place. Among Jews there, he detects fear of a resurgence of anti-Semitism. After much searching he finds the unkempt and untended Jewish cemetery where most of the village whence is grandparents came are buried. He has, at least for the purposes of this book, found his roots.

            Jacobson’s style throughout is sardonic and peppered with one-liners, like a travelling stand-up comic. The book sometimes wanders off theme (why did he visit that Mormon tabernacle?) and is best read in short bursts. As it is an insider’s book, Jacobson is licensed to make jokes at the expense of his fellow Jews. Sometimes the tone is that of an agnostic English gentleman who is contemptuous of tradition (especially religious tradition) and feels the past is something to be escaped from.

            There are some interesting insights. One is his judgement that the Holocaust “industry” (as he calls it) too often reduces Jews to the status of helpless victims, and feels compelled to depict non-Jewish European peasants as illiterate oafs. This is how he reacts to the Holocaust museum in America at which juncture, surprisingly, he also says some negative things about Elie Wiesel. At the same time, even though he is an agnostic, Jacobson instinctively sides with the religion of his ancestors when it seems to be under attack (he is very contemptuous of the Jew-for-Jesus).

            There is another aspect of his agnosticism which I find revealing. At one point he visits a mainstream synagogue with the sentimental desire to fully participate in a service, just for old time’s sake. He is horrified to discover how blandly secular and lacking in traditional ceremony and colour the service now is. I’ve found exactly the same attitude in agnostics of Christian background when they put their noses inside a church for the first time in years. They come for a purely aesthetic buzz and instead are annoyed to find people who actually believe in this religious stuff unadorned. Jacobson’s attitude reminds me of Melvyn Bragg, in his recent superficial book The Book of Books – about the English-language translation of the Bible – lamenting the language of the defunct Anglican Authorised (“King James”) Version, and wishing it could still be used in churches. Never mind what’s being said, just so long as it sounds quaint and euphonious.

            When I’ve said all these things, though, the best thing about Roots, Schmoots is the way Howard Jacobson judges his own community by broad, humanistic values. He’s sometimes affectionate, sometimes negative and often satirical about fellow Jews, but he’s never under the illusion that they are a special category of humanity exempt from human weaknesses, follies and misjudgements.

            If you like, you could say it’s a book about the limits of ethnic identity.