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Nov. 9, 2007

Confident in his Jewishness

Author Howard Jacobson opens the JCCGV book fest.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY

The first section of Kalooki Nights is called "Five Thousand Years of Bitterness," after the comic-book history of the Jewish people that protagonist Max and friend-turned-murderer Manny begin writing together. The divergent paths their lives take and their conflicted relationship with Jews and Judaism are the story of Kalooki Nights, but that description doesn't do justice to the aggressively written, darkly comedic, thought-provoking book written by British author Howard Jacobson, who opens the 23rd annual Cherie Smith JCCGV Jewish Book Festival Nov. 24.

Given Jacobson's bombastic and irreverent writing style, one could be excused for thinking that he's probably loud and overbearing in person, but nothing could be further from the truth. He likes to talk, yes, and he's passionate about his ideas, but he's charming, funny and intelligent.

"I had words early. I was a talker," Jacobson told the Independent in a phone interview. "I was articulate and dreamed of being a novelist from the moment I was born, really, never wanted to do anything else. But I was very shy to use the words and I remember clearly the first time I felt anything like confidence was when I made a joke with some of my mother's glamorous friends and they laughed. I thought, 'I like this; I like making women laugh. I like using words to entertain women' – it excited me. But I was very, very shy, right until adolescence, really."

The story of his transformation bodes well for his upcoming presentation at the book festival.

"I discovered that I liked public speaking," he said. "It was funny because, although I was shy, if I walked into a room of people, when I was 15 or 16, I'd fall to pieces, but if I had a chance at the school debating society, with 200 people there, I loved it. Ever since then, I've thought I am happiest when I've got large numbers of people to entertain. I love it.

"I do a lot of public talking. I love going to festivals and things. I really do like it and I sometimes wonder whether I don't write like that; whether I don't write in order to be heard by a lot of people. I know I make noisy sentences, and I think that's because I'm imagining a big crowd out there. I'm not one of those writers where you curl into a ball, intimately, and you feel that the writer is speaking very quietly and gently into your ear."

Rather, Jacobson said, he has the ambition "to seize the lapels of large numbers of people and make them hear, make them listen, make them laugh."

He'll also make you cringe, no doubt. Consider some of his subject matter – the Tom of Finland books, for example, which he came across in San Francisco and incorporates into Kalooki Nights.

"I saw them [the books] there and I thought this is preposterous, really, and funny and particularly interesting to a Jewish person because these gay figures are dressed in, they're not really Nazi uniforms, and yet they are.... [It] makes you slightly queasy and uncomfortable and I thought, that's just the image I want for this book. But I also mean very seriously all that stuff about Jews and the body and Jews' discomfort with the body.... I meant that joke to come out of those rude magazines and him [the character, Max] cartooning them and his inability to 'get it,' the sex part – I meant that seriously."

Jacobson writes with a raw authenticity that makes it seem that he has, indeed, lived the lives of his characters, but he is quick to point out that his novels are not autobiographies.

"But there's a lot of what I know about life in there," he said, referring to Kalooki Nights and admitting that he, like Max, has been married more than once, now happily.

"And into Max goes a lot of my exasperations with all aspects of Jewishness, being Jewish, being on the receiving end of Jewishness," he said. "It's funny, because the book began more as an argument. In my head, it was going to be more of an argument among Jews themselves; Jews, for being timid, Jews for not owning up to being Jews, Jews for being philistine.... And it very quickly turned into something else and it very quickly became just as much an argument with, however you choose to put it, the enemies of the Jewish people and so on.
"I think that happened because, even as I was writing, all sorts of things were happening here: there was the Holocaust denial that was picking up again, there were several aspects of anti-Semitism around Israel that I was locating in English life."

In Kalooki Nights, it's hard at times to know whether Jacobson is denigrating or defending Jews, Judaism and Israel.

"I think this is a very Jewish book and it's about affirming Jewishness, very much affirming Jewishness," he stressed. "I do that, I feel that, I feel very positive about mine – I never shut up about it. (There are many people who know me who wish I would.)

"I think it's all about finding a spot and a strong voice for it, and wanting to locate one's Jewishness. I don't locate mine in observance, for example. I'm not an observant Jew, but I get very angry when I'm told by observant Jews, if you like, that they're more Jewish than I am because they keep Shabbas and they wear a yarmulke. I always want to argue, 'No, my Jewishness is also essentially Jewish.' I think Jewish thoughts, I write Jewish books, I argue that this is what Jews are for - we argue, we are the People of the Book. We are famous throughout the Old Testament, throughout the Talmud, for arguing and arguing and arguing and that's what we're for and that's what we're about."

As Jacobson wrote Kalooki Nights, he said, he became more conflicted, but thought, "isn't that terrific, that's what being Jewish is, make it a Jewish argument, put the lot in, have this Jewish person angry about every aspect of being Jewish, but never not wanting to be Jewish.

"Some of the most passionate rage is against people who change their name, pretend they're not – I hate that, I just hate their not wanting to be Jewish. Why do people not want to be Jewish? Well, I know some of the reasons, but, you see, some people think that they can conceal their Jewishness and the first thing you see about them is that they're Jewish. They think [if] they change their name to Smith, no one will think they're Jewish."

Jacobson said that he hasn't always considered himself a confident Jew, but came to that realization when he started writing.

"I used to try and write like Henry James or D.H. Lawrence and got nowhere with it," he explained. "It was only when I thought, 'Look, you're Jewish, you've got a Jewish voice, find the Jewish voice, evolve the Jewish voice,' that I discovered that I could write. It's now impossible for me not to write Jewishly and my interest has been to find an original Jewish voice."

Jacobson said that he's continually compared to Philip Roth, but that such writers were not his models. "My antecedents are the English writers; Dickens, George Eliot, it's even, as ridiculous as it might sound, Jane Austen," he said. "I hear their sentences and I want to make sentences like them, and then transformed by a Jewish sense of the ridiculous, a Jewish sense of exaggeration. I exaggerate a lot. I love going over the top. I love bad taste in a way that Jane Austen couldn't. But it's them. I came to people like Saul Bellow, Mordechai Richler, Philip Roth, late. Although I admire them all, they're not formative on me."

In addition to novels, Jacobson writes a weekly column for the British Independent. In Kalooki Nights, the character of Max points to Jewish socialists as being one of the greatest enemies of the Jewish people, a topic that Jacobson said he covers a lot in his column.

"Some of the most rabid anti-Israeli critics in this country are Jewish and they are, of course, wheeled out whenever they are needed, by people who aren't Jewish. It makes one feel very queasy. It makes you feel that there's some treachery afoot.... We can't have it that, the minute someone criticizes Israel, they're accused of being anti-Semitic – that's intolerable. On the other hand, the opposite is happening now. Now it seems that you can say anything you like about Israel and the minute someone questions you, you go, 'Oh, you're calling me an anti-Semite,' when that's not what [you're doing]. Both sides are calling the other [that]. I think it's pathological just how anti-Israel some English and American Jews and, no doubt, Canadian Jews are. I'm not saying they shouldn't be, but I think it reaches a pitch sometimes, where you do have to say to yourself, this is a psychological disturbance – and not because they shouldn't be critical of Israel, but because of the degree of it, because of its virulence. I mean, why would you want to do that?"

Jacobson postulated that the most virulent, Jewish critics of Israel are perhaps more Jewish than other Jews, in that "they're going along with that Jewish thing that we are special, that we are a special people. And they think we are so special that any crime, anything that we do is more terrible because we've done it. In a perverse kind of way, those critics of Israel are asking more of the Jewish people than those of us who think of ourselves as just good Jews who want the best for Israel, but are worried, are. Some paradoxical thing is at work.... I mean, you come up against such violence and absence of calm or restraint from Jews in some of the academies, it's as if they're some way or other, I don't know, ashamed. They're more ashamed than you should be. Something about their Jewishness pains them in a way. You're not allowed to talk about Jewish self-hatred anymore, that's something you're not allowed to say, but there is such a thing, you know."

Hypothesizing from where such negativity might come, Jacobson said, "My wife is a counsellor, so we have a lot of psychological literature in the house. One of the things that I hear her talking about to her friends is – and I think, too, that it's just well known now – that an abused child, or an abused person, one of the terrible things that happens to them is that they come to take on the valuation of the abuser and they come to see themselves as worthy of that abuse, deserving of that abuse. It's as if, if you degrade someone for long enough and often enough, they accept the justice of that degradation. And, I think, to a degree, that has happened horribly to some Jews over hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years, so that it's in the stock, it's in our cultural baggage to feel like that.

"When you look back at some of the people, the early founders of Zionism, that was one of the things that we said, 'Unless we have our own country, unless we stop being at the beck and call of wherever we happen to be with our luggage ready and packed, just in case, and ready for the next pogrom; unless we can escape those circumstances, then we will never have a decent sense of ourselves. We won't have a pride in ourselves.' They located that as almost a permanent characteristic of the Jewish people, that they accepted their own degradation."

Jacobson said that one thing he offers his audiences is "a version of Jewishness that is in the world, absolutely secular, but not non-spiritual, not Dawkins atheistical, none of that, so rationalistic that almost nothing exists, but funny and vitalistic and of the past and of the now and there's a real hunger for it.

"I think there's a real passion for it out there, for a Jewishness that's shed some of the old terrors, because we have been, there's no question of it, a frightened people.... We were brought up, as Jews, just frightened: frightened of our bodies, frightened of where we were, frightened of being noticed – that's very English Jewish, that is, that thing that you mustn't make too much noise because then they'll, the English, will figure out there's Jews here and kick us out again; all that.
"So I think there's a real need for saying, 'Look we can be, without being gross, without being loud and coarse, we can be confidently Jewish.' And we have a lot to offer. We are a very smart people. We're very funny. We do funny better than anybody. Funny is ours. [I] don't know why anyone else bothers to be funny."

Despite being an outspoken Jew, Jacobson said that he has not experienced much anti-Semitism. He said that, if his overt Jewish writing gives anyone problems, it's other Jews.

"The Jews in the media in this country, everybody knows it – I don't know if it's like that over there – but the media Jews, and there are a lot of Jews in the media, want you to shut up about it. They're embarrassed by it. Their liberalism, because the media here is uniformly liberal and they're all a little bit more anti-Israel than they need to be and so on, their liberalism, as far as being Jewish is concerned, takes the shape of not wanting to know about it ... there's that embarrassment with Jewishness here among Jewish intellectuals and Jewish media people, which I think is problematic and upsetting; socially upsetting and it's also intellectually upsetting. They shouldn't be like that, but they are – to a man and to a woman, they are like that."

But not Jacobson. And his openness and strong opinions extend beyond his Jewishness into other aspects of his life.

"People talk about comedy as though it's nothing," he said. "I think that literary comedy is the highest form we have, but some people think it's merely comedy, it's not serious. I think a thing is only serious when it is comedy and my comedy is serious. You can smell blood in it, and you're meant to.

"I like having those contrary things. The price I pay for it is I don't think reasonably, I'm not capable of that. I don't know anything truly. I can't read a history book, I can't read politics. I don't belong to a party. I don't have a point of view, which is why I think the novel is my natural mode. I clang between different positions and dramatize different positions, and feel one thing on Monday and another thing on Tuesday, which is not so great in life, but it's good on the page." And no doubt it'll be good – and different from what's written here – on the Saturday night that Jacobson shares his writing and his views with CBC Radio One host Eleanor Wachtel and other book festival-goers.

Register in person, at www.jccgv.com or at 604-257-5111 for the opening event. Tickets are $25 in advance, $30 at the door.

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