Kalooki Nights by Howard Jacobson Page A

the older ones, including Rodney Silverman, remembered being carried on the shoulders of strikers – marching the length of the country they would have me believe – their baby voices raised in the cause of higher wages, better working hours, more considerate and less divisive practices, a fairer deal altogether for just such sweatees in the tailoring and cap-making industries as Selick Washinsky. My father’s father had been present as a Manchester delegate or observer – spying, stirring, who can say? – at the Great Boot Strike which had broken out in the East End in 1889, ten thousand Jewish journeymen coming out of their cellars and garrets ‘like the rats of Hamelin’, as he had famously reported it, to protest the sweating system as a crime against ‘the ineffable nameof Elohim’. A crime also (and to my grandfather a far more serious one) against the indigenous British workers whose jobs were daily being put in jeopardy by alien outworking Jews who wouldn’t think twice before undercutting and overtoiling their fellow Hebrews, to say nothing of Gentiles to whom they acknowledged no bond of amity or solidarity. The words of Beatrice Potter, one day to be Beatrice Webb the illustrious Fabian, were embroidered on a pillowcase, like a sampler, by my father’s mother and mounted in a flimsy walnut frame which frequently fell apart but which my father always repaired and replaced where we could read it on a wall above the bath – a monument more to Beatrice Potter’s research into late-nineteenthcentury Jewish immigration than my grandmother’s skill with the needle.
    We need not seek far for the origin of the
antagonistic feelings with which the Gentile inhabitants
of East London
regard Jewish labour and Jewish trade.
For the Immigrant Jew, though possessed of many
first-class virtues,
is deficient in that highest and latest development of –
SOCIAL MORALITY
    Those last two telling words, the badge of our ethnic deficiency, had been picked out by my grandmother in what at the time must have been the reddest of red threads; now, in the humidity of our bathroom, they looped limply in faded pink, like pressed roses found in a spinster’s book of commonplaces.
    So why over the bath? I never asked him. I think I didn’t want to hear the answer. Didn’t want to hear him say that it wasn’t just the body’s daily toll of grime we were to wash away, but something in our natures too.
    My family had mixed feelings about this embroidery. That theframe fell apart as often as it did I put down to my mother’s hatred of it. It’s only a pity that she never had the courage to destroy it altogether, or to form the words that would make my father understand what her hatred of it was about. ‘I don’t think that’s very nice, Jack, I don’t think that’s a very nice thing to have said about us, not at this particular time in our history anyway,’ was the best she could do, and that wasn’t good enough to shake my father’s resolution.
    Tsedraiter Ike despised it too, but he knew better than to express an opinion. Who was he to complain about what hung above the bath? He was lucky to be allowed a bath! What my sister Shani thought I never knew. As an object that wasn’t a mirror or a wardrobe, it can hardly ever have fallen within her purview. And as for me, well, I came home from school one afternoon not that long before my father died, found him repairing the frame for the hundredth time, and told him what I thought. ‘You know Hitler said something pretty similar, Dad. Why don’t we get Shani to embroider a selection from Mein Kampf ?’
    I did well to escape a backhander. I am unable to remember whether he drew the distinction for me between the measured thoughts of a benevolent socialist who kept company with people (my grandfather, for example) who wanted to emancipate the Jews, and the rantings of a psychopathic little bastard who wanted only to annihilate them, but the distinction blazed in his unwell