Kalooki Nights by Howard Jacobson Page B

eyes. Wrong son for him, I was. Shame – I’d have liked to be the one he wanted before he died. But the truth of it is that although I loved the socialists and Fabians and Bundists and the rest of them who came to do their exercises in our garden at weekends (and to listen to my mother shout ‘Kalooki!’ midweek), in my soul I was never much smitten by their philosophies. There was always too much of the excitement of apostasy about them for my taste. Their boldness was the boldness of public self-abuse. I am not saying I can come up with anything better, but then as a cartoonist I don’t have to. Ask me, though, as the author of FiveThousand Years of Bitterness , who are the greatest enemies of the Jewish people today, as bad as the Nazis in their hearts, as indurated in their detestation of us, however short they fall in practice – ask me who I fear the most and I will whisper to you, looking up and down the street, ‘socialists, Fabians, Bundists and the rest of them’. A Jewish socialist or Fabian the worst of the lot.
    The day after my father died my mother threw Beatrice Potter’s words into the dustbin. Beating when she took up kalooki again by more than a week.
    The point about ‘social morality’ anyway is that it hadn’t only been in order to protect the Selick Washinskys of the world from unscrupulous sweaters that agitators like my father’s father had encouraged Jewish tradesmen to go on strike; it had been to protect all Jews from themselves, to save them from an imputation which, true or not, threatened – as witness what eventuated in Germany – their very existence. For our failure to make connections we would pay a heavy price. But that was then. Who, other than a few of my father’s firebrand pals, cared about ‘social morality’ now? Let Selick Washinsky labour all the hours God sent if that was what he chose to do. His lookout if he sold himself cheap. His eyes to ruin. He wasn’t putting anyone else out of work. Dark little men in other socially amoral parts of the world were now doing that. You had, though, to call a spade a spade, and the spectacle of him bent over his sewing machine turned all our stomachs.
    Why he was such a vexation to us, the kids of the street – not a one of whom was a communist or trade unionist – or such a trouble to our games which he never bothered to observe or threatened to disrupt, I don’t know. But so long as he was at his window he bugged us. When we dragged a bin into the road to be a wicket and took guard or ran up to bowl, there he was in the corner of our eye, not an incidental obstacle but the very thing we had to hit, the end and object of our game. Four runsif we smashed the ball into the main road, six if we drove at Washinsky’s window, and eight (though that was normally the conclusion of the innings, tantamount to a declaration) if we managed to break it. Similarly with tennis. Traffic was light enough then for us to throw a line across the street and have to take it down only in the early evening, at rush hour when we could expect about three cars to want to come through. Almost peaceful but for disagreements as to whether a ball had gone over the net or under it, and Washinsky concentrating on his needle, ever-present like an umpire with his mind elsewhere. Fifteen-love if your first serve was an ace; thirty-love if you aced it into Washinsky’s garden. Game if you got him to look up.
    Jew-baiting was what it was. And we were all Jews who were doing it.
    And I, who was in a manner of speaking – as someone close to Manny – a friend of the family? I was worse than anybody. I would have goaded him to death had it been in my power to do so. But then I had an excuse. I was close to Manny.
    I was the first, anyway, to hit an eight. I’d clattered his window a few times when I’d been at the crease and got him to glare and wave his hands at us, but that summer we’d graduated from a soft to a hard cricket ball – the fearsome