Kalooki Nights by Howard Jacobson

survival. Seeing Manny out with his father on their way to the synagogue, both of them spruced up darkly to attend on God, urgent on their errand, two men engaged in what never for a moment occurred to them was not the proper business of men, joined as I was never joined with my father, bonded in abstraction, but also bonded in the activity of being purposefully out and about, traversing the community, going from home to the house of worship, as though devotion wore a civic aspect – on such occasions, though it was an act of treachery to my father to be feeling such a thing, I wished my life were more like Manny’s. I would then secretly envy Manny his mother, too, Channa Washinsky on the doorstep looking out for their return, haloed in cooking fumes, her head covered by a scarf, weaving spells from under it, or so it seemed to me the one Shabbes dinner they asked me to share with them, making those welcoming motions with her hands, as though to call on the angel of light to bless their bread and ignite their candles, before covering her eyes and delivering the blessing. True, my mother wove spells over her playing cards, but when she blew on her fingers and shuffled the decks my mother was commemorating the unbroken sameness of things, another night of kalooki in a life given over to kalooki.
    Whereas Channa Washinsky was not only marking the Shabbes from what was not the Shabbes, she was honouring the concept of separateness itself, the beauty of one time not occurring simultaneously with another, ourselves not existing forever and unchangingly as ourselves. What the woman ushers in on the eve of the Sabbath, the man bids farewell to at its close, pouring out a glass of wine, lighting a single candle, perhaps shaking a spice box whose aromas symbolise the additional soul to which the Sabbath has given him access, and reciting the Habdalah benediction – a thank you to the Almighty for drawinga distinction between the holy and the profane, between light and darkness, between the six days of creation and the seventh day of rest. For that, simply, is what Habdalah means: separation. And whether you light the candle and shake the spices or you don’t, you cannot call yourself a Jew unless the concept is written on your heart.
    In its way, Habdalah is a justification for the idea of art. Here is the daily world of fact, there is the other-worldly domain of the imagination. Here is the tongue we are obliged as responsible citizens to mind, and there is the outlandish language we speak when we are otherwise possessed. So you would think the Orthodox, who thank Elohim for dividing this from that, would be hot on the separation which is art. But you’d be wrong.
    5
    Manny blamed the failure of Five Thousand Years of Bitterness to get beyond our respective houses on me. ‘You and your cartoons,’ he said.
    ‘It’s the cartoons that make it,’ I told him.
    ‘Yeah, that make it blasphemous.’
    That was his father talking. Blasphemy, impurity, uncleanness. Everything a sin against the Law. Everything an infringement. Leave aside the content, which Selick Washinsky was not the first and no doubt will not be the last to be repelled by, the mere fact that I drew a likeness at all offended him. Who was it – Feuerbach, Hegel, or simply every German philosopher there has ever been – who accused the Jews of being aniconic to their soul, eschewing the concrete because they would not envision God other than abstractly? Well, though I take no pleasure in their being right about anything, they were right about Manny’s father. In his eyes I was an idolater. I pause before that thought, because in my eyes I was an idolater too. The difference being that idolatry frightened Selick Washinsky whereas, primarily I suppose becauseI confused the word with iconoclast – and you can’t really be the second until you’ve been the first – it energised me.
    On his ownio, without the word of God at his shoulder, Manny himself liked my