Kalooki Nights by Howard Jacobson Page A

cartoons. They made him laugh. A pretty sickly laugh, but still a laugh. Our studio was the disused air-raid shelter in which we had talked of God and choked on poison gases. I thought of it as my air-raid shelter because you could only get to it by hacking your way through the hedge at the bottom of my garden or other gardens on my side of the street, but Manny considered it his by spiritual right – a dank, disused, overgrown underground space to which one fled to escape the irreverent light of day. Here, working with the help of those Second World War torches which everyone had lying around in those days, we would sit for hours on end, he rattling his chest asthmatically (there was a chemicals factory close to the shelter, which didn’t help), chewing his pencil and trying to think up adjectives to match the wickedness of one oppressor of the Jewish people after another; oppressors, I have to say, who didn’t only trip off his tongue but sprang from his ears and eyes, grew out of his hair and fingernails – Pharaoh, Amalek, Haman, Torquemada, Goebbels, Goering, Oswald Mosley – mamzers, bastards, the lot of them – I clicking my tongue and making Donald Duck noises as I sought for features grotesque enough to suggest their inner ugliness. Not easy when you can’t employ big noses, those having to be reserved, of course, for our own people, the eternally oppressed. In life, a button nose becomes a tyrant well enough, as witness Zoë, but it looks a lot less menacing in a cartoon. Big nose bad, small nose good – that’s just the way of it, in caricature as in race relations. Something, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, to do with the sense of smell and its embodying archetypal longings for the lower forms of existence. The nose a disgrace because the sense of smell a disgrace, a hankering after lowly origins, a refusal to embrace the liberating separateness of civilisation. Hence, presumably, Zoë’s wanting me to rid myself of mine. Mysolution as far as cartooning went, anyway, was the ruse of giving all the anti-Semites through the ages a Hitler moustache. Manny laughed like a drain at that. A field of Philistines with Hitler moustaches and their right hands in the air. The Pharaoh with a Hitler moustache. The Romans with Hitler moustaches. Ditto the Spanish Inquisition and the Roman Catholic Church and the Cossacks. Only Hitler himself – which seemed to me a novel concept – without. But then, as Manny observed – laughing like the dead, laughing as though his laughter were the ghost of laughter passed – how would anyone know it was Hitler if he didn’t have a Hitler moustache?
    Good point. So in the end I drew him just as a moustache. Which also made Manny do his drain thing. A disembodied moustache screaming ‘Heil!’ and banging on about the Final Solution.
    Had I painted rather than cartooned, I’d have been a surrealist. Which is peculiar because I’ve never liked surrealism. Another argument I might have had with myself.
    While I had grown up with knowledge of Hitler and extermination from an early age, thanks largely to Tsedraiter Ike, it was Manny who introduced me to the phrase ‘Final Solution’. We had just moved in to the opposite side of the street (part of my family’s downward social spiral), and as he was the only kid in the immediate vicinity my age – immediate vicinity meaning within my mother’s melodic shouting range – I was persuaded to make a friend of him. I wasn’t keen. He looked too historically Jewish for my liking. Too persecuted and unhealthy, his skin yellow and waxy, the colour of old candles. Farshimelt. I wasn’t exactly an athlete in the Benny Leonard mould myself, but I didn’t have that Asiatic blight on me that goes with being Orthodox. Or that fluffy moustache, which there was no explaining because Manny was otherwise physically immature, not to say underdeveloped. Was there a moustache you could go grow at that age which denoted the opposite of