Kalooki Nights Read Online Free PDF

some affiliation. That the fire-yekelte in question didn’t mind making the fires, and considered herself fairly remunerated for it – just as Elvis Presley was said to have performed a similar service for Rabbi Fruchter and his wife in Alabama Avenue, Memphis, refusing to take a penny in recompense, just so long as no spark from the fire landed on his blue suede shoes – was neither here nor there. What did it do to us to demean in the name of our religion – that was the issue. ‘Social relations come first, remember that,’ my father used to lecture me. ‘Man and man will always be a more sacred connection than man and God.’ So what kind of God, Manny, would hand us out a code of conduct which of necessity entailed condescension to people of another faith, neighbours who had carved crucifixes on the bricks of this very shelter when the bombs were falling, even as our parents, who shared their terror, were carving Stars of David? A God of Love, a God of Contempt, or a God who didn’t give a shit?
    He had a way of closing down his face – Manny, I mean, not God – as though he could make himself deaf by sheer force of will. He ought to have repudiated the condescension charge with a flick of his fingers. ‘What’s demeaning to either party in a favour asked for and delivered? Show me the injured Gentile. Did Elvis mind? No. The King was only too pleased to be of service. All you have to show on your side of the argument is yourself – a Jew injured by all things Jewish. It’s not we who are guilty of fanaticism, it’s you, the fanatics of disavowal and self-revulsion.’
    But that, for Manny (leaving aside what could reasonably be expected of a twelve-year-old boy), would have been to enter thelists on behalf of a God who needed no defending. Not for him to interrogate, or to hear another interrogate, the laws of Elohim. He was not called Emanuel – meaning ‘God is our protector, God is ever with us’ – for nothing. Emanuel Eli Washinsky, Eli also meaning God, as in Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? So I should have known something was wrong when, three or four years later he suddenly began to worry at that very question. Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? Where were you, Elohim, in our hour of calamity?
    An unmistakable cry for help, that, wouldn’t you say, from someone with two Gods in his name?
    But a cartoonist isn’t there to help. Not in the conventional sense, at any rate. A cartoonist is there to make the complacent quake and the uncomfortable more uncomfortable still. So to Manny, who had been the one and was now the other, I said, ‘You don’t ask Elohim to explain Himself.’ And was mightily pleased with the echo. I felt it was a blow struck for my poor father whose memory I feared that I traduced whenever I talked God with Manny.
    It also pleased me, in some disreputably aesthetic way, to see my friend’s certainties under pressure. The refuser of all questions returned to questioning. It was shapely.
    But then of the two of us, I was the artist.
    And I was forever looking for an excuse not to be his friend.
    2
    ‘Why do you have to look so Jewish all the time?’
    Zoë talking. Zoë, catching me with my people’s woes on my shoulders. Zoë, my flaxen Übermadchen Gentile second wife in our itchy seventh year of marriage.
    Zoë, Chloë, Björk, Märike, Alÿs, and Kätchen, little Kate . . .what does it say about me that the only people with whom I am able to enjoy intimacy must have diaereses or umlauts in their names?
    That I’m a Shmoë – that’s what Zoë said it says.
    Good job I never met Der Führer at an impressionable age.
    With Zoë I wasn’t ever unimpressionable. I bore the impress, visibly, of her harrying. And because I lowered my head and shouldered it, there was no inducement for her to stop. Grow a moustache, shave your moustache; wear a tie, don’t wear a tie; try being sweeter to people, try having the courage of your own belligerence; come live with me in the country,