HOWARD JACOBSON: Shtetl grit and Jewish self-belief

Councillor Paul Dimoldenberg, the Lord Mayor of Westminster, with his chaplain, St John’s Wood’s Rabbi Mendel Cohen, celebrated Chanukah this year with a reception in the Lord Mayor’s Parlour at City Hall. Special guest was Booker Prize-winning author Howard Jacobson. His writer’s address is published here.

A few weeks ago His Right Worshipful the Lord Mayor of Westminster asked if I’d say a few words today, and when I wondered if he had any particular words in mind, he thought a moment and then said yes — words about coming from Manchester. He is, of course, from Manchester himself, and if there is one thing a Jew from Manchester loves to hear about, it’s another Jew from Manchester.

In my time, Manchester wasn’t as frum as it is today. You could say it wasn’t frum at all. I’m not saying we denied our Jewishness. We just kept it to ourselves; stayed shtum, kept our heads down and hoped no one would notice we were there.

Some of us even took up non-Jewish activities such as hiking in the Pennines and drinking beer. (Shandies anyway.) That said, we fasted on Yom Kippur, put a glass of Palwin No 10 out for the angel at Passover (though my mother feared it would too strong for him) and sang The Cat’s In The Cupboard and it Can’t Catch Me at Chanukah.

As I recall, we even had our own silver menorah, though we were never sure on which day we should begin lighting it. In its own way, this loyal but baffled relationship to the symbols of Judaism made us more Jewish, not less. We honoured the stories more than the rituals, and the stories connected us imaginatively to the lives we’d lived as Jews for centuries.

My mother’s family was from Lithuania, my father’s from the Ukraine. Historically, there was a rift between them. Lithuanian Jews thought Ukrainian Jews were too demonstrative and Ukrainian Jews thought Lithuanian Jews were too quiet. As a consequence, I grew up both. This division still showed itself at simchas, where my mother sat with her eyes lowered while my father danced the kasatski, which rhymes with latkie, a dish you Londoners mispronounce as latker, which takes all the taste out of it.

When he wasn’t driving a taxi my father was a children’s magician. He was a short, square man with broad shoulders and a beard. People mistook him for Peter Ustinov and, if they were old enough, for Sische Breitbart, the Jewish Polish circus performer known as the Strongest Man in the World. Later they would mistake him for Topol. A Manchester store once employed him as its Father Christmas. He was so convincing, I sat on his knee and didn’t recognise him.

One of his favourite tricks was to produce a glass from the inside pocket of his jacket, hold it upside down to prove it was empty, and then, with a tap of his wand, cause it to fill up with Ribena. Thinking this would perfectly illustrate the miracle of the oil replenishing itself in the Temple, an Orthodox family in Broughton Park employed him to perform it at a children’s Chanukah party. He arrived dressed as Father Christmas.

He always denied he had confused the two religious holidays and insisted he was just having fun. And that might have been true. Jews joked more in the 1950s. Or at least we did in Manchester.

Ask me why I left in that case and I am bound to admit it was because I was ashamed of the provinciality. I wasn’t ashamed of being a Jew — I didn’t change my name or learn to ride a horse — but I yearned to move in more sophisticated, educated circles. None of the writers I admired had fathers who doubled as Father Christmas. Years later I discovered that they all wished they had.

A week or so ago, the Lord Mayor and I sat in his parlour —which sounds more intimate than it was — and swapped stories about our Manchester origins.

It turns out that we grew up just a stone’s throw from each other and bought latkies from the same delicatessen. After only a few minutes comparing notes we discovered there wasn’t a relative of his that wasn’t a relative of mine. He showed me photographs of his father rubbing shoulders with my father’s cousins. The uncle and auntie who had a bedding shop, and gave me a set of double bed sheets and matching pillowcases for my barmitzvah, went on to give double-bed sheets and matching pillowcases to him. It’s not impossible they were the very same set I’d taken back, asking for a refund  — on the grounds that no 13-year-old boy wants matching bedding.

To my eye, Jews have looked a little adrift of late, dismayed and baffled in proportion to the degree that they are — I won’t say assimilated – but acculturated or, if you prefer, un-shtetled. The apple can fall too far from the tree

We frequented the same social clubs, played on the same billiard tables, stood on the same street corners eating the same vorsht sandwiches and chips. We had similar ambitions – he to write books (which he has succeeded in doing) I to become Lord Mayor (which I haven’t.) It’s a miracle we didn’t marry the same girl.

What became clear to me as we reminisced was that Manchester was essentially no different from the shtetls my family had left. Take my father dancing the kasatski in Broughton Assembly Rooms: in all essentials he was still living in Kamenetz Podolski, tearing telephone directories in half as the Strongest Man in the World had done.

It shames me now to admit it shamed me then. It felt like a village and I wanted to live in a city. Like Pip in Great Expectations, I had cosmopolitan ambitions.

I have promised myself not to be political, which is hard given the last two years, never mind last four days, but allow me to ask an almost political question: Have we Jews gained as much as we have lost by kicking off the mud of the shtetl? To my eye, Jews have looked a little adrift of late, dismayed and baffled in proportion to the degree that they are — I won’t say assimilated – but acculturated or, if you prefer, un-shtetled. The apple can fall too far from the tree.

My father’s Manchester shtetl friends put on their wartime medals and went out onto the street to take the fight to Oswald Moseley. My father claimed he once breached a police cordon and got close enough to Moseley to throw a punch at him. Only Moseley’s horse, rearing back, saved its rider from a bloody nose. Whether it’s true that my father knocked out the horse I don’t know. But it’s a good joke, whether it happened or not. When people asked if he was sorry for the horse, he shrugged his shoulders. In his view Moseley’s  horse was antisemitic by association.

Leaving Manchester means learning to see the horse’s point of view.

Well, we have all moved on. Leaving Manchester is a metaphor for loss. Shtetl vitality is no more. We no longer risk the jokes we once made for fear of giving offence. The refined are frightened of their own shadows and the intelligentsia I longed to join have turned out to be gullible fools.

We light the Chanukah candles in memory of a miracle that occurred 3,000 years ago, but we are careful not to rejoice too openly in our victory. Modern historians question the miracle of the oil, remind us that not every Jew was on the side of the Maccabees – ‘Not in my name,’ some of them chanted —  and find a hundred other faults with the story. As though there are any stories that don’t exaggerate or distort.  You don’t think all I’ve told you about Manchester is true, do you?

What matters is that we recall a vigorous version of our past, because without such past we have no vigorous present.

We survive because we believed in a God who, so long as we fought for who we were, wouldn’t let the oil run out.

May there never be a time when we grow too sophisticated and self-doubting, too cowed and apologetic, to do as the Maccabees did and stand firm against those who want to see the back of us.