was news exactly, but because I had never before seen it written down. Over five million! So that was what being put an end to meant! The figures conferred a solemn destiny upon me. For it is not nothing to be one of the victims of the greatest crime in world history.
By any of the usual definitions of the word victim, of course, I wasn’t one. I had been born safely, at a lucky time and in an unthreatening part of the world, to parents who loved and protected me. I was a child of peace and refuge. Manny too. But there was no refuge from the dead. For just as sinners pass on their accountability to generations not yet born, so do the sinned against. ‘Remember me,’ says Hamlet’s father’s ghost, and that’s Hamlet fucked.
Manny wasn’t the only boy in the street who knew The Scourge of the Swastika. Errol Tobias, a year or two older than us, was also a reader. Not that we were any sort of study group or book club. Because I felt ashamed of being Manny’s friend when I was with Errol, and ashamed of being Errol’s friend when I was with Manny, I was careful not to bring them together or otherwise to intimate our shared experience. Left to their own devices, neither existed for the other. Manny too devout, Errol too profane. They weren’t simply chalk and cheese, they were the devil and the deep blue sea. Not a fanciful comparison: in Manny there were unfathomable depths, in Errol a diabolism that was frightening to be near. When he went into one of his lewd playground rages, Errol’s eyes boiled in his head like volcanoes; you could smell his anger, like a serpent turning on a spit; a translucency upon his skin, as though God were trying to see through him. Yet it wasn’t the devilish one of the two who ultimately did the devilish thing. Unfair, but there you are. It would seem that it isn’t necessarily your nature that determines your fate. Incidentals such as spending too much time listening to your fathers’ fathers’ ghosts can do it just as well. But in that case all three of us should have grown up to be murderers, not just Manny Washinsky.
As for Jews not showing strangers the outline of their glans penis, Errol Tobias was either a changeling or the exception that proved the rule. A genitally besotted boy, he grew into a genitally besotted man. Manny and I were more in character. For which demureness I have not the slightest doubt that the Nazis – to borrow my uncle’s favourite locution – would have tried to exterminate us. As a cartoonist I am given to travesty and overstatement, but this is not an example of either. There are serious causal connections to be traced between the Jew’s relation to his body – modesty, purity, the dread solemnity of the circumcision covenant – and the Jew-baiting practised by the Germans. For reasons that will bear deep scrutiny, the world hates and fears a man who makes a palaver of his private parts. I think that’s the issue: not the foreskin, the palaver. Whenever anti-Semitism is mobilised from an itch into a movement it takes flight into some ideal Sparta – a Finlandia of square-jawed analisers skylarking in the gymnasia or the baths, at ease with both their own and others’ genitalia. And what is that but nostalgia for a time before the Jews imposed seriousness upon the body?
No going back into the Garden, we say. And no return to nature. Life – now that we have been expelled from Paradise -life, as an activity of the mind and not the sexual organs, begins in earnest.
For which devotion to intellect and conscience they cannot forgive us.
That was that as far as Tom of Finland went, explain it how you like. Max of Muswell Hill in accommodating flannel pants looked a nice enough guy but he wasn’t going to make a killing in the sex shops of Soho.
It wouldn’t surprise me to learn I was the first and last Jew – the first and last English Jew, at any rate – to be employed in the homoerotic copycat business.
Jew, Jew, Jew. Why, why, why, as my father asked until the asking killed him, does everything always have to come back to Jew, Jew, Jew?
2
He was a boxer whose nose bled easily, an atheist who railed at God, and a communist who liked to