unalike. My mother – born Leonora Axelroth – as euphonious as her name, tall and tapering, legs and ankles if anything too thin, like an Ethiopian’s, her hair almost bronze in colour, her skin, the minute it was exposed to sun, the same. A burnish on her, which made her look expensive, of the highest quality. Whereas Tsedraiter Ike (who received letters addressed to Isaac Finster, not Axelroth) was flabby, one-toothed, wet about the mouth, discoloured, as though he ’d been dipped in ink at birth. I don’t think I ever knew what he did for a living, but it couldn’t have been much because he was almost never out of the house, at least in my early years, and, from what I gathered from the arguments about him, made no contribution whatsoever to his keep. ‘Keep?’ I recall my mother saying in his defence. ‘He isn’t an animal, he doesn’t have to be kept. But if we’re talking keeping, at least he keeps himself smart’ – ‘smart’ being a big accolade with my mother, a word she used almost as often as ‘Kalooki!’ To which my father – who was never smart – replied always with the same words: ‘Correction: at least I keep him smart.’
In fact Tsedraiter Ike wasn’t smart either, merely fallen-formal in the manner of some minor shtetl functionary, one of those embittered, jeering, half-demented clerks you read about in nineteenthcentury Russian novels, halfway to being rabbinical, in Tsedraiter Ike’s case, in a black, far too shiny gaberdine suit and a sort of morning, or do I mean mourning, tie. It’s my sense that wealthy Russian and Polish families once retained such people talismanically, partly as jesters, partly to assuage their consciences, as though they could thereby pay their dues to learning or religion or the twisted life of the mind. My father tolerated Tsedraiter Ike, though he could ill-afford him, in a spirit that was the very obverse of this. ‘Look what we have left behind us,’ that’s what he was saying. ‘Behold our ignominious past. Learn from this human wreckage what we dare never allow ourselves to sink into again.’ In response to which unspoken motive, Tsedraiter Ike hummed loudly around the house, making sounds that were more a parody of Hebrew prayer, as far as I could tell, than prayer itself, rocking, rustling, moaning, wailing, whistling, choking, humming – humming Hebraically, yes, it’s possible – and, whenever he caught my eye, winking at me and interrupting his devotions or whatever they were to chuck me affectionately under the chin and call me, in reference to heaven knows what, his ‘old palomino’. Palomino being, by my calculation, one of the hardest words a person with only one tooth in his head could ever try to pronounce. Which could be why he never left off trying to pronounce it.
There was a song he sang, too, my Uncle Ike, whenever he felt himself to be under pressure from my father, made to feel unwelcome, or otherwise humiliated. ‘It’s only me from over the sea, said Barnacle Bill the sailor.’ An apology for his existence which was clearly an expression of the sense of worthlessness my father instilled in him, though why the nautical reference I had no idea. But it all added to the domestic cacophony, whatever it meant.
So yes, had there been anything I badly needed to get off my chest in those early years I might well have taken the option of sketching it on paper.
Whatever the reasons, I was a mournful, withdrawn, apparently biblical-looking baby – Mendel, Tsedraiter Ike called me when my father wasn’t listening, Mendel which he tried to persuade me was biblical Hebrew for Max, and which he went on using secretly in preference to ‘my old palomino’ when the Jewishry in which he sought to enmesh me darkened – and I remained biblical and withdrawn throughout the chrysalidal stage after that, until one afternoon, sitting on my mother’s lap in a train bringing us back from an afternoon on a cold New Brighton beach with Liverpool Ike ’s family, my nasal cousins Lou and Joshua twice removed, I said Jew Jew, Jew Jew, Jew Jew . . .
‘Sounds to me that he was imitating the train,’ my father guessed when my mother excitedly told everybody about it later. ‘Am I right, Maxie? Was that the sound the engine made? Choo choo, choo choo?’
‘Jew Jew,’ I said, clamping my teeth around the Js. ‘Jew Jew, Jew Jew . . .’