I shook my head. ‘Jew Jew,’ I said. ‘Jew Jew, Jew Jew.’
He gave me a cold stare. As though I’d informed him I wanted to be a rabbi when I grew up. Or that it was my ambition to return to the Russia we never talked about. Novoropissik, as he called it, a Nowhere place of piss and sick. Near where the Danube spilled its shit into the Black Sea. Spiritual if not actual home of Tsedraiter Ike.
‘Your doing,’ he told my mother.
‘My doing?’
‘Kalooki this, kalooki that. Kalooki’s the only word the kid ever hears.’
‘What’s kalooki got to do with anything?’
‘How do you expect him to grow up in a world free of all that shtetl rubbish if you won’t stop reminding him of it? Kalooki, kalooki, night and day kalooki! We live in Crumpsall in the twentieth century, not Kalooki in the Middle Ages.’
‘Jack, kalooki isn’t the name of a shtetl.’
‘Isn’t it? Well, that’s what you say.’ Whereupon he stormed out of the house.
Years later I looked up Kalooki in an atlas, to see whether there was such a place within spitting or sicking distance of Novoropissik. I couldn’t find one. But there was a Kalocsa in Hungary, and a Kaluga one hundred miles to the south-west of Moscow on the left bank of the Oka, and a Kalush in the Ukraine where Jews had lived and been submitted to the usual indignities, so maybe he was confusing kalooki collectively with those – the marshlands of our hellish past.
It’s possible I imagined it, but after the Jew Jew, Jew Jew incident I thought my father shrank from me a little, as a man will shrink in fear and loathing from the ghost of someone he thought he’d murdered and disposed of long ago. And it’s not impossible that his socialist friends shrank from me as well, the little cancer in the body of their hope for change.
They needn’t have worried. I have not become a rabbi. Nor have I been back to Novoropissik. Or gone the way of Tsedraiter Ike. Unless hearing Jew Jew, Jew Jew, Jew Jew, whenever a train goes through a tunnel, amounts to the same as any or all of those.
To that hypersensitivity, at least, I plead guilty. I am one for whom a train can never again be just a train. First I have to enquire whom the train, please, is carrying. Then who commissioned it. Then where its ultimate destination is.
Jew Jew, Jew Jew . . .
The Auschwitz Express.
I could not of course have known anything about Auschwitz at the time I sat like a precocious Hebrew prophet on my mother’s lap and blew the horror whistle. But footfalls echo in the memory, and who’s to say what footfalls, past or future, a child’s memory contains?
For what it’s worth, I believe we would be able to hear Adam’s tread if we knew which part of our memories to access. And Abraham coming out of his tent to receive the Covenant. And Moses the lawgiver, in all his years, climbing to the top of Pisgah. And the Jews of Belsen and Buchenwald crying out to be remembered.
Jew Jew, Jew Jew.
What my father tried to do was ditch the J-word as a denomination of suffering altogether. Not to forsake all those who’d travelled on that train, but to reinvent the future for them. A kind of muscular Zionism of the mind, without the necessity of actually establishing a Zionist state and going, as he put it, ‘beserk in someone else’s country’. Without, indeed, the necessity of going anywhere at all. Or at least, now that he was out of the puke of Novoropissik and safe in the North of England, not going anywhere else. But you never know what’s waiting to spite you in your genes. My father wanted a new start, and had me.
It could have been worse. He could have had Manny Washinsky.
He could have had Manny Washinsky and been murdered in his bed.
Only had my father been his father, who knows? Manny might never have turned into a murderer at all.
TWO
Draw, you bastard!
R. Crumb, The R. Crumb Handbook
1
When we weren’t refusing to divulge our names or religion to SS men, or choking to death on Zyklon B, Manny and I met in the Second World War air-raid shelter which had become our play space and discussed God.
‘You don’t ask Elohim to explain Himself,’ Manny, not yet a teenager, not really ever a teenager, told me,