fingering the squiggly ear-locks which made his new-moon face appear as though someone had scribbled on it.
I’m cartooning him. He didn’t have ear-locks to finger. Sideburns turned to fluff were what he had, hardly even sideburns, little curls of unsportive fuzz run wild, which, in the event of trouble – the trouble we all half feared was only round the corner, the Crumpsall Park Pogrom which would one day come out of a clear blue sky – he would be able to conceal quickly under his school cap. These were the golden days of Jewish secularity, before the Orthodox found the effrontery to blaze their fanatic retrogression on their faces. What there was of medieval Jewishry was confined to a couple of streets of teeming five-storey houses in Lower Broughton on the Manchester/Salford borders where, for a while, Sir Oswald Mosley ran a provocative office, and through which my father occasionally walked me, holding me firmly by the hand, so that I should see, but not be inveigled into, what the long march to emancipation was emancipating us from. Frummers was how we referred to these out-of-time Talmudicliteralisers among ourselves, from frum meaning devout. Not a pejorative exactly, but not approving either. I could never decide whether my father’s interpolations – from frummers to frummies, and then from frummies to frumkies – were designed to diminutise them or diminutise their offence. But frumkies was the term we settled on finally. The Washinskys, to be fair to them, were not like those we saw in Lower Broughton. They did not wear long black coats or high black hats which seemed to float on a current of spirituality above their heads. They were not in the same hurry when they were out of doors, as though late for an appointment with the Almighty. And their house was not a gypsy caravan of trumperies and trinkets to protect it from the evil eye. No, the Washinskys were not living in the Middle Ages, but to us they were the halfway house on the journey back.
And they were still frumkies.
‘I’m not asking Elohim,’ I’d say, usually while gouging out the mortar between the bricks of our air-raid shelter – a peculiarly wanton impulse, to pull apart what sheltered us – ‘I’m asking you.’
To tell the truth, I wasn’t asking Manny anything. I was needling him. As though to pay him back for my own shortcomings as a friend, for making me ashamed to acknowledge him in such polite company as Errol Tobias’s, I pestered him to distraction. Why this, Manny? Why that? When Manny or either of his parents went through their front door they put a finger to their lips and then to the mezuzah on the door frame. I knew about mezuzahs; we had one at our front door, put there by the Jewish family who had lived in the house before us, but now painted over and ignored. I knew what a mezuzah contained: words, words from the Torah, including the Shema, the holiest words of all – ‘Shema Yisrael, Hear, O Israel, the Lord is one . . .’ But precisely because the Lord was one we did not tolerate idols. In which case why did we kiss words? A word too could be an idol, couldn’t it?
Why, Manny? Why the food hysteria? Why all the salting that went on in his house, salting the flavour out of everything? Why,when they bought kosher meat from a kosher butcher did they have to kosher it again when they got it home? Had the Christian street unkoshered it? And why the obsessive keeping this from that? So a crumb of cheese the size of mouse bait fell on to a thrice salted, petrified slice of chicken breast from which the flavour had already been extracted to make soup, was that so terrible? Did Elohim have nothing else to do, was he so smallminded that he would notice and punish a transgression as negligible as that? And why the obsession with Saturday? How can a day be holy?
‘It’s a commandment,’ Manny told me. ‘Remember the Sabbath day to—’
‘I know all that. But next to “Thou shalt not kill”, remembering the Sabbath day is a bit unimportant, isn’t it? We don’t say “Remember not to kill”. Because forgetting wouldn’t be any excuse. “Remember the Sabbath day” is more like a nudge than a commandment.’
‘The Ten Commandments are all equally important,’ he replied. ‘The rabbis say that if you break one you might as well