Free Kalooki Nights by Howard Jacobson

flew.
    ‘What about Asher?’
    Asher was Manny’s older brother. Somehow farshimelt and dashing in the past tense – dashed – all at once. Hollowed out, was how he had looked to me, great black volcanic gouges for eyes, and a sunken, tubercular chest. There was a touch of that about Manny too, but in his case you imagined that he had simply never inhaled enough fresh air, that his were coward’s lungs, whereas in Asher you saw someone made ill by late nights, if not alcohol then coffee, and if not debauch then at least the imagination of debauch. All guesswork on my part. I hardly knew him. He appeared a handful of times to keep Jewish assembly at our school – that’s to say to look after the Jewish kids while the Gentiles were hymning their saviour in the hall. He was meant to be teaching us Hebrew, or at least occupying us Hebraically, but all we did was chant a few letters of the Hebrew alphabet and throw chalk at him. He made no attempt to keep us in order. When a piece of chalk hit him he would smile and put it in his pocket. He was unnerving. He was somewhere else in his head.
    Because he was six or seven years older than Manny he had never figured in our conversation, never came out to offer us his opinion on The Scourge of the Swastika , never followed us into the air-raid shelter to make suggestions for Five Thousand Years of Bitterness , and for all I knew was unaware that he even had a brother, let alone that his brother had a friend. But although he wasn’t much in evidence in person, rumours about him had circulated freely, stories so wild and contradictory it was hard to believe they referred to the same person. Now he was a teacher at a Talmud Torah somewhere in the Midlands, and such was hispopularity that children cried to be allowed to go to his lessons. A businessman in New York who happened to be in the Midlands at the time was so impressed by Asher’s methods that he was funding him to set up a string of chederim – Sunday schools for Jews – all over the United States. But the next week he was out of work, penniless, keeping bad company, haunting low dives, in such deep trouble morally that his parents had disowned him, and not only disowned him but actually recited the prayers for the dead over him. And there’s only one reason why devout Jewish families ever do that. A shikseh!
    Asher and a shikseh! The whole of Crumpsall was abuzz with it.
    Could Asher – training to be a rabbi – really have been found in bed with the fire-yekelte who was three times his age, a sootyfingered woman in an apron who only ever visited the house on Saturday, and who therefore must have seduced or been seduced by him on the Sabbath? Count the sins against Leviticus, count the number of abominations the Washinskys would have enumerated in that! Once the most reserved family in the street, the Washinskys were suddenly waking us all up in our beds with their cursing. So violently did they turn on one another that Selick Washinsky had to be carried out on a stretcher, collapsing after trying to tear his son’s heart out. If the father didn’t kill the son, the son would kill the father. ‘Help!’ Channa Washinsky ran out into the street to cry. ‘They are murdering each other!’ My own father was dying at the time. I recall our concern that the last weeks of his sublunary sleep should not be disturbed by the war that had broken out between the Washinskys. But what could we do? A family had a right to rip itself apart if it wanted to. My father even found a sort of consolation in it. With luck these were the death throes of the Orthodox. They would tear themselves to shreds and that would be the end of this strange passage of ahistoricity and fancy dress which Jewish history had entered. Then all things stopped together: my father’s breathing and theWashinskys’ shouting. Asher, like my father, was spirited away. To a yeshiva in the North-East, it was said, Gateshead no doubt, where Manny, too, went