Free Shylock Is My Name by Howard Jacobson Page A

out.”
    —
    Needy or not, Strulovitch would have liked those to be the last words exchanged between them for the night. He felt he could sleep soundly on them. Sad, that he had no wife capable of taking heart from what he read to her. But sometimes it’s possible to feel pleased for the hearts of other people.
    Shylock, however, showed no signs of wanting to retire. Strulovitch was beginning to feel crowded by him. He was a guest one needed all one’s energy for. Though his eyes leaked no light, and his mouth was resolutely unplayful, he still suggested a sort of irascible sociability, as though conversation, however desolate, were his medium and he dreaded its cessation. Or was it just sleep he dreaded? Did he ever turn in, Strulovitch wondered. Was this to be the price of having him here—that there would be no more sleep for him either? Only talk of daughters and identity, anger, betrayal, monkeys…?
    To keep himself awake, he asked if Shylock could remember the last joke the Gentiles had told him.
    “Do you want it how I tell it or how they tell it?”
    “How you tell it.”
    “Then I’ll tell it how they tell it. ‘G
rr
eenberg goes to the doctor because he’s not feeling vell…’ As a matter of interest have you ever met anyone who talks like that?”
    “No…except maybe the occasional rabbi.”
    “It seems more likely that they’re aping what frightens them.”
    “Let me tell you that no one’s frightened of us any more.”
    “You must speak for yourself. I can still scare dogs.” Strulovitch didn’t say that his own dogs hadn’t been scared. But then they were used to keeping company with an inordinate Jew.
    “I don’t doubt,” he said, “that you, personally, still have the power to terrify. I meant ‘us’ collectively.”
    “I’m not sure that the distinction between ‘I’ and ‘us’ quite works. The individual Jew brings the collective Jew with him into any room. It’s the collective Jew that Christians see. Person to person, I grant you, they can be very nice. I have received proposals of marriage from Christians sincerely wanting to make amends. I’ve had my portrait sympathetically painted. A German apologised to me in a cemetery once. But when I extended my hand he seemed afraid to take it. Why? Because at that moment it wasn’t the individual Shylock’s hands, it was the hand of the collective Jew. And collectively, we still connect to the uncanny.”
    Strulovitch felt the surge of dark forgotten powers. The uncanny…If only.
    “Shall I go on with the joke?” Shylock said.
    Strulovitch remembered his manners. “Yes, please. G
rr
eenberg’s at the doctor’s…”
    “ ‘G
rr
eenberg,’ says the doctor, ‘you’re going to have to stop masturbating.’ ‘Stop masturbating!’ exclaims G
rr
eenberg, ‘Vy is that?’ ‘In order,’ says the doctor, ‘that I can examine you.’ ”
    Strulovitch laughed. It was one of his favourite jokes but he wouldn’t have got it if he hadn’t known it already. He had never heard it told so badly. Job could have told it better. Maybe that was Shylock’s point. Telling it how
they
told it. He knew Shylock to be a man of savage humour. The fact of his never smiling was the irrefragable proof of that. Perhaps he was one of those who had to write his own material. And write it out of extremity—at the edge, or in the crevices. No wonder people couldn’t always tell for sure when he was jesting and when he wasn’t.
    “I love that joke,” Strulovitch told him, remembering the consternation it had caused Ophelia-Jane.
    “You should have stopped me if you knew it.”
    “I wouldn’t have stopped you for the world. But now you tell me something—why are there are so many stories about Jews masturbating? Onan, Leopold Bloom, your Alexander Portnoy, G
rr
eenberg. Is that how Gentiles see us? Or is it how we see ourselves?”
    He expected Shylock to take his time replying. But a scholar who had written a neglected paper on