Mazel Tov to Howard Jacobson who has won the British Booker prize for his book The Finkler Question but I cannot resist taking a few shots at the Toronto Star for pussy-footing around and not fully airing the premises which Jacobson’s book revolves around. But first, the Toronto Star’s two shillings.
But in the end, it was the underdog — Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question — who won.
When Jacobson, 60, took the podium to claim the £50,000 prize, he first said he was speechless. But the London-based author, who had been nominated for the prize in 2002 and 2006, joked that he did have a few in his pocket. “The language in these speeches grows less gracious. You start wanting to berate the judges for the awards they didn’t give you,” he said. “But the judges of the 2010 prize surpass all praise.” The Finkler Question, published by Bloomsbury, is Jacobson’s 11th novel — a poignantly comic story of love, loss, male friendship and what it means to be Jewish today.
All of which is true – as far as it goes – but there is a deeper, more tragic-comic side to Jacobson’s award winning book which probably made the editorial department of the Toronto Star instinctively winch and snot out coffee from their noses when the news was passed around that The Finkler Question had won the coveted English language prize for fiction. So let me quote Howard Jacobson writing about Anti-Zionism in the Jewish Chronicle Online.
Every other Wednesday, except for festivals and High Holy-days, an anti-Zionist group called ASHamed Jews meets in an upstairs room in the Groucho Club in Soho to dissociate itself from Israel, urge the boycotting of Israeli goods, and otherwise demonstrate a humanity in which they consider Jews who are not ASHamed to be deficient. ASHamed Jews came about as a consequence of the famous Jewish media philosopher Sam Finkler’s avowal of his own shame on Desert Island Discs.
“My Jewishness has always been a source of pride and solace to me,” he told Radio Four’s listeners, not quite candidly, “but in the matter of the dispossession of the Palestinians I am, as a Jew, profoundly ashamed.”
“Profoundly self-regarding,” you mean, was his wife’s response. But then she wasn’t Jewish and so couldn’t understand just how ashamed in his Jewishness an ashamed Jew could be. That I know of, there is no Jewish media philosopher named Sam Finkler nor any anti-Zionist group meeting regularly at the Groucho Club. They exist only in the pages of my new novel, The Finkler Question, and any relation between them and real people or organisations is of course coincidental.
Though the ASHamed Jews are a satiric invention, my novel is not primarily a satire. It is a bleak tale of love and loyalty and the loss of both. It tells of three men, old friends, two of whom have recently lost their wives, and a third who has no wife to lose.
The widowers are Jewish, the third man is not. But he would like to be. He envies his Jewish friends their warmth, their cleverness, the love they have inspired, and even their bereavement. It is a bitter irony that he protests his admiration for all things Jewish just as many Jews are protesting their desire not to be Jewish at all.
As the rats desert the sinking ship, he alone – it might appear – is left to clamber aboard.
The ostensible cause of these defections is, of course, Israel. Not the actual Israel. For the purposes of my narrative, Israel exists only poetically, in the imaginations of those who cannot adequately describe themselves without it.
I happen to think this is largely true outside my novel as well: that Israel performs a function greater than itself, enabling or disabling ideas about belonging and disengagement, fanning the flames of ancient allegiances and animosities. For many Jews and non-Jews in this country Israel has become a figure of speech, the occasion for wild and whirling words, a pretext for bottling up or setting loose emotions which originate somewhere else entirely.
I began writing the The Finkler Question in 2008 but it came to the boil for me in the early months of 2009 at the time of Operation Cast Lead, as a consequence of which, or as a consequence of the reporting of which – for it, too, like everything else to do with Israel outside Israel, was figmentary – England turned into an uncustomarily frightening place for Jews. I am not speaking only of the physical threats and even damage that some Jews endured, attacks on persons, synagogues, cemeteries, the Jew-hatred expressed by primary school children etc, but of that anti-Zionist rhetoric which, in its inflatedness and fervour – a rhapsodic hyperbole growing more and more detached from any conceivable reality – was so upsetting in itself. You do not have to be punched in the face to feel you’ve been assaulted: intellectual violence is its own affront.
I have to admit I haven’t read The Finkler Question but I do need some travel reading for Friday’s journey and will pick it up. And did I mention for a 68 year old man…he’s kind of hot?
