Kalooki Nights

A bit of personal history: my grandmother played kalooki, a card game that the protagonist's mother played religiously. I always thought it was from the French "Quelque" and never had a clue it was spelled like this. I picked up this novel because I've enjoyed Jacobson's work, particularly Coming from Behind and Redback, and I hadn't read his fiction in awhile. I had no idea I was going to find out about my grandmother's card game. It took me awhile to warm up to this novel. Others have compared it to Roth and Chabon, but the immediate and obvious comparison to me was to one of my favorite novels ever, Mordecai Richler's Joshua Then and Now (simplified into a little-seen film with a young James Woods and a not so young Alan Arkin and a very old Alexander Knox). In both novels, the father is a boxer with little connection to Judaism and the son takes his Jewish roots much more seriously notwithstanding marrying Gentiles. Each has a substitute for a bar mitzvah that highlights the sexual difficulties of adolescent boys around older women, a topic rarely discussed elsewhere. Here, it is the father with the greater connection to socialism, rather than the son in the Richler novel, but the parallels were so clear at the beginning that it took me awhile to unmoor Jacobson's vision from Richler's. Happily, the novel is long enough and complex enough that it left the progenitor behind. As the focus of the book shifts away from the narrator, Max Glickman, and more to his childhood friends, Manny, who murdered his parents, and Errol, who left the group he led in adolescent sexual games to lead a seemingly conventional life, it starts to make you care about these Manchester Jews. As the plot unpeels like an onion, and the interrelationship of the characters, including Manny's brother, a highly regarded Yeshiva student who falls in love with the daughter of the woman who laid the fires on the Sabbath in his parents' house, Max's ne'er do well uncle and his secret love, and Max's own three umlaut-laden wives, becomes clear, the novel demonstrates a depth and a purpose that is both subtle and masterly. There is straightforward Jewish humor, but there is also pathos and a deep understanding of the imperfections of the human condition. No one in this novel is all good or all bad; everyone is worth caring about to a degree. The obsession of the generation whose guilt over having been safe away from the Nazis (also a theme of the Richler novel) towards all things German is explained beautifully here, not just exploited.

Jacobson strides into the hearts of those people we call Jews with his banner of Truth flying high, keeping us laughing and crying all the way as we end up infinitely the wiser. It told me more about Jews than any of the academic stuff I've ever read...

You're gonna plotz before you find plots here. And if you lack at least a minimal Jewish background,or don't much care a some modern Jews and their wrestlings with identity, lust, love, religion, and whirlagig confusions, then you probably won't laugh, inwardly and outwardly, at the stylistically marvelous feats of humor that Howard Jacobson pulls off in this uniquely entertaining reading experience. I think that the Washington Post reviewer is really off base when he laments that the book is old hat. I've read umpteen Jewish authors over the years, and Kalooki Nights is entirely new hat to me. But the cartoony title! Yikes! Marginally relevant at best. Finally, the book does ramble. But so does my Uncle Bernie, who, nevertheless, is really enthralling to listen to.

Jonathan Safran Foer noted in the NY Times that Kalooki Nights "is a tragedy, and a work of genius". Indeed, it is a masterpiece. I laughed and cried from start to end. Membership in the tribe (or honorary membership) may be necessary to absorb its full impact. Indeed, if any recent book emerges as a Jewish classic, this will be the one. Jacobson is now in the Pantheon.