Howard Jacobson is appearing at a literary retreat in October – see details below article. Tanya Gold reviews his latest novel
Howl by Howard Jacobson, Jonathan Cape, £20
Howard Jacobson, a Mancunian Jew, was born in 1942, the worst year in Jewish history.
To say that Jacobson summarises the diaspora condition better than anyone makes Howl sound no fun. Howl is very funny.
It also makes me want to kill myself but, as Jacobson reminds me, if I wait long enough someone else may do it for me.
The hero is Ferdinand Drexler, the Jewish headmaster of a primary school in London. After the October 7 massacres, Drexler has “lost his mind”.
But Drexler hasn’t lost his mind. That is just the projection that the Jew – the Christ-killer, the child-killer, the demon – submits to.
No, the world has lost its mind: it cannot process its desire to both inhabit – and murder – the Jew.
Nor can Jews themselves. October 7 sent Drexler, “into slow motion. I had suffered no personal loss but the space I moved in, like the air I breathed, had acquired a different density”.
And so Drexler, son of a Holocaust survivor – “the camps are of today, and so am I,” his mother says - sits in St James’s Park, “wary of the pelicans, in case they were concealing grenades in their beaks”.
This being a Howard Jacobson novel, it is essentially one long panic attack. You may not enjoy a panic attack, but they don’t get better than this.
Jacobson is a Jane Austen fan and Howl has all her form and poise. If Jacobson is dismayed by the Age of Stupid – he published Pussy, a Swiftian satire of Donald Trump’s childhood in 2017 - his writing never falters. “She touched my wrist. ‘I’m Melody.’ ‘And I’m Dissonance,’ I didn’t say.”
If Drexler believes “grammar was the image of a perfect republic of language”, he is alone in that republic. He watches people write JENOSIDE on walls and, “glue themselves to Rubens’s Samson and Delilah in the National Gallery… because they confused Rubens the painter with Reubens the delicatessen in Golders Green”.
Drexler’s book Shakespeare and the Shlemiels is cancelled, because students are, “ill with not liking my book … I murder babies with my bare words – or at least in the gaps between them”. Watching the “pro” Palestine marches, he, “passed people on the street who had green faces and one eye. Some had 11 fingers. Many had turned themselves into placards”.
Around him, people transform into Jew-haters, or Jews. Drexler’s daughter Zoe “had sorrow educated out of her” at Cambridge University and becomes a determined Jew-hater.
If twentieth-century Jews believed the Nazis, or intermarriage, would annihilate them, their children prefer to annihilate themselves. “What,” Drexler asks of Zoe, in one of Jacobson’s perfect aphorisms, “was marrying out compared to murdering in?”
The most despised character is Drexler’s deputy, the once-Christian Max Axelberg – “né Tony Evans – a ‘Jew by Choice’, he called himself”.
It’s a play on Jewish “chosen-ness”.
Axelberg “was a convert to a form of Judaism whose distinguishing feature was an intense dislike of Jews who’d got to Judaism any other way”. Drexler hates Axelberg’s greed for a personal history – a trauma – that is not his, but which he covets.
He knows that Axelberg, “blinking back tears of ahistorical sanctimony behind faux-owlish spectacles”, wants to eat him because Christianity’s oedipal fury with Judaism cannot end. “He wants my x [certificate], I thought. I am an adult film to him.”
It is self-hatred, Drexler frets, that might destroy the Jews at last: would that be an irony? “Whittle away at that interior place of self-respect as well as the homeland, dismantle the history from which they emerged again and again as defeated heroes, and at last they would be as the dirt beneath their own feet.”
An Arab tells Drexler, “We can’t bear to lose but you, my dear friend, can’t bear to win. You are melting before our eyes.”
Howl is Jacobson’s definitive panic attack, and as fine a novel as I have read.
“I was sick of Holocaust talk,” he tells us. “The word was wearing thin. We needed another catastrophe.”
Now it’s here.
Tanya Gold is author of Shameless: Exploiting the Holocaust
Details of Reading Retreat with Howard Jacobson:
https://jewishliteraryfoundation.co.uk/events/reading-retreat-with-howard-jacobson
