Saga of the quintessential Jew

BOOK REVIEW: THE FINKLER QUESTION
By Howard Jacobson

HOWARD Jacobson is the greatest Jewish novelist you’ve probably never read. Suffice to say, if he lived in America he would be held in the same regard as Philip Roth, an author to whom those in the know have often compared him.

However, Jacobson has the misfortune of hailing from England, a land that eschews Manischewitz in favour of a much snootier drop. For years now, while bookish types have championed a Jewish literary renaissance, rallying around the likes of Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss, Jacobson has had to settle for plying his trade with subtle brilliance in the shadows.

But suddenly, as if playing a trump card from his previous book Kalooki Nights, he has exploded onto the world stage, winning the prestigious Man Booker Prize for his latest novel, The Finkler Question, published by Bloomsbury.

No doubt he is finding the irony truly delicious. The book is not only his funniest to date, but also the most overtly Jewish; the very factors that critics had identified as preventing him from having won before.

In the book, Sam Finkler is a pop-philosopher, intellectual and thoroughly modern Englishman. To his friend, failed BBC producer Julian Treslove, Finkler is the quintessential Jew.

So marked is the infatuation that Treslove coins the term “Finkler” to be liberally interchanged with all other Semitic appellations. Rather mockingly then, Jacobson sets up from the outset a riff on the age-old “Jewish” question. How, the book asks, has Diaspora Jewry reached its present state?

In Treslove we see semitophilia taken to the realm of absurdity. It’s not just that he loves Finkler, he wants to be a Finkler. He chases Jewish women, scours his family tree for hints of Jewish ancestry, even examines his reflection in search of Semitic characteristics.

The obsession goes into overdrive when, after a dinner with Finkler and their former teacher Libor Sevcik, Treslove is mugged by a woman who, he believes, calls him “you Jew”. To Treslove it is the greatest compliment he could have received.

Treslove’s obsession is, of course, misguided. Finkler has spent an entire life distancing himself from his people. He wants to be a cosmopolitan everyman, devoid of the stereotypical characteristics that might lump him in with his more parochial brethren.

Indeed, Finkler actively searches out ever more desperate ways of being less “Jewish”.

In one of the book’s funnier recurring gags, Finkler joins Ashamed Jews, a group of self-hating anti-Zionists who meet every Wednesday except High Holy Days to speak out against Israel.

While the group gradually falls apart, Finkler grows in his righteous indignation. Then his son assaults a Jew at a pro-Israel rally and Finkler is faced with the tragic flipside to his dissent.

Not since Portnoy’s Complaint has an author so perfectly captured what it means to be Jewish in a particular time and place.

The Finkler Question brims with every obsession, every neurosis that marks the 20th century Diaspora Jew. Zionism, faith, marrying out, fidelity and education all get a good lambasting, with Jacobson in stellar mocking form.

And yet the book is so much more than a Yiddishe roast. Jacobson’s true brilliance lies in the pathos he imbues between the gags — for this is also a meditation on friendship, family and mortality.

Strip away the humour and you will find a compassion that is almost without parallel. In the pair of Finkler and Treslove we hear an author’s plea for good sense and moderation.

Given the abundance of white noise in modern Jewish life, it is a message we would all do well to heed.

Reviewed by Bram Presser

Bram Presser is a criminal lawyer and writes the literary blog, Bait For Bookworms.