Booker Prize Winner’s Jewish Question

By SARAH LYALL

Published: October 18, 2010

LONDON — A funny thing happened when Howard Jacobson won the Man Booker
Prize last Tuesday. Instead of the traditional audience reaction — euphoria from the
winner’s entourage, anemic clapping underpinned by envy and bitterness from everyone
else — the announcement, over dinner at the Guildhall here, was greeted by loud, sustained
applause. A smattering of people who were not even related to Mr. Jacobson stood and
cheered.

Andrew Testa for The New York Times

Howard Jacobson, winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize and shown here at his home in central London, says he would
prefer to be “the Jewish Jane Austen.”

“I think it’s that I’m someone who’s been around for a long time,” Mr. Jacobson, exhausted
but excited, said in an interview two days after. “There was also the feeling that, ‘Thank God
an old man’s won it.’ ” (He is 68).

The winning book, “The Finkler Question,” is Mr. Jacobson’s 11th novel; it was published in
the United States as a paperback original by Bloomsbury on the same day that the prize was
announced. It is an unusual Booker choice, both because it delves into the heart of the
British Jewish experience, something that few contemporary British novels try to do, and
because it is, on its surface at least, so ebulliently comic. It tells the story of three friends,
two Jewish and one, Julian Treslove, who longs to be.

When Treslove is attacked by a mugger who mutters something like, “You’re Jules,” or
possibly, “You Jew!,” the experience sends him on a long exploration of the nature of
Jewishness, culturally, socially and politically. He grapples with questions like, What makes
someone Jewish? Is it anti-Semitic to make generalizations about what makes someone
Jewish? Why are British Jews so much more open and warm than British non-Jews?

“Don’t idealize us,” his new girlfriend, Hephzibah Weizenbaum, warns.

“Why not?” he asks.

“For all the usual reasons. And don’t marvel at our warmth.”

Meanwhile his friends argue endlessly about Israel, forever “examining and shredding each
other’s evidence,” Mr. Jacobson writes. One of them, Sam Finkler, who writes pop-
philosophy books, joins an anti-Zionist group called the ASHamed Jews — mercilessly
lampooned by Mr. Jacobson — that meets regularly at the fashionable Groucho Club to
denounce Israel’s foreign policy.

“I think you’ve got to be one to get it,” Finkler’s wife explains to Julian.

“Be one what?” he responds. “One of the ASHamed?”

“A Jew. You’ve got to be a Jew to get why you’re ashamed of being a Jew.”

Some readers have misunderstood. “People think they’re parodies of Jews who happen to
disapprove of Israel,” Mr. Jacobson said of the ASHamed, sitting in his apartment in the
Soho neighborhood here, his new Man Booker statuette gleaming behind him. “But they’re
not. They’re parodies of Jews who parade their disapproval of Israel.”

Andrew Motion, chairman of the Booker judges, said last week that the subtlety of Mr.
Jacobson’s writing, the way it mixes comedy and tragedy, had not, perhaps, been sufficiently
appreciated before.

“There is a particular pleasure in seeing somebody who is that good finally getting his just
deserts,” he said. He added that “The Finkler Question” is “very clever and very funny,” as
Mr. Jacobson’s work generally is. “But it is also, in a very interesting way, a very sad,
melancholic book. It is comic, it is laughter — but it is laughter in the dark.”

Indeed, there is an ominous undercurrent in the book in the form of a growing number of
anti-Semitic attacks, mostly offstage, that shatter the complacency of characters who resist
the notion of Jews as perpetual victims. Mr. Jacobson says that such incidents worry him
too, and that some of the views in the cacophony of arguments and counterarguments in the
book reflect his own opinions. But mostly, he said, he adheres to the notion, as one of his
characters says, that “as a Jew, I believe that every argument has a counterargument.”

Mr. Jacobson said: “Once we accept there’s a constant to-ing and fro-ing of understanding
and misunderstanding, all is possible. Here’s the wonder of the novel. The novel is the great
fluid form in which all those possibilities flow in and flow out. Nothing is definite, nothing is
finished, nothing is determined.”

Mr. Jacobson grew up in working-class Manchester, to a father who worked as a children’s

entertainer and who ran a market stall selling trinkets. Bright, bookish and intellectually
ambitious, he studied English literature at Cambridge under the legendaryF.R. Leavis.

“I’m an old-fashioned English lit. man,” he said. “Straight down the line — it’s George Eliot,
it’s Dickens, it’s Dr. Johnson, it’s Jane Austen.”

At first, he said, he tried to emulate his heroes.

“I wanted to write the most obscure sentences you’ve ever seen and I wanted to write about,
you know, the English country house experience,” he explained. “You see the problem. I
didn’t get very far.”

Academic in-fighting in the college where he took a teaching job led to his first novel,
“Coming From Behind” (1983), a campus farce in the manner of David Lodge or Malcolm
Bradbury, but with a Jewish hero.

The book drew rave reviews. “And then I discovered I rather liked writing about Jews,” he
said. “Everyone in my family was astounded.” He mimics their response: “You’re not
interested in Jews!”

“I was brought up a Jew, but you know that way of being Jewish — the New York way,” Mr.
Jacobson continued. “We were stomach Jews, we were Jewish-joke Jews, we were bagel
Jews. We didn’t go to synagogue. I’m frightened of synagogue to this day. When I went to
synagogue as a little boy, you’d go in and 70 little bald men with their prayer shawls would
turn around and go, “Sh!” — he deploys the word as if spitting something out — “and it still
happens now, the only difference being that now I’m older than they are.”

Few contemporary novelists here write explicitly about the experience of Jews in Britain, a
state of affairs that could be debated as exhaustively, and probably with as little resolution,
as Treslove and his friends debate the issues that consume them in “The Finkler Question.”
Because of his rare position in the literary landscape, Mr. Jacobson has been called the
“English Philip Roth,” but he says he would prefer to be “the Jewish Jane Austen.”

“I’m an English writer who happens to know about Jews and would like to write like Jane
Austen, with a little bit of Yiddish,” he said.
He also resists being defined as a purely humorous writer and, indeed, “The Finkler
Question” ends on a note that is not humorous at all.

“To me, being a comic novelist is obviously to be serious, too — what else is there to be
comic about?” Mr. Jacobson said. “But when I hear people call me a comic novelist, I want
to scream, because they mean something different. I can call myself a comic novelist,
though, because I know what I mean when I say it.”