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Authors: Howard Jacobson
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well.
On consideration I think Manny’s parents were right to have kept them from him. The pity was that he got to see them in the end.
The pity was that any of us did.
6
Emanuel Eli Washinsky was found guilty of manslaughter on the basis of diminished responsibility in 1973. The year of my first divorce. And the year Syria and Egypt coordinated a surprise attack against Israel on Yom Kippur, also on the basis of diminished responsibility. So a big year for Jews. In fact the Yom Kippur War was a bit of a godsend for Manny, in that the consternation and anger it generated distracted attention from his trial. That’s assuming he cared one way or another by that time.
The crime itself had been committed the year before. I was gone from the neighbourhood when it happened. I was plying my trade. Living modestly in London and selling my cartoons – this was well before my Tom of Finland phase – to whoever would buy them: Punch , Private Eye , the Spectator , I wasn’t particular. I doubt I had yet developed an individual style. Baleful I suppose was the word for what I did – incongruities, absurdities and falsities eyed splenetically and in the English manner: Gillray, Rowlandson et al, but more fingery in the line, more persnickety, and without the current affairs. Not yet on an epic scale, you might say. But then the epic scale I was reserving for what really mattered to me – Five Thousand Years of Bitterness . Yes, it had been our book, a Stroganoff Brothers production, but Manny had washed his hands of it, both spiritually and intellectually, years before. Blasphemous. Unclean. Unfunny. So I felt that the moral rights to it had reverted to me. Besides, I wasn’t using any of his words. Beyond a few necessary AARGH!s and SPLAT!s and SKREEAAAK!s there were no words. Just pictures. Illustrations, in the grotesque mode and with lots of colour – think Dr Doom as drawn by Goya – of what successive generations of bastards had done to us in every corner of the globe. Graphic novels hadn’t even happened yet, so I was at the vanguard of comic history. Not that I was drawing fiction. This was graphic history. And not just any graphic history. The graphic history.
I wasn’t rushing. No one was breathing down my neck. When I finished it I finished it, and when I finished it the world would notice. That wasn’t arrogance, merely the certainty without which you cannot do the work. The only people I couldn’t imagine reading it with pleasure were the Germans, though I have since learned that collective guilt, if you know how to work it, can sell books in piles as high as bones. In the meantime I could just about earn enough to keep me in cigarettes, Bell’s whisky, and the sort of Gentile women – awe-inspiring and essentially ill-disposed to me – who made me go weak at the knees. Being squeezed through the divorce courts by Chloë, post St Matthew Passion , had depressed my spirits and strained my finances, but I felt that when I needed more I could always draw more. As for running out of ideas, the proposition would have struck me as laughable. I was the fruit of Five Thousand Years of Bitterness which meant that I was heir to Five Thousand Years of Jokes.
It was from my mother that I first heard about the Washinskys’ tragedy. A phone call at an odd hour. The call you know, from the time and from the ringtone, bodes only ill.
‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘I have something very terrible to tell you.’
‘Is it Shani?’
‘No, it isn’t anybody in the family. We ’re all all right. It’s the Washinskys. Something unbearably awful has happened. Oh, Max, I don’t know how to start to tell you.’
Although she had moved out of Crumpsall Park soon after Shanileft, installing herself and Tsedraiter Ike into a maisonette in more salubrious Prestwich, with the intention of renting out our old house for extra income, she was back in it again for reasons of economy, neither she nor Tsedraiter Ike being capable
On consideration I think Manny’s parents were right to have kept them from him. The pity was that he got to see them in the end.
The pity was that any of us did.
6
Emanuel Eli Washinsky was found guilty of manslaughter on the basis of diminished responsibility in 1973. The year of my first divorce. And the year Syria and Egypt coordinated a surprise attack against Israel on Yom Kippur, also on the basis of diminished responsibility. So a big year for Jews. In fact the Yom Kippur War was a bit of a godsend for Manny, in that the consternation and anger it generated distracted attention from his trial. That’s assuming he cared one way or another by that time.
The crime itself had been committed the year before. I was gone from the neighbourhood when it happened. I was plying my trade. Living modestly in London and selling my cartoons – this was well before my Tom of Finland phase – to whoever would buy them: Punch , Private Eye , the Spectator , I wasn’t particular. I doubt I had yet developed an individual style. Baleful I suppose was the word for what I did – incongruities, absurdities and falsities eyed splenetically and in the English manner: Gillray, Rowlandson et al, but more fingery in the line, more persnickety, and without the current affairs. Not yet on an epic scale, you might say. But then the epic scale I was reserving for what really mattered to me – Five Thousand Years of Bitterness . Yes, it had been our book, a Stroganoff Brothers production, but Manny had washed his hands of it, both spiritually and intellectually, years before. Blasphemous. Unclean. Unfunny. So I felt that the moral rights to it had reverted to me. Besides, I wasn’t using any of his words. Beyond a few necessary AARGH!s and SPLAT!s and SKREEAAAK!s there were no words. Just pictures. Illustrations, in the grotesque mode and with lots of colour – think Dr Doom as drawn by Goya – of what successive generations of bastards had done to us in every corner of the globe. Graphic novels hadn’t even happened yet, so I was at the vanguard of comic history. Not that I was drawing fiction. This was graphic history. And not just any graphic history. The graphic history.
I wasn’t rushing. No one was breathing down my neck. When I finished it I finished it, and when I finished it the world would notice. That wasn’t arrogance, merely the certainty without which you cannot do the work. The only people I couldn’t imagine reading it with pleasure were the Germans, though I have since learned that collective guilt, if you know how to work it, can sell books in piles as high as bones. In the meantime I could just about earn enough to keep me in cigarettes, Bell’s whisky, and the sort of Gentile women – awe-inspiring and essentially ill-disposed to me – who made me go weak at the knees. Being squeezed through the divorce courts by Chloë, post St Matthew Passion , had depressed my spirits and strained my finances, but I felt that when I needed more I could always draw more. As for running out of ideas, the proposition would have struck me as laughable. I was the fruit of Five Thousand Years of Bitterness which meant that I was heir to Five Thousand Years of Jokes.
It was from my mother that I first heard about the Washinskys’ tragedy. A phone call at an odd hour. The call you know, from the time and from the ringtone, bodes only ill.
‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘I have something very terrible to tell you.’
‘Is it Shani?’
‘No, it isn’t anybody in the family. We ’re all all right. It’s the Washinskys. Something unbearably awful has happened. Oh, Max, I don’t know how to start to tell you.’
Although she had moved out of Crumpsall Park soon after Shanileft, installing herself and Tsedraiter Ike into a maisonette in more salubrious Prestwich, with the intention of renting out our old house for extra income, she was back in it again for reasons of economy, neither she nor Tsedraiter Ike being capable
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