Read Online The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson - Free Book Online

You're a household name -'
    Finkler, pleased, waved the compliment away. Who cared about being a household name? The flush of satisfaction in his cheeks was probably not satisfaction at all, just embarrassment. Household name - for God's sake. Household name! How many households, he wondered, were naming him this very moment? How many households did it take to make a household name?
    'Only think of Julian,' Libor continued, 'and how disappointing his life must appear to him.'
    Finkler did as he was told and thought about it. The two spots of colour in his cheeks, previously the size of ten-pence pieces, grew into two blazing suns.
    'Yes, Julian. But then he has always been in waiting, hasn't he? I never waited for anything. I took. I had the Jewish thing. Like you. I had to make it quick, while there was time. But that only means that what I am capable of doing I have done, whereas Julian, well, his time might yet come.'
    'And does that scare you?'
    'Scare me how?'
    'Scare you to think he might overhaul you in the end. You were close friends, after all. Close friends don't get over their dread of being beaten in the final straight. It's never over till it's over with a friend.'
    'Who are you afraid might overtake you, Libor?'
    'Ah, with me it really is over. My rivals are all long dead.'
    'Well, Julian's not exactly breathing down my neck, is he?'
    Libor surveyed him narrowly, like an old red-eyed crow watching something easy to get its beak into.
    'He's not now likely to make it as a household name, you mean? No. But there are other yardsticks of success.'
    'God, I don't doubt that.' He paused to ponder Libor's words. Other yardsticks, other yardsticks . . . But couldn't think of any.
    Libor wondered if he'd gone too far. He remembered how touchy he had been about success at Finkler's age. He decided to change the subject, re-examining the chopsticks Finkler had bought his wife. 'These really are lovely,' he said.
    'She talked about collecting them, but never did. She often discussed collecting things but never got round to it. What's the point? she'd ask. I took that as a personal affront. That our life together wasn't worth collecting for. Could she have known what was going to happen to her, do you think? Did she want it to happen to her?'
    Libor looked away. He was suddenly sorry he had come. He couldn't take another man's wife-sorrows on top of his own. 'We can't know those things,' he said. 'We can know only what we feel. And since we're the ones who are left, only our feelings matter. Better we discuss Isrrrrae.' He put a fourth 'r' in the word to irritate his friend out of pathos.
    'Libor, you promised.'
    'Anti-Semites, then. Did I make a promise not to discuss your friends the anti-Semites?'
    The comedic Jewish intonation was meant as a further irritant to Finkler. Libor knew that Finkler hated Jewishisms. Mauscheln , he called it, the hated secret language of the Jews, the Yiddishising that drove German Jews mad in the days when they thought the Germans would love them the more for playing down their Jewishness. The lost provincial over-expressiveness of his father.
    'I don't have friends who are anti-Semites,' Finkler said.
    Libor screwed up his face until he resembled a medieval devil. All he lacked were the horns. 'Yes, you do. The Jewish ones.'
    'Oh, here we go, here we go. Any Jew who isn't your kind of Jew is an anti-Semite. It's a nonsense, Libor, to talk of Jewish anti-Semites. It's more than a nonsense, it's a wickedness.'
    'Don't get kochedik with me for speaking the truth. How can it be a nonsense when we invented anti-Semitism?'
    'I know how this goes, Libor. Out of our own self-hatred . . .'
    'You think there's no such thing? What do you say to St Paul, itching with a Jewishness he couldn't scratch away until he'd turned half the world against it?'
    'I say thank you, Paul, for widening the argument.'
    'You call that widening? Strait is the gate, remember.'
    'That's Jesus, not Paul.'
    'That's Jesus as