Howard Jacobson has called Kalooki Nights ‘the most Jewish novel that has ever been written by anybody, anywhere’. What does this mean? It is a novel whose hero, Max Glickman, is Jewish. It is a history of two Jewish families living in Manchester, the Glickmans and the Washinskys, and a study of the degrees by which successive generations adapt to English society and English culture. It is a book full of Jewish words and phrases, Jewish customs and Jewish friends and relatives. In fact the only non-Jews in the book are either Max’s wives and girlfriends (a plentiful crew), his sister’s boyfriend Mick, and Dorothy, the half-German girlfriend of his neighbour Asher Washinsky. Oh, and a rather odd TV producer named Francine.
In a lecture he gave in January at the London Jewish Cultural Centre, Jacobson said, ‘For us [Jews] to be truly convinced we are reading Jewish literature, we must read about the Holocaust.
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