The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson

This is last year's Booker prize. I wasn't really sure what it was about, even having read the blurb on the back but was feeling a little adventurous and need of a new author who I could get my teeth into. Jacobson is good. Very good. Hey, he won the Booker, so you don't really need me to go on about that.
I think what surprised me most was the honesty of Jacobson's novel. It's about Jewishness and how British society intersects British Jewishness. It's a strange book on that front and could have been preachy, morbid, angry or mawkish. It's none of those things. Instead it's funny, black and at once honest about the predicament of Jewish people and those they live with - that is, the rest of us.
I think it's hard to write honestly about issues of race and religion but Jacobson writes unashamedly through the voice of his non-Jewish main character about his life with a collection of different people across the spectrum of Jewish culture and belief that it's hard not to admire the depth of argument and conflict he brings to the surface without ever getting lost in it.
If Jacobson says there are few satisfactory answers to questions like the Shoah, Israel, Orthodoxy or belonging then I can only admit he has done something many others wouldn't be brave enough to do - look hard at these subjects and then (perhaps rather Jewishly) throw a hard long shrug and carry on with life.

You could argue that by refusing to pick a side and argue its case Jacobson has chickened out - I'll defend his choice as being the bravest of the lot. Everywhere I turn people have an opinion on Israel, the Palestinians and the Shoah. They have an opinion on religion, culture and the rights of people to defend themselves. I do too but before I'll ever admit to my true feelings on a subject like this I'll demand an hours worth of discussing the problem with trying to call out the good guys from the bad and deciding when enough history is enough. The world is too big and individuals are too small for clear cut judgements to be so easily arrived at.

I've found it hard to marshal my feelings on this book. I think because it's so flat in its view of the rights and wrongs of this subject but if there is one thing that comes clear it's the impact of the Shoah on the Jewish people. I think most non-Jewish people have essentially forgotten the nature of the Holocaust. Genocide has become a much misused word and even if there are other very legitimate examples (the Armenian Christians in what is now Turkey) it's something the normal non-Jewish British person knows is a Bad Thing but it's little more real than the achievements of Harold Shipman.

What Jacobson does is help you remember that the Shoah has defined a people, the survivors and observers of such an event in ways that, at risk of speaking of where I don't know, they have yet to fully work it through. Is that a surprise? No. Is it something we can process - I'm not so sure, most people find it hard to think on scales of weeks let alone months. This is an event whose repercussions are still swamping whole peoples decades after it officially ended. That is both immense and a cause for us to pause when we try to work out what we think on such a subject.

Now, as someone of mixed-race background I'm not a stranger to racist abuse - either from white people or from brown and black (which may be a surprise to my white friends - but hey I'm not Indian and I don't know Urdu or Hindi so I don't fit there either...and don't get me started on how great swathes of sub-Saharan African people feel about Indians). However, what saddens me most is the racism Jacobson writes of. The casual hatred fostered towards Jewish people makes me cringe but also frightens me a little too - because I know what it feels like and I know how close to the surface it bubbles in so many people.

This IS a novel, one which made me laugh. Yet it speaks to an issue that is one of the most important our society faces today - how we treat the stranger who will never wish to be like us. I don't think it will ever be resolved for us but that is because I don't think there will ever be an answer.