What’s the title of that great Leonard Cohen anthem to imperfection? The one telling us to ring the bells that still can ring? I’m not going to look it up on the internet. I’m encouraging what’s left of my cracked memory to do its own work. “About, my brain!” as Hamlet says.
Though mine will take a little longer to start up. Ring those bells anyway, because today (give or take 72 hours in either direction) marks 40 years since the publication of my first novel, Coming From Behind, and so my emergence from a 39-year depression brought on by not publishing anything.
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Jacobson's first book
I don’t expect anyone else to care about my depression but CFB, as one of my relatives called it to avoid vulgarity, is of some cultural interest if only because it had — still has — a Jewish hero, and there weren’t many of those in the literature being written on this side of the Atlantic in 1983.
Despite being 50 years old, Louis Golding’s Magnolia Street, set in the very part of Manchester I’d grown up in, remained the model of how to write about British Jews without boring Gentiles to distraction or incensing Jews themselves.
Keep it picturesque, panoramic and don’t forget the perils of marrying out. Brian Glanville’s harsh depiction of Anglo-Jewish materialism in The Bankrupts, published in 1962, raised the hackles of the very community likely to read his books.
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Franz Kafka as a cockroach (Getty Images. Illustration by Gus Condeixa)
Much as Gerald Kersh had done 30 years before, after irate family members caused his first novel, Jews Without Jehovah, to be withdrawn, Glanville decided to give Jews a swerve. You could count on more readers and less broiges if you wrote about football.
Such gifted writers as Bernice Rubens and Frederic Raphael were of course writing about Jews (somewhat quizzically in Raphael’s case) at the time I was wondering if I dared, but they couldn’t be said to constitute a “scene”.
There was no brotherhood to join. Indeed, it would hardly have suited my purposes if there had been.
The point of my Jewish hero — the name Sefton Goldberg came to me in a lightning burst of shame — was that he was all alone, if not the only Jew in Christendom then certainly the only Jew teaching English Literature, or anything else come to that, in a purgatorial polytechnic in the West Midlands, a freak of nature even among the Magnolia Street Jews he’d grown up among in Manchester.
The novel’s first reviewers were reminded of Woody Allen’s dysphoric alter-ego Alvy Singer. I thought I was doing something more along the lines of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa who woke one day and found himself a cockroach.
I was not surprised that not everyone approved this depiction of a Jew. I wasn’t sure I approved it myself. But Jewish comedy, I maintained, requires an element of self-immolation.
You cannot successfully burn up all around you unless you, too, are willing to die in the flames. The coup de théâtre, for a Jewish writer or comedian, is the moment you joke yourself back to life. Call it the ascension but with better lines.
A distant cousin — every Jew is your distant cousin in Manchester — accused me of washing my family’s dirty linen in public. By “family” she meant the Jewish people. In making Sefton Goldberg a klutz I made all Jews klutzemer.
So did Kafka make all Jews insects, I asked her. Why couldn’t Jewish writers write about nice Jews, was her reply.
My father, whose advice to me had always been “keep your head down and stay shtum”, was sorry that I hadn’t kept my head down and stayed shtum.
I asked what he thought might happen as a consequence. He shrugged, surprised I needed to ask. In that shrug I saw the whole of our Eastern European history — the looting, the burning, the lynching.
It wasn’t by doing anything that Sefton Goldberg would be the cause of this. He drew attention to us, that was all. By the logic of my father’s politics, a cultural landscape devoid of novels by and about Jews was a good thing.
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Jacobson speaking at Jewish Book Week
My mother’s objections were slightly different. She said that the novel made her laugh but wondered why I had to be so hard on myself. I told her Sefton Goldberg wasn’t me. I took her through James Joyce on impersonality.
And DH Lawrence on how the author isn’t the work. She listened patiently before asking where I taught. “Wolverhampton Polytechnic.” “And where does Sefton Goldberg teach?”
“Wrottesley Polytechnic.” “I rest my case,” she said.
In the end, what worried both my parents was that the freak Sefton Goldberg believed himself to be was not a fair reflection of how others saw us. If I drew less attention to my Jewishness, people probably wouldn’t even know I was one.
Hallelujah! I’ve recovered the title of Leonard Cohen’s anthem. It’s called Anthem. I once saw him sing it at the O2 Centre to a million adoring, largely Gentile fans, all dressed as he dressed.
Did they know how Jewish they looked, with their bad backs and those little old Zaydeh tribute trilbies? Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t, maybe they didn’t care either way. My parents were right.
Our immemorial enemies aside — and yes, that’s a big aside — most people are Jew-impervious and don’t see what Sefton Goldberg saw in his bathroom mirror. We should like ourselves more. But try telling that to Kafka.
