Some of the best Jewish novels, such as Saul Bellow’s Herzog, The Dean’s December and Mr. Sammler’s Planet and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, have been about the eruption of unreason and mayhem in America, especially in the 1960s. In each case, a decent, thoughtful person watches on as his world goes mad. Now at last we have a British one: Howard Jacobson’s new novel, Howl, without doubt, a book for our terrible, crazy times.
Jacobson’s equivalent to Herzog and Sammler is Dr Ferdinand Draxler MBE, headmaster of a junior school in south London. He watches in dismay as his world is turned upside down after October 7. “Today,” writes Jacobson, “he is lost in the sense that what used to matter doesn’t and that what used to be true isn’t.” His world has “lost its mind”. It’s not just the murder and rape of civilians in Israel.
It’s the way people in Draxler’s world – some of his school colleagues, people in a squat across the street, even his daughter – have started to hate Jews beyond reason. He looks on baffled as his world falls apart. “In this world of crazy ideologues,” he thinks, “they don’t deny atrocity…they welcome it.”
Who are “they”? “Random anti-Semites. Fourth-year students from Soas. A gang of Oxford professors of Settler-Colonial Studies...” Then there are the so-called “peace marches”, all those who deny October 7 even took place, “feminists [who] applauded rape” and those who write hate-filled antisemitic graffiti, even on the front door of his mother, a survivor from Belsen.
Draxler tries to find a way to respond to this crazy, hate-filled new world. “A flippant, ill-considered clever-dickery.” Biting sarcasm. He is argumentative, funny, melancholic and remains very, very intelligent in the face of this carnival of unreason. And, above all, he reflects on his Jewishness, “still wondering in middle age what sort of Jew to be?” as he tries to deal with the various self-hating Jews in his life.
His wife Charmian watches on, bemused, sometimes even frightened by his reaction. “And I knew what she feared,” thinks Draxler. “That if madness was the price of telling the truth I would choose madness.” In a novel full of great sentences this is perhaps the best. Who has not thought in the face of so much hatred and unreason since October 7, that standing up for the truth against media bias and so much hatred might leave us isolated, fearing for our sanity?
Jacobson has filled his novel with a terrific cast of characters. The self-hating Jewish deputy head at Draxler’s nursery school and Hasheen, the school janitor, “waving his mop in celebration of the recent ravaging of his enemies, crying God is great” while the nine-to-11s shout “Go, Hasheen!” There is Draxler’s daughter Zoe, an Oxford student who has decided she hates Israel. His mother, Agata, difficult, irascible, who tells Ferdinand, “Of course you are a son of mine, just not the one I expected.” And her late husband who told her in 1950, “Don’t you think it’s time to forgive and forget?” “1950!” thinks his son. “Measured by trauma-time, 1950 was a mere ten seconds after she’d served the beast of Belsen… yet my poor gutless father thought it was time to forgive and forget.” Howl is the first major British novel to address the greatest event of recent years: Why have so many in this country been driven mad with hatred for Israel and for Jews since October 7 and why have so few stood against this craziness? It is one of Jacobson’s very best.
Howl
By Howard Jacobson
Jonathan Cape
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