Booker Prize Winner’s Jewish Question

By Sarah Lyall
Published New York Times: October 18, 2010.

LONDON — A funny thing happened when Howard Jacobson won the Man Booker Prize last Tuesday. Instead of the traditional audience reaction — euphoria from the winner’s entourage, anemic clapping underpinned by envy and bitterness from everyone else — the announcement, over dinner at the Guildhall here, was greeted by loud, sustained applause. A smattering of people who were not even related to Mr. Jacobson stood and cheered.

Howard Jacobson, winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize and shown here at his home in central London, says he would prefer to be “the Jewish Jane Austen.”

The winning book, “The Finkler Question,” is Mr. Jacobson’s 11th novel; it was published in the United States as a paperback original by Bloomsbury on the same day that the prize was announced. It is an unusual Booker choice, both because it delves into the heart of the British Jewish experience, something that few contemporary British novels try to do, and because it is, on its surface at least, so ebulliently comic. It tells the story of three friends, two Jewish and one, Julian Treslove, who longs to be.

When Treslove is attacked by a mugger who mutters something like, “You’re Jules,” or possibly, “You Jew!,” the experience sends him on a long exploration of the nature of Jewishness, culturally, socially and politically. He grapples with questions like, What makes someone Jewish? Is it anti-Semitic to make generalizations about what makes someone Jewish? Why are British Jews so much more open and warm than British non-Jews?

“Don’t idealize us,” his new girlfriend, Hephzibah Weizenbaum, warns.
“Why not?” he asks.
“For all the usual reasons. And don’t marvel at our warmth.”

Meanwhile his friends argue endlessly about Israel, forever “examining and shredding each other’s evidence,” Mr. Jacobson writes. One of them, Sam Finkler, who writes pop-philosophy books, joins an anti-Zionist group called the ASHamed Jews — mercilessly lampooned by Mr. Jacobson — that meets regularly at the fashionable Groucho Club to denounce Israel’s foreign policy.
“I think you’ve got to be one to get it,” Finkler’s wife explains to Julian.
“Be one what?” he responds. “One of the ASHamed?”
“A Jew. You’ve got to be a Jew to get why you’re ashamed of being a Jew.”
Full article at NYT.