buy his wife expensive shoes. In appearance he resembled Einstein without the hair. He had that globe-eyed, hangdog, otherwise preoccupied Jewish look. Einstein, presumably, is thinking E = mc2 when he stares into the camera. My father was thinking up ways to make Jewishness less of a burden to the Jews. J ÷ J = j.
Had he seen me with my head buried in The Scourge of the Swastika he’d have confiscated it without pausing to find out whether it was mine or someone else’s. Let the dead bury the dead, was his position. The way to show them the reverence they were owed was to live the life that they had not.
‘When I die,’ he said, unaware how soon that was going to be, ‘I expect you to embrace life with both hands. Then I’ll know I’ve perished in a good cause.’
‘When you’re dead you won’t know anything,’ I cheeked him.
‘Exactly. And neither do the dead of Belsen.’
This wasn’t callousness. Quite the opposite. It was our deliverance he sought – from morbid superstition, from the hellish malarial swamp shtetls of Eastern Europe which some of us still mentally inhabited, and from the death-in-life grip those slaughtered five or more million had on our imaginations.
He didn’t live to see me sell my first cartoon, which was probably a blessing. It showed Gamal Abdel Nasser and other Arab leaders looking out over an annihilated Israel on the eve of what would become known as the Six Day War. ‘Some of our best friends were Jewish,’ they are saying.
The Manchester Guardian wouldn’t take it but the Crumpsall Jewish Herald did, publishing it alongside a leader article warning of another Jewish Holocaust.
Jew, Jew, Jew.
Like many atheists and communists, my father never quite got the joking thing. He couldn’t understand why, if I was joking, I didn’t look more cheerful. And if I couldn’t look more cheerful, what I found to joke about.
It’s a mistake commonly made with cartoonists. People confuse the matter with the man. Since you draw the preposterous it is assumed that you are the preposterous. Everyone thinks you must be joking all the time, and in the end, if you are not careful, you come to believe you must be joking all the time yourself.
Jew, Jew, Jew. Joke, joke, joke. Why, why, why?
You can have too many of all three, as Chloë, my first flaxen Übermadchen Gentile wife, told me in explanation of her wanting a divorce.
‘Why’s that?’ I asked her.
‘There you go again,’ she said.
She thought I was trying to get under her skin deliberately. In fact it was just bad luck. With Chloë every word I said came out differently from how I meant it. She rattled me. Made me speak at the wrong time, and in the wrong tone of voice. I felt that she was interrogating me and in fear of her interrogation I blurted out whatever I thought she wanted me to say, which was always the opposite to what she wanted me to say, that’s if she wanted me to say anything.
‘Do I frighten you?’ she asked me once.
‘Of course you frighten me,’ I told her. ‘That very question frightens me.’
‘And why is that, do you think?’ But before I could answer she held her hand up in front of my mouth. ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘I know what’s coming. Because you’re Jewish. And you can’t ask a Jew a question without him thinking you’re Gestapo.’
Since I wasn’t permitted to speak, I turned my face into a question mark. So wasn’t she Gestapo?
Hence her wanting a divorce.
We’d just been to a St Cecilia’s Day performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion in St Paul’s Cathedral – Chloë, to spite me, cramming in as many saints as she could muster. If she could have sat me next to someone with St Vitus’s Dance – say St Theresa – she would have.
‘I’d call that the last straw,’ she said as we were coming out.
‘What are you telling me, Chloë, that our marriage is dashed on the rocks of Christ’s immolation?’
‘There you have it,’ she said, still holding my arm, which I thought was odd given the finality of the conversation. But then again, the steps were icy. ‘You call it an immolation, everyone else calls it the Passion.’
‘That’s just me trying to keep it anthropological,’ I said.
‘Trying to keep it at arm’s length, you mean. What are you afraid of, Max? Salvation?’
I turned to face her. ‘I don’t think what we’ve seen offers much salvation for the Jews,