Shylock is my Name by Howard Jacobson: A review

Shylock Is My Name by Howard Jacobson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is another entry in the Hogarth Shakespeare series, the retelling of Shakespeare's classic tales by modern writers. It is a contemporary reimagining of The Merchant of Venice, with the emphasis, as is obvious from the title, on the character of Shylock. It is a study of his inner life and we get to know him more intimately than we ever did in the original play.

I had last encountered Howard Jacobson when I read his Man Booker Prize winner, The Finkler Question, in which he ruminated at length and often with considerable humor upon what it means to be a Jew and on the roots of anti-Semitism. In many ways, this book is a continuation of that contemplation. It seems to me that Jacobson was the perfect writer to tackle the assignment of exploring the character of Shylock in all its complexities.

He chooses to do this by materializing Shylock in a cemetery in northwestern England in the 21st century with the personality that Shakespeare gave him fully intact. Shylock appears there, in conversation with his dead wife Leah, as the philanthropist and art collector Simon Strulovitch has come to inspect the newly erected tombstone over his mother's grave.

Shylock is in the habit of having daily conversations with Leah in cemeteries or gardens, bringing her up to date on all the news and pouring out the contents of his heart to her. Strulovitch sees Shylock in the cemetery and invites him home with him and the two begin engaging in extended colloquies about the nature of Jewishness and what it is to be an observant or unobservant Jew in the modern world. The conversations crackle with both tartness and humor as they consider the tensions of the father-daughter relationship and and the quandary of being a Jew both in Shylock's time and in the modern era.

Gradually, it becomes clear that Strulovitch is a kind of modern doppelganger for Shylock. The challenges of Strulovitch's life mirror those of Shakespeare's creation. The plot, in fact, is reflective in all major aspects of Shakespeare's play, with some subtle differences of emphasis. All of the best-known characters and all of the plot devices of The Merchant of Venice can be found here in one form or another. We even see Strulovitch/Shylock demanding his "pound of flesh" in quite a unique and unexpected fashion.

My favorite parts of the book were the philosophical conversations between Strulovitch and his house guest, Shylock. These are sharp-edged verbal fencing matches which give Jacobson a chance to fully display his wit, not to mention his appreciation of the English language - and occasionally of Hebrew.

My second favorite parts - a close second - were Shylock's conversations with his dead wife. These are tender and filled with a different, gentler kind of wit and they help us to see the full humanity of Shylock.

The original Shakespeare play was a bit of comedy and a bit of tragedy. Jacobson has reimagined it with an emphasis on the comedy. It works very well in those terms.





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The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson: A review

I'm not sure that Howard Jacobson would welcome the comparison, but he reminds me of Philip Roth. Roth at his best, that is, because Jacobson's Man Booker prize-winning The Finkler Question is very good. It is an exploration of the Jewish identity - the Jewish (Finkler) question - laced with good humor and a comic sensibility that is accessible to any reader without respect to religious background or preference.

Jacobson tells his story through the perceptions and worries of one Julian Treslove, who isn't a Jew. In fact, he is one of the few characters in this book who isn't. His two best friends, Libor Sevcik and Sam Finkler, are both Jews and Treslove is envious of them. He feels excluded from their culture and he very much wants in.

Treslove has lost his job at BBC and now makes his living impersonating famous people like Brad Pitt and Colin Firth. His life is changed when he is mugged one night - by a woman! - and he comes to believe that he was attacked because the mugger thought he was a Jew. He becomes more and more obsessed with making the mugger's misidentification of him become reality.

Treslove's friend, Libor, is an elderly man, a recent widower who has lost his beloved wife, Malkie, and who was teacher to both Treslove and Finkler when they were in school. He has passed his ninth decade and now he feels bereft and alone without Malkie. He finds it difficult to come up with a reason to go on living without her.

Sam Finkler is a wildly successful writer of pop psychology or pop philosophy books of the self-help variety. He, too, is a recent widower, having lost his wife Tyler. Tyler, who had had an affair with Treslove, which Finkler apparently never knew about. Finkler is a stereotypical self-hating Jew. When Finkler remarks to Libor that he doesn't have anti-Semitic friends, Libor replies: "Yes, you do. The Jewish ones." In the context of this book, that seems all too true.

Jacobson is dealing here with free-floating anxiety. It's the anxiety of the individual "Finkler" as well as the anxiety of the larger Finklerish (i.e., Jewish) community. He explores Jewish attitudes regarding all facets of Middle East politics, as well as attitudes toward Jewish history, particularly the Holocaust, and toward the religion of Judaism. He paints with a broad brush, and yet within those sweeping swirls of paint, he manages to delineate the finer details of his characters' personalities.

This is a book that is both funny and sad, bombastic and subtle. It is extremely well-written, as becomes the Man Booker prize winner, and I think it will appeal to a wide audience. It certainly appealed to me.