Jacobson, Howard, (The Finkler Question [hc, Bloomsbury USA, 2010] 978-1608196425 [pb, Bloomsbury USA, 2010] 978-1608196111 [Explores the psychological impact of perceived hate crimes. The plot centers on a misunderstood street mugging, and connects to the rising tide of antisemitism in modern Britain. The non-Jewish victim of a mugging is mistakenly convinced that he was attacked for appearing to be Jewish, and reacts by becoming totally attached to Jewish culture. The novel satirizes self-hating Jews who adopt anti-Zionism and regard Israel’s very existence as a moral crime against the Palestinians. They are in turn condemned by loyal Jews who view them as traitors, guilty of moral crimes. Jacobson winds up leading his Jewish anti-Zionist (Finkler) into a realization of the hypocrisies he has indulged in, and being pulled back into the inescapable embrace of tribal loyalty and shared grief.
United Kingdom · Fiction author
Howard Jacobson
Howard Jacobson (born 1942 in Manchester) – prominent comedic-satirical British author and columnist, winner of Man Booker Prize in 2010 for The Finkler Question. Somewhat like Canadian author, Mordecai Richler, Jacobson does not write crime fiction with perpetrators and detectives and the struggle between them. The treatment of crimes in his work is rather a vehicle to explore victimhood, identity and the lingering threat of racial violence. Several of his books are relevant to this discussion:
Jacobson, Howard, (Kalooki Nights [hc, Simon & Schuster, 2007]) 978-1416543428 [pb, Simon & Schuster, 2008] 978-1416543435 [The bizarre plot focuses on a Holocaust-obsessed British Jewish youth with a psychological fixation on Jewish suffering. He winds up murdering his own parents by gassing them. The rest of the novel deals with attempts to understand the motive for this catastrophic act. Jacobson contrasts those who cope by forgetting through triviality (like the card game Kalooki) versus those who are entirely destroyed by their inability to stop remembering (like the deranged youth who gassed his parents to death. The book pioneered Jacobson’s “seriously funny” style, arguing that Jewish comedy is fundamentally rooted in the knowledge that life is not funny, serving as the ultimate coping mechanism for historical terror.]
Jacobson, Howard, (J: A Novel [hc, Hogarth, 2014] 978-0553419559 [pb, Random House, 2015] 978-0553419566 [A bleak dystopian depiction of a near-future Britain where almost the entire Jewish population has been wiped out in a national Government-inspired massacre, which is then systematically erased from memory. The plot focuses on an initiative to manipulate the last two remaining Jews to propagate, so as to lead to a regeneration of Jews in the population. The sinister motive is the realization that society requires a scapegoat for its ills, a role the Jews are intended to fill, ad infinitum. – Google/AI]