Review
------
International Praise for Shylock Is My Name:
“[An] ebullient riff on Shakespeare... [a] blend of purposeful
deja vu and Jewish alism…Jacobson’s highflying wit is more
Stoppardian than Shakespearean, even amid rom-com subplots and
phallocentric jests equally well suited to Elizabethan drama as
to the world of Judd Apatow.”
-- The New York Times Book Review
“Jacobson… has delivered with authority and style… [a] deft
artist firmly in control, offering witty twists to a play long
experienced by many as a racial tragedy.”
-– The Washington Post
“Sharply written, profoundly provocative.”
--The Huffington Post
"The Shylock of the novel is ... a character in search of an
author, or at least an author who will write him fully, fill in
the blanks and give him a voice where once he was voiceless. And
in Jacobson, after just over 400 years, he has found a mensch who
has done—with considerable skill—exactly that."
-- The Daily Beast
“Stimulating… Jacobson is ideally suited to take on ‘Merchant.’”
-- The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“It is delicious…Jacobson is one of our finest writers.”
-- Forward
“A funny and inful reimagining of The Merchant of
Venice…Jacobson is uniquely qualified to take on The Merchant of
Venice.”
-- The Miami Herald
“A serious comic masterpiece.”
–- The Spectator (UK)
“Supremely stylish, probing and unsettling…This Shylock is a
sympathetic character... both savagely funny and intellectually
searching, both wise and sophistical, and coldly
controlling… Jacobson's writing is virtuoso. He is a master of
shifting tones, from the satirical to the serious. His prose has
the sort of elastic precision you only get from a writer who is
truly in command.”
-- The Independent (UK)
“Jacobson takes the play's themes - justice, revenge, mercy, Jews
and Christians, Jew-hatred, hers and daughters - and works
away at them with dark humour and rare intelligence… This is
Jacobson at his best. There is no funnier writer in English
today. Not just laugh-out-loud humour, though there is plenty of
that, including wonderful jokes about circumcision and
masturbation. But a sharp, biting humour, which stabs home in a
single line… This is one of his best novels yet.”
– Jewish Chronicle (UK)
“Part remake, part satire and part symposium, Jacobson's Merchant
is less Shakespeare retold than Shakespeare reverse-engineered...
in these juicy, intemperate, wisecracking squabbles, Jacobson
really communicates with Shakespeare's play, teasing out the
lacunae, quietly adjusting its emphases … and making startlingly
creative use of the centuries-old playscript.”
–-Daily Telegraph (UK)
“Jacobson, with glorious chutzpah, gives Shylock his Act V, and
the end when it comes is extremely satisfying… Provocative,
caustic and bold.”
–- Financial Times (UK)
"Jacobson is a novelist of ideas... What is added to a great work
in the rewriting? Do we need the argot of the 21st century
because the original is now intimidatingly remote? [Shylock Is My
Name] is a moving, disturbing and compelling riposte to the
blithe resolution offered in the urtext."
-- Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)
“Jacobson treats Shylock less as a product of Shakespeare’s
culture and imagination than as a real historical figure
emblematic of Jewish experience—an approach that gives the novel
peculiar vigour.”
– Prospect Magazine (UK)
“When Shylock and Strulovitch are swapping jokes, stories, and
fears, the tale is energetic…a work that stands on its own.”
– Publishers Weekly
“The Merchant is well-suited to Jacobson, a Philip Roth–like
British writer known for his sterling prose and Jewish
themes….full of the facile asides and riffs for which Jacobson
has been praised.” -- Kirkus
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About the Author
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HOWARD JACOBSON has written fourteen novels and five works
of non-fiction. In 2010 he won the Man Booker Prize for The
Finkler Question and was also shortlisted for the prize in 2014
for his most recent novel, J. Howard Jacobson’s first
book, Shakespeare’s Magnanimity, written with the scholar Wilbur
Sanders, was a study of four Shakespearean heroes. Now he has
returned to the Bard with a contemporary interpretation of The
Merchant of Venice.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***
Copyright ©2016 Howard Jacobsen
It is one of those better-to-be-dead-than-alive days you get in
the North of England in February, the space between the land and
sky a mere letterbox of squeezed light, the sky itself
unhomably banal. A stage unsuited to tragedy, even here where
the dead lie quietly. There are two men in the cemetery, occupied
in duties of the heart. They don't look up. In these parts you
must wage war against the weather if you don't want farce to
cl you.
Signs of just such a struggle are etched on the face of the
first of the mourners, a man of middle-age and uncertain bearing,
who sometimes walks with his head held arrogantly high, and at
others stoops as though hoping not to be seen. His mouth, too, is
twitchy and misleading, his lips one moment twisted into a sneer,
the next fallen softly open, as vulnerable to bruising as summer
fruit. He is Simon Strulovitch - a rich, furious, but easily hurt
philanthropist with on-again off-again enthusiasms, a
distinguished collection of twentieth-century Anglo-Jewish art
and old Bibles, a passion for Shakespeare (whose genius and
swashbuckling Sephardi looks he once thought could only be
explained by the playwright's ancestors having changed their name
from Shapiro, but now he isn't sure), honorary doctorates from
universities in London, Manchester and Tel Aviv (the one from Tel
Aviv is something else he isn't sure about) and a daughter going
off the rails. He is here to inspect the stone that has recently
been erected at the head of his mother's grave, now that the 12
months of mourning for her has elapsed. He hasn't mourned her
conscientiously during that period - too busy buying and lending
art, too busy with his foundations and endowments, or
'benefacting,' as his mother called it with mixture of pride and
concern (she didn't want him killing himself giving money away),
too busy settling scores in his head, too busy with his daughter
- but he intends to make amends. There is always time to be a
better son.
Or a better her. Could it be that it's his daughter he's
really getting ready to mourn? These things run in families. His
her had briefly mourned him. 'You are dead to me!' And why?
Because of his bride's religion. Yet his her wasn't in the
slightest bit religious.
'Better you were dead at my feet...'
Would that really have been better?
We can't get enough of dying, he thinks, shuffling between the
unheralded headstones. 'We' - an idea of belonging to which he
sometimes subscribes and sometimes doesn't. We arrive, lucky to
be alive, carrying our belongings on a stick, and immediately
look for somewhere to bury the children who betray us.
Perhaps because of all the anger that precedes all the burying,
the place lacks the consolation of beauty. In his student days,
when there was no word 'we' in his vocabulary, Strulovitch wrote
a paper on Stanley Spencer's 'The Resurrection, Cookham',
admiring the tumult of Spencer's graves, bulging with eager life,
the dead in a hurry for what comes next. But this isn't a country
churchyard in Berkshire; this is a cemetery of the Messiahless in
Gatley, South Manchester, where there is no next. It all finishes
here.
There is a lingering of snow on the ground, turning a dirty
black where it nestles into the granite of the graves. It will be
there until early summer, if summer ever comes.
The second person, here long before Strulovitch arrived,
tenderly addressing the occupant of a grave whose headstone is
worn to nothing, is Shylock, also an infuriated and tempestuous
Jew, though his fury tends more to the sardonic than the
mercurial, and the tempest subsides when he is able to enjoy the
company of his wife Leah, buried deep beneath the snow. He is
less divided in himself than Strulovitch but, perhaps for that
very reason, more divisive. No two people feel the same about
him. Even those who unreservedly despise him, despise him with
different degrees of unreservation. He has money worries that
Strulovitch doesn't, collects neither art nor Bibles, and finds
it difficult to be charitable where people are not charitable to
him, which some would say takes something from the soul of
charity. About his daughter, the least said the better.
He is not an occasional mourner like Strulovitch. He cannot
leave and think of something else. Because he is not a forgetful
or a forgiving man, there never was or will be something else.
Strulovitch, pausing in his reflections, feels Shylock's
presence before he sees him - a blow to the back of the neck, as
though someone in the cemetery has been irreverent enough to
throw a snowball.
The words 'My dearest Leah,' dropped like blessings into the icy
grave, reach Strulovitch's ears. There will be many Leahs here.
Strulovitch's mother was a Leah. But this Leah attracts an
imperishable piteousness to her name that is unmistakable to
Strulovitch, student of husbandly sorrow and herly wrath. Leah
who bought Shylock a courtship ring. Leah, mother to Jessica who
stole that ring to buy a monkey. Jessica the pattern of perfidy.
Not for a wilderness of monkeys would Shylock have parted with
that ring.
Strulovitch neither.
So 'we' does mean something to Strulovitch after all. The faith
Jessica violates is his faith.
Such, anyway, are the only clues to re Strulovitch
needs. He is matter of fact about it. Of course Shylock is here,
among the dead. When hasn't he been?
Eleven years old, precociously moustached, too clever by half,
he was shopping with his mother in a department store when she
saw Hitler buying aftershave.
'Quick, Simon!' she ordered him. 'Run and get a man, I'll
stay here and make sure he doesn't get away.'
But no man would believe that Hitler was in the store and
eventually he escaped Strulovitch's mother's scrutiny.
Strulovitch hadn't believed that Hitler was in the store either.
Back home he made a joke of it to his her.
'Don't cheek your mother,' his her told him. 'If she said she
saw Hitler, she saw Hitler. Your Aunty Annie ran into Stalin on
Stockport market last year, and when I was your age I saw Moses
rowing on Heaton Park Lake.'
'Couldn't have been,' Strulovitch said. 'Moses would just have
parted the waters.'
For which smart remark he was sent to his room.
'Unless it was Noah,' Strulovitch shouted from the top of the
stairs.
'And for that,' his her said, 'you're not getting anything to
eat.'
Later, his mother sneaked a sandwich up to him, as Rebekah would
have done for Jacob.
The older Strulovitch understands the Jewish imagination better
- why it sets no limits to chronology or topography, why it
cannot ever trust the past to the past, and why his mother
probably did see Hitler. He is no Talmudist but he occasionally
reads a page in a small, private-press anthology of the best
bits. The thing about the Talmud is that it allows a bolshie
contrarian like him to argue face-to-face with other bolshie
contrarians long dead.
You think what, Rabbah bar Nahmani? Well fuck you!
So is there a hereafter after all? What's your view, Rabbi?
To Strulovitch, Rabbah bar Nahmani, shaking off his cerements,
gives the finger back.
Long ago is now and somewhere else is here.
How it is that Leah should be buried among the dead of Gatley is
a question only a fool would risk Shylock's displeasure by
asking. The specifics of interment - the whens, the wheres - are
supremely unimportant to him. She is under the ground, that is
enough. Alive, she had been everywhere to him. Dead - he long ago
determined - she will be the same. Wheeling with the planet. An
eternal presence, never far from him, wherever he treads.
Strulovitch, alert and avid, tensed like a minor instrument into
affinity with a greater, watches without being seen to watch. He
will stand here all day if he has to. From Shylock's demeanour -
the way he inclines his head, nods, looks away, but never
looks at anything, sees sideways like a snake - he is able to
deduce that the conversation with Leah is engrossing and devoted,
oblivious to external event, and no longer painful - a fond but
brisk, even matter-of-fact, two-way affair. Shylock listens as
much as he speaks, pondering the things she says, though he must
have heard her say them many times before. He has a paperback in
one hand, rolled up like a legal document or a gangster's wad of
bank notes, and every now and then he opens it brusquely, as
though he intends to rip out a page, and reads to her in a low
voice, covering his mouth in the way a person who is too private
to make a show of mirth
will stifle a laugh. If that is laughter, Strulovitch thinks,
it's laughter that has had a long way to travel - brain laughter.
A phrase of Kafka's (what's one more unhappy son in this
battlefield of them?) returns to him: laughter that has no lungs
behind it. Like Kafka's own, maybe. Mine too? - Strulovitch
wonders. Laughter that lies too deep for lungs? As for the jokes,
if they are jokes, they are strictly private. Just possibly,
unseemly.
He is is at home here as I am not, Strulovitch thinks. At home
among the gravestones. At home in a marriage.
Strulovitch is pierced by the difference between Shylock's
situation and his. His own marital record is poor. He and his
first wife made a little hell of their life together. Was that
because she'd been a Christian? ('Gai in drerd!' his her said
when he learnt his son was marrying out. 'Go to hell!' Not just
any hell but the fieriest circle, where marriers-out go. And on
the night before the wedding he left an even less ambiguous phone
message: 'You are dead to me.') His second marriage, to a
daughter of Abraham this time, for which reason his her
rescinded his curse and called him Lazarus on the phone, was
brought to an abrupt, numbing halt - a suspension of all feeling,
akin to waiting for news you hope will never come - when his wife
suffered a stroke on their daughter's fourteenth birthday, losing
the better part of language and memory, and when he, as a
consequence, shut down the husband part of his heart.
Marriage! You lose your her or you lose your wife.
He is no stranger to self-pity. Leah is more alive to Shylock
than poor Kay is to me, he thinks, feeling the cold for the first
time that day.
He notes, observing Shylock, that there is a muscular tightness
in his back and neck. This calls to mind a character in one of
his favourite comics of years ago, a boxer, or was he a wrestler,
who was always drawn with wavy lines around him, to suggest a
force field. How would I be drawn, Strulovitch wonders. What
marks could denote what I'm feeling?
'Imagine that,' Shylock says to Leah.
'Imagine what, my love?'
'Shylock-envy.'
Such a lovely laugh she has.
Shylock is dressed in a long black coat, the hem of which he
appears concerned to keep out of the snow, and sits, inclined
forward - but not so far as to crease his coat - on a folding
stool of the kind Home Counties opera-lovers take to
Glyndebourne. Strulovitch cannot decide what statement his hat is
making. Were he to have asked, Shylock would have told him it was
to keep his head warm. But it's a fedora - the mark of a man
conscious of his appearance. A dandy's hat, worn with a hint of
frolicsome menace belied by the absence of any mark or memory of
frolic on his face.
Strulovitch's clothes are the more abstemious, his
art-collector's coat flowing like a surplice, the collar of his
snowy white shirt buttoned to the throat without a tie in the
style of contemporary quattrocento. Shylock, with his air of
dangerous inaffability, is less ethereal and could be taken for a
banker or a lawyer. Just possibly he could be a Godher.
Strulovitch is glad he came to pay his respects to his mother's
remains and wonders whether the graveside conversation he is
witness to is his reward. Is this what you get for being a good
son? He should have tried it sooner in that case. Unless
something else explains it. Does one simply see what one is fit
to see? In which case there's no point going looking: you have to
let it come to you. He entertains a passing fancy that
Shakespeare, whose ancestors just might - to be on the safe side
- have changed their name from Shapiro, also allowed Shylock to
come to him. Walking home from the theatre, seeing ghosts and
writing in his s, he looks outside himself just long enough
to e Antonio spitting at that abominated thing, a Jew.
'How now! A Jew! Is that you cousin?' Shakespeare asks.
This is Juden-frei Elizabethan England. Hence his surprise.
'Shush,' says the Jew.
'Shylock!' excls Shakespeare, heedlessly. 'My cousin Shylock
or I'm a
Christian!'
Shapiro, Shakespeare, Shylock. A family association.
Strulovitch feels sad to be excluded. Only a shame his name
doesn't have a
shush in it.
It is evident to Strulovitch, anyway, that receptivity is the
thing, and that those who go looking are on a fool's errand. He
knows of a picturesque Jewish cemetery on the Lido di Venezia -
once abandoned but latterly restored in line with the new
European spirit of reparation - a cypress-guarded place of
melancholy gloom and sudden shafts of cruel light, to which a
fevered righter of wrongs of his acquaintance has made countless
pilgrimages, certain that since Shylock would not have been seen
dead among the ice-cream licking tourists in the Venice ghetto,
he must find him here, broken and embittered, gliding between the
ruined tombstones, muttering the prayer for his several dead. But
no luck. The great German poet Heine - a man every bit as
unwilling to use the 'we' word as Strulovitch, and the next day
every bit as much in love with it - went on an identically
sentimental 'dream-hunt', again without success.
But the hunting - with so much unresolved and still to be
redeemed - never stops. Simon Strulovitch's trembling Jew-mad
Christian wife, Ophelia-Jane, pointed him out, hobbling down the
Rialto steps, carrying a fake Louis Vuitton bag stuffed with fake
Dunhill watches, as they were dining by the Grand Canal. They
were on their honeymoon and Ophelia-Jane wanted to do something
Jewishly nice for her new husband. (He hadn't told her that his
her had verbally buried him on the eve of their wedding. He
would never tell her that.) 'Look, Si!' she'd said, tugging his
sleeve. A gesture that annoyed him because of the care he
lavished on his clothes. Which might have been why he took an
eternity following the direction of her finger and when at last
he looked saw nothing.
It was in the hope of a second visitation that she took him
there on every remaining night of their honeymoon. 'Oy gevalto,
we're back on the Rialto,' he complained finally. She put her
face in her hands. She thought him ungrateful and unserious. Five
days into their marriage she already hated his folksy
yiddishisms. They took from the grandeur she wanted for them
both. Venice had been her idea. Reconnect him. She could just as
easily have suggested Cordoba. She had married him to get close
to the tragic experience of the Hebrews, the tribulations of a
noble Ladino race, and all he could do was oy gevalto her back to
some malodorous Balto- Slavic stetl peopled by potato-faced
bumpkins who shrugged their shoulders.
She thought her heart would stop. 'Tell me I haven't gone and
married a footler-schmootler,' she pleaded as they wandered back
to their hotel. He could feel her quivering by his side, like a
five-masted sailing ship. 'Tell me you're not a funny- man.'
They had reached the Campo Santa Maria Formosa, where he paused
and drew her to him. He could have told her that the church was
founded in 1492, the year the Jews were expelled from Spain. Kiss
me to make up it for it, darling, he could have said. Kiss me to
show you're sorry. And she would have done it, imagining him
leaving Toledo with his entourage, praying at the Ibn Shushan
Synagogue for the last time, erect in bearing, refusing to
compromise his faith. Yes, on the fine, persecuted brow of her
black-bearded Hidalgo husband she would have ed a lipstick
star. 'Go forth, my lord, be brave, and may the God of Abraham
and Moses go with you. I will follow you with the children in due
course.' But he told her no such thing and gave her no such
rtunity. Instead, aggressively playing the fool, he breathed
herrings, dumplings, borscht, into her anxious little face, the
alism of villages unvisited by light or learning, the
broken-backed superstitions of shmendricks called Moishe and
Mendel. 'Ch Yankel, ribbon salesman,' he said, knowing how
little such a name would amuse her, 'complains to the buyer at
Harrod's that he never orders ribbon from him. "All right, all
right" says the buyer, "send me sufficient ribbon to stretch from
the tip of your nose to the tip of your penis." A fortnight later
a thousand boxes of ribbon turn up at Harrod's receiving centre.
"What the hell do you think you're playing at?" the buyer screams
at Ch Yankel down the phone. "I said enough ribbon to reach
from the tip of your nose to the tip of your penis, and you send
me a thousand miles of it.". "The tip of my penis," says Ch
Yankel, "is in Poland."
She stared at him in disbelieving horror. She was shorter than
he was, finely constructed, exquisite in her almost boyish
delicacy. Her eyes, just a little too big for her face, were
shadowy pools of hurt perplexity. Anyone would think, he thought,
looking deep into them, that I have just told her someone close
to us has died.
'You see,' he said relenting, 'you've nothing to worry about,
I'm not a funny man,"
'Enough,' she pleaded.
'Enough Poland?'
'Shut up about Poland!'
'My people, Ophelia . . . '
'Your people are from Manchester. Isn't that bad enough for
you?'
'The joke wouldn't work if I resituated the punch-line to
Manchester.'
'The joke already doesn't work. None of your jokes work.'
'What about the one where the doctor tells Moishe Greenberg to
stop masturbating?'
The Campo Santa Maria Formosa must have been witness to many
sighs, but few so dolorous as Ophelia-Jane's. 'I beg you,' she
said, almost folding herself in half. 'On my bended knees, I
implore you - no more jokes about your thing.'
She shook the word from her as though it were an importunate
advance from a foul-smelling stranger.
'A foolish thing is but a toy,' was all he could think of
saying.
'Then it's time you stopped playing with it.' Strulovitch showed
her his hands.
'Metaphorically, Simon!' She wanted to cry.
He too.
She traduced him. He, playing? How could she not know by now
that he had not an ounce of play in his body?
And his thing. . . why did she call it that?
And on their honeymoon, to make things worse.
It was a site of sorrows, not a thing. The object of countless
comic stories for the reason that it wasn't comic in the least.
He quoted Beaumarchais to her. 'I hasten to laugh at everything
for fear I might be obliged to weep at it.'
'You? Weep! When did you last weep?'
'I am weeping now. Jews jest, Ophelia-Jane, because they are not
amused.'
'Then I'd have made a good Jew,' she said, 'because neither am
I.'
When mothers see what's been done to their baby boys the milk
turns sour in their s. The young Strulovitch, slaloming
through the world's religions, was told this at a garden party
given by a great great-grandnephew of Cardinal Newman in Oxford.
His informant was a Baha'i psychiatrist called Eugenia Carloff
whose field of spem was circumcision trauma within the
family.
'All mothers?' he asked.
A sufficient number of them of your persuasion, she told him, to
explain the way they mollycoddle their sons thereafter. They have
a double guilt to expiate. Allowing blood to be spilled and
withholding milk.
'Withholding milk? Are you kidding?'
Strulovitch was sure he'd been -fed. Sometimes he feels as
though he's being -fed still.
'All men of your persuasion think they were copiously suckled,'
Eugenia Carloff told him.
'Are you telling me I wasn't?' he said.
She looked him up and down. 'I can't say definitively, but my
guess is no, actually, you weren't.'
'Do I look undernourished?'
'Hardly.' Deprived then?'
'Not deprived, denied.'
'It was my her who did that.'
'Ah,' Eugenia Carloff said, tapping her nose, 'there is no end
to what those executioners we call hers do. First they m
their boy children then they torment them.'
Sounds right, Strulovitch thought. On the other hand, his her
liked amusing him with anecdotes and rude jokes. And sometimes
ruffled his hair absent-mindedly when they were out walking. He
mentioned that to Eugenia Carloff who shook her head. 'They never
love you. Not really. They remain excluded from the eternal
nativity play of guilt and recompense which they initiated,
forever sidelined and angry, trying to make amends in rough
affection and funny stories. This is the bitter nexus that binds
them.'
'That binds the her and the son?'
'That binds men of your persuasion, the penis and the joke.'
I'm not a man of any persuasion, he wanted to tell Eugenia
Carloff. I have yet to be persuaded. Instead he asked her out.
She laughed wildly. 'Do you think I want to get into all that?'
she said. 'Do you think I'm mad?'
Poor Ophelia-Jane, who must have been mad, did all in her power
in the few years they were together to make their marriage work.
But in the end he was too much for her. He agreed with her in his
heart. He upset and even frightened people. It was the acrid
jeering that did it. The death-revel ironies. Did he or didn't he
belong? Was he or wasn't he funny? His own mortal indecision for
which everyone who knew him - Ophelia-Jane more than any of them
- had to pay.
'You could just have loved me, you know,' she said sadly on the
day they agreed to divorce. 'I was willing to do anything to make
you happy. You could just have enjoyed our life together.'
He enfolded her in his arms one final time and told her he was
sorry. 'It's just who we are,' he said.
'We!'
It was the last word she said before she walked out on him.
There was one small consolation. They had been virtually
children when they married and they were still virtually children
when they parted.
They could be done with each other and still have plenty of life
left with which to start again. And they hadn't had children of
their own - the cause of all human discontent.
But the divorce itself was wormwood to them both. And in the end
she couldn't help herself. Though she believed Jews to have been
grievously maligned, when the final papers were delivered to be
signed she still stigmatized them, through the person of her
husband, in the usual way. 'Happy now you've extracted your pound
of ?' she rang him to ask.
The accusation hurt him deeply. Thought not yet wealthy, he was
the one who had brought money to the marriage. And what he didn't
spend on her went, even in these early years, on causes to which
she had given her blessing and which would always bear her name.
He believed the settlement was more than generous to her. And he
knew that in her heart she thought so too. But there it was - the
ancient stain. She hadn't been able to help herself. So the stain
was on her as well.
The phone became a viper in his hand. Not in anger but in
horror, he let it fall to the floor.
He wrote to her the next day to say that henceforth they were to
speak to each other only through their solicitors.
But even after he remarried he carried a torch for her. Despite
the pound of allusion? He wondered about that. Despite it
or because of it?
A watched kettle never boils, but Shylock watched by Strulovitch
rattles like a seething pot. It's not noise that distracts him
but anxiety, disquiet, neurasthenic perturbation. On this
occasion, Strulovitch's. Conscious of him, Shylock fractionally
shifts his position on his Glyndebourne stool and twitches his
ears. He could be an Egyptian cat god.
'What's to be done with us?' he asks Leah.
'Us?'
'Our people. We are beyond help.'
'Nobody's beyond help. Show compassion.'
'I shouldn't have to feel it as compassion. I should feel it as
loyalty.'
'Then show loyalty.'
'I endeavour to, but they try my patience.'
'My love, you have no patience.'
'Nor do they. Especially for themselves. They have more time for
those who hate them.'
'Hush,' she says.
The tragedy is that she can't stroke his neck and make the wavy
lines go away.
When Leah was big with child she would call Shylock to her and
get him to put his hand on her belly. Feel the kicking. He loved
the idea that the little person in there couldn't wait to join
them.
Jessica, my child.
Now it was Leah who made her presence felt. The gentlest of
nudges, as though some burrowing creature were at work in the
ground beneath him. 'Well said, old mole,' he thinks. He knew
what she was nudging him about. One of the traits of his
character she had always disliked was his social cruelty. He
teased people. Riddled them. Kept them waiting. Made them come to
him. And he was doing the same with Strulovitch, not letting on
he knew he was there, testing his endurance. Hence her prod,
reminding him of his obligations.
Only when Shylock turned did Strulovitch see that his cheeks and
chin were stubbled - not so much a beard as a gnarling of the
. Nothing about his face admitted softness, but the company
of his wife had called light into his features and the remains of
a querulous amusement lingered in the cruel creases around the
eyes he showed to Strulovitch. 'Ah!' he said, closing the
paperback from which he'd been reading, rolling it up again and
putting it with some deliberation in the inside pocket of his
coat, 'Just the man.'
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