Kalooki Nights or the Sacred Duty to Remember the Holocaust

What is it about?

Most scholars agree that the uniqueness and enormity of the Holocaust clearly conditions the act of writing and the process of literary representation In fact, since Theodor Adorno denounced the “barbarism” of writing poetry after Auschwitz there has been a great debate about whether the horror of the Holocaust is capable of representation. There are those who believe that the literary imagination is incapable of rendering intelligible the extermination of 6,000,000 Jews or of giving us any consolation, redemption or transcendence. Other critics not only believe that the enormity of the Holocaust is capable of literary representation, but argue that comedy can treat the Holocaust respectfully while at the same time offering a different perspective. They assert that the use of the comic mode to write about the Holocaust helps both reader and writer to transcend the horrors of the event. Howard Jacobson is a Jewish writer very much concerned with the phenomenon of Holocaust denial and with the rise of anti-Semitism in Britain. Unlike other Jewish writers who try to find a balance between remembering the Holocaust and remembering that it is over, in Kalooki Nights Jacobson, by means of the narrator’s identification with Jewish suffering, makes clear his refusal to forget. In contrast to those who insist on moving on or they will never stop seeing themselves as victims, Jacobson believes that never forgetting has become “a sacred duty”. Jacobson’s greatest achievement in Kalooki Nights is that he has fulfilled the sacred duty to remember the Holocaust in a comic way. Jacobson shows not only that it is possible to laugh about the Holocaust without minimizing the horrifying reality being explored, but that comedy is a mode of survival that offers us a renewed sense of life in the midst of so much pain. Jacobson himself has explained that his aim in Kalooki Nights was not to recreate history but to find a different discourse, a different language to talk about the Holocaust. He has emphasised that in Kalooki Nights he is merely doing what Jews have always done in the face of suffering: use humour as a talisman to survive in a world hedged with the threat of every horror and every ignominy. Jacobson fuses comedy and tragedy in his novels because he firmly believes that humour allows us to transcend life’s miseries and affirm and celebrate life. Like many critics, Jacobson believes that there is something particularly Jewish about mixing the tragic and the comic and claims that the more tragic the themes are the more obliged he feels to exploit the comedy in them, not to make light of catastrophe, but to cope with pain and suffering.

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Why is it important?

In this paper we deal with two topics that have been of great interest to scholars in the last years: on the one hand what makes Jewish humour such a unique and extraordinary phenomenon and, on the other, whether the literary imagination can recreate the Holocaust in the comic mode. Our article contributes to a better understanding of both themes.

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