Q and A with Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson is the author of “The Finkler Question,” a novel that won the prestigious 2010 Man Booker prize. We spoke with him about the book and what it’s like to be one of the premier English Jewish authors.

Michael Orbach: What exactly is the Finkler Question?

Howard Jacobson: The Finkler Question is, of course the Jewish Question. The phrase was made famous first by Bruno Bauer in his 1843 book of that name, urging Jews to give up religion if they wanted emancipation, and then by Marx in “On The Jewish Question.” After that it requires a new life, or if you like a new death, under Nazism. In every instance the phrase is unflattering to Jews, seeing them as a problem for humanity in general, and for socialism and Nazism in particular. The underlying assumption is that it will be better for everybody if there were no Jews — an unspoken proposition which the Nazis finally speak.

So when, in my novel, the gentile Julian Treslove makes friends at school with Samuel Finkler, the first Jew he has ever met, and decides it would be nicer all round if Jews were called Finklers, because Finkler is a nicer word than Jew, and would draw out the toxins implicit in phrases like The Jewish Question, he both does and doesn't know what he's saying. Certainly he doesn't know what a hateful history the phrase has. And certainly he means only well by it. But as in all his dealings with Jewish characters in the novel, he is blundering around, benevolently, in the dark.