J: A Novel by Howard Jacobson

Review by Bob Goldfarb for Jewish Book Council

The word “Jew” does not appear even once in Howard Jacobson's dark, urgent new novel, but Jews haunt its world. That world is an imagined England of perhaps the 2070s, in the aftermath of a nameless social cataclysm. Though set in the future, it sounds a warning for our own time.

A man and a woman meet, seemingly by accident, in a small coastal village. Who are they? They are not entirely sure themselves. Like everyone else, they know very little of their family history. Personal and national history has been suppressed; technology has been repudiated. Family names and place names have been erased and replaced in a national mandate called Project Ishmael. The result is that everyone's new surname is something like Cohen, Solomons, Rabinowitz, Nussbaum, Heilbronn, Kroplik, Gutkind—but no one is Jewish.

At least, not any more. A couple of genera­tions before, the question was “What to do with those about whom something needed to be done... foreigners who had what they called a country only by taking someone else's.” The final solution, it can only be whispered, was a "campaign to drive them from the face of the earth, to make of them vagabonds and fugitives."

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