Howard Jacobson is my name

Visiting his mother Leah’s grave, Strulovitch hears the words “‘My dearest Leah,’ dropped like blessings into the icy grave.” He knows instantly that “this is the Leah who bought Shylock a courtship ring. Leah, mother to Jessica, who stole that ring to buy a monkey. Jessica is the pattern of perfidy. Not for a wilderness of monkeys would Shylock have parted with that ring.”

“Strulovitch neither,” writes 73-year-old Jacobson.

“Of course,” Strulovitch thinks, “Shylock is here, among the dead. When hasn’t he been?”

Shylock is My Name is Booker Prize-winner Jacobson’s clever, witty, melancholic take on The Merchant of Venice. His vigorous novel is the second of Hogarth’s Shakespeare series in which leading contemporary novelists reimagine some of his most famous plays to mark the 400th anniversary of his death, translating them from stage to page. The project launched last year with The Gap of Time, Jeanette Winterson’s lively “cover version” of The Winter’s Tale. Other writers reworking the canon are Margaret Atwood (The Tempest), Edward St Aubyn (King Lear), Gillian Flynn (Hamlet) and Jo Nesbo (Macbeth).

The seriously comic Jacobson – the self-described “Jewish Jane Austen” and surely one of the most ferociously entertaining writers at work today – wanted to give us his Hamlet. “I love Hamlet; it’s my favourite play,” he says, when we meet over coffee at the Groucho Club in Soho, near where he and his third wife, documentary maker turned couples therapist, Jenny De Yong, live in a penthouse apartment.

“When my agent called about the project asking which play I wanted to write a contemporary novel about, I replied immediately, ‘Hamlet.’ I had already written about it in the first book I ever published: Shakespeare’s Magnanimity: Four Tragic Heroes, Their Friends and Families (1978), which I co-wrote with an academic colleague, the late Wilbur Sanders.”
There was much toing and froing betwixt and between Jacobson, his agent and the publishers. “Finally, I said, ‘Okay, someone else is doing Hamlet, aren’t they?’ Then the penny dropped! ‘I get it. They want The Merchant of Venice.’ I can’t think why they wanted me to do The Merchant of Venice, can you?” he asks me, arching an eyebrow in an ironic quotation mark. “Although they may have noticed that Jewishness is one of my preoccupations. Anyway, my agent and my wife and I had a good laugh. I said to Jenny, ‘I’ve got to stop writing about Jews.’ She said, ‘Then what will you write about?’ Exactly.”

The Merchant of Venice was not, says Manchester-born Jacobson, a play with which he was familiar. “It’s not one of my Shakespeares. I thought it silly. We did it at school when I was about 13 and I remember another Jewish boy or perhaps it was even me – there were about 20 of us – having to be Shylock. ‘Hath not a Jew eyes and so on...’ There was all that daft, comic stuff with the caskets. It embarrassed us as Jewish boys that Shylock was a moneylender.

“Whenever someone said something against Jews, we would hunch our shoulders, wring our hands and go, ‘Hasn’t a Jew eyes?’ It became a running joke. We wanted to take the mickey out of our Jewishness. We thought anti-Semitism was all in our parents’ heads, although it was only eight years after Auschwitz. So I never wanted to read it or even see productions of it. I had forgotten it existed. Then I got this commission. I read it, re-read it, read it again, re-read it... I steeped myself in it. Suddenly, I was crazy about it.

Sometimes I think it’s a very angry play, then I think it’s very melancholic, although it starts off as a comedy – it’s scathing.

“Anti-Semitic? I don’t think so, but I think there are Jewish readings of it that reveal how much Jews dislike themselves, seeing themselves filtered through Shylock’s legalism, his cruelty, his absence of refinement and beauty. A critique of anti-Semitism? Definitely. I even began to think – something I joke about in the novel – that the genius Shakespeare might have been Jewish himself. Perhaps he was Shapiro not Shakespeare? He must have met a Jew. Consider the way he has Shylock musing and pondering. His repetitions, how he disappears inside himself. Very Jewish.”

Once he took on this “mad venture,” he began tracking down every production of the play he could find. It remains one of the most performed, if most troubling, of the works. “My wife got me a load of tapes, Al Pacino and people. There were about four or five stage productions recently. I saw them all.

nce, as an uptight academic, I would never have thought that setting the play as a TV game show in Las Vegas, say, was brilliant. But it was!

“Once, I’d have been a sniffy critic – the way that some people are being sniffy about this. ‘Why do that? Who do you think you are, taking on Shakespeare?’ I saw people being sniffy about Jeanette’s interpretation of The Winter’s Tale, for instance. No doubt they’ll be very sniffy about Shylock is My Name, too. I don’t read reviews.” Dramatic pause: “Have you read any?” he asks.

Well, only two so far. One rave, one very sniffy indeed, by a female academic. “I heard that there was one stinker. Novels are always destroyed. That’s what critics do; they don’t care.

It’s like adultery,” he replies wearily. “Although, by the way, with my critic’s hat on I’ve yet to see a Shylock I like on film or stage, but there’s probably a deep psychological reason for that.”

In Shylock is My Name Jacobson substitutes Alderley Edge in Cheshire’s affluent “golden triangle” – home of “models and actresses, bankers, rappers, star footballers and breakfast-TV astrologers” – for Venice. Strulovitch is not a usurer but a philanthropic art collector, with an invalid wife and a wayward teenage daughter, who falls for dim footballer, Gratan Howsome (Gratiano), who has a penchant for doing Nazi salutes in public.

When she’s not having corrective surgery to her corrective surgery, filthy rich Plury (Portia) lives in a mansion called the Old Belfry (Belmont) and fronts a TV programme in which she passes judgment on guests over fancy food, while D’Anton (Antonio, the eponymous merchant) is lingering in the closet.

He exports ghastly objets d’art and has hidden shallows. Handsome and vacuous Barney (Bassanio) woos Plury by repairing her VW Beetle as opposed to one of her Porsches.

The Christians in his novel are a vile crew, I tell Jacobson.

“Aren’t they just!” he exclaims. “Every bit as vile and unlikeable as the Christians in The Merchant of Venice. Oh, I’ve had immense fun writing this book, especially in using quotations from other plays.”

At the heart of the novel are profound conversations between Strulovitch and Shylock, the archetypal wandering Jew, in which they discuss events in Shakespeare’s play, as well as interrogating what it means to be Jewish today. These debates are a thrilling, intellectually challenging read.

Introducing Shylock himself into the action is a rare moment of magical realism for Jacobson, whose previous work ranges from his debut novel, Coming From Behind (1983) to The Finkler Question, for which he won the 2010 Booker Prize. His last novel, J, was shortlisted for the 2014 prize.

“I did feel Shakespeare was at my elbow,” he confesses. “I have Hamlet and Othello in my head all the time anyway. Writing this novel seemed a mad idea, but it turned out to be liberating once I introduced the real Shylock. It was like jumping up and down on a mattress – the springs were the play itself. I didn’t feel I was stealing his story – Shakespeare did it all the time anyway. The Shylock tale is an ancient one. Shakespeare handed the baton on to me, though he had no say in the matter!”

Has writing Shylock is My Name changed him as a writer?
“I don’t know, but it has liberated me from myself. I’m a Leavisite [at Cambridge University, he studied under F R Leavis, evangelist of the Great English Novel]. Everything was too precious. But I do think this is one of the freest books I’ve ever written. As to what I’ll write next, I’ve no idea.”
Get thee to a cemetery. Who knows whom he might encounter. “Now there’s an excellent idea!” he exclaims, laughing loudly.

Shylock Is My Name, by Howard Jacobson (Hogarth Press, £16.99)