In his recent novel, J, the prizewinning British novelist Howard Jacobson imagines a future in which Jewish identity has been simultaneously erased and universalized. Ruth Wisse explains:
This novel is situated in the aftermath of “WHAT HAPPENED,” a fictional time at about the same chronological remove as we are now from the Shoah, whose horrors have been written about, commemorated, and mourned by a people schooled in such matters since Jerusalem’s destruction at the hands of the Babylonians. However, unlike the events of the Shoah, WHAT HAPPENED has been deliberately and systematically repressed.
In stark contrast to Jews who transmitted their heritage from generation to generation, always focused on their eventual recovery of Zion, the residents of Jacobson’s allegorical territory inherit a frightful history they refuse to confront. Determined to create a “harmonious society,” they try to erase the murderous past—for perpetrators, bystanders, and victims alike—through strategies of silencing and pacification. They look for a final solution to the “J” question by trying to expunge all memory of the evil that was done as a means of stamping out both the evil and those destined to become its victims. One is not permitted to speak of what happened except by adding “if it happened,” which attempts to suppress reality itself. Nor may one teach a J about his ancestor Js, as a means of ensuring that it will never happen again. . . .
Everyone in this fictional land assumes a recognizably Jewish family name to eradicate the kind of distinctions that presumably led to what happened—if it happened. That the given names of all the characters are British or Celtic in origin situates the action somewhere in the fictional England of all of Jacobson’s fiction, with the adopted Jewish patronyms ensuring a permanently irritating reminder of what is being denied.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/1552/coming-with-a-lampoon/