Kalooki Nights

Max is the son of an atheist boxer, Jack ‘The Jew’ Glickman, and a glamorous Kalooki-playing mother. He grows up enjoying all the peace and security that 1950s suburbia can offer, but the words ‘extermination’ and ‘Nazis’ haunt his vocabulary and imagination. His fixation on the crimes which have been committed against his people does not fade as he grows, and Max moves away, marries out, and draws cartoon histories of Jewish suffering in which no one, least of all the Jews, is much interested. When his childhood friend Manny is released from prison, the tug of religion and history prove to be too powerful to be ignored. Little by little, Max is drawn into Manny’s family history – above all his brother’s tragic love affair with a girl who is half German. But more than that, he is drawn back into the Holocaust obsessions from which he realises there can be, and should be, no release.