Literary Review

Howard Jacobson is perhaps Britain’s most prominent Jewish novelist, and certainly Britain’s most prominent Jewish novelist who deals consistently with Jewish themes. He’s singularly adept at extracting laughter from unpromising subjects – as he demonstrated in particular in Kalooki Nights (2006), a sort of Bumper Book of Holocaust Gags. ‘Adorno famously said that, after the Holocaust, poetry wasn’t a good idea,’ observes its narrator, a creator of satirical comic strips. ‘He never thought there was need to include cartoons in that proscription.’