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The Swag Man
A hilarious and moving true story by Man Booker Prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson about the greatest "swag man" in the history of Manchester.
A charming, brazen salesman of genius, Frankie Cohen rises from selling cheap gewgaws, known as swag, for Jacobson's father in the rough market streets of the Northern English city, to buying and selling some of the world's greatest artworks.
Jacobson's tale of a poor Jewish kid who becomes a friend of Dukes and Duchesses is the story of a man who succeeds not by changing his accent or clothes, but by being himself regardless of where he is or who he is with - which Jacobson comes to understand is how a truly sophisticated man behaves.
An unusually poignant memoir of Jewish life in Manchester, The Swag Man is also a funny, fantastical meditation on how we define ourselves, how our roots do and don't define us, and the pleasures and perils of assimilation in a modern multi-ethnic society.
A charming, brazen salesman of genius, Frankie Cohen rises from selling cheap gewgaws, known as swag, for Jacobson's father in the rough market streets of the Northern English city, to buying and selling some of the world's greatest artworks.
Jacobson's tale of a poor Jewish kid who becomes a friend of Dukes and Duchesses is the story of a man who succeeds not by changing his accent or clothes, but by being himself regardless of where he is or who he is with - which Jacobson comes to understand is how a truly sophisticated man behaves.
An unusually poignant memoir of Jewish life in Manchester, The Swag Man is also a funny, fantastical meditation on how we define ourselves, how our roots do and don't define us, and the pleasures and perils of assimilation in a modern multi-ethnic society.
- GenresFiction
31 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 25, 2013
4 people are currently reading
30 people want to read
About the author
Howard Jacobson
77 books386 followersHoward Jacobson was born in Manchester, England, and educated at Cambridge. His many novels include The Mighty Walzer (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), Who’s Sorry Now? and Kalooki Nights (both longlisted for the Man Booker Prize), and, most recently, The Act of Love. Jacobson is also a respected critic and broadcaster, and writes a weekly column for the Independent. He lives in London.
Profile of Howard Jacobson in The New York Times.
“The book's appeal to Jewish readers is obvious, but like all great Jewish art — the paintings of Marc Chagall, the books of Saul Bellow, the films of Woody Allen — it is Jacobson's use of the Jewish experience to explain the greater human one that sets it apart. Who among us is so certain of our identity? Who hasn't been asked, "What's your background" and hesitated, even for a split second, to answer their inquisitor? Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question forces us to ask that of ourselves, and that's why it's a must read, no matter what your background.”—-David Sax, NPR.
Profile of Howard Jacobson in The New York Times.
“The book's appeal to Jewish readers is obvious, but like all great Jewish art — the paintings of Marc Chagall, the books of Saul Bellow, the films of Woody Allen — it is Jacobson's use of the Jewish experience to explain the greater human one that sets it apart. Who among us is so certain of our identity? Who hasn't been asked, "What's your background" and hesitated, even for a split second, to answer their inquisitor? Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question forces us to ask that of ourselves, and that's why it's a must read, no matter what your background.”—-David Sax, NPR.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
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January 26, 2016Howard Jacobson's fiction provides a fascinating window into the mind of a certain generation of Jewish Britain, like Woody Allen without the things I'm not sure I should mention for legal reasons. But Howard Jacobson's opinion pieces tend to be fist-bitingly infuriating. So how does a Howard Jacobson memoir pan out? Somewhere between the two, as it happens. On his father's days trading tat at the market, and the former employee who ended up moving far beyond those circles, he's intriguing and evocative; on the merits of contemporary art, and with the bizarre assertion that British Jews don't do pubs, he's very much the non-fiction Jacobson.
January 20, 2026
Before I picked this up, I hadn’t realized it was a memoir. Or maybe a novella. Call it a memoir-ella – which is appropriate since that suffix is the Yiddish diminutive.
Jacobson remains one of our great writers. He’s often called the British Philip Roth, and, while that’s often a too-easy shorthand, it gets across the essential point. Like Roth, he is concerned with what it means to be a Jew – the son of Jews – growing up in a world where that means something different than it did for his parents.
This begins as a portrait of his father, a man he describes as a Jewish comedian who made a living in the outdoor market selling “swag” with his witty patter. Customers came close because he made them laugh, and they bought because he knew how to sell.
Even early, Jacobson poses an implicit question: is he an authentic heir to his father given that he himself is an artist, someone who’s stepped back from the world as it is in order to construct worlds from his imagination. He’s asking, at some level, whether he is truly his father’s son, and that feeds the poignance of his colorful portrait.
Close to halfway through, though, the focus shifts to one of his father’s acolytes, a Jewish kid Jacobson’s age named, eventually, Frank Cohen. Unlike Jacobson, Cohen mastered his father’s art of the sale, rising as a salesman to own a string of home improvement stores. And, from there, he became one of the leading collectors of British fine art.
By the end, then, the question is which of those two – the yiddische salesman turned art mogul or the donnish writer – is more accurately the heir to the tradition of selling swag.
In the final line, Jacobson suggests he’s the one who’s been left behind, the one who remains metaphorically in the alleys of the open-air market, but I think he renders a more complicated answer.
That is, he sees that working-class Jewish tradition as the fuel that made both their careers. It’s now spent – or perhaps not entirely – and reflecting on the arc of its flight is the quiet power of the book.
This is short, but it does all that it sets out to do. Another score for Jacobson.
Jacobson remains one of our great writers. He’s often called the British Philip Roth, and, while that’s often a too-easy shorthand, it gets across the essential point. Like Roth, he is concerned with what it means to be a Jew – the son of Jews – growing up in a world where that means something different than it did for his parents.
This begins as a portrait of his father, a man he describes as a Jewish comedian who made a living in the outdoor market selling “swag” with his witty patter. Customers came close because he made them laugh, and they bought because he knew how to sell.
Even early, Jacobson poses an implicit question: is he an authentic heir to his father given that he himself is an artist, someone who’s stepped back from the world as it is in order to construct worlds from his imagination. He’s asking, at some level, whether he is truly his father’s son, and that feeds the poignance of his colorful portrait.
Close to halfway through, though, the focus shifts to one of his father’s acolytes, a Jewish kid Jacobson’s age named, eventually, Frank Cohen. Unlike Jacobson, Cohen mastered his father’s art of the sale, rising as a salesman to own a string of home improvement stores. And, from there, he became one of the leading collectors of British fine art.
By the end, then, the question is which of those two – the yiddische salesman turned art mogul or the donnish writer – is more accurately the heir to the tradition of selling swag.
In the final line, Jacobson suggests he’s the one who’s been left behind, the one who remains metaphorically in the alleys of the open-air market, but I think he renders a more complicated answer.
That is, he sees that working-class Jewish tradition as the fuel that made both their careers. It’s now spent – or perhaps not entirely – and reflecting on the arc of its flight is the quiet power of the book.
This is short, but it does all that it sets out to do. Another score for Jacobson.
March 21, 2017
Deceptively simple, Jacobson's memoir / rags-to-riches story is poignant, funny and quietly charming as it follows Frankie Cohen, who builds a fortune from swag (whether wallpaper or YBAs), staying true to his roots while doing so. A thoughtful novella.
November 6, 2013
I was disappointed in this short, mostly because it lacked the humor in much of Jacobson's writing. The heavy Jewish cultural background also proved to be a bit of a slog at times, but worse the story seemed disjointed between the narrator's father's swag sales and his friend's ascendance in the contemporary art world. The ending moral felt a bit didactic as well.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews