The Finkler Question

by Howard Jacobson

He supposed a Jew would be like the word Jew – small and dark and beetling. A secret person.

Unless he was just too tall to dream.

Had Malkie retained her beauty for him because she’d retained it for a fact, for everyone who saw her, or had he kept her beauty alive in his eyes by feasting on it every day? And if so, did that make her beauty illusory?

He should have howled like an animal. That at least would have been a genuine expression of how he felt. Except that it wasn’t. There was no genuine expression of how he felt.

None of them fancied the sound of the play. But as Finkler said, if you don’t go to the theatre whenever you don’t like the sound of a play, when do you ever go to the theatre?

He sat and cried a little. Tears were good in that they were undiscriminating. He didn’t have to know for whom or what he wept. He wept for everything.