Kalooki Nights

Product Description

Life should have been sunny for Max Glickman, growing up in Crumpsall Park in peacetime, with his mother`s glamorous card evenings to look forward to, & photographs of his father`s favourite boxers on the walls. But other voices whisper seductively to him of Buchenwald, extermination, & the impossibility of forgetting. Fixated on the crimes which have been committed against his people, but unable to live among them, Max moves away, marries out, & draws cartoon histories of Jewish suffering in which no one, least of all the Jews, is much interested. But it`s a life. Or it seems a life until Max`s long-disregarded childhood friend, Manny Washinsky, is released from prison. Little by little, as he picks up his old connection with Manny, trying to understand the circumstances in which he made a Buchenwald of his own home, 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, & should be, no release. There is wild, angry, even uproarious laughter in this novel, but it is laughter on the edge. It is the comedy of cataclysm.