Shylock Is My Name by Jacobson Howard

Author:Jacobson, Howard [Jacobson, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2016-02-08T19:00:00+00:00

“Subdues us, in other words.”

“Is that so terrible if the alternative is running lawless in the wilderness?”

Strulovitch was the wrong one to ask. What struck him as terrible one day, didn’t strike him as all that terrible the next.

“We can’t be saved from nature a little bit,” Shylock went on. “It’s all or nothing, it’s human values or the monkeys.”

Strulovitch’s mind turned from abstractions of duty to the living daughter in whom, at the hour of her birth, he’d glimpsed the meaning of covenant. “Well that might fix it for the boys,” he said, as though Shylock had both won and lost the argument, “but what help is there for the girls? There’s no mohel’s knife to subdue a daughter. Not in the civilised world, there isn’t. In the civilised world, men who talk of subduing daughters are stoned to death.”

“And that,” said Shylock, in a tone of steely quiet, “is why daughters are a byword for disloyalty.”

Were they a byword for disloyalty? I used to think I was an extremist, Strulovitch thought.

Shylock read his reservations. “You wouldn’t anyway dispute,” he said, much calmer now, “that it’s because her footballer is a ‘natural’ man that Beatrice loves him. At least if you have described him to me correctly.”

“He is not the question. She is. Does she love him? Who knows, but I’m pretty sure she’ll give it a good try now. And my telling her that life isn’t meant to be a womb-swoon won’t deter her.”

“She’s a bright young woman.”

“She’s sixteen! That’s too young to be giving up on life as an idyll.”

“Then it’s too young to be Jewish.”

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