דער קערפער פֿון השם"[#HowardJacobson] has #written and spoken about how unmoored he has felt from his country, society and fellow citizens during the brutal conflict in #Israel and #Gaza, and has attracted opprobrium for doing so; in #Howl, he explores not simply a feeling of being out of joint with the times, but of experiencing the reawakened fear of #displacement and #violence that #antisemitism provokes. He knows, one suspects, that some #readers will find this utterly enraging, not to say morally repulsive, and he confronts them head on; in Ferdinand Draxler, he creates a man who wholeheartedly believes that #7October has allowed #Jew-hatred to flourish untrammelled, who argues – to anyone who will listen, and even more to those who will not – that it has provided the alibi for #antisemites to do what they wanted to do all along.
Unsurprisingly, Howl is an immensely uncomfortable #novel; it is also, like most of #Jacobson’s work, a comic one."
Just Jim