At first glance, the novel The Finkler Question has almost nothing to do with the Reformation, original or modern. The only slight connection is the rather incidental remark that the Jews were thrown out of England in 1290 and welcomed back in 1655 (179). The discerning reader of Modern Reformation will know that in 1655 England was governed by the Puritan Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector, but the novel does not mention or reflect in any way on Cromwell's policy of religious toleration. Nonetheless the novel deserves attention. In 2010, it was the winner of the prestigious Man Booker Prize for the best novel of the year by a writer in Great Britain or Ireland, and despite that, the book is readable and interesting.
The main character of the novel, Julian Treslove, lives in contemporary London. He is about fifty and is a Gentile whose two closest friends are both Jews: the one’Sam Finkler’is a friend from his school days, and the other’Libor Sevcik’is a Czech immigrant who is about eighty. The two Jews are recent widowers. Julian has never been married, although he has two sons from two of his many loves.
The novel revolves around Treslove's growing interest in trying to understand and then to identify with his Jewish friends and with Jewish life. Sam Finkler in many ways epitomizes for Julian what it means to be Jewish. Early in the novel Julian concludes that he will better understand things Jewish if he substitutes for the word "Jewish," whenever he thinks of it, with the word "Finkler" (17). So the Finkler question is the Jewish question in the novel.
The style of the novel is one of its most appealing and engaging features. The writing is beautiful, at times epigrammatic, and often comic. Libor's relationship with his wife expresses something of Jacobson's attitude in the novel: "He had made her laugh at the beginning. Laughter had been his most precious gift to her" (268). The humor in this book comes in many forms: the ridiculous, the absurd, the teasing, and the flippant. Ponder for example this statement: Julian and one of his loves spent "three fretful days in Paris during which they hadn't been able to find a single place to eat. In Paris!" (51). Or less subtly and at greater length: Julian "had once fallen in love with a woman he had watched lighting a candle and crossing herself. In grief, he'd presumed….After a fortnight of intense consolation, she asked him, 'Why do you keep telling me it'll be all right? There isn't anything wrong.' He shook his head. 'I saw you lighting a candle'….'There's something you should know about me,' she said. 'I'm a bit of an arsonist….' In the morning he woke to twin realizations. The first was that she had left him. The second was that his sheets were on fire" (30).
As Treslove's involvement with Jewish life and issues becomes more intense, the novel becomes more serious, although it never loses a comic dimension. Various questions are raised in a variety of discussions among the characters: What is it like to be a Jew, to live in a predominately Gentile world, to live with anti-Semitism, to live in the shadow of the Holocaust, and to feel some responsibility for Israel, particularly for violence there against Arabs? Does having a state of their own make the Jews now like everybody else (274)?
All of these questions express in one way or another two underlying issues: Are Jews special and how are they to live with a sense of exceptionalism, both in themselves and in others? The problem of exceptionalism is powerfully presented in the relationship of Sam Finkler and his wife. When Finkler proposed to Tyler, she was a Gentile. He did not care, but she had insisted on converting to Judaism. She pressed the question: Are the Jews "a light to the nations" (Isa. 42:6)? This question in many forms is raised personally, provocatively, and challengingly throughout the book.
While the characters in the novel constantly discuss Judaism, God is seldom considered. Most of the Jews in the novel do not really believe in God, although God's providential care is considered briefly as a possibility by Finkler (185). Much time is spent discussing circumcision, not however in its theological significance, but much more in terms of its physical and sexual consequences. The Finkler question is more ethnic or cultural than religious, but it is still seriously (or comically) thought provoking.
For those readers wanting other thoughtful and informative books on Jewish-Gentile relations in the twentieth century, I would recommend two books. The first is a striking novel, The Song before It Is Sung by Justin Cartwright (2007), which examines the friendship of a Jew in England with an anti-Nazi German in the 1930s and 1940s. The second is a chilling historical study, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder (2010), presenting the suffering particularly of Ukrainian and Polish Jews at the hands of Communist and Nazi ideologues.
As important as the Jewish questions are to the novel, the attraction of The Finkler Question rests more fundamentally on the universal human issues it discusses. The universal themes are the ones raised by most good novels: truth, love, death, relationships, and meaning. For example, the novel vacillates on meaning in human life: "None of it made the slightest sense" (56) and "There were no accidents. Everything had a meaning" (164).
The central universal theme of the novel is that of identity, which is played out particularly in relation to Julian. Who is he? He is a Gentile who wants to be a Jew, a father who does not like his children, a romantic and tragic figure, a profound lover of women, one after another: "The sense of history swirling around him, all made him an unreliable witness to his own life" (82). The end of the book says of Finkler, "He never really knew Treslove either" (307). The struggles for identity in all the major characters lead the reader to reflect on his or her own identity.
Near the end of the novel, after the death of a friend, Julian dreams of Finkler speaking to him, "If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, absent thee from felicity awhile" (288). This quotation from Hamlet evokes a game they had once played: "He and Finkler had quoted Hamlet endlessly to each other at school. It was the only work of literature they had both liked at the same time. Finkler was not a literary man. Literature was insufficiently susceptible to rationality for his taste. And lacked practical application. But Hamlet worked for him" (48). The Hamlet quotation in Julian's dream works by drawing on the words of the dying Hamlet in the last scene of the play, begging Horatio not to commit suicide. Hamlet's words continue, "And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, To tell my story." Finkler in effect calls on Treslove to tell the story of the Finkler question.
Hamlet is the universal story of identity, meaning, and relationships. Horatio, after Hamlet's death, says to Fortinbras in the midst of all the dead: "What is it you would see? If aught of woe or wonder, cease your search." Jacobson also helps us see life, largely through the eyes of Julian, for whom life is not so much woe or wonder, or even tragedy, as farce (300). Christians will not agree that life is ultimately tragedy or farce, but will be stimulated to think about life by this remarkable book.
