Summary
Julian Treslove, a healthy, obsessive 49-year-old man and failure in professional life, is mugged one night on a busy London street by a woman. This act becomes the central event of the novel, The Finkler Question.
While the plot may at first seem slightly unfocused, brooding and ruminative, Jacobson’s work is deceptively consistent in its fixation on the thematic question at its core: what does it mean to be Jewish in the contemporary England?
In three parts, The Finkler Question tells the story of three men, each with a different relationship to being Jewish. The first man, Treslove, is a gentile who dreams of becoming Jewish and eventually takes up with a Jewish woman in his obsessive attempt to redefine himself.
The other two men are actually Jewish and each receives direct narrative treatment in the text, swapping places with Treslove and becoming the temporary protagonists of the story.
Samuel Finkler, a television personality and writer of pop-philosophy self-help books, is a Jew who professes not to like the company of other Jews. Finkler’s great friend, Libor Sevcik, is a retired celebrity columnist, nearing ninety years old, who maintains an extended disagreement with Finkler on the question of Israel. Each man is a widower having recently lost his wife.
Structured and styled to explore the perspectives of all three men, The Finkler Question provides direct access to the thoughts of Treslove, Finkler, and Sevcik through a “familiar” third-person narrative point of view with each man’s neurotic fixations fully on display.
Julian Treslove and his fixations constitute the greatest portion of The Finkler Question beginning at the opening of the novel. Treslove’s boyhood is recounted in broad strokes along with his professional career. As a teenager, Treslove visits a psychic who tells him that he will one day meet a woman named June or Juno and find both love and danger.
For years Treslove weighs the prophecy and habitually falls in love with women whose names resemble June or Juno, always wondering if the current love is the fulfillment of the prophecy. Fatalism and romanticism are both exaggerated in Treslove and have equal power over him, his girlfriends often leaving him because of this coupled set of traits.
Recalling the mothers of his two children, Treslove thinks over the death arias of operas he used to sing with each woman. They both leave him without telling him they are pregnant yet also both name their sons after characters from the operas, Rudolpho and Alfredo.
The novel’s first action comes when Treslove goes to dinner at the home of Libor Sevcik. Libor, Treslove, and Samuel Finkler discuss Israel and bond over the shared grief of recently losing their wives, which Treslove must imagine as he has never been married.
After dinner, Treslove meanders on the streets of London near the BBC where he once worked, peering into storefront windows and reminiscing about his childhood. Breaking into his reverie, someone comes close to Treslove and demands his valuables. He is assaulted in front of a music store, and mugged for his wallet, watch and cell-phone.
The person mugging him is a woman who delivers an enigmatic epithet as she leaves Treslove on the well-lit street where he has been mugged.
Shaken by the encounter, Treslove tries to make out what the woman said to him and struggles to come to a conclusion. He is mildly injured in the mugging but more importantly has been given a new cause for obsession. Treslove cannot stop thinking about what the woman said to him as he was mugged, finally concluding the words were “You Ju,” or “You Jew.”
When...
(This entire section contains 1451 words.)
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Treslove tells Finkler and Libor about his mugging and the Jewish slur, they dismiss his concerns that the event was a hate crime because Treslove is not Jewish. Treslove argues that the mugger may have mistaken him for a Jew but Libor says that Treslove could not be confused for anything but a gentile.
Despite the reasonable protests of Libor and Finkler, Julian Treslove remains troubled by a confusion of identity, wondering if he may somehow be an uncircumcised Jewish man.
In a section devoted to Samuel Finkler, his doubts and his turmoil regarding his deceased wife, one of Treslove’s two sons is introduced in a flashback. Finkler is carrying on a dalliance with a big-breasted woman and takes her to a seedy hotel lounge where Alfredo Treslove plays piano derisively for the patrons.
To Alfredo, Finkler is “Uncle Sam,” a rather close family friend. Finkler’s adulterous situation is not lost on Alfredo who reappears again after this flashback. In the present time, when Finkler has reached a low point in his grief, Alfredo catches Finkler trying to pick up a prostitute in a downtrodden neighborhood.
Finkler’s many affairs and constant disappointment in his fellow Jews (for failing to live up to his ironically impeccable standards of conduct) ruined Finkler’s marriage to his wife, Tyler, long before she passed away in her forties. Sunk into guilt and remorse over his failures in his marriage, Finkler decides to pick up a prostitute and while prowling, happens upon Alfredo Treslove once again.
Finkler is disturbed to find his friend’s son in the neighborhood where he expected to find a prostitute yet manages to tell Alfredo about Treslove’s mugging and his Jewish confusion. Finkler drives off and goes home.
Later, Finkler’s attitudes regarding Israel and Jews in the contemporary world are thoroughly explored. Elected president of a group calling themselves the ASHamed Jews, Finkler has many opportunities to articulate his contradictory views on the honorable conduct he expects of his fellow Jews while carrying on numerous affairs and largely ignoring his own children.
When his son is involved in a violent episode sparked by anti-Zionist comments, Finkler is shocked to discover that it was own son who made the comments and incited the violence.
The anti-Israel statements made by Finkler’s son echo Finkler’s own very public and divisive opinions. Finkler is shaken by this episode and from this point begins to take steps toward a pro-Zionist stance and toward embracing his identity.
Libor Sevcik’s life is explored also with his story interwoven with those of Treslove and Finkler. The sections dealing with Libor focus on the depth of his love for his wife, Malkie. Though the two shared a rich and loving marriage, Libor feels doubts creeping into his grief which lead him to wonder if he was a good enough husband.
Malkie’s parents had disapproved of Libor and Libor never let go of his bitterness toward them, allowing himself to generalize this distaste into a view of Jews as falling into two camps—those worthy of respect and sympathy and those who are not.
Libor, almost ninety years old, has long been retired from his job as a gossip columnist but is approached by an old friend to help bring attention to the story of her relative, a young Jewish man who suffered an attack on the streets of London. This attack is definitively a hate-crime and resembles Treslove’s mugging, though far more violent.
Troubled by feelings of anger, doubt, and subtle intimations of his impotence to change things, Libor refuses to help and goes so far as to suggest that the attack may have been deserved. As in Finkler’s narrative sections, Libor’s sections recount the illness and death of his wife. Unlike Finkler, who is grief-stricken and disturbed, Libor is deeply depressed and despondent, finally committing suicide by jumping from a cliff into the sea.
In the last sections of The Finkler Question, Treslove moves in with a Jewish woman who patiently accepts his fixation on becoming Jewish. Hephzibah is working to open an Anglo-Jewish museum in London while Treslove attempts to work out his emotional confusions, but Libor’s death puts an end to Treslove’s transformation.
Never fully convinced of his value as a person, Treslove falls into despair and drifts away from Hephzibah, finally accepting the fact that he is not Jewish. This acceptance does not serve to ground Treslove but instead pushes him into a desperate emotional state and leads him to start a fight outside the grand opening of Hephzibah’s Anglo-Jewish museum.
With several interlaced narratives crisscrossing time periods in the lives of Julian Treslove, Samuel Finkler, and Libor Sevcik, the story of The Finkler Question ultimately conveys a notion of the complexities of Jewish identity as it is tied to the state of Israel, Jewish historical customs and culture, and as it relates to the inevitable moments of love and loss in a person’s life.
