Kalooki Nights or the sacred duty to remember the Holocaust

Jewish people have used humor as a talisman to survive in a world hedged with the threat of every horror and every ignominy. Howard Jacobson is a great comic novelist who fuses comedy and tragedy in his novels because he firmly believes that the more tragic the themes the more obliged he is to exploit the comedy in them. In fact, in Kalooki Nights Jacobson shows not only that it is possible to laugh about the Holocaust without minimizing the horrifying reality being explored, but that comedy is a mode of survival that offers us a renewed sense of life in the midst of so much pain.