Little Joe
A Kid for Two Farthings.
by Wolf Mankowitz.
Dutton. 120 pp. $2.50.
Wolf Mankowitz’s little book has a simple and harmless theme and it takes us on a pleasant excursion through London’s East End. The East End is to that city what Second Avenue is to New York—a self-contained society in miniature with the color and warmth that the more austere areas surrounding it often lack. Though we are dealing here with English Jews, the faces in this book are, for the most part, familiar ones, and the food is substantially the same, though bagel is spelled with an “i” (baigel) and the gefuelte fish is of Sephardic rather than Litvak recipe.
What is the book about? Ostensibly, childhood and the pains attendant on growing up. Like his fictional American counterparts, Little Joe (the six-year-old hero) has days which are packed with significant experiences and wanders in and out of many circles as freely as a tax collector—playing, listening, learning, and having a benign effect on everyone he meets.
Little Joe is excluded from only one thing, but this sets him apart from all the other characters in the book—he doesn’t get what he wants. The others (adults) have their desires fulfilled so effortlessly and efficiently that they would seem to have a good fairy sitting at their elbows: Kandinsky, the Yiddish trouser-maker (a philosopher in his spare hours), obtains the “Superheat Patent Presser” that was beyond his reach before a factory owner decided to sell one for a song; Shmule, his muscular apprentice, wins a wrestling match from a fierce opponent along with the purse that will allow him to marry his equally muscular fiancée, Sonia; Sonia wins Shmule; Madame Rita (the male milliner) wins the girl he has been chasing around the hatracks. Everybody covets, everybody obtains what he covets. Except little Joe.
Little Joe wants a unicorn. His friend, Kandinsky, buys him a goat with one aborted horn in the middle of his forehead and Joe is satisfied—until the goat dies. Then Kandinsky is forced to make Joe face up to hard facts: “Unicorns can’t grow on Fashion St. But boys have to.” It’s all very well for Kandinsky to talk when he’s pressing pants with a new machine.
Mr. Mankowitz is very hard on his hero—though he allows his grown-ups to remain children, he makes his child grow up. Kandinsky, Shmule, Sonia, and Madame Rita are allowed to sustain their fantasies while the six-year-old Joe is urged to accept reality and mature.
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Little Joe, like most child heroes in fiction, is very appealing, very sensitive, very virtuous, and very unreal. I took the book, at first, to be a fantasy and expected Joe to awake one morning to find, like Thurber’s hag-ridden husband in the fable, his unicorn eating cabbages in the garden—after all, Kandinsky found his pants-presser in the steam room. But Mr. Mankowitz, trying to become tender at the close, confuses his genres and upsets the balance of his world; and rather than a real child, Little Joe emerges as a highly glamorized creation.
In fact, since they are mostly seen through Little Joe’s eyes, all the characters are slightly glamorized; if they are not paternal and lovable, the supporting players are evil and cantankerous—and though this is doubtless the way a child sees the world, it is also an author’s evasion and causes frequent unpremeditated collisions between the real and fantasy worlds. Furthermore, the good characters avoid doing evil by remaining almost completely passive, and their wants seem to be supplied not by any activity on their part but by Joe’s nightly prayers to his unicorn. In short, the book has all the characteristics of a fairy tale or juvenile fantasy where the child wields the power of a god, achieving the happiness of adults at the sacrifice of his own.
Since this is obviously not Mr. Mankowitz’s conscious intention it becomes all the more significant because it reflects an unconscious fantasy heretofore alien to the Jewish people. The Jews are one of the few peoples who, in their literature as in their jokes, have continued to regard themselves with a rather harsh realism, acknowledging a driving ambitiousness and priding themselves on it. We must therefore regard the passivity of Mr. Mankowitz’s adult figures and the fairy-tale quality of the story as new elements in Jewish fiction; and we must note that the book, by resting in colorful dialect and quaintness of character, achieves its harmlessness at the sacrifice of its bite.
The author, however, has positive virtues that need to be mentioned: he has an ear, eye, nose for unusual sounds, sights, smells, and the ability to communicate these vividly to the reader. If not overflowing with incident, the novel is rammed with facts. Best of all, it is simply written. In days like these, when most authors are making sounds like insects rubbing their legs together, this is something.
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