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Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today I'm honored to have us my guest, Howard Jacobson.

You know, the Booker Prize is probably Britain's most respected literary

prize, and Howard Jacobson's most recent novel, The Finkler Question, won the Booker Prize this year.

It's an extraordinary novel. It's hugely comic, but it's also melancholic and philosophical and paradoxical.

And so I want to begin by asking the question in this novel, what is a Jew?

You thought you'd start with the gentle question and then lead up to the big ones.

What is a Jew?

Well, it's one of the things that the novel sets out to ask, and I'm sure it never comes up with an answer. I don't know what one is. I don't know where my being Jewish resides. To what degree I am Jewish. There are some Jews who think I'm not a Jew at all, because I don't do the Jewish things of eating carefully

and obeying all the laws of Leviticus. I've never been able to do any of those things.

I would argue with those who say, well, you call yourself a Jew, you're not much of a Jew.

I would say, well, I have Jewish thoughts, and that's pretty Jewish.

And then they'd say, well, what's a Jewish thought and I'd

have trouble answering that but I just know I have them there to do with some of the things

you've already said there to do with rejoicing in paradox was a word that used to be used of

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