Kureishi ties Jewish identity to language failure and failed belonging

Evidence

The marker for the difference is not only skin color but also language. Just as Big Billie mangles spoken English, so too does Azhar’s father, whose desire to become a writer is limited by his lack of a “sure grasp of the English language which was his, but not entirely, being ‘Bombay variety, mish and mash.’ Their neighbor, a retired schoolteacher, was kind enough to correct Father’s spelling and grammar, suggesting that he sometimes used ‘the right words in the wrong place, and vice versa’” (47). The tale ends with the child listening to his father and his father’s family shouting in Urdu during a cricket match on the radio. “He endeavored to decipher the gist of it, laughing, as he always did, when the men laughed, and silently moving his lips without knowing what the words meant, whirling, all the while, in incomprehension” (50–51). Language confusion, exile, cosmopolitanism are all qualities of the image of the “Jew” in the world of Kureishi’s characters. To identify with them, however, means accepting the potential of a cosmopolitanism that is tainted by the failure of language as a marker of belonging. Yet language is in terms of Kureishi’s image of the Jew tied closely to physicality. — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 737