The Credit Draper

In 1911, eleven-year-old Avram Escovitz is shipped off to Scotland by his mother to escape conscription into the Russian Army. Growing up in the heart of the Kahn family in the tightly-knit Jewish community in the Glasgow Gorbals, Avram discovers he has a natural talent for playing football. He dreams of turning out for Celtic – but war intervenes. He is sent to work with his adopted uncle, the orthodox Jew Mendel Cohen, as a credit draper, peddling goods on credit to the crofters and villagers of the Western Highlands. There, a chance encounter with a Royal Flying Corps pilot leads to fresh possibilities: setting up a new business venture and winning the heart of a crofter girl. But shaking off his Jewish roots is not so simple ...

The Credit Draper, a beautiful and original début novel by J. David Simons, is more than just an immigrant’s story about the search for identity in an alien land: it is also a book about whisky, football and waterproof clothing.

Praise for The Credit Draper:

'The Credit Draper is a rare evocation of an earlier genre: the immigrant novel. This tends to be one of two types: an examination of the immigrant's inner life and the changes wrought upon it by a new land and language ... or a bildungsroman ... in which the young hero gains the world but jeopardises his Yiddisher soul. The Credit Draper belongs in the second camp, adding a most welcome Scottish dimension.' Clive Sinclair, The Jewish Chronicle
(For complete review click here.)

‘This is a subtle, beautifully written story about a rarely touched subject. It unites two great literary traditions – the Jewish and the Scottish novel – without ever seeming to force them together. Sad but never sentimental, full of hardship but easy to read, The Credit Draper is a truly fine début which heralds the arrival of a bold new voice in fiction.’ Rodge Glass

About J. David Simons

J. David Simons was born in Glasgow in 1953. He studied law at Glasgow University and became a partner at an Edinburgh law firm before giving up his practice in 1978 to live on a kibbutz in Israel. Since then he has lived in Australia, Japan and England, working at various stages along the way as a charity administrator, cotton farmer, language teacher and university lecturer. In his most recent guise as a journalist he has written extensively about the Internet and new media. He returned to Glasgow in 2006; The Credit Draper is his first novel.

The author's website is at http://www.jdsimons.demon.co.uk/

An Interview with J. David Simons

When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so?

I always wanted to write – I just felt I had to wait until I had something to say before I could do it. Sadly, that meant I didn’t actually start writing seriously until I was 40. At that time I was living in Japan and was inspired by the sparseness and simplicity that runs through the art and culture of that country so I wrote a very sparse and simple short story. To my surprise it was published.

Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind this work in particular? And about what you were trying to achieve; what ideas you were trying to convey?

The credit draper of the title was a kind of travelling salesman who peddled goods on credit on behalf of large city warehouses. At the time of my novel – the early 20th century – a lot of new Jewish immigrants to the Gorbals in Glasgow became credit drapers for the Jewish-owned warehouses. It was an easy way to give and to gain employment. I always understood these credit drapers to work in and around Glasgow, but when I discovered they also went out into the Highlands, the seeds of my novel were sown. What must it have been like for say an Orthodox Jew from Russia with all his strange customs and language to come into contact with the villagers, crofters and shepherds in northern Scotland? But this novel is also about community and how as we age, we shift in and out of different communities as some become more important to us and others less so. But yet somehow that first community – the one we were born into – retains such a hold on us.

How and when do you write?

I was always told to treat writing as a proper job so when I first started out I wrote from 9am to 5pm. However, I found that I spent the first half of my day in total distraction and that it was only really around 2pm that I could begin to put finger to keyboard. So on the days that I write, I now reward myself with the morning off to officially engage in my distractions and then sit down at my desk in the early afternoon for an intense session of around four hours of writing.

What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?

I enjoy all good fiction. I almost never read any non-fiction – not even instruction pamphlets or travel guides. I bow to the greats – Joyce’s Ulysses, Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song, De Lillo’s Underworld, Updike’s Rabbit series. But I also love the multi-culturalism that has informed writing in the UK for the last twenty five years or so, from Rushdie (in the early years), Okri, Ishiguro and Kureshi through to Zadie Smith, Monica Ali and Andrea Levy. The most recent book I enjoyed of this ilk was Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss. It’s so impressive and humbling to see how effortlessly she can move between the northern Himalayas and the streets of New York, confidently plucking words and ideas from different languages and cultures to create her own colourful tapestry – and she’s not even 40!

An extract from The Credit Draper

Avram took the pail into the small milk-house on the other side of the kitchen from the byre.

‘Och, ye gave me a right fright,’ Mrs. Kennedy said when he went back into the kitchen. ‘I thought ye were Jamie standing there.’ She told him there was another child, an older boy, but he’d enlisted a couple of weeks before.

‘I pray for him every night,’ she said. She was frying up some bacon in spitting lard on top of the range.

‘He’ll be back for the harvest,’ her husband promised, wandering in with a plunder of eggs cupped into his large hands. ‘Sit down, lad. Have some breakfast. Then we’ll be off.’

Mrs. Kennedy put a plate down in front of him. Avram eyed up the rashers framing the two fried eggs. The bacon was curled up crispy along its edges, glistened greasy in the middle, the colour of a raw burn. He had never eaten bacon before, although Solly swore it tasted better than the pickled brisket from Abrahamson’s the kosher butcher. Suddenly, the laws of clean and unclean animals he’d studied in Hebrew class started to prod at his conscience. He remembered Rabbi Lieberman’s pastry-crumbed lips form the words of warning, his finger pointing to the heavens as he spoke. ‘Leviticus. Chapter Eleven. Every animal which is not cloven-hooved or which does not chew the cud shall not be clean to you.’ That was the rule, complicated as it was to understand given the three negatives in Rabbi Lieberman’s sentence. But the consequences were clear. Cows, sheep and goats were kosher, for their hooves were entirely split and they chewed the cud. And pigs? Yes, their hooves were cloven, but they did not chew the cud. Definitely not kosher. He imagined God hovering in the rafters of this small cottage waiting to punish him for eating this forbidden flesh. The smell was already tickling his nostrils, stirring up the saliva in his mouth. It was a smell he knew from neighbouring houses in the Gorbals to which Madame Kahn responded by slamming the window down and uttering the word ‘Treife’ as if it were the disease tuberculosis itself wafting into her kosher kitchen.

Avram cut himself a piece, placed it slowly in his mouth. The texture was slippery yet pleasing. There was a thick, concentrated, salty yet still meaty taste that awoke a new vocabulary of sensations in his mouth. A non-kosher vocabulary. A Christian vocabulary. A New Testament vocabulary. Tastes that made him know what kosher was because now he was experiencing what it wasn’t. A profound flavour compressed within layers and layers of succulent bloody pig flesh, so unlike the anaemic meat from Abrahamson’s. He chewed slowly, glancing up to the rafters for the punishment that might be inflicted. But none came. He wolfed down his portion and asked for more.

After breakfast, fortified by the pig meat and lard flowing in his veins, he helped Kenny Kennedy load slabs of peat on to his wagon.

‘They’re only freshly cut,’ the gamekeeper told him. ‘Ye’ll need to lay them out proper and turn them regularly. If ye dinnae, they’ll be as worthless as the udders on a dried-up cow.’

‘What’s “lay them out proper”?’

‘Yer uncle has a kind of a shed out there. Lay them out flat under that. Not one on top o’ the other. But mind to turn them. And another thing, while I mind?…’

Kenny Kennedy disappeared behind his cottage and returned pushing a bicycle ahead of him.

‘Yer uncle told me to look one out for ye. I got it off the factor’s boy. He’s off to the war with Jamie. It’s a wee bit rusty. But oil it up, give it a shine and it’ll look braw. Tell yer uncle he can settle with me next time he’s by.’

Avram rubbed his hand over the well-worn saddle. ‘It’s … it’s … it’s just great.’ No-one except his mother had ever given him a present before. Even if it was the rusting hulk of a second-hand bike. ‘Thank you. Thank you.’

‘Dinnae thank me. Thank yer uncle. He’s paying for it. Can ye ride it?’

‘I’ve never had one before.’

‘Well, the country’s a good place to start. They’ll be no broken bones for falling on your backside. Yer uncle says ye’ll need it for work.’

Kenny Kennedy loaded the bicycle onto the wagon beside the peat, then called into the house. ‘Are ye ready, Megan Kennedy?’

Gone was the gamine Avram had seen at milking. Instead, emerging from the cottage came a young woman in a dark tartan skirt, a tight little jacket and a white blouse underneath it, secured at the collar with a brooch.

Kenny Kennedy heaved his daughter’s trunk on to the back of the wagon.

‘Sit up front, lassie.’

‘I want to sit in the back with the Glesca boy.’

‘Ye’ll dae as yer telt. I dinnae want yer claes all soiled before ye get to see her ladyship.’