by M G Vassanji
The New Eretz Israel calls upon us. Let us go and rebuild Zion. Our help, our support, our selves are needed.
Let us arise and rebuild!
The other epigraph is from a statement made in 1938 by Albert Einstein, which is far from the Zionist position.
I would much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state.… I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will suffer— especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks.
What, then, was Israel to Mordecai Richler? There was not quite the choking moment when he arrived for the first time, in 1962, to the Promised Land of his ancestors. He was not a Zionist any longer. He was thrilled, nevertheless, walking that first night in Tel Aviv, “where everybody was like you, where you couldn’t be goy-frightened into behaving larger than your true self or be put down for failings other than your own.” If he no longer quite believed in a two-thousand-year promise, this was still a country where the Jews were a majority and Hebrew was spoken in the streets. He did not exult long over this. He was a tough young writer who had come to report.
Thirty years later the feeling is different. Israel now is to experience, in all its multiplicity, without coherence; it is to observe and listen to, in its many voices; it is to meditate over. It cannot be otherwise.
Having denied coherence, the resulting book is therefore scattered in its approach. Being in Israel has taken him back to his Orthodox Jewish upbringing, about which he muses in a manner he has not quite done before—it’s not something he has escaped but a part of him; he comes up with quaint little childhood episodes he had forgotten or never written about before. Grandfather Shmariyahu, whom he had regarded a petty thief, comes to mind, not negatively this time, and the other grandfather, Rabbi Jehudah Rosenberg, drawing a picture of a man on a horse, wearing a wide hat in the manner of a Hasidim; he is led to puzzle over the bizarre politics of the Israeli nation with its multiple factions; he dwells on the contentious political history of the land; he describes his meetings with Montreal friends from Habonim who had made aliyah (when he hadn’t). He meets Canadians and Americans, with whom he shares a North American Jewish culture and past. He treads gingerly, sensitivities are high. He does not presume to judge; if there is irony or satire in what he reports, it is of the mildest form. Throughout, he is seen by the Israelis he meets as a familiar, a fellow Jew and one of them, and also as a stranger, a North American against whom there runs a current of resentment and envy. “Do you own an aeroplane?” asks a taxi driver. There is not that much to see in Israel, unless you are a Bible scholar, but a lot of talking to listen to. A cacophony of opinion, a tangle of detail.
One of the most moving moments in the book is Richler’s meeting with his former Habonim leader Ezra Lifshitz, whom he has not seen in four decades. Ezra, a former McGill engineering student, made aliyah in 1952, arriving at Kibbutz Urim, in the desert, near Gaza. As Richler describes it, not a pretty place and a very far cry from Westmount, where he only recently lived, and his large multiroom retreat in the Eastern Townships by Lake Memphremagog. Kibbutz Urim has six hundred members who work six days a week in their fields or in their mills, and have communal meals in, when Richler discovers it, “an unpleasantly hot dining hall, just about everybody in shirts and shorts and sandals, everybody helping themselves to food out of long metal trolleys.” Ezra is sixty-six and works from eight to four every day at the textile mill, even though he doesn’t have to, but just to be useful. “Do you ever yearn for Montreal?” Mordecai asks. “If somebody offered me a million bucks,” comes the reply, “I wouldn’t go back. I wouldn’t know what to do. Here I’m part of something.” He doesn’t know how much he is paid, but he is sure he is in the black. He supports a Palestinian state. “Poor bastards have nothing. In Gaza you could probably sell a five-year-old toothbrush.…”
When he returns to his room, having spent a night at the kibbutz, Richler reports to Florence that he has never been in the presence of so many good souls before—or eaten such unspeakably bad food. And he tells her Ezra’s last words to him: “I’ve been here forty years last March, and I still believe in it.”
He meets Sol and Fayge, two other former Habonim Montrealers, who made aliyah in 1950. “The dream has gone sour,” Sol says at one point but does not elaborate. He later adds, “You’re sitting and listening to the radio and you’re fighting Scuds with Sellotape.” All their children fought in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Sol works for a support group helping runaway kids from ultra-Orthodox families. Richler observes, as he recalls this meeting at an Israeli-Arab restaurant: “It didn’t strike me until later that neither Sol nor Fayge had asked me any questions about Canada, or about how Montreal had changed since they had left it forty-two years before. Difficult as it was, I had to accept that in some ways Canada was now the irrelevant Old Country for them, the way Galicia was for my grandparents.”
Waiting for his cousin Benjy at a restaurant in Little Italy, sipping a much-needed Scotch, he is led to brood over the memory of the tyrant, his grandfather Shmariyahu. It was Benjy’s father, Uncle Joe, who had told fourteen-year-old Mordecai he could not touch his grandfather’s coffin. Benjy made aliyah in 1960. When Richler during his 1962 trip asked Benjy why he left Canada, Benjy had replied that he believed all the Jews would have to leave Canada. “It’s not our country.” Just the other day, at the Kibbutz Urim, a group of kids had asked Richler would he come to Israel if there was a Holocaust in America. Now Benjy is assistant director at the Jewish National and University Library, working with ancient manuscripts. Still very much a religious Jew, he gives Mordecai a long and interesting lecture on his work. When they part, he presents Mordecai with two books: one, Benjy’s own beautifully illustrated Hebrew Manuscripts: A Treasured Legacy, inscribed, “To Motl, from Benjy, This is what keeps me going.” The other, “compounding my pleasure,” Richler says, a recently published Hebrew edition of his grandfather Jehudah Rosenberg’s tales of the Golem and the Maharal of Prague. Lily would have been pleased too.
Throughout his stay, there comes news of terrorist killings. A computer expert bludgeoned to death at a Jewish settlement in Gaza; a Jew stabbed at a bus stop; a woman of fifty-seven stabbed five times in the back.
But Richler does not stop here. He visits a Palestinian refugee camp. It is a mark of his honesty, and indeed his courage under the circumstances, that in the Palestinian faces he also sees Jewish faces; that even as he feels a tug of sympathy for the Arabs, he recalls the historical oppression of the Jews. When his Palestinian Christian guide, an articulate young woman, shows him her old family house, now lost, saying that her grandfather still keeps the keys to it, Richler recalls that Spanish Jews expelled by the Catholic monarchs in 1492 had held on to their keys for generations. When a grieving Palestinian woman tells him, “The Jews haven’t suffered as we have. We fight with stones. They have guns. Many of our children have lost their fathers,” Richler recalls his grandfather Shmariyahu, sitting on his balcony catching the breeze on Jeanne Mance Street, Der Kanader Adler on his lap. “Was he, I now wondered, sitting out there pondering the fate of those Reichlers left behind in Rawa Ruska?” Where they perished during the war.
I ran through this heritage of outrages and endurance in my head, not forgetting the 1903 pogrom in Kishinev.… Or the Black Hundreds, the notorious Russian nationalist movement, perpetrators of innumerable pogroms, that emerged in 1904. Or Kristallnacht.… Or the conference at Wannsee that led to the Final Solution. But, even sending buckets down the well of my Jewish provenance, I still had to allow that Nihad ‘Odeh and Aba Nidal Abu ‘Aker were not culpable. They could not be blamed. Big-bellied, black-eyed [Aba Nidal]—endlessly rocking, keening, but also relishing the importance that injustice had bestowed on her, rendering her the mother of a martyr, was unnervingly reminiscent of the St. Urbain Street grandmothers of my boyhood, spinning their sorrowful tales of the Old Country. Instead of drunken Cossacks wielding
swords, it was IDF delinquents with dum-dum bullets. Even as I luxuriated in guilt, I had to acknowledge a deeper feeling, one that I hadn’t plucked out of my liberal convenience store. I was grateful that, for once in our history, we were the ones with the guns and they were the ones with the stones. But, taking it a step further, I also found myself hoping that if Jerry, Hershey, Myer, and I had been born and bred in the squalor of Dheisheh rather than the warmth of St. Urbain, we would have had the courage to be among the stone-throwers.
Israel, Jerusalem, then was a necessary journey, one of coming to terms and making peace with the ancestors and with his childhood. At the end of the journey, recalling Ezra, who would not leave for a million bucks, Richler concludes, “I too continue to feel a part of something, and at home, right here in Canada.”
What we do not learn is why Richler did not look up Ezra on his first visit.
PHILIP ROTH’S WRITER-PROTAGONIST, Nathan Zuckerman, in The Counterlife, makes an eloquent case for why for some Jews at least, America (and by extension Canada) is the promised land.
I was the American-born grandson of simple Galician tradesmen who, at the end of the last century, had on their own reached the same prophetic conclusion as Theodor Herzl—that there was no future for them in Christian Europe.… Insomuch as Zionism meant taking upon oneself, rather than leaving to others, responsibility for one’s survival as a Jew, this was their brand of Zionism. And it worked.… I could not think of any historical society that had achieved the level of tolerance institutionalized in America or that had placed pluralism smack at the center of its publicly advertised dream of itself.
Philip Roth is an interesting comparison to Mordecai Richler. Only two years younger, he too came of Galician grandparents and was brought up in a Jewish neighbourhood, Weequahic, in Newark. We recall that, but for a whim, Richler’s paternal grandfather could well have ended up in New York (or Chicago). Roth too attended Talmud Torah as a child. His upbringing, however, was not as strictly Orthodox. His father worked at an insurance company in the city, and Roth himself ended up going to university and even graduate school. His characters are profoundly Jewish, though they negotiate this identity in personal terms as Americans. Roth in his fiction is deeply engaged with America, most obviously in the titles The Great American Novel, American Pastoral, and The Plot Against America. Richler was doubly exiled: a Jew in Montreal, a Canadian in Europe. Canada did not give him as grand a subject as America did to Roth, but Jewishness did. Also interesting to note is that in The Counterlife, when Roth’s Zuckerman goes to Israel, Arabs are background, though of course a vital one. Richler on the other hand goes to meet them, and he sees himself in them, without doing violence to his own history. Roth through his fictional character intellectualizes the predicament of Israel for an American Jewish writer, and he does so brilliantly. For Richler, Israel is not an intellectual journey but a personal one.
CHAPTER NINE
“Maw” and Mutkele
In the early 1970s, in Montreal, Mordecai Richler’s mother, Lily, informed him that she did not wish to see him again. Their relationship had ended. Richler, as we have seen, kept his inner life private; even Florence was only occasionally privy to it. So we can only conjecture about the mother-son relationship based on external evidence. By the more simplistic accounts of the story, she was a typical Jewish mother, an evil witch in his life, or both. She was actually a complex and troubled woman, both interesting and accomplished, as well as a dominating mother. She was not well liked.
Lily’s problem was that she had been married off to a very simple soul and a congenital loser, Moe Richler, for whom she very soon developed contempt.
As younger, more intrepid brothers and cousins began to prosper, he assured my mother, “The bigger they come, the harder they fall.”
My mother, her eyes charged with scorn, laughed in his face. “You’re the eldest and what are you?”
Nothing.
All this humiliation the boy Mordecai watched. Surely he also felt some of his mother’s contempt for his father? “As a boy, I made life difficult for him. I had no respect … I was charged with appetite, my father had none. I dreamed of winning prizes, he never competed.” His grandfather Shmariyahu would scold and hit Mordecai; his father only muttered empty threats.
During the war, some five thousand Jewish refugees were allowed into Canada. Many of them headed for Montreal, and one, Julius Frenkel, tall, erudite, and charming, came to live as a boarder with the Richlers. Lily had an affair with him, which could not remain a secret from Moe or the neighbourhood. She even wrote love letters to him, which Moe discovered. And unbeknownst to his mother and her lover, young Mordecai once discovered them in the act of sex. This had a profound effect on the boy, but reticent as he was, he confronted his mother with it only many years later, and also mentioned it to his brother Avrum.
Lily had her marriage annulled, and Moe left to live in a rented room—“Stunned, humiliated. St. Urbain’s cuckold.”
When Moses Richler died in 1967, Mordecai came from London for the funeral. Afterwards he wrote a moving tribute to his father that he reprinted in his collection Home Sweet Home, and which he read publicly with barely suppressed emotion. In that tribute, in his reading of it, one gets a sense of lost time. Moe, his humiliated father, did not get his due, his son was not there for him. It seems one of those instances when the son sees the father as a man, sees himself in his father:
So many things about my father’s nature still exasperate or mystify me.
… was he really so sweet-natured as not to give a damn? Finally, there is a possibility I’d rather not ponder. Was he not sweet-natured at all, but a coward? Like me. Who would travel miles to avoid a quarrel. Who tends to remember slights— recording them in my mind’s eye—transmogrifying them—finally publishing them in a code more accessible than my father’s. Making them the stuff of fiction.
In confronting his dead father, the son finally gives us a rare glimpse of his own soul.
But Lily received no such tribute (though Mordecai’s ambition reflected hers). He did not even attend her funeral. What happened?
She brought him up, a typical Jewish mother, diligently paid attention to his education, and always earned her living, most commonly by keeping rooming houses. She, as well as Moe, had sent money and food parcels to Mordecai in Europe the first two years. She was always proud of him. But unlike Moe, unlike Mordecai, she was effusive in her attentions. Overbearing. Too much.
Mordecai had loved his mother once, as he admitted some time after the break: “I was very close to my mother for a certain period.” In his early autobiographical novels, the unpublished “The Rotten People” as well as the published Son of a Lesser Hero, the mother, already an overbearing figure even from a distance, is nevertheless and naturally guaranteed her son’s affection. When Richler was settled in London, he would bring Lily to visit, and he would send money to her in Montreal. In his letters to William Weintraub, he referred to her as “Mum” and even “Mumsy.” (Though when he wrote to her, he began “Dear Maw.”) He kept her informed of his successes. When he returned to Montreal from Europe the first time, it was with her that he initially stayed. She was “Maw,” after all.
Until, as he said, “she became insufferable.” Until he was married again and bringing up a family of his own, a not untypical condition for family conflicts. When she came to visit, she tended to be bossy, aloof from Florence, her gaze, her attentions directed only toward her “genius” son. In Montreal the children would go visit their grandmother, watch TV, were fed, and the parents would later come by to fetch them. If she bribed them with presents in exchange for their affection, as has been suggested, that’s hardly unusual in a lonely grandmother and deserves pity if anything. But there was a trigger that turned off the son from the mother. Perhaps something was said by the irrepressible woman, to Mordecai, to Florence. But according to Richler, it was simply that
She was driving me crazy. She would turn up unan
nounced at seven in the morning.… [S]he wanted to move in, and I thought, “I won’t be able to live here.” So it was a question of survival, and I chose mine. It must have been 1974.
He sounds like a son with a parent. When she told him she didn’t want to see him again, he said a silent Amen. Perhaps this was his way of travelling the mile to avoid a quarrel, or recurrent scenes. She died at the home of her older son Avrum, who would recall her in the most hateful terms. But, as he said, it was Mordecai who had been her favourite. And Mordecai himself sometimes had not thought highly of Avrum, to put it mildly.
The comic book scenario of Lily’s dramatic conflict with her son has Mordecai as a latter-day Jacob Two-Two battling the Hooded Fang. It misses out on Lily’s own story. She was not only a mother, after all. She would say that if she had been a boy she would have trained as a rabbi. That surely is a clue to her frustrations. A person trapped in a woman’s body, by time, by Orthodoxy—for if she took pride in her religious tradition, it also kept her in her place—a mother, a daughter.
Not only did she write the quaint stories about a rabbi’s household, with titles such as “I Pay a Visit to the Beloved Rabbi,” she also wrote, in her seventies, her autobiography, The Errand Runner. It is a fascinating, informative book. We learn that much as she loved her father, she never forgave him for not letting her go on to high school, despite her teachers’ entreaties on her behalf; and for falling for Shmarya Richler’s wiles and arranging her marriage to his son. In Toronto, where her family first settled, she would accompany her father to circumcisions (and witnessed boys throwing stones at him because in his Orthodox rabbi’s garb he looked so alien), and in Montreal to kosher inspections. She ran errands for him. According to her, Rabbi Jehudah Rosenberg had already discerned little Mordecai’s Talmudic mind.