by M G Vassanji
Her letters to her son until the early 1960s are missing, except for a handful, which are remarkable. Beginning “Darling Muttkele,—” her thoughts and emotions pour out in them in dense single space. We can understand his dread. She planned to read Son of a Lesser Hero three times, she wrote once, first as an ordinary reader, then as a mother, and finally as a Jew. Meanwhile, there followed a mini review. She defends the mother in the book (based on her), and understands that Mordecai may have hated her at times, just as there were times when she had hated her own father whom she also loved. She likes the portrait of the Jews (which had offended many of them). “The people who can think will enjoy it. Many parts of the book I mean. But as Cathy [Boudreau] wrote to me, it is not a pretty book. But life on St Urbain was not pretty and life for us was not pretty.…” She can’t help taking a dig at Moe, however, calling him pathetic.
In a breathless unpunctuated letter, except for dashes, she writes to “Muttkele” about reading Lucretius and Lillian Ross, and watching The Red Badge of Courage, and she mentions Gide. In 1959 she confesses that she has met a Dutch Jew to whom she is attracted; they have spoken, sex has been discussed, but he remains secretive. Mordecai seems to have replied that this is “not kosher.” Lily gives up the man after a few weeks. She goes to New York and sees a triplet of plays by Yiddish playwrights, Aleichem, Peretz, and Seforim: “they lost much in translation.” She finds an African ballet “fabulous.” She forms a literary club, plans a marriage bureau.
In the 1960s, when Florence is in the picture, the letters, which are preserved, are addressed to both her and Mordecai. She sends gifts to the children. She writes every week, preferably on Monday, and even when she says she’s being short, the letters are long and dense; and articulate. She is disturbed by the Kennedy assassination. But, watching Martin Luther King’s speech, she says, “I am beginning to weary of all the fuss made of Mrs. Kennedy, I can never forget the picture of Mrs. Evers [wife of civil rights leader Medgar Evers] as I saw and heard her speak on television after the brutal murder [1963] of her husband.”
All this can hardly be dismissed as pretense, though no doubt there was a need to impress. But she was too much for a son with his own life and family. He did not want to discuss culture with her. He did not want a mother who was a colleague and a reviewer. But she needed a companion.
Richler perhaps saw greater honesty in the letters of the simple Moe, who was more the traditional father, even in his rejection of Cathy. His letters were short, with family news—“Sara’s father died. Should you wish to send a card …”—and clippings, sometimes, containing news about Mordecai. Mordecai in his “Dear Daddy” letters sent stamps, once some Churchill commemorative coins, and mostly news about his own work. Moe did not presume to judge Mordecai or mention his work. It is not even clear that he had read them through. Once, in 1959, he wrote a mild note of admonishment. “The reviews [of Duddy Kravitz ] are very good, but all critics mention the fact of certain language that could have been omitted.” Quoting from the Ethics of the Fathers, he said the critics were the teachers and perhaps Mordecai could learn from them.
He lived, then, in a completely different cultural world from that of his wife or son.
IN THE MANUSCRIPT of Richler’s first unpublished novel, “The Rotten People” (1951), the protagonist Kerman receives a letter from his mother that reads, in its tone and density, remarkably like one of Lily’s. This is how Kerman responds to it in his mind, giving us a hint of the oppressive weight of his mother’s attentions on a young Mordecai Richler:
He felt as if he had been hunted down; over two continents and across an ocean, she was boring her clamps into him.… Then he felt a whole wave of conflicting emotions: his love for his mother, guilt for not having written her for so long, anger because she was going on furnishing a room for him.… A poisonous rage filled him to the brim as he visualized his insignificant brother—the nonentity of nonentities.…
Kerman’s view of his brother here is also worth noting. Did Mordecai already dislike his brother at that early age (twenty-one)? Much later he had made it clear that he did not like Avrum. The reason was that Avrum had been borrowing money for his debts from the hard-pressed Moe, who had to dip into his savings. My other disease is Avrumitis, Moe said. When Moe was in hospital, seriously ill, he complained that Avrum was neglecting him. But it was Avrum who had always been physically closer to Moe, and this was Mordecai’s guilt and later grief.
The harshest caricature of Lily in Richler’s novels is as Mrs. Hersh, Jake’s mother, in St. Urbain’s Horseman, who comes to visit him and Nancy in London during his travails. It is evident that the watchful, interfering Mrs. Hersh is Nancy’s own travail, while Jake does his best to avoid his mother. Dare we read in these scenes the domestic situation as it prevailed when Lily visited Mordecai and Florence? Perhaps. A letter written to the couple from Montreal ends thus, giving us a flavour of Lily’s presence in their lives: “Mordecai, next time you write me, please dear put the pictures in the envelope first before you put the letter in.”
Lily was aware of her caricature as Mrs. Hersh, and once complained bitterly about it.
The break between mother and son came in 1974 in Montreal. In a letter dated August 1, in which she returned his check for $500, she said she had been the object of “humiliation, insult and many times hatred.”
… you are right … I call you late at night, I interfere in your family life, I tell you how ill I am, I demand money from you. And I want to devour you with love. So I have decided never to trouble you any longer.
She does not want to see him again; his memory is her coat of many colours in exile.
But later she did send him some taped messages, to which, on August 3, 1976, he sent her a long, angry, and final letter of reply. It is accusatory, and he cannot help his sarcasm—about what he saw as her piety and pretenses— nor his contempt for her. Unfortunately, it cannot be excerpted or paraphrased here. “Dollink Muttkele,” as she called him in another letter, concludes with a bombshell. A sin of the distant past—her sexual infidelity with the boarder Frankel—comes to haunt this woman now in her seventies. This much can be said: the letter is the one piece of evidence we have of how haunted Mordecai had been since the age of twelve upon witnessing the infidelity. It tells us why he found his simple father more authentic. What Mordecai saw one night in the bedroom he shared with Lily he told his brother Avrum, who reported it in an interview with Michael Posner in blunter and cruder terms than Mordecai himself used with his mother.
It must have crushed her, this letter. But surely it also pleased her a little? He was the old rabbi’s progeny, after all. But in the letter it is also evident that there is no love left to spare for her. There is no room to forgive.
CHAPTER TEN
Engaging with Canada
In his youth Mordecai Richler’s experience of Canada was essentially that of downtown Montreal. Before he left for Europe, he had been to Toronto and Ottawa once, and to New York to visit a contact. It was from New York, and the United States, that much of popular culture came to Montreal’s Main: comic books, films, books and magazines, even the strippers at the Gayety; there were the fiery wartime anti-Nazi broadcasts by Walter Winchell. In the 1960s, in an interview, Richler had said that he felt closer to writers in New York or Chicago than, for instance, to those in Edmonton. The Jews’ entitlement to Canada had also been problematic, due to an inherent anti-Semitism in the mainstream culture. The phrase “None is too many” is a blot on Canada’s history, being an official’s reply to the question of how many Jewish refugees could the country take during the war. Not surprisingly, for many Jews their perceived ideal homeland was Israel, and some of them left to settle there with its establishment in 1948. His own grandfather, Jehudah Rosenberg, had bought property in Israel but died before he could emigrate, and Mordecai as a teenager had dreamed of becoming a pioneer in that land. Today these past attitudes might surprise some, but they also indicate what a long way the
nation has come.
In the 1940s, Canada could still be considered a part and parcel of Britain’s Empire. A decade later, however, as British power diminished, this dominion in the north was gradually emerging as an independent, influential nation on the world stage. From afar, in Europe, it is this newly assertive country in America that he would have perceived, in its entirety, as “home.” During his return visits from Europe, he would now visit Toronto, which was gaining in importance and already was the nation’s English-media capital, home to the CBC, the country’s only national (English-language) newspaper, and the major publishers. He became increasingly better known as a novelist and commentator, with a distinct persona aided by his controversial, candid opinions. He travelled the country. Montreal, still, was his chosen place to live, when he ended his exile and returned for good; here he could go to Woody’s or the bar at the Ritz to chew the fat over a Scotch, discuss the world; or take a walk down the old neighbourhood, stop for a smoked meat sandwich at Schwartz’s, and never mind the fat. As he would say, “I could not live anywhere else in Canada but Montreal.”
Soon after his return to Canada, Richler visited Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories. He enjoyed it immensely and took a charter flight north into the arctic barrens. He returned several times. Certainly there were problems there, particularly with alcoholism and unemployment. What he liked about it was its ruggedness, its honesty and lack of pretense, even as reflected in its terrain. It was cold and extreme, period. It came with its own sense of sardonic humour. It was not boring. No doubt he idealized it somewhat. And perhaps it reminded him of that essential quality of his father that he had come to love. He was charmed.
Following that first trip into the Arctic he began to conceive an ambitious novel that would embrace a Canada beyond Montreal’s Jewish ghetto, over a longer historical and mythological span. Obviously he could not write about the WASPs or the French, the so-called founding nations; he would short-circuit them. It was, one would like to think, Richler’s own embrace of his native country to which he had unequivocally committed. He read about the Franklin Expedition, the Arctic voyage in 1845 of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror to discover a sea route from Europe to Asia, a subject that totally absorbed him. He researched, in addition, the myths of the Haida, a northwestern Aboriginal people, and life in nineteenth-century England. The book he produced was called Solomon Gursky Was Here. By his own confession, it was not easy to write. He finished it in 1989, more than a decade since he began to think about it. It is, technically, his most ambitious and riskiest book, linking his personally staked-out space of Jewish Montreal with the Canadian North, the rituals of Judaism with the rituals of the Inuit, the history of Canada with the history of the Jews. Daring and brilliant in its conception, it is in a sense a Jewish and personal appropriation of Canada.
Moving back and forth from the middle of the nineteenth century to the 1980s, telling the stories of numerous characters in many settings, the novel is held together by the obsession of Moses Berger, brilliant scholar and alcoholic, with the story of the elusive Solomon Gursky, one of three brothers, liquor barons who began in Yellowknife, the Northwest Territories, and amassed their fortune in the Prairies selling bootleg. But the Gurskys are no ordinary family from the shtetl. The first Gursky, Ephraim, the grandfather of the three brothers, is introduced to us with all his mythical potential as he descends from the sky, as it were—or from the North:
One morning—during the record spell of 1851—a big menacing black bird, the likes of which had never been seen before, soared over the crude mill town of Magog, hard by the Vermont border, swooping low again and again. Luther Hollis brought down the bird with his Springfield. Then the men saw a team of twelve yapping dogs emerging out of the wind and swirling snows of the frozen Lake Memphremagog. The dogs were pulling a long, heavily laden sled at the stern of which stood Ephraim Gursky, a small fierce hooded man cracking a whip.
Lake Memphremagog, in Quebec’s Eastern Townships, incidentally, is also where Mordecai Richler had made his home, and where he finished this book. It is also where Moses, “Jeanne Mance born-and-bred” in Montreal’s Jewish ghetto, now makes his home. As Moses goes about his quest, Solomon is presumed dead, and the Gursky empire, its headquarters in Montreal, is in the hands of his brother, the crotchety “Mr. Bernard.” Moses is the son of L.B. Berger, a poet, who had accepted patronage from Mr. Bernard as his speech writer and cultural adviser. There is an obvious resemblance of the Gurskys to the Canadian liquor family of the Bronfmans, who had employed the poet A.M. Klein in a similar capacity to L.B.
The novel has the quality also of a mystery and reveals its secrets about the past (and present) in fits and starts. Ephraim Gursky, created by Moses from his researches, emerges as a trickster figure. A man of many abilities, he has worked as a coal miner, a thief, and a forger, and speaks English, Yiddish, Russian, and Hebrew. It turns out that he has an excellent singing voice too, and is in fact the son of a widowed Russian Jewish opera singer and cantor who ran away from a wicked stepmother. There is an element of the fairy tale, therefore, to his story. He easily acquires a knowledge of Latin, and though he may or may not observe a kosher diet, he knows his Scripture only too well. With him there is always his prayer shawl and silk top hat. While a convict awaiting deportation from London “to parts beyond the seas,” he schemes by forging letters of recommendation to join the Franklin Expedition. Naturally he is virile, and fathers many children in various places. Ultimately he is the only man to survive the tragic expedition and sets his roots in Canada. Of his three grandsons, Bernard, Maurie, and Solomon, the latter is his favourite and becomes Moses Berger’s obsession. It is Solomon who heard parts of Ephraim’s story, which is revealed to Moses during his quest.
Solomon Gursky is considered by many to be Richler’s best book, Canada’s own example of magical realism. Moses’s girlfriend reading Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, the best-known founding text of magical realism, is surely Richler thumbing his nose at the critics: I know, I know. Whatever one calls it, the novel belongs to the class of works of the 1970s and 1980s that were involved with rewriting history—in the jargon, creating “subaltern history”—using both traditional and scholarly sources. Though the Arctic is emblematic of Canada, and is present in its mythic and geographic sense, it is the Jewish tradition that sings, loudly and richly. Yiddish expressions are scattered throughout, as are Biblical references. Ephraim Gursky, while surviving in the Arctic, bamboozles a group of Eskimos by “making” an eclipse come forth, and thus saves his skin. In the process he founds a Jewish sect, whose descendants wear parkas with four fringes hanging from them, each fringe made up of twelve silken strands; a kind of garment young Mordecai had to wear on St. Urbain as an Orthodox child, much to his discomfiture. It takes an advanced Sudoku-solver’s resolve to follow Moses’s pursuit of the clues that finally lead us to the mystery of Solomon Gursky, more elusive than his grandfather, a Scarlet Pimpernel and Jewish Avenger combined. Not quite the Horseman, but of the same ilk. We see him, or someone who looks like him, fleetingly, in Nairobi on the eve of the Israeli raid on Entebbe in the early 1970s; with Marilyn Monroe in the 1960s; in D.C. during the Watergate crisis; running the Palestine blockade in 1948 using a freighter with the emblem of a raven.
That it had been a difficult book to write is acknowledged in the author’s expression of gratitude to his wife, Florence: “Without her encouragement, not to mention crucial editorial suggestions, I would have given up on Solomon Gursky Was Here long ago.”
WHEN SOLOMON GURSKY was published, Mordecai Richler was on the verge, sleeves rolled up, so to speak, of joining the battle for Canada, more precisely, Quebec. He was writing an article on the Quebec language crisis for The New Yorker and complained to an interviewer about how much he had to explain about Canada to American readers. But he was paid well. That article proved controversial, but the undaunted Richler followed it with a full-length book in 1992, Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for
a Divided Country, which became a national bestseller in a country anxious about whether it would survive intact. The book was not quite a requiem, however, though the situation might well have called for one in the near future; rather it was in part an explication of the crisis and in part a polemic to counter the claims and demands of the Quebec nationalists clamouring for greater protection of the French character and heritage of the province.
The issue of language rights had become the battleground for the nationalists, who claimed to fight for the French soul of Quebec, and the anglophones, who sought protection of their democratic freedoms. In 1977, the nationalist Parti Québécois under the charismatic premier René Lévesque passed Bill 101, the French Language Charter, which declared French the official language of the province and detailed a language policy. The charter went further than Bill 22 of 1974, the Official Language Act, under which French had already been declared the only official language of Quebec. Hitherto, under the British North America Act of 1867, the province had been officially bilingual. Bill 101 now explicitly made English and even bilingual commercial signs illegal. (Its other provisions put restrictions on children’s education, and called for toponymic name changes.)
There were protests, the loudest in Montreal, which had long been a bilingual, commercial city, a metropolis of many cultures. Anglophones resorted to the national media for support and the courts for protection. Emotions ran high during this period, nationalist supporters of Bill 101 and “Francization” coming out in the streets in the tens of thousands. In 1988 the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that the sign provisions of Bill 101 were illegal in so far as requiring signs to be in French only. This did not end the matter; it was politics that ultimately reigned. Premier Bourrassa of Quebec promised to amend the bill and, using the “notwithstanding clause” to override the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, introduced Bill 178.