On Saturdays we listened to speeches about soil redemption, we saw movies glorifying life on the kibbutz. All of us planned to settle in Eretz.
“What’s there for a Jew here? Balls all squared.”
“Did you hear about Jack Zimmerman’s brother? He came third in the province in the matrics and they still won’t let him into pre-med school.”
Early Sunday morning we were out ringing door bells for the Jewish National Fund, shaking tin boxes under uprooted sleepy faces, righteously demanding quarters, dimes, and nickels that would help reclaim the desert, buy arms for Hagana and, incidentally, yield thirty-five cents off the top – enough for the matinee at the Rialto. We licked envelopes at Zionist headquarters. Our choir sung at fundraising rallies. And in the summertime those among us who were not working as waiters or shippers went to a camp in a mosquito-ridden Laurentian valley, heard more speakers, studied Hebrew and, in the absence of Arabs, watched out for fishy-looking French Canadians. Our unrivalled hero was the chalutz, and I can still see him as he stood on the cover of God knows how many pamphlets, clear-eyed, resolute, a rifle slung over his shoulder and a sickle in his hand.
After the meeting one Friday night Irving pulled me aside. “If my father calls tell him I’m staying at your house tonight.”
“Sure,” I said, delighted, and I offered to invite Hershey, Gas, and some of the others over for a blackjack game. Then, looking into Irving’s apprehensive face, I suddenly understood. “Oh. Oh, I get you. Where you going, but?”
Irving put a finger to his lips, he gave me a meaningful look. For the first time, I noticed Selma strolling slowly ahead of us down the street. She stopped to contemplate a shop window.
“Go to hell,” I said vehemently to Irving, surprising myself.
“You’ll do it, but.”
“Sure, sure,” I said, hurrying off in the opposite direction.
Selma was reputed to be hot stuff – crazy for it, Stan said – but all I saw was a shy dark girl with blue-black hair, a manner that was somewhat withdrawn, and the loveliest breasts imaginable.
“You know what she told me,” Hershey said. “She broke it jumping over a fire hydrant when she was a kid. Oi.”
Even Arty, who was as short as me with worse pimples, claimed to have necked through The Jolson Story three times with Selma.
On Friday, having managed to walk all the way to Habonim without once treading on a sidewalk crack, I asked Selma to come to a dance with me. But she was busy, she said.
On the night of Nov 29, 1947, after the U.N. approved the partition plan, we gathered at Habonim and marched downtown in a group, waving Israeli flags, flaunting our songs in WASP neighbourhoods, stopping to blow horns and pull down street car wires, until we reached the heart of the city where, as I remember it, we faltered briefly, embarrassed, self-conscious, before we put a halt to traffic by forming in defiant circles and dancing the hora in the middle of the street.
“Who am I?”
“YISROAL.”
“Who are you?”
“YISROAL.”
“All of us?”
“YISRO-YISRO-YISROAL.”
Our group leaders, as well as several of the older chaverim, went off to fight for Eretz. I lied about my age and joined the Canadian Reserve Army, thinking how wonderfully ironic it would be to have Canada train me to fight the British, but in the end I relented and decided to finish high school instead.
In the febrile days that followed the proclamation of the State of Israel, we gathered nightly at Habonim to discuss developments in Eretz and at home. A distinguished Jewish doctor was invited to address the Canadian Club. To our astonishment, the doctor said that though he was Jewish he remained, first of all, a Canadian. Israel, he warned, would make for divided loyalties, and he was opposed to the establishment of the new state.
Tansky’s regulars were in an uproar.
“He’s what you call an assimilationist.”
“You’d think what happened in Germany would have taught such people a lesson – once and for all.”
Sugarman pointed out that the doctor was already an O.B.E. “My son says he’s sucking after something bigger on the next Honours List.”
The Star printed the complete text of the doctor’s speech.
“If Ben Gurion speaks,” Takifman said, “maybe they can fit in a paragraph on page thirty-two, but if that shmock opens his lousy mouth.…”
Punitive action came quickly. The editor of the Canadian Jewish Eagle wrote that the Star of David will long outshine the Star of Montreal. We collected money so that A.M. Klein, the poet, could reply to the doctor on the radio. We also, I’m sorry to say, took to phoning the doctor at all hours of the night, shouting obscenities at him, and hanging up. We sent taxis, furniture removers, and fire engines to his door … then, as one event tumbled so urgently over another, we forgot him. Baruch, we heard, had been interned in Cyprus. Lennie was a captain in the army.
One day we opened our newspapers and read that Buzz Beurling, Canada’s most glamorous war ace, had joined the Israeli air force. That night at Habonim we were told, yes, but the price was a thousand dollars a month. We had outbid the Arabs.
Beurling never got as far as Eretz. His fighter plane crashed near Rome.
Abruptly, our group began to disintegrate. We had finished high school. Some of the chaverim actually went to settle in Eretz, others entered university, still more took jobs. Irving, who had been in charge of our J.N.F. funds, was forced to leave Habonim in disgrace when it was discovered that nearly two hundred dollars was missing.
We made new friends, found fresh interests. Hershey entered McGill. My marks weren’t high enough and I had to settle for the less desirable Sir George Williams College. Months later I ran into Hershey at the Café André. He wore a white sweater with a big red M and sat drinking beer with a robust bunch of blond boys and girls. Thumping the table, they sang loudly,
If all the girls were like rabbits,
and I was a hare I’d teach them bad habits.
My companions were turning out a little magazine. I had written my first poem. Hershey and I waved at each other, embarrassed. He didn’t come to my table; I didn’t go to his.
Afterword
BY WILLIAM WEINTRAUB
Mordecai Richler’s grave is in Montreal’s historic Mount Royal Cemetery. It’s in the Rose Hill section, on the eastern flank of the mountain, high above the city. From there one can look down and see, not too far away, his street – St. Urbain.
In November of 1958, I was dispatched to that street by Mordecai, who was living in London. “I know you’re damned busy,” his letter to me said, “[but] could you take an hour or maybe two off and drive down to St. Urbain Street and take some photos for us? What we need … are:
Some shots of outside staircases.
Outside shots of a cigar & soda store. Inside, too, if possible, and details of window displays.
Ditto a garage.
And anything else you can thk of. Area I had in mind is St. Urbain corner Fairmount, Laurier Street from St. Urbain to Jeanne Mance, anything ard there.”
The photos Mordecai wanted were for the guidance of the set designer of his new television play, Benny, based on a story that first appeared in a magazine and is now Chapter Seven in this book. It was to be produced in London in January and, Mordecai wrote, “I’m anxious for this play to come off well.”
After getting his letter, I bought two rolls of film for my ancient Rolliecord camera and set out for St. Urbain Street, pleased to think that I would be helping the British public visualize a very exotic corner of the Empire. Now they would be able to see, albeit in a stylized way, what they had first read about four years earlier in Son of a Smaller Hero, Mordecai’s second novel. In its review of that book, the Times Literary Supplement hed said: “Mr. Richler’s admirable novel recreates the teeming streets … of Montreal’s Jewish Quarter … the stiflingly rich background of sex, religion, and food from which [the characters] emerge.�
�� Note the phrase “Jewish Quarter.” Not neighbourhood, not district, but “Quarter.” For the British reviewer, this was a corner of the colonies as exotic as, say, the Turkish Quarter of Nicosia.
With the publication of The Street in 1969, Mordecai consolidated his suzerainty over his domain, not that there had been any doubt about it since the publication of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz ten years earlier. And Duddy, he wrote to a friend, would be the first book in a trilogy about the people of St. Urbain Street. “I’m staking out a claim to Montreal Jew-ville,” he wrote, “in the tradition of H. de Balzac and Big Bill Faulkner.” St. Urbain and the four adjacent ghetto streets would be for Richler what that unpronounceable county was for Faulkner, except that St. Urbain was real while Yoknapatawpha was imaginary.
In later years, interviewers would sometimes ask Mordecai what he wanted to achieve in his writings and he would answer that he wanted to be a witness to his time and his place, and that he wanted to “get it right.” Any reader of The Street who is familiar with its time and place can attest to the fact that this author got it absolutely right, or at least 99 per cent right.
“I was raised to manhood in a hairier, more earthy Montreal,” he writes, and who could put it more succinctly? Who could match this evocation of a special kind of childhood: “Kids like myself were dragged along on shopping expeditions to carry parcels. Old men gave us snuff, at the delicatessens we were allowed salami butts, card players pushed candies on us for luck, and everywhere we were poked and pinched by the mothers.”
Mordecai’s rapier is at its most devastating when he tells of life on the beach at Prévost, where St. Urbainites had summer cottages: “Plump, middle-aged ladies, their flesh boiled pink, spread out blankets and squatted in their bras and bloomers, playing poker, smoking and sipping Cokes. The vacationing cutters and pressers seldom wore bathing suits either. They didn’t swim. They set up card tables and chairs and played pinochle solemnly, sucking foul cigars and cursing the sun.”
When passages like this first appeared in magazines, most Montreal Jews were either furious or, at least, not amused. Was this Richler a self-hating Jew, or what? But as the decades passed, the sons and daughters of those cutters and pressers, now doctors and university professors, could read Richler with amusement and pride, finding not insult but warmth and nostalgia in that world of his.
When it comes to dialogue, these stories again get it right as they resound with utterances of that bygone time and place: “Married six weeks and he’s already got one in the oven. A quick worker, I’ll tell you.” … “Aw, those guys. You think the cockroaches know what an artist’s struggle is?” … “When it comes to choosing a bedroom set you can’t go wrong with my son-in-law Lou.”
A line of dialogue from this book – “Hey, big writer. Lard-ass. How many periods in a bottle of ink?” – has found its way into the Oxford English Dictionary in a citation for the phrase lard-ass. There are forty-three other phrases of Mordecai’s immortalized in the great dictionary, taken from his various novels and short stories and duly credited to him. Among the salty words that are cited are loudmouth, whang, schmaltz, and piker.
For Montreal readers there is a truly great line voiced by a Jewish housewife bargaining with a French Canadian farmer: “So fiel, Monsieur, for dis kleine chicken? Vous crazy?” This is trilingualism at its most practical.
Mordecai’s observations about the relations between Jews and French Canadians are particularly trenchant. There were street fights between boys of both groups, but, Mordecai writes, “the French Canadians, who were our enemies, were not entirely unloved. Like us, they were poor and coarse with large families and spoke English badly.… Actually it was only the WASPs who were truly hated and feared. ‘Among them,’ I heard it said, ‘with those porridge faces, who can tell what they’re thinking?’ It was, we felt, their country, and given sufficient liquor who knew when they would make trouble?”
“Quel portrait saisissant!” the Montreal daily La Presse wrote in a long and enthusiastic review of The Street, when it first appeared in 1969. “Grâce à lui, un quartier qui n’est plus … et une époque déjà oubliée revivent.” Calling Richler a brilliant author, the review urged all francophones who could read English to read this book.
But in later years, during the 1990s, the Richler name was anathema among most Quebec francophones, particularly the intellectuals. They were infuriated by Mordecai’s long article in The New Yorker about Quebec’s draconian, undemocratic language laws. Denunciations of ultra-nationalism in Quebec could be ignored by Quebec ultra-nationalists when they appeared in Canadian media, but it was deeply embarrassing for them to see the bizarre extremes of the Parti Québécois language laws revealed to Americans and elsewhere in the Western world. Torrents of abuse were heaped on Mordecai’s head for his detailing of the historic anti-Semitism of French Quebec and its kinship with the growth of nationalism.
Separatists equate being anti-separatist with being “anti-Québec,” and this label was affixed to Mordecai throughout the 1990s in countless journalistic diatribes, none of which could dispute the facts that he cited in his article and in the book that followed, Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! As for being anti-Quebec, Mordecai responded to that charge by pointing out that he had chosen to make his home in Quebec and that he had written, years before, that “the most gracious, cultivated and innovative people in this country are French Canadians.” Separatism, however, was a deplorable aberration.
Even in the months after his death, there were Quebec writers who came forth with snide things to say about Mordecai. But in December of 2001 there was an event in Montreal that suggested that the Richler name was on the road to rehabilitation. It was at the official launch of construction of the Grande Bibliothèque du Québec, the province’s huge new “national” library. Present at the ceremony was Lise Bissonnette, president of the library, who sought to reassure anglophones that its shelves would house not only books in Quebec’s official language – French – but also books in English. “Books by Mordecai Richler will be among the greatest of them,” she said. This was the same Lise Bissonnette who, as editor of Le Devoir a decade earlier, had written some of the most vicious of the editorials denouncing Mordecai.
That Mordecai is “among the greatest of them” is indisputable. His literary reputation derives largely from his landmark novels. But this slim volume, The Street, so much less known than the novels, ranks – in my opinion – very high among the best of his works.
BY MORDECAI RICHLER
ESSAYS
Hunting Tigers Under Glass: Essays and Reports (1968)
Shovelling Trouble (1972)
Notes on an Endangered Species and Others (1974)
The Great Comic Book Heroes and Other Essays (1978)
Home Sweet Home: My Canadian Album (1984)
Broadsides: Reviews and Opinions (1990)
Belling the Cat: Essays, Reports, and Opinions (1998)
FICTION
The Acrobats (1954)
Son of a Smaller Hero (1955)
A Choice of Enemies (1957)
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959)
The Incomparable Atuk (1963)
Cocksure (1968)
The Street (1969)
St. Urbain’s Horseman (1971)
Joshua Then and Now (1980)
Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989)
Barney’s Version (1997)
FICTION FOR YOUNG ADULTS
Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang (1975)
Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur (1987)
Jacob Two-Two’s First Spy Case (1995)
HISTORY
Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!: Requiem for a Divided Country (1992)
This Year in Jerusalem (1994)
SPORTS
On Snooker (2001)
Dispatches from the Sporting Life (2002)
TRAVEL
Images of Spain (1977)
Most of these stories and memoirs first appeared, sometimes in slightly
different form, in The New Statesman, Commentary, the Kenyon Review, the London Magazine, Canadian Literature and Maclean’s, and I would like to thank the editors for permission to reprint them here. “The Other Beach” is an excerpt from Son of a Smaller Hero.
M.R.
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