Solomon Gursky Was Here (2 page)

Thirty years— 1959 to 1989 —separate
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
from
Solomon Gursky Was Here
. Over that time, Richler's St. Urbain Street emerged definitively from obscurity. After the novels, the awards, and the film adaptations, no literate Canadian could admit to ignorance of Richler or St. Urbain. I don't think it is possible to overstate the magnitude of such an achievement. To make a marginal community broadly accessible without diminishing it demands tremendous artistic skill and commitment. Before
Solomon Gursky
this is precisely what Richler had done: in the popular imagination, where there had been nothing, there now existed St. Urbain Street. This in itself was remarkable, but with
Solomon Gursky
Richler decided to take matters a step further. Audaciously, the novel imagines a Canada in which Jews are not marginal, but rather a Canada whose history is intimately affected by a mysterious Jewish confidence man and his offspring.

The story of
Solomon Gursky Was Here
is the story of the wealthiest and most influential Jewish Canadian family. It begins in 1845 when Ephraim Gursky, the family's progenitor, steals aboard the
Erebus,
one of two ships under the command of Sir John Franklin sailing in quest of the Northwest Passage. Two years later, when all
the other members of the expedition perish, Ephraim and his accomplice, Izzy Gerber, emerge as the sole survivors. In classic picaresque style, Ephraim spends his remaining years embroiled in one scheme or another. He converts a band of Inuit to an idiosyncratic version of the Jewish faith; posing as one Reverend Horn he convinces dirt-poor Englishmen to travel to Gloriana, a utopian community in bountiful northern Saskatchewan; in the Quebec townships he masquerades as a Millenarian prophet and defrauds the local settlers of their land; in New Orleans he runs guns during the Civil War; during the gold rush he works as a piano player and cashier in a Dawson saloon. In ways both peculiar and intricate, Richler weaves each of these schemes into the fabric of the novel. Each of Ephraim's schemes has consequences that affect the history of Canada and the lives of his descendants. Chief among these descendants is the eponymous Solomon Gursky, his middle grandchild. Solomon inherits his grandfather's talents for charisma, adventure, and inscrutability, and lays the foundation for the family fortune with the winnings from a contentious poker game.

More than any of Richler's previous books,
Solomon Gursky Was Here
flirts with the line between truth and fiction. Richler variously cites the names of actual historical figures (Sir John Franklin, Meyer Lansky, Kurt Waldheim), fabricates characters from whole cloth (Ephraim Gursky, Solomon Gursky), and alters the biographies of recognizable people. The latter is what makes
Solomon Gursky
acutely provocative. The book's central conceit invites the reader to draw a connection between the Gurskys and a prestigious, real-life Montreal Jewish family. In broad terms, the parallels between the two are unmistakable: a phenomenally wealthy family, operating a multi-generational, multi-billion-dollar liquor business, whose beginnings can be traced back to gangsters and rum-runners. Also unmistakable is the parallel drawn between a failed poet named L.B. Berger and
A.M.
Klein—both Jewish poets of a certain renown who accept the position of speechwriter to a whisky baron. The depictions of the Gurskys—particularly Bernard Gursky, the autocratic mastermind behind the family's success—and of L.B. Berger are quite caustic. One gets the impression that Richler, now an estab
lished writer, wishes to raise the stakes, to further antagonize the establishment (literary, Jewish, Canadian nationalist), to really hunt big game. No quarter is given to any group or institution. Westmount WASPs, installed in mansions decorated with heraldic crests, are exposed as beneficiaries of Ephraim Gursky's Millenarian scam; the Gurskys themselves, lionized by a sycophantic Jewish community, are riddled with dysfunction; an honest and upright customs agent, the son of Gloriana settlers, is revealed to be a xenophobe; a senior French-Canadian civil servant, champion of Québécois art, welcomes graft; and practically everyone who isn't Jewish is an anti-Semite. The list goes on. It is as vast as Canada.

There is a famous anecdote about a meeting between Richler and Saidye Bronfman, the matriarch of the wealthy Bronfman clan that provided the model for the Gurskys. The incident took place in 1976, at the film premiere of
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz,
some years before Richler began work on
Solomon Gursky Was Here
. Reportedly, Ms. Bronfman approached Richler and remarked that he had “come a long way for a boy from St. Urbain Street,” to which Richler replied that Ms. Bronfman had “come a long way for a bootlegger's wife.” Besides being funny, the exchange is telling. It's doubtful, after all, that even while daydreaming at Baron Byng High Richler could have conceived of the extent of his eventual fame and acceptance. Similarly—if the description in
Solomon Gursky
can be taken as authentic—when her bootlegging relatives were straining moonshine through loaves of rye bread it is unlikely that Ms. Bronfman could have imagined the scope of her family's future wealth and prestige. The same, albeit on a less glamorous level, could be said for most of the Jews of St. Urbain Street. The intervening years between
Duddy Kravitz
and
Solomon Gursky
had been good to them. They had abandoned their coldwater flats for the suburbs and the conveniences of modern plumbing. They had integrated themselves into the larger society, which is another way of saying that the larger society, to its credit, had evolved. Despite a less than impeccable record, Canada had become a more tolerant and hospitable place. Richler, selfappointed chronicler of the Montreal Jewish experience, could not ignore these facts. Their confluence created an atmosphere in which
a book like
Solomon Gursky Was Here
could be written and published to wide acclaim. And though Richler satirizes everything under the northern sun and gleefully subverts all the sober Canadian literary conventions (the harsh life on the prairie, the perils of the high Arctic), the result is his most ambitious and most Canadian book.

“Gerald Murphy got it wrong—living twice, maybe three times, is the best revenge.”

Solomon Gursky in conversation with Tim Callaghan

“Cyril once observed that the only reason for writing was to create a masterpiece. But if you haven't got it in you to make a great work of art there is another option—you can become one.”

Sir Hyman Kaplansky,
as quoted in
The Diaries of Lady Dorothy Ogilvie-Hunt

Solomon Gursky Was Here

One

One

One morning—during the record cold 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, 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 stem of which stood Ephraim Gursky, a small fierce hooded man cracking a whip. Ephraim pulled close to the shore and began to trudge up and down, searching the skies, an inhuman call, some sort of sad clacking noise, at once abandoned yet charged with hope, coming from the back of his throat.

In spite of the tree-cracking cold a number of curious gathered on the shore. They had come not so much to greet Ephraim as to establish whether or not he was an apparition. Ephraim was wearing what appeared to be sealskins and, on closer inspection, a clerical collar as well. Four fringes hung from the borders of his outermost skin, each fringe made up of twelve silken strands. Frost clung to his eyelids and nostrils. One cheek had been bitten black by the wind. His inky black beard was snarled with icicles. “Crawling with white snakes,” one of them would say too late, remembering that day. But the eyes were hot, hot and piercing. “I say,” he asked, “what happened to my raven?”

“Hollis shot it dead.”

Ebenezer Watson kicked the runners of the long sled. “Hey, what are these dang things made of?” Certainly it wasn't the usual.

“Char.”

“What's that?”

“Fish.”

Ephraim stooped to slip his dogs free of their traces.

“Where are you from?”

“The north, my good fellow.”

“Where … north?”

“Far,” he said.

It was forty below on the lake and blowing. The men, knocking their throbbing feet together, their cheeks flaring crimson with cold, turned their backs to the wind. They retired to the warmth of Crosby's Hotel, to which a first-class livery was attached. A sign posted in the window read:

WM. CROSBY'S HOTEL

The undersigned, thankful for past favours

bestowed upon this

LONG-ESTABLISHED HOTEL

is determined to conduct this establishment in a

manner that will meet the approbation of the public,

and therefore begs a continuance of Public Patronage.

REFRESHMENTS SERVED AT ANY HOUR

OF DAY OR NIGHT

Wm. Crosby

Proprietor

Ebenezer Watson took a coal-oil lamp to the window and cleared a patch of frost to keep watch.

“What did he mean
his
raven?”

Ephraim was throwing slabs of bear meat to his leaping dogs, settling them down, and starting to clear snow from a circle of ice with a board, flattening it to his satisfaction. Then he took to stacking goods from his sled on to the ice he had cleared. Animal skins. Pots and pans. A Primus stove. A soapstone bowl or
koodlik
. A harpoon. Books.

“See that?”

“What?”

“Crazy bastard's brought reading books with him.”

They watched him pull a rod and what appeared to be a broadsword free of the sled ropes. Then he slipped into his snow-
shoes and scrambled up the sloping shore, jumping up and down there, plunging his rod into the snow like one of their wives testing a cake in the oven with a straw from a broom. Finally finding the texture of snow he wanted Ephraim began to carve out large blocks with his sword and carry them back to his flattened circle. He built an igloo with a low entry tunnel facing south. He banked the walls with snow, tended to the seams, and cut more blocks for a windbreak. Then just before he got down on his hands and knees, disappearing inside, he banged a wooden sign into the snow and ice.

CHURCH OF THE MILLENARIANS

Founder

Brother Ephraim

The men turned up early the next morning, fully expecting to find Ephraim dead. Frozen stiff. Instead they discovered him squatting over a hole in the ice, taking a perch, setting the eye in the hook, taking another, starting over again. He threw some of the perch to his dogs, some he stacked on the ice, and now and then he nimbly skinned one, filleted it, and gulped it down raw. He also harpooned two landlocked salmon and a sturgeon. But it was something else that troubled the men. Clearly Ephraim had already found the yard in the woods where the deer wintered, walled in by some seven feet of snow into a trap of their own making. A buck hung on a pine pole lodged in the ice. Obviously it had just been dressed. The dogs, their snouts smeared with blood, were tearing into the still-steaming lungs and intestines that had been tossed to them.

“You shouldn'ta told him I kilt his bird,” Luther Hollis said.

“You scared?”

“The hell I am, Mister Man. I figger he's only passing through.”

“Ask him.”

“You ask him.”

It continued overcast, the fugitive sun no more than a milky stain in a wash of grey sky. The men stopped counting the cracking trees or bunting pipes or exploding bottles. The temperature sank to fifty below. The men checked out Ephraim the next morning and he was still there, and the morning after and he was still there. The
fourth morning the men had something else on their minds. Luther Hollis had been found hanging from a rafter in his sawmill. Dead by his own hand, apparently. He hadn't been robbed, but neither had he left a note. It was baffling. Then, even as the men were deliberating, Crosby's boy came running up to them. “I talked to him,” he said.

“Wipe your nose.”

But they were impressed.

“He told me he was something called a Four by Two. What's that?”

Nobody knew.

“He invited me inside, eh, and it's really cosy, and I got to see some of the stuff he has in there.”

“Like what?”

“Like he has a book by Shakespeare and cutlery in sterling silver with crests of some kind on them and a blanket made of the skin of white wolves and a drawing in an oak frame of a ship with three masts called
Erebus
.”

The Reverend Columbus Green knew Greek. “Erebus,” he said, “is the name of the place of darkness, between Earth and Hades.”

The cold broke, the wind gathered force, and it began to snow so thick that a man, leaning into the wind, squinting, still couldn't see more than two feet ahead of him. Overnight the drifting snow buried roads and railway tracks. The blizzard blew for three days and then the sun rose in a blue sky so hard it seemed to be bolted into place. On Friday the men who had waited things out in Crosby's Hotel found that the only exit was through a second-floor window.

Ephraim was still in place. But now there were three more igloos on the lake, many more yelping dogs, and what Ebenezer Watson described as dark little slanty-eyed men and women everywhere, unloading things. Ebenezer, and some of the others, maintained a watch from the window in Crosby's Hotel. When the first evening star appeared they saw the little dark men, beating on skin drums, parading their women before them to the entry tunnel of Ephraim's igloo. Ephraim appeared, wearing a black silk top hat and fringed white shawl with vertical black stripes. Then the little men stepped forward one by one, thrusting their women before them, extolling
their merits in an animated manner. Oblivious of the cold, a young woman raised her sealskin parka and jiggled her bare breasts.