Solomon Gursky Was Here (4 page)

A messenger was dispatched to Ste.-Agathe with a stinging letter to
die Roite Gitel
from L.B., quoting Milton, Lenin, Rilke, and of course L.B. himself, and the couples were soon reconciled, if only for the children's sake.

The children, the children.

The children were everything. Friday nights they were brought along to L.B.'s flat, free to play run-sheep-run in the lane, stuff themselves in the kitchen, and finally flop four to a bed if necessary. They were hugged and kissed and pinched and squeezed and all they were
obliged to do in return was to demonstrate, to cries of astonishment, the different ways in which they were bound to dazzle the world. Pudgy Misha Bloomgarten, who would later go into plate-glass windows, had only to scrape out a simple exercise on his violin for the names of Stern and Menuhin to be invoked. Giggly Rifka Schneiderman, who would marry into Kaplan's Knit-to-Fit, had merely to stand up and sing “The Cloakworkers' Union Is a No-Good Union”, her voice piercing, for the dining room to rock with applause. Sammy Birenbaum, the future television oracle, had only to recite Sacco's speech to the court for it to be recalled that Leslie Howard, the quintessential Englishman, was actually a nice Jewish boy, mind you Hungarian. But it was Moses (after all, does the apple fall far from the tree?) who was recognized as the prodigy. L.B. flushing with pleasure, his mother summoned out of the kitchen, he would be called upon to deliver a socialist critique of
The Count of Monte Cristo
or
Treasure Island,
or whatever it was he had read that week, or to recite a poem of his own, its debt to Tristan Tzara duly noted.

Pens need ink,

Leaky boats sink.

Moses clung to his father, constantly searching for new ways to earn his love. L.B., he noticed, often delayed his morning departure to the dreaded parochial school, blowing on his pince-nez, wiping the lenses with his handkerchief, as he stood by the front window waiting for the postman to pass. If there was no mail L.B. grunted, something in him welcoming the injustice of it, and hurried into his coat.

“Maybe tomorrow,” his wife would say.

“Maybe, maybe.” Then he would peer into his lunch bag, saying, “You know, Bessie, I'm getting tired of chopped egg. Tuna. Sardines. It's coming out of my ears.”

Or another day, the postman passing by their flat again, she would say, “It's a good sign. They must be considering it very, very carefully.”

One ten-below-zero morning, hoping to shave ten minutes off his father's anxiety time, Moses quit the flat early and lay in wait for the postman at the corner.

“Any mail for my father, sir?”

A large brown envelope. Moses, exhilarated, raced all the way home, waving the envelope at his father who stood watch by the window. “Mail for you!” he cried. “Mail for you!”

L.B., his eyes bulging with rage, snatched the envelope from him, glanced at it, and ripped it apart, scattering the pieces on the floor. “Don't you ever meddle in my affairs again, you little fool,” he shouted, fleeing the flat.

“What did I do, Maw?”

But she was already on her hands and knees, gathering the pieces together. He kept carbons, Bessie knew that, but these,
Gottenyu,
were the originals.

L.B. went to Moses that evening, removing his pince-nez and rubbing his nose, a bad sign. “I don't know what got into me this morning,” he said, and he leaned over and allowed Moses to kiss his cheek. Then L.B. declined supper, retired to his bedroom, and pulled the blinds.

A baffled Moses appealed to his mother. “That envelope was addressed to him in his own handwriting. I don't get it.”

“Sh, Moishe, L.B. is trying to sleep.”

It would begin with a slight tic of discomfort in the back of his neck, a little nausea, and within an hour it would swell into a hectic pulse, blood pounding through every vein in his head. A towel filled with chopped ice clamped to his forehead, L.B. would lie in the dark, staring at the ceiling, moaning.
One day a floodtide of blood, surging into my head, seeking passage, will blow off the top. I will die drenched in fountains of my own blood
. Then, on the third day, bloated, his bowels plugged, he would shuffle to the toilet and sit there for an hour, maybe more. Afterward he would stagger back into bed, fall into a deep sleep and wake whole, even chirpy, the next morning, demanding his favourite breakfast: scrambled eggs with lox, potatoes fried with onions, bagels lathered with cream cheese.

Moses adored accompanying L.B. on his rounds. After sufficient funds had been raised by the group, he went with him to Schneiderman's Spartacus Press on St. Paul Street, present at the creation. Sorting out pages of L.B.'s first collection of poems. Pages of
The Burning Bush
as they peeled hot off a flat-bed press that
usually—much to Nachum Schneiderman's embarrassment— churned out nothing more socially significant than letterheads, business cards, wedding invitations, and advertising circulars. Commercial
chazerai
. Schneiderman treating Moses to a Gurd's ginger ale and a May West, saying, “When he wins the Nobel Prize I'll say I knew him when …”

Mrs. Schneiderman arriving with a thermos of coffee and her own apple strudel covered with a linen napkin, saying, “If this were Paris or London or even Warsaw in the old days your father would be covered with honours instead of struggling to earn a living.”

The money hadn't found L.B., not yet, but neither was he really struggling any more. L.B.'s wife had decreed his teaching job souldestroying, obliging him to resign, and she had gone back to work, bending over a sewing machine at Teen Togs. L.B., free at last, slept late most mornings and roamed the streets in the afternoons, usually stopping at Horn's for a coffee and a Danish, nobody coming to his table if he had his notebook open, his Parker 51 poised. Back home he wrote deep into the night.

“Sh, Moishe, L.B.'s working.”

Poems, stories, and fiery editorials for the
Canadian Jewish Herald
on the plight of the Jews in Europe. Some nights he would be invited to read from his work at modern synagogues in Outremont, Moses tagging after through the snow, lugging a satchel full of signed copies of
The Burning Bush
. When his father mounted the podium, Moses would take up a position in the back of the hall, applauding wildly, torn between rising anger and concern, as it became obvious that once again there would be only eighteen or twenty-three poetrylovers in attendance, though folding chain had been provided for a hundred. Most nights Moses was lucky to peddle four or five copies of
The Burning Bush,
but once he actually succeeded in unloading twelve for three dollars each. No matter how few he sold he always managed to inflate the number by three, nine dollars having been slipped to him by his mother before they left for the synagogue. Sometimes L.B. would crack sour jokes on the way home. “Maybe next time we should fill the satchel with neckties or novelty items.” More often, inconsolable, he cursed the Philistines. “This is a raw
land, an empty space, and your poor father is a soul in exile here.
Auctor ignotus,
that's me.”

The breakthrough came for L.B. in 1941. Ryerson Press, in Toronto, brought out their own edition of
The Burning Bush
in their Ethnic Poets of Canada series, with an introduction by Professor Oliver Carson: “Montreal's Eloquent Israelite”. There was a stunning review by Rabbi Melvin Steinmetz, B.A., in the University of Alberta's
Alumni News,
which was immediately enshrined in one of the scrapbooks kept by Bessie.

Not long afterward fame found L.B., fame of a sort, although not the kind he yearned for. His impassioned guest editorials about the plight of the European Jews, published in the
Canadian Jewish Herald,
led to invitations for him to lecture, not only in Montreal but also in Toronto and Winnipeg. He was, without a doubt, an inspired orator. All that banked anger, those glowing coals of resentment, fanned into flame by his long cherished feelings of being a man wronged, winning him the praise of his dreams so long as he directed the fire at the enemies of the Jews. L.B., thick around the middle now, his greying hair allowed to grow even longer, thumbs hooked into his waistcoat pockets, rocking on his heels, red in the face as he inveighed against the obloquy of the gentiles in phrases that released howls of recognition from his audiences. Audiences that no longer numbered eighteen or twenty-three but that turned up in the hot hundreds, squabbling over folding chairs, sitting on the floor, standing three deep in the back; L.B. gathering in their outrage, orchestrating it, and then letting fly. Understandably he began to strut a little. He acquired a broadbrimmed felt hat, a cape, a foulard. On the road he now refused to sleep on pissy old mattresses in the rabbi's spare bedroom but demanded a room in the most stylish hotel. Back in Montreal, where invitations to dine with the affluent began to proliferate, he would assure Bessie that she wouldn't enjoy dinner with materialists like the Bernsteins, starting with the outside fork. He would endure it alone.

L.B. continued to write. Ryerson's edition of
The Burning Bush
was followed by poems and stories and literary pensées in
Canadian Forum, Northern Review, Fiddlehead,
and other little magazines.
Ryerson brought out a second volume of his poems,
Psalms of the Tundra,
followed by a first collection of stories,
Tales of the Diaspora
. He was interviewed by the Montreal
Gazette
. Herman Yalofsky invited him to sit for his portrait. L.B. in profile pondering the mysteries of the cosmos, enduring its weight. The fingertips of one spidery hand supporting his wrinkled forehead, the other hand holding his Parker 51.

L.B. now began to wander further afield, making forays into gentile bohemia, tippytoe at first, but soon
con brio
as he found himself, much to his astonishment, welcomed as an exotic, a garlicky pirate, living proof of the ethnic riches that went into weaving the Canadian cultural tapestry. Soon he was at ease at their soirées, collecting compliments from young ladies who, although educated in Switzerland, now wore Russian peasant blouses and drank beer out of bottles and talked dirty. He became a proficient punster. He found that he was adept at flirting, especially with Marion Peterson (such a trim waist, such nice firm breasts) who trailed a sweet scent of roses. Just a tasteful
goyishe
hint, mind you, not drenched in it like Gitel Kugelmass. Marion sculpted. “Your head,” she said, cupping it, cool fingers running through his hair.

“What's wrong with it?” he asked, alarmed.

“You have an Old Testament head.”

Traipsing home through the snow, his scalp was still tingly.

Bessie, as usual, had left the hall light on for him. She sat in a worn robe at the kitchen table, trimming her corns with a knife. The following evening L.B. refused the stuffed derma, a favourite of his, that she had prepared for him. “Didn't you have a movement this morning?” she asked.

“It's too fattening.”

L.B. became a regular at evenings in the apartments of dedicated McGill professors who also wrote poetry, swore by the
New Statesman,
and toiled long hours to save Canada through socialism. They proved a bizarre lot, these gentiles, their intelligentsia. They had not been nourished on Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, the Zohar, Balzac, Pushkin, Goncharov, the Baal Shem Tov. Among them it was G.B.S., the Webbs, H.G. Wells, board-and-brick bookcases red with
Gollancz's Left Book Club editions,
New Yorker
cartoons pasted on the walls of what they called the loo and, above all, the Bloomsbury bunch. Catty, clever people, L.B. thought. Writers who luxuriated on private incomes and knew the best years for claret. But when he brought back news of the
goyim
out there to his acolytes who still gathered round the dining-room table with the crocheted tablecloth on Friday nights, he made it sound like a world of wonders. L.B. now eschewed chopped liver on rye with lemon tea and, instead, nibbled Camembert and sipped Tio Pepe.

Then came the summons from Sinai. L.B. was invited to an audience at Mr. Bernard's opulent redoubt cut high into the Montreal mountainside, and he descended from those heights, his head spinning, pledged to unheard-of abundance, an annual retainer of ten thousand dollars to serve as speech writer and cultural adviser to the legendary liquor baron.

“And this,” Mr. Bernard had said, leading him into a long room with empty oak shelves running from ceiling to floor, “will be my library. Furnish it with the best. I want first editions. The finest morocco bindings. You have a blank cheque, L.B.”

Then Libby was heard from. “But nothing second-hand.”

“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Gursky?”

“Germs. That's all I need. We have three children, God bless them.”

L.B., once he had acquiesced to the deal, grasped that he had a lot of fancy footwork to perform. For, as far as his acolytes were concerned, the sly, rambunctious reformed bootlegger, worth untold millions now, was still a
grobber,
a hooligan who rained shame on Jews cut from a finer cloth. Saddened by the seduction of their mentor, they were as yet unable to rebuke their cherished L.B. to his face. Except for Schneiderman, who beat his fist against the table and cried out, “Ask him why he betrayed his brother.”

“What?”

“Solomon.”

Moses, clearing cups from the table, heard for the first time the name that would become both quest and curse to him.

Solomon. Solomon Gursky.

“There are many versions of that story,” L.B. protested.

“His own brother I'm telling you.”

“Didn't Jacob slip one over on Esau and isn't he still one of our fathers?”

“To the Jesuits you would be a real credit, L.B.”

“Artists have always had to dance a jig for their patrons. Mozart, Rousseau. Mahler, that bastard, actually converted. Me, all I have agreed to do is to write speeches for Mr. Bernard about the plight of our brethren in Europe. Coming from me, it's noise. From Mr. Bernard
they
will prick up their ears. Gates will open, if only a crack. In this country big money talks.”