Not Quite Mainstream: Canadian Jewish Short Stories.

Kertzer, Jon

Norman Ravvin, ed. Calgary: Red Deer Press, 2001. 248 pp. $18.95 sc.

Leslie Fiedler once suggested that in the 1950s Jews briefly served as an American everyman by providing a literary mirror for shifting national values after World War Two, but by the 1960s they had been displaced by African-Americans. This observation makes me wonder if Jewish-Canadian writing can still claim to be "not quite mainstream," because Jews have earned a secure place in Canadian culture, and because authors from other ethnic groups have so broadened and muddied the waters of Canadian literature as to make the river analogy obsolete. It is hard to be even slightly eccentric when there is no regular current from which to deviate. There are some fine short stories in this anthology edited by Norman Ravvin, but they are not quite eccentric enough to be surprising, not daring enough to be shocking.

It is hard to generalize about seventeen stories, since they were not chosen for their conformity to any pattern, as Ravvin notes in a curiously jumbled introduction. A quick summary: they were published between 1961 and 2000, although many are not dated clearly; seven are written by women, ten by men; and three are translated from Yiddish. All reflect an Ashkenazi background--Polish, Russian, Hungarian, Czech--and most are set in Montreal or Toronto. Western Canada is not represented, nor are Sephardic Jews from North African or Middle Eastern backgrounds. Admittedly the latter have been less prominent in Canadian letters, although Naim Kattan might have provided material from his memoirs. Nevertheless, the collection is not meant to be thorough, only diverse. As well as Ravvin, the authors are Yaacov Zipper, Rochl Korn, Chava Rosenfarb (Yiddish), Irving Layton, Mordecai Richler, Norman Levine, Matt Cohen, Cary Fagan, Robyn Sarah, Joe Rosenblatt, Tom Wayman, Elaine Kalman Naves, Irena Eisler, Claire Rothman, Roma Gelblum-Bross, and Kenneth Sherman. I question the inclusion of only two stories. Irving Layton is better known as a poet, and his heavy-handed fable about hypocrisy shows why; Joe Rosenblatt's whimsical fable of the ants is fun but seems out of place, unless I failed to notice that the ants are Jewish.

Most of the stories are realistic, sticking close to the texture of everyday life. When handled skilfully, for instance by Richler, Levine, Cohen, or Rothman, this style appears effortless, never insisting on its significance, yet evoking the density of an experience that invites sympathy and speculation. When stories stress their own importance or attempt to shock (Layton, Sarah, Fagan) they strain for effect. Only two (Rosenblatt, Ravvin) venture into fable or fantasy, and the anthology remains quite conservative. Indeed, my main reaction is nostalgic: once again I am invited to walk the Montreal streets that Richler made famous, to suffer the indignity of being a "greenhorn" (a term once derisive, now needing a footnote), and to hear my grandparents' warm accents. As Ravvin notes, there is a "distinct falling off, a downplaying of explicitly Jewish themes as one moves from the early pieces ... to the more contemporary stories." The "falling off" is not just a matter of subject matter, but of energy. Because the past is more vibrant and troubled than the present, the narrative passion is devoted to retrospection. It is distressing to observe how strongly the stories locate Jewishness in the past, and how little they find in the present. They associate religious and cultural Judaism with reminiscence, guilt, trauma, secrecy, or the piety of the old world. For inspiration, they turn to cemeteries, childhood memories, return journeys, or fading family traditions. Stories set in the present either ignore Judaism entirely, or treat it as irrelevant or vaguely embarrassing. Evidently the reward for assimilation into the Canadian mainstream is uncomfortable self-effacement.

If there is a common thread here, it may be that the stories record degrees and kinds of discomfort, ranging from utter horror (dislocation, exile, the Holocaust) to minor inconvenience. Ethnic literature, especially when concerned with immigration, often uses the clash of generations within a family as a dramatic forum for assessing one's new home and calculating the price of assimilation to it, or exclusion from it. Several stores in Not Quite Mainstream depict these tensions by using family secrets both as theme and as narrative structure, either to probe the past for its hidden meaning, or to approach a revelation that provides the tale's climax. A child is often the focal point of, in the first pattern, recollection, or in the second, initiation. The power of secrets lies not so much in their meaning, which is always much the same--betrayal, failure, death, sexual initiation--but in the intensity with which the secret is withheld or sought. Viewed in this way, the stories about past secrets are more intense and more Jewish than those about secrets anticipated.

Jon Kertzer

Department of English

University of Calgary