Seymour Blicker z"l (1940-2025)

One of the great blessings I have had in my life in the last 20 years or so has been getting to know the great Montreal novelist and playwright Seymour Blicker, who passed away at his home this past Friday. 

Seymour made a name for himself in the late 1960s and 70s with the publication of three novels, Blues Chased a Rabbit (1969), Shmucks (1972) and The Last Collection (1976). I wrote about Shmucks in an earlier blog post. In the 1980s and 90s, Seymour went on to write screenplays, television scripts and plays. He is perhaps best known for the play "Never Judge A Book By Its Cover" (1987) which I know was still being performed internationally a few years ago, and the film script of The Kid (1997). 

It was Shmucks that brought Seymour and I together. The novella was mentioned to me by my friend  and co-author Seymour Mayne. He said that he had recently re-read it for consideration to be put on a syllabus for a Jewish Canadian literature class he was teaching at University of Ottawa, and found that it had stood up surprisingly well. I immediately tried to find a copy, locating a used hardcover edition on Abe Books. I loved it. It was funny, poignant and clever. I wondered whatever happened to Blicker. A bit of online searching revealed that he had continued to write plays, taught in the creative writing department at Concordia University, and had moved up north in the Laurentians. I was intrigued by his apparent reclusiveness. And there was something else that caught my interest, his work in television, particularly an episode he had written for the police comedy Barney Miller. When I was growing up I was a fan of that show, and one episode in particular had stuck with me. It's possibly the most famous Barney Miller, when a man comes to the station claiming that he's a werewolf and asks to be incarcerated before midnight when he transforms and wreaks violent havoc. It's a masterfully written story. I remember the anticipation of waiting until the very end of the episode to find out if he actually becomes a werewolf. Unbeknownst to me Blicker had written that memorable episode.

Mayne put us in touch, and the two Seymours and me (they called me an honorary Seymour) met for coffee in Cote-Saint-Luc. By that time Blicker had moved back to the city. I felt giddy (and honored) to meet him. That was the first of many coffees with Seymour. We stayed in touch, regularly exchanging emails and meeting every so often at the local McDonalds. The last time was about a year ago I think. We had planned to get together for coffee last spring and at various points over the summer but something always got in the way. He'd had health difficulties for many years but somehow always mustered the energy to meet. It was apparent now that his health was declining more quickly. By the end of the summer he was messaging that he wasn't feeling well enough for a visit but would let me know when he was up for one. I had a feeling I wasn't going to be seeing him again. 

It's a terrible shame that Seymour has not received the acknowledgement that he deserves. In around 2019 when Seymour was approaching his 80th birthday I contacted some people I knew at the Concordia creative writing department to see if they would be interested in organizing a public literary event to celebrate his birthday. I also brought the idea to the Jewish Public Library where I know there is an archive of clippings on his career. I received polite but unenthusiastic responses. Busy in my own life, I didn't press harder, which I now regret.

Seymour had undoubtedly been a talented and ambitious writer in his prime. In the mid-70s he packed up his family and moved to Los Angeles in the hope of establishing himself as a writer for film and television. It didn't last very long. I asked him what happened. He said, LA was no place to raise a family. I got the impression it was culture shock for him.

By the time I got to know him he had mellowed, maybe even become disillusioned. Like so many writers who felt they deserved more recognition, he now seemed to have become ambivalent about it. In truth, I think Seymour had acknowledged that the culture had moved on. You might say that he was a casualty of the times: Novelists, playwrights and even filmmakers were no longer held in the same esteem as they had been. 

Every time we met I asked if he'd been writing, working on a new play or short story. He'd say he had ideas, but was finding it harder and harder to focus enough to bring his ideas to fruition. At one point he travelled to Vienna to see the opening of one of his plays, which he found gratifying. And he was excited when his novels were re-issued by his publisher as e-books. At one point, I suggested to my publisher Vehicule Press, who specializes in publishing classic forgotten Montreal novels, to consider buying the rights to publish a new edition of Shmucks. The literary industry being what it is, it's doubtful that this satirical novel, which has comic elements that are decidedly 'unwoke', will have a new print edition too soon unfortunately. Even the novels of Mordecai Richler have been taught less and less in the years since his death. 

I look forward to the day that Blicker is back on the syllabus alongside other great Montreal literati Richler and Cohen, where he deserves to be. Sad that he won't be here to enjoy the accolades.  

Bonus: My brief online review of The Last Collection, a novel which didn't get close to enough attention when it was released.

Absolutely hysterical and thoroughly enjoyable. Canada is not known for its satirical novels, but in Shmucks and The Last Collection Seymour Blicker proves himself to be equal to the masters of the genre, especially the Jewish sub genre, which has it's own style and flavour. This novel is especially reminiscent of Woody Allen's wackiest. Memorable characters include a particularly neurotic psychiatrist whose office features tropical decor and a remote controlled recliner chair that spins and rises to the ceiling, and a Jewish thug with a soft spot. Blicker does what all the best authors do, he turns the tables on the characters and at the same time on the reader. The cons get conned, and we can't ever really be sure who is the genuine article. And therein lies the deeper resonance of this novel, as in all superior satire, the layers of truth and deceit are revealed. The last collection referred to in the title is not only collection on a debt, or the mental illness of hoarding and greed which afflicts the protagonist and which gets him into debt in the first place. But it also cleverly refers to the collection of moral sins that one party wants to atone for and the collection of guilt that the other party wants to liberate themselves from.

The Gold Star

Words of praise arrived unexpectedly from the somewhat reclusive, legendary Montreal novelist and playwright Seymour Blicker. Receiving this note I felt the thrill of being in elementary school again and getting a gold star from the teacher (which didn't happen much when I was a kid).

...Regarding HALBMAN STEALS HOME – Once I began reading it I didn’t want to put it down. It is a wonderful novel, suspenseful, dramatic, and filled with pathos and humour and some artfully executed surprises. It is also an excellent tour of contemporary Jewish Montreal as seen through the eyes of our guide, Mort Halbman. Congratulations on having crafted an insightful and unique work. I’m looking forward to your next one.

Is the book up for the Leacock Award? It should be!...

Anyways, I’ll be touting your book to all and sundry and I hope it will be a best-seller.

All will be made clear in the end

I've mentioned before about my idiosyncratic method for choosing the next novel to read. And how, whatever book I end up choosing for whatever spur-of-the-moment reason, it all makes sense in the end. I walked out of the local library with an armload of summer reading, which, for no apparent reason included Faulkner's The Sound and The Fury and Ellison's Invisible Man. I was consciously thinking 'American classics', subconsciously, I might have realized I was choosing novels set in the South. But the real insight came courtesy of Hanniford's grocery store in Saint-Albans Vermont, which I've also written about before. There I was browsing the used book table where I've had some luck in the past (paperbacks for fifty cents, hardcovers for a buck, proceeds going to local charities) and scored a hardcover edition of Seymour Blicker's 1969 debut novel Blues Chased a Rabbit in decent condition. Blicker's novel is surprising for a host of reasons not the least of which is that a nice Jewish boy from Montreal is telling the not-so-nice story of a young African American's experience with prejudice in the US south. If nothing else, this novel is noteworthy as an anomaly. I can see why critics didn't really know what to make of it at the time it was published. Readers must have been asking themselves 'what the hell does this white middle-class Canadian Jewboy know about it'? There is surely no precedent in Canadian literature. The better known Jewish-Canadian novelists of the time, from Klein to Richler to Cohen to Wiseman to Kreisel, all stubbornly stayed close to home (religiously, culturally, geographically etc.). The best part is how convincingly Blicker pulls it off. So now I'm reading Ellison and Blicker in tandem and can't help seeing parallels. I'm convinced Blicker must have read Ellison and not only that but looked to Invisible Man as a literary antecedent. It would not be farfetched. Think of the solidarity of Jews and Blacks during the civil rights movement in the '60s. I look forward to writing more about both novels when I'm done them.

Forgotten Classics: "Shmucks" by Seymour Blicker

The premise is as ingenious as it is simple. It's 11ish pm. A divorced Jewish property manager named Levin turns his car into a downtown Montreal alleyway, taking a shortcut so he can get home as fast as possible to bed the woman he's just picked up at a local bar. His car is three quarters through the alleyway when a taxi driven by a Romanian immigrant (Pelzic by name) pulls in to the laneway headed in the opposite direction. What ensues is a high-noon stand-off, two equally angry, equally self-righteous stubborns, both perenially unable to catch a break from life, who have decided to make this confrontation their last stand. Each stays in his respective bubble not budging and watching from afar (except for the odd "Fock you!") the comings and goings in the other person's vehicle. They include a drunken millionaire wanting to be taken home and a fourteen year old girl looking for spare change.

It's an allegory of prejudice and miscommunication in a world that's gone crazy, in other words, a world of shmucks (a particular joy is reading Levin's explications on the nuances of the Yiddish term.) The beauty of this story is that neither Levin nor Pelzic seems to realize how he's one of them, a shmuck that is.

I had to track this short novel (128 pages) down on the internet and managed to snag a reasonably priced copy from Abebooks. A writer friend had recommended it as a work that he found had stood up surprisingly well over time. Extremely well, I say. It's absolutely hilarious and has a sad poignancy and an underlying seriousness that still resonates.

I have a vague memory of the time this book first came out in the early seventies. I was about seven or eight years old and Seymour Blicker lived around the corner in Hampstead on Gayton. I used to play with his kids on occasion at Gayton Park across the street, particularly the eldest son Jason, who you might know from his successful acting career. We never asked Jason about what his dad did for a living, though the word around the neighbourhood was that it wasn't a 'normal' living. Still, they lived in a nice house and the kids (four of them, Jason had a very pretty, very smart, older sister and twin younger brothers) seemed to have everything that the rest of us had who came from shmatta, legal or accounting families. When "Shmucks" came out I have a hazy recollection of an adult (it might or might not have been one of my parents) mentioning that what Mr. Blicker wrote was smut. I imagined something out of Penthouse Forum. Something akin to Roald Dahl's ribald naughtiness would be more accurate. Actually, the sex scenes and references in the novel which were deemed so outrageously crass and vulgar, often feel dated, even quaint, which tells you something about how far we've come.

One of the many pleasures of this book for me was how Levin's being harrassed by his tenants. At one point he decides to use his time in the car to answer their complaint-filled correspondences. (I got a particular chuckle out of how, in the absence of cellphones and Blackberries, each complaint was communicated to him and had to be answered by letter. By the end he's having enough of it, answering one formally-worded complaint in a dream by simply saying, "And perhaps you could do a little favour for me, Mr. Sanderson... perhaps you can go fuck yourself" - okay maybe you have to be in the property management game as long as I have to truly enjoy that response.)

The resolution is as simple and ingenious as the premise, and also as satisfying, leaving the reader with a sense of hope. I won't give it away, but I'll say one thing, both Pelzic and Levin finally win out in their own little way, and in the process each gains a glimmer of insight into himself. If there is a publisher out there listening, please re-issue this book! The hardcover I managed to obtain is already cracking at the seams.