Anniversary

Today is the 150th anniversary of one of the most spoken about speeches in recent history that starts Four score and seven years ago, the Gettysburg Address. In tribute I re-post this 'love' poem which, for some strange reason makes reference to it.

READING HER POETRY

I wonder if her eyes are brown

or blue (green is rare)

and if her hair is blond

and flowing or dark and curly

(poems by poets with shortcropped

hair generally don't appeal to me),

and if she writes sitting

at the kitchen table longhand

on coffee-stained sheets of foolscap

that scatter to the floor,

or by the window

in lined hardcover volumes

she numbers and places on the shelf

in her 'office'

when she's finished

(it matters)

and whether her room

is in a tiny apartment

in a crowded city

or a cottage in the country

(perhaps something grand and colonial

with a wrap-around porch),

I also picture her

full-breasted

not flat-chested

and imagine that sometimes,

when she is not getting it quite right

she touches herself

for reassurance
until the word comes:

Arriving at the end

of her poem

(like some great battle that has been won

or lost, I'm not sure which)

I think of Abe Lincoln

standing in front of 15,000
at a national cemetery in Gettysburg PA

orating those famous 272 words

and question

how anyone heard him

without a mic.

LE MOOD

A very good session at the 3rd annual LE MOOD day of learning this past Sunday. What a super cool, happening event. Hundreds of (mostly young) people attending dozens of informative and enlightening sessions.  I even passed renowned environmentalist and broadcaster David Suzuki in the jam-packed hallway after our conference. My thanks to Zev Moses and the other organizers for doing a great job drumming up interest for "Whatever Happened to the Shmata Business." Congratulations to the other participants, Arleen Solomon Rotchin, Irwin Tauben and Jonathan Reisler (aka Stick) who passionately described the finer points of shmatology to a standing-room only audience. I've been asked to reproduce my brief opening remarks, so here they are: 

I do not believe it is hyperbole to state that manufacturing clothing was the single most important industry to the Jewish community of Montreal in the twentieth century. Yes, it is true that Jewish people have been active in a variety businesses including scrap metal, real estate, retail, and dry goods to name only a few. But no other industry employed a larger number of people, generated more wealth and afforded more opportunity, particularly to the Jews emigrating from Eastern Europe in the two great waves of immigration at the end of the 19^th century and early 20^th century, and the next wave after the Holocaust in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It was also critical for the third wave of immigration from North Africa in the 1960s and early 1970s.

When I’ve spoken to Jewish audiences in the past I sometimes ask a show of hands on the question how many people in the room have had immediate relatives ie. parents or grandparents, who worked in the garment industry. Invariably it is almost unanimous: No matter who we are today, what businesses or professions this generation we works in, the origins can be traced back to shmatas. The doctors, lawyers, accountants, MBAs, financial analysts, university professors, school teachers, architects, engineers and software developers of today are the progeny of cutters, sewers, shippers, patternmakers, designers, fabric salesmen, knitters and manufacturers. We often talk about the importance of the Bronfman family to the establishment of the institutional Montreal Jewish community. But I think it is more accurate to say that, at street level, the Montreal Jewish community was built on rags.

In the area where I work along Chabanel and the surrounding streets, giant buildings were built during the industry’s heyday in the 60s, 70s and 80s, almost 7 million square feet in all. There were between 50 and 100,000 employees working in almost 1000 garment companies in these buildings. Chabanel was reportedly the second most important generator of wealth on the island of Montreal on a per square foot basis after downtown.

            So, if for more than a century there is no other industry more important to the creation of the Montreal Jewish community; if a portrait of our community, our history, our character, our mentality, our families, our culture and way of thinking, is impossible without an understanding of the shmata industry, why have there not been more books written about it? More films made? More exhibitions? More academic study?

Shmatas, or rather the people who built the industry, have been given short shrift.

When Mordecai Richler started writing about life in the 1940s on the Main, Jews were initially either doubtful or incensed at his portrayal. Richler’s portrait, as truthful as it might have been, was considered unflattering and many Jews didn't like it being publicized. There was a sense of embarrassment and shame.

Have shmatas been given short shrift for a similar reason?

I remember as a child in the early seventies driving with my dad to his office at 9320 Saint-Laurent corner Chabanel on Saturday mornings. Those giant white brick structures loomed above the street filling me with a combination of awe, fear and loathing all at the same time. I won’t end up here, I told myself. I’m going to be better than this, better than a dress manufacturer. Is this sense of shame our dirty little secret? Why we don’t talk about the shmatta business? There is no Nobel prize given out for dress manufacturing. 

I wonder if a sense of wanting to redress an injustice is the reason why people like me and Johnny and Arleen are writing about what we experience in an industry that is so important to all of us. One thing is for sure, it's necessary.

Whatever Happened to the Shmata Business?

The Montreal shmata business will be the topic of discussion featuring an illustrious panel of shmatta mavens and yours truly at the upcoming Le Mood conference. Check out the details at the Facebook page, like us and join us. 

Presented by The Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal "What Happened to the Shmata Business" takes place at Le Mood Festival, Sun. Nov. 3rd, 2pm, Room 9 at Le Mood. www.lemood.ca 

The garment trade or "Shmata Business" has defined Montreal's Jewish community for over a century. Nearly every Jewish Montrealer knows someone who works or worked in the industry. But over the past 15 years the Shmata business has undergone a major transformation, as retail giants have changed the way "shmatologists" do business. We'll talk...to a panel of Jews in this business who have witnessed these changes first-hand and either left the field or reinvented it. And we'll find out how this effects the Jewish community's identity. 

The Rent Collector Ebook, finally

Eight years since its original publication, my debut novel The Rent Collector is finally available from Amazon as an ebook for Kindle. It is also available for purchase in epub format for your Kobo by clicking on the Paypal account on this website where it says "Buy Now".   
 

Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories by Philip Roth
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I made it a bit of a project this summer to read a bunch of Philip Roth books. I started with his latest (and final?) novels Nemesis and Indignation and finished by re-reading his first book Goodbye, Columbus. In the back of my mind I was expecting the recent work to display a seasoned mastery and the early work to pale in comparison. What happened was the absolute contrary. The stories in Goodbye Columbus are loose, ingenious, lively, crafty, profound, surprising and generally thrilling in a way the later books aren't. The late Roth is tempered, measured, nostalgic, reserved, pessimistic and plodding in comparison. The titular novella was not my favourite in Goodbye, Columbus. The much anthologized story "Defender of the Faith" and in particular, "The Conversion of the Jews," are as fine as any stories I've ever read, amazingly self-assured for a debut. I've read about a dozen of Roth's novels spanning his career and can not think of any of his fiction I've enjoyed more, even the second time around.

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Nemesis by Philip Roth
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It was the best of years, it was the worst of years. The summer of 1944 Newark, New Jersey, that is. That's kind of how I felt about this novel, sort of ambivalent. There is an ennervating nostalgic 'sheen' that coats the polite (almost antiseptic) prose of the narrative - I guess symptomatic of writing in the mode of a reminiscence - in spite of the creeping horror called polio that is terrorizing the children of the community. The character of Bucky is so unfalteringly the schoolyard hero, so without edge as to verge on bland. This despite being raised by his grandparents because his mother died in childbrth and his estranged father is an ex-con. He is apparently utterly without bitterness or anger because his grandfather taught him how to be tough. Bucky does all the right things, defends and cares deeply for the fitness and well-being of his kids as their playground director, and offers his condolences to the families of the ones who suddenly succumb to the childhood scourge. The first real sign of conflict comes when about half way through the novel Bucky, or Mr. Cantor as he is referred to for most of the novel, makes the fateful and 'unheroic' decision to abandon his anxiety-ridden kids and fearful community (not to mention his aging grandma) to escape the ravaged city for Camp Indian Hill in the idyllic Poconos to join his fiancee the unblemished Marcia Steinberg, where they canoe out to an island for lovemaking trysts surrounded by white birches. The decision to leave Newark happens in a flash, engendering some inner conflict but not very much, when it becomes clear to Bucky that life as a member of the upstanding and intact Steinberg family (the very model of an Ozzie and Harriet assemblage) offers escape from his own disjointed roots (of course, he doesn't think of it that way). He does hesitate once in camp for abandoning grandma and the kids - everything just seems way too perfect in the mountains - but I expected much more gutwrenching guilt. The reader knows this can't end well, and thus two things happen at this point in the story; it becomes apparent that this is all a set-up (which is the way it feels from page 1) and, the disastrous ending has been precisely telegraphed. It's all very tidy and we rush to see how Bucky is going to deal with the inevitable. Only in the last few pages, in the present, does the writing start to sing with the depth of Bucky's inner turmoil. But when he starts arguing about theological matters it feels forced, sounding more like Roth than his protagonist. Bucky simply doesn't seem like the type to go there. Still, his anger with himself at the end comes as a refreshing show of genuine emotion.

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The Ravine by Paul Quarrington
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This novel kept me at a distance most of the time. Partly, this was due to the nature of the protagonist, a guy who is essentially in denial (or as he puts it The Twilight Zone) about a traumatic incident that has supposedly altered the path of his life culminating in screwing up every decent and worthwhile relationship he's ever had (wife, brother, friend). Phil is a hard guy to like and the only thing that keeps his voice from sounding self-pitying is its comic edginess, which kept me engaged. The other aspect of the narrative that distances the reader is the novel within a novel gimic. Phil is a bullshit-artist of the highest order, believing his own lies (part of living in denial), and partly why he ends up writing for teevee, the flakiest and most commercial medium of all. So now he has taken to writing the novel - for reasons he can not quite understand himself - that the characters of the novel are reading and reacting to. This is either Phil's therapeutic act of re-constituting memory and coming to terms, or just another attempt at rationalization and denial, we're never quite sure which. The novel playfully ties together a variety of narrative motifs and allusions, factoring in a Twilight Zone Episode, with a play that Phil has written for his ex-wife Veronica, and an episode of the TV show he writes, as well as the fateful childhood event he is trying (or not) to remember. Finally, it's enjoyable to watch Quarrington/Phil, the author qua author, pull the ends together into a tight but forgiving slipknot.

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