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 established 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 cold-water 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, self-appointed 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.”
“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.”
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.