“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 broad-brimmed 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.