Son of a Smaller Hero

  BOOKS BY MORDECAI RICHLER

  FICTION

  The Acrobats (1954)

  Son of a Smaller Hero (1955)

  A Choice of Enemies (1957)

  The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959)

  The Incomparable Atuk (1963)

  Cocksure (1968)

  The Street (1969)

  St. Urbain’s Horseman (1971)

  Joshua Then and Now (1980)

  Solomon Gursky Was Here (1989)

  Barney’s Version (1997)

  FICTION FOR YOUNG ADULTS

  Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang (1975)

  Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur (1987)

  Jacob Two-Two’s First Spy Case (1995)

  HISTORY

  Oh Canada! Oh Quebec!: Requiem for a Divided Country (1992)

  This Year in Jerusalem (1994)

  TRAVEL

  Images of Spain (1977)

  ESSAYS

  Hunting Tigers Under Glass: Essays and Reports (1968)

  Shovelling Trouble (1972)

  Notes on an Endangered Species and Others (1974)

  The Great Comic Book Heroes and Other Essays (1978)

  Home Sweet Home: My Canadian Album (1984)

  Broadsides: Reviews and Opinions (1990)

  Belling the Cat: Essays, Reports, and Opinions (1998)

  On Snooker: The Game and the Characters Who Play It (2001)

  Dispatches from the Sporting Life (2002)

  ANTHOLOGIES

  The Best of Modern Humour (1983)

  Writers on World War II (1991)

  Copyright © 1955 by Andre Deutsch Limited

  Copyright © 2002 by Mordecai Richler Productions, Inc.

  First published in Canada by McClelland & Stewart by permission of the author and Andre Deutsch Limited, 1965

  First Emblem Editions publication 2002

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Richler, Mordecai, 1931-2001

  Son of a smaller hero

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-561-8

  1. Jews–Quebec (Province)–Montréal–Fiction. I. Title.

  PS8535.138S6 2002 C813′.54 C2001-904143-8

  PR9199.3.R5S6 2002

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  SERIES EDITOR: ELLEN SELIGMAN

  EMBLEM EDITIONS

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street,

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com/emblem

  v3.1

  For Cathy

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Epigraph

  1 Summer 1952

  2 Autumn and Winter 1952

  3 Spring 1953

  4 Summer 1953

  5 Autumn and Winter 1953–4

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  Although all the streets described in this book are real streets, and the seasons, tempers, and moods are those of Montreal as I remember them, all the characters portrayed are works of the imagination and all the situations they find themselves in are fictional. Any reader approaching this book in a search for “real people” is completely on the wrong track and, what’s more, has misunderstood my whole purpose. Son of a Smaller Hero is a novel, not an autobiography.

  If God did not exist, everything would be lawful.

  DOSTOIEVSKI

  1

  Summer 1952

  NOAH’S ROOM WAS ON THE FOURTH FLOOR. THE PLACE had been recommended to him by a taxi driver who worked for the same company as he did. Mrs. Mahoney, the landlady, was a stringy woman with hands which were brown and bony, like twigs. She eyed him suspiciously as he set down his bags.

  “Yer a young ’un, ain’t yer?”

  Noah nodded. He had a brown sceptical face and a narrow body and long legs. He was twenty years old, but his forehead was already wrinkled. His eyes, which were black, were sorrowful and deep and not without a feeling for comedy. They had a quick tender quality as well. He grinned shyly. He wanted Mrs. Mahoney to go.

  “No wimmin. No parties,” Mrs. Mahoney said. “Rent every Friday on the dot.”

  Noah handed her a month’s rent in advance. He turned away from her and began to unpack, hoping that she would leave him. But without looking he knew that she was still there. He unpacked his books and dumped them on the bed.

  Mrs. Mahoney picked up a copy of The Naked and the Dead.

  “Medical student?”

  “No,” Noah said.

  The walls were a faded green but there was a clean unfaded spot where a cross had used to hang. The nail was still there. Noah stared at the nail and lit a cigarette. The window was open, but it was very hot.

  “I’ve been driving all night,” Noah said. “I’m very tired. I’d like to sleep.”

  Mrs. Mahoney hesitated. The last young man who had moved in with books had turned out to be a ballet dancer, a homosexual. She was tempted to wait until Noah took off his shirt to see whether he shaved under his armpits, but – feeling the rent money freshly in her hands – she decided against that. “Well,” she said. “I can’t stand here all morning.”

  As soon as she left Noah lay back on the bed. He pulled a towel out of his suitcase and wiped his forehead clean of sweat. He was still angry about his last fare – a drunk and his girl. The drunk had worn a badge on his lapel. His name had been Pete somebody, and he had been in Montreal for the Lumbermen’s Convention. Looking into the rear-view mirror, Noah had watched him make the first pass and then sprawl clumsily over the girl. She had groaned a lot, making it hard for him to drive. She had reminded Noah of his Aunt Rachel. He had imagined her, like his Aunt Rachel, entering a room full of people who had been talking heatedly for an hour or so, and saying: “Well, have you settled all the world’s problems?” Anyway, when they had got in front of the Mount Royal Hotel, the man had insisted on tipping Noah ten dollars. Noah, inexplicably angry, had shoved the ten dollars back into the drunk’s jacket pocket. Now he was sorry. Ten dollars meant a week’s rent. He wanted to get a record player, too. Noah leaned over and squashed his cigarette on the floor. This is my room, he thought. He sighed, and he felt empty. There was little joy in that. He couldn’t help thinking about his mother and how she had looked at him when he had said that he was going. He went over his reasons again. It was stifling at home … Melech … his father always apologizing.…

  He fell asleep.

  The ghetto of Montreal has no real walls and no true dimensions. The walls are the habit of atavism and the dimensions are an illusion. But the ghetto exists all the same. The fathers say: “I work like this so it’ll be better for the kids.” A few of the fathers, the dissenters, do not crowd their days with work. They drink instead. But in the end it amounts to the same thing: in the end, work in textile or garment factories. Some are orthodox, others void.

  Most of the Jews who live at the diminishing end of the ghetto, on streets named St. Urbain, St. Dominique, Rachel
, and City Hall, work in textile or garment factories. Some are orthodox, others are communist. But all of them do their buying and their praying and their agitating and most of their sinning on St. Lawrence Boulevard, which is the aorta of the ghetto, reaching out in one direction towards Mount Royal, and past that (where it is no longer the ghetto) into the financial district and the factory slums, coming to a hard stop at the waterfront. In the other direction, northwards, St. Lawrence Boulevard approaches the fields at the city limits; where there is a rumour of grass and sun and quick spurious love-making.

  All day long St. Lawrence Boulevard, or Main Street, is a frenzy of poor Jews, who gather there to buy groceries, furniture, clothing, and meat. Most walls are plastered with fraying election bills, in Yiddish, French, and English. The street reeks of garlic and quarrels and bill collectors: orange crates, stuffed full with garbage and decaying fruit, are piled slipshod in most alleys. Swift children gobble pilfered plums, slower cats prowl the fish market. After the water truck has passed, the odd dead rat can be seen floating down the gutter followed fast by rotten apples, cigar butts, chunks of horse manure, and a terrifying zigzag of flies. Few stores go in for subtle window displays. Instead, their windows are jammed full and pasted up with streamers that say ALL GOODS REDUCED or EVERYTHING MUST GO.

  Every night St. Lawrence Boulevard is lit up like a neon cake and used-up men stumble out of a hundred different flophouses to mix with rabbinical students and pimps and Trotskyites and poolroom sharks. Hair tonic and water is consumed in back alleys. Swank whores sally at you out of the promised jubilee of all the penny arcades. Crap games flourish under lamp posts. You can take Rita the Polack up to the Liberty Rooms or you can listen to Panofsky speak on Tim Buck and The Worker. You can catch Bubbles Dawson doing her strip at the Roxie Follies. You can study Talmud at the B’nai Jacob Yeshiva, or you can look over the girls at the A.Z.A. Stag or Drag.

  Conditions improve on the five streets between St. Lawrence Boulevard and Park Avenue. Most of the Jews who live on these streets market what is cut or pressed by their relations below St. Lawrence Boulevard. Others, the aspiring, own haberdashery stores, junk yards, and basement zipper factories.

  The employer and professional Jews own their own duplexes in Outremont, a mild residential area which begins above Park Avenue. They belong to the Freemasons, or, if they can’t get into that organization, to the Knights of Pythias. Their sons study at McGill, where they are Zionists and opposed to anti-Semitic fraternities. They shop on St. Lawrence Boulevard, where the Jews speak quaintly like the heroes of nightclub jokes.

  In the spring of 1952 the B’nai Brith published a report saying that anti-Semitism was on the decline in Canada and that the Jews joined with the great prime minister of this great country in the great fight against communism. The uranium market boomed. Dr. S. I. Katz, O.B.E., told the Canadian Club that “The Jewish beavers of this land will help make the Maple Leaf a symbol of greatness.” But the spring passed fast. Those balmy days which had accounted for the melting of the snows turned longer and more hard. The sun swelled in the sky and a stillness gripped the ghetto. When the heat was but two days old everyone seemed to have forgotten that there had ever been a time of no heat. This was partly sham. For, secretively, the people of the ghetto gloated over every darkening cloud. They supposed that tomorrow there would be rain, and if not tomorrow then at least the day after that. But the sky was a fever and there was no saying how long a day would last or what shape the heat would assume by night. There were the usual heat rumours about old men going crazy and women swooning in the streets and babies being born prematurely. When the rains came the children danced in the streets clad only in their underwear and the old men sipped lemon tea on their balconies and told tales about the pogroms of the czar. But the rains didn’t amount to much. After the rains there was always the heat again. The flies returned, the old men retreated to their beds, and all the missing odours of the heat reappeared with a new intensity.

  The heat first appeared in June when it was still too soon to send the family up north for the summer. But, just the same, things were not too bad. Not too bad until the weekends came along. The weekends were hell. All week long you could at least work but when the weekends came along there was nothing to do. You were on your own. You were free, so to speak.

  So on Saturday afternoons the well-to-do Jews walked up and down Queen Mary Road, which was their street. A street of sumptuous supermarkets and banks built of granite, an aquarium in the lobby of the Snowdon Theatre, a synagogue with a soundproof auditorium and a rabbi as modern and quick as the Miss Snowdon restaurant, neon drugstores for all your needs, and delicatessens rich in chromium plating. Buick convertibles and Cadillacs parked on both sides: a street without a past. Almost as if these Jews, who had prospered, craved for many lights. Wishing away their past and the dark. Almost as if these Jews, who had prospered, regretted only the solemn sky, which was beyond their reach. Sunny by day, and by night – star-filled: a swirl of asking eyes spying down on them. Watching. Poking fun at their ephemeral lights.

  The neither rich nor poor Jews walked up and down Park Avenue – a few of the nervy ones attempting Queen Mary Road. The poor and the elderly kept to St. Lawrence Boulevard. Each street had its own technique of walking, a technique so finely developed that you could always tell a man off his own street.

  The Queen Mary Road Jews walked like prosperity, grinning a flabby grin which said money in the bank. Notaries, lawyers, businessmen, doctors. They wore their wives like signposts of their success and dressed them accordingly. The children were big and little proofs, depending on the size of their achievements.

  “Lou, meet the boy. Sheldon. He just won a scholarship to McGill.”

  “Don’t say, eh? Mm. Hey, I hear talk you’re gonna expand the factory. That increases your risk, Jack. You come round first thing Monday morning and I’ll fix you like a friend. For your own good. You owe it to your family to protect yourself.”

  The wives exchanged small flatteries.

  “Jack’s going to buy a Cadillac. You try to stop him.”

  “Me, I don’t live for show. Lou doubled his life insurance instead of buying a new car this year. He says you can never tell.…”

  Park Avenue was different. It had once been to the prospering what Queen Mary Road was to them now. But the prospering had built a more affluent street for themselves to walk on, a bigger proof, where, twenty years hence, they would again feel the inadequacy of the neon, the need to push on and to flee the past and install brighter lights again. Meanwhile, the new ones, the intruding greeners, were beginning to move in around Park Avenue. Here, they mixed with the middling Jews. Knowing the right people was important. The aspiring walked without certainty, pompous and ingratiating by turns.

  On St. Lawrence Boulevard the Jews, many of them bearded, walked with their heads bent and their hands clasped behind their backs. They walked looking down at the pavement or up at the sky, seldom straight ahead.

  On that Sunday morning in the summer of 1952, as under a stern sun the split asphalt of St. Dominique Street showed quivering hot in spots, Melech Adler, his mottled hands lying big on his lap, sat on the kitchen chair on his balcony considering the prospects before him. Later, after he had eaten his lunch of roast beef and fried potatoes, his children and grandchildren would begin to arrive. Mr. Adler had ten children, six boys and four girls. All but the two youngest – a girl, and a boy of nineteen – were married. The married came with their young every Sunday. This Sunday, however, was special. There was going to be a family meeting. Even Noah was expected to come. Noah was Melech Adler’s eldest grandson, Wolf’s boy. Wolf was Melech Adler’s first-born.

  Melech Adler sat on his balcony wearing a worn skullcap, a Jewish Star folded under his arm and bits of egg clinging to his stiff short beard. He looked down at the weeds struggling up through fractures in the sidewalk and frowned. So the boy is coming, he thought.

  Their argument was many years old.
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  Noah had been born in his grandfather’s forty-second year, and whereas Mr. Adler had ruled all his own children by authority he had approached Noah, the first of his grandchildren, with kindness. Noah had responded by attaching himself to his grandfather like a shadow, leaping dreamily before him down the street and allowing no other to carry his prayer shawl. Then, one summer day in his eleventh year, Mr. Adler had taken Noah with him to the coal yard. He had allowed Paquette to take him for a drive in the Ford, and on his return had treated him with oranges and a bottle of Mammy and Halvah. Towards twilight a man drove a cart heaped high with scrap through the gates of the coal yard. Mr. Moore, who was an old customer, waved cheerily to Mr. Adler. Mr. Adler escorted him into his office, and rolling back his swivel-top desk pulled a bottle of rye out from behind a ledger. He placed the uncorked bottle and a clean glass on the desk. Mr. Moore poured himself a drink. Here’s to you, Melech, he said, and tossed it down quickly. Then he began to cough. Tears streamed down his cheeks and his broken, bony body quivered and turned wet from sweat. Noah, unnoticed, drew away into a corner. Mr. Moore had sharp prowling eyes and an insolent mouth. He poured himself another and bigger drink, and this time consumed it easily. Afterwards he laughed hard and slapped Mr. Adler on the back. Mr. Adler smiled. Several more drinks were consumed, and then Mr. Moore asked Mr. Adler when his scrap was going to be weighed. Mr. Adler said, you don’t worry your head Mr. Moore, the men are fixing. Mr. Adler was a coal merchant and only dealt in scrap and old tires as a side-line. Noah, afraid of the stranger and dubious of his grandfather, slipped out of the office. Paquette and his father were unloading the cart. He noticed them pile several of the sacks on the scales, hastily concealing others behind a stack of coal-bags. Two of the sacks were quickly emptied and their contents strewn about the yard. Finally Mr. Adler and Mr. Moore appeared in the yard and walked over to the scales to check the weights. Only after they had begun to haggle in a jocular way about prices did Noah realize what had happened. He whispered to his grandfather that his father and Paquette had hidden many of the sacks. His grandfather, his face darkening, told him to please wait for him in the office. Noah believed that his grandfather had failed to understand what he had said, so he began his story over again. Mr. Adler slapped him. Noah turned away from him swiftly and ran off across the yard, stumbling on a rock and falling down. Mr. Adler chased after him but Noah scrambled to his feet deftly and ran off into the dusk.