Solomon Gursky Was Here Read Online Free PDF

“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.
    â€œSh, 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 rawland, 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 broadbrimmed 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.