Solomon Gursky Was Here Read Online Free PDF Page 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.
    L.B. now began to wander further afield, making forays into gentile bohemia, tippytoe at first, but soon con brio as he found himself, much to his astonishment, welcomed as an exotic, a garlicky pirate, living proof of the ethnic riches that went into weaving the Canadian cultural tapestry. Soon he was at ease at their soirées, collecting compliments from young ladies who, although educated in Switzerland, now wore Russian peasant blouses and drank beer out of bottles and talked dirty. He became a proficient punster. He found that he was adept at flirting, especially with Marion Peterson (such a trim waist, such nice firm breasts) who trailed a sweet scent of roses. Just a tasteful goyishe hint, mind you, not drenched in it like Gitel Kugelmass. Marion sculpted. “Your head,” she said, cupping it, cool fingers running through his hair.
    â€œWhat’s wrong with it?” he asked, alarmed.
    â€œYou have an Old Testament head.”
    Traipsing home through the snow, his scalp was still tingly.
    Bessie, as usual, had left the hall light on for him. She sat in a worn robe at the kitchen table, trimming her corns with a knife. The following evening L.B. refused the stuffed derma, a favourite of his, that she had prepared for him. “Didn’t you have a movement this morning?” she asked.
    â€œIt’s too fattening.”
    L.B. became a regular at evenings in the apartments of dedicated McGill professors who also wrote poetry, swore by the New Statesman, and toiled long hours to save Canada through socialism. They proved a bizarre lot, these gentiles, their intelligentsia. They had not been nourished on Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, the Zohar, Balzac, Pushkin, Goncharov, the Baal Shem Tov. Among them it was G.B.S., the Webbs, H.G. Wells, board-and-brick bookcases red withGollancz’s Left Book Club editions, New Yorker cartoons pasted on the walls of what they called the loo and, above all, the Bloomsbury bunch. Catty, clever people, L.B. thought. Writers who luxuriated on private incomes and knew the best years for claret. But when he brought back news of the goyim out there to his acolytes who still gathered round the dining-room table with the crocheted tablecloth on Friday nights, he made it sound like a world of wonders. L.B. now eschewed chopped liver on rye with lemon tea and, instead, nibbled Camembert and sipped Tio Pepe.
    Then came the summons from Sinai. L.B. was invited to an audience at Mr. Bernard’s opulent redoubt cut high into the Montreal mountainside, and he descended from those heights, his head spinning, pledged to unheard-of abundance, an annual retainer of ten thousand dollars to serve as speech writer and cultural adviser to the legendary liquor baron.
    â€œAnd this,” Mr. Bernard had said, leading him into a long room with empty oak shelves running from ceiling to floor, “will be my library. Furnish it with the best. I want first editions. The finest morocco bindings. You have a blank cheque, L.B.”
    Then Libby was heard from. “But nothing second-hand.”
    â€œI beg your pardon, Mrs. Gursky?”
    â€œGerms. That’s all I need. We have three children, God bless them.”
    L.B., once he had acquiesced to the deal, grasped that he had a lot of fancy footwork to perform. For, as far as his acolytes were concerned, the sly, rambunctious