Literary Ancestors

It’s said that every person has two families.  There’s the one that you are born into and the one that you choose for yourself—your friends.  But writers have a third family, the literary ancestors that they claim for their  own, that they both embrace and rebel from.

For me, the family tree that I first wanted to climb onto might be called the tree of secular Jewish literature.  There were fully assimilated but still somehow Jewish writers like Kafka and Joseph Roth.  There were the Yiddish writers, from Sholem Aleichem to Isaac Peretz to Isaac Bashevis Singer, who eventually made an appearance in my 1999 novel, Felix Roth.  (After Singer died in 1991, The New York Times published an article about his life in New York that I hung on my wall.  That article was the seed the sprouted into both the novel and a picture book called Mr. Zinger’s Hat.)  Of course there were also the American Jewish writers, Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska, and Delmore Schwartz,  Malamud and Bellow and Roth (although I had my reservations), as well as the critics—especially Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin.  These were the literary ancestors that I, with youthful arrogance, claimed for myself. 

And then a little later I shifted to the Russians.  The Russian writers, after all, were worshipped by most of the Jews.  I read all the big ones but the two writers who meant the most to me were Turgenev and Chekhov, perhaps because they seemed most modern.  I spent an entire year reading Turgenev. Chekhov came to me first through his plays, which still feel to me like novels, but I soon moved on to his incomparable stories.  And while I wasn’t quite so arrogant to claim these two as my forefathers, I still secretly considered them as my own.  And then I shifted again.

It started with Norman Levine.  Born in Poland to Yiddish-speaking parents, Levine grew up in Ottawa where his father was a fruit seller.  During World War II he flew RCAF, then studied as a veteran at McGill University before moving to England where he lived for decades before eventually returning to Canada for a few years.   I fell for a short story called ‘We All Begin in a Little Magazine” and had soon read all of his books.  I can see now that Levine, who later became a friend, embodied so much of what I had already been drawn to.  There was something Russian, something Jewish, and something modern about his spare and resonant prose.   (Levine even wrote a story, “Thin Ice,” that was a secret rewriting of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “The Briefcase.”)  But there was also something very Canadian about his preoccupations. In Norman’s stories, his autobiographical protagonist was always thinking about Canada and returning for visits.  He notably, if ironically, titled his his early non-fiction travelogue, Canada Made Me.

It wasn’t as if I didn’t know Canadian writers.  I remember being in high school, happening on a copy of Fifth Business at a Coles bookstore, and becoming irate that my English teachers had never told me about Robertson Davies.  But Levine was the first Canadian writer that I could identify with, adding him to my family tree as a somewhat difficult uncle.

By now, there are so many Canadian writers that I admire and look up to that I wouldn’t try to count them all.  And while I still hold those old Jewish and Russian writers close to my heart, somewhere along the way I began to identify myself as a Canadian writer, too.    I don’t consider that in any way a restrictive term.  After all, Alice Munro is a Canadian writer and although she writes about small-town Canada there is nothing parochial about her magnificent body of work. 

And now I too can admit, but without the irony, that Canada made me.