Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature (review)

128 SHOFAR Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature, by Michael Greenstein. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1989. 232 pp. The first two solitudes recalled in the title of this important study denote the strained relationship between Canada's two "founding" peoples, the English and French components of the population, still barely on speaking terms after 125 years' confederation. The phrase-taken from Rilkebecame the title of one of Canada's landmark novels whose subject was the unbridgeable chasm separating the culturally distinct communities. When, at the turn of the century, Jews began to settle in Canada in substantial numbers, the prevailing conditions of language, religion, economics, and politics determined their acculturation into the English Protestant element rather than the French Catholic enclave concentrated in Quebec. While English was adopted by the vast majority of Jewish immigrants and subsequently became the language of literary expression, the nature ofJewish experience-urban, ethnocentric, proletarian-distinguished their writing from the conventional Canadian literary renditions. Thus, equidistant from their neighbours by virtue of religion and language, Jews emerge as a third solitude within the Canadian landscape. The Jewish population of Canada never exceeded three percent of Canada's total-considerably less than other European immigrant groups-yet they figure prominently in the nation's artistic life. This is especially so in the field of literature where Jewish writers helped shape the course of Canadian modernism and, in the process, lent their unique voices to the upstart urban-immigrant novel when it began to impress itself on the national consciousness. Most of these authors have received considerable critical attention as individual artists, but surprisingly, for a body of writing that spans over six decades, Greenstein's is the first monograph to deal with Jewish-Canadian literature as a unified, coherent subject, based on a conception of Jewish identity and historical memory summarized as "tradition and discontinuity." Consistently post-structuralist, Greenstein offers a fairly strict Derridian reading of the major Jewish authors including A. M. Klein, Layton, Richler, Henry Kreisel, Norman Levine, Adele Wiseman, Leonard Cohen, Monique Bosco, Nairn Kattan, and Matt Cohen. At the center of his discussion is the dominating presence of A. M. Klein, whose writing and career announced to a raw first-generation the possibility of a literary vocation in the acquired tongue. Klein is paradigmatic because his deep knowledge of Judaic learning and lore was self-consciously incorporated into his poetic and fictional works-forming a unique kind of bilingual discourse; but in drawing upon the sacred traditional texts for modern art he was not only celebrating Volume 10; No.2 Winter 1992 129 orIgms, he was also ruefully acknowledging his departure from their authority. In a similar fashion, Greenstein traces the discontinuities that mark the sensibilities and strategies of the generation that followed Klein, strangers alike to the unfamiliar world they sought to enter and the close-knit traditional world of their formative years. In their need to mediate between "tradition and modernism, home and exile, Jewish-.Canadian particularism and universal significance" Greenstein locates the decentered, duplicitous quality that provides the focus and energy for the Jewish-Canadian literary voice. Guided by this overarching conception, the study proceeds to offer close readings ofwork by the assembled artists, and it does so with varying degrees of success. Greenstein writes uncommonly well, and his taut, aphoristic style is often arresting in its ability to summarize or clarify. Less satisfying, however, is the fairly narrow reliance on a set of formulations which, given the theoretical cast of the monograph, tend toward over-use and repetition. Perhaps this results from the fact that the chapters originally appeared as separate essays in periodicals, a matter that closer editorial attention could have avoided. A more serious instance of this problem is suggested by the treatment accorded Irving Layton. His poetry is considered in a chapter which also examines the work of Leonard Cohen and Eli Mandel as postAuschwitz writers, and therefore limits drastically the attention paid to the most significant poet of his generation. The arbitrary nature of this treatment of Layton is glaringly obvious when compared to the fuller discussion of other writers who have played a relatively minor role in the...