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

146 LETTERS IN CANADA 1989 next direction Goldie might take, towards Mandel and away from the semiosis of the sign to the semiosis of the cultural artifact. In his foreword he claims that 'the apparently significant variable ofthe enormous ethnographic differences between the Maori and the indigenous peoples of Canada and Australia does not appear a major factor.' Not to Goldie, perhaps, but to a reviewer familiar with this third, or 'control' group, Goldie's excellent semiotic analysis might have moved forward into more complex discriminations between these three postcolonies . He is aware of the absence of indigenous writers, and this imbalance is most apparent in the case of New Zealand where there has been a 'Maori renascence' in literature in the last decade. His treatment of New Zealand literature is admittedly tangential and spotty and his earlier paper contains a manifestly ignorant statement (even for 1985) that in New Zealand's contemporary literature 'the emphasis is on the Maori of the paua shell and the small farm.' The healthy trans-Pacific traffic of writers and academics in recent years, epitomized in the existence of ACSANZ (the Association for Canadian Studies in Australia and New Zealand) and Tom Tausky's new journal from the University of Western Ontario entitled Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada, will no doubt extend this area of transnational literary studies. Fear and Temptation is a timely, exhaustively researched (within its confessed limits), and pioneering (that imagery again) inquiry. Goldie's energetic engagement with his subject sparks exciting ideas for more specific semiotic comparisons, e.g. the presence or absence ofindigenous technologies in the literatures, the semiotic value of tattoos, the semiosis of cannibalism. As we continue these efforts to know ourselves as post-colonials, we begin to understand the sentence of being a 'tourist.' (DAVID DOWLING) Michael Greenstein. Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature MeGill-Queen's University Press. vii, 232. $29.95 Michael Greenstein has written the most complete and scholarly account to date ofJewish writingin Canada. Moreover, challengingthe bleakvista of isolated communities that his title calls to mind, he has included in his survey authors in French (Monique Bosco and Nai:m Kattan) as well as English, thus indicating underlying junctures in a cultural landscape notable first of all for its fissures. As well as being ambitious and bilingual in scope, this study also has the merits of being straightforward in organization (by genre and chronologically by author, though dates and biographical details are eschewed) and of being on the whole clearly written, especially for the HUMANITIES 147 deconstructionist discourse from which it derives. The bibliography, which gives a good indication of the author's critical orientation as well as his sensitivity to the resonance of his subject, is extensive and will prove helpful to others working in this field. Although I found the level of critical commentary uneven as well as frequently and irritatingly stylized, Greenstein offers many acute readings of individual texts (especially of Leonard Cohen's two novels) and persuasive accounts of writers. He has made a significant contribution to Canadian and Jewish studies. In the course of this energetic and substantial book Greenstein also raises more questions than he answers, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The title, for example, with its 'Third' inserting the Jewish presence into the French-English duality named by Hugh McLennan in 1945 in Two Solitudes, seems closed to the proliferation on the Canadian literary scene in the last twenty years or so of racially, ethnically, and gender-based 'solitudes.' The mediating postures, balancing acts, schizoid tensions, and marginal sites that Greenstein repeatedly discovers in his authors can, I expect, also be found in the work of Rudy Wiebe, Austin Clarke, Michel Tremblay, Bharati Mukherjee, Clark Blaise, Neil Bisoondath, and Jane Rule, as well as Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, and Timothy Findlay. In other words, what is being evoked here is the modern condition and its characteristic indications of displacement, anxiety, and tension with which Jews and Jewish writers in Europe and America - starting with Kafka (from whom Greenstein takes most of his epigraphs), if not Heine- have been associated, one way or another, in modern times...