SOURCE: Brenner, Rachel Feldhay. “Mordecai Richler in the Context of Canadian Jewish Writers' Response to the Holocaust: A. M. Klein, Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, and Adele Wiseman.” In Assimilation and Assertion: The Response to the Holocaust in Mordecai Richler's Writing, pp. 167-205. New York: Peter Lang, 1989.

[In the following essay, Brenner compares Richler's dualistic representation of the Jewish response to the Holocaust in his fiction and nonfiction with the works of A. M. Klein, Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen, and Adele Wiseman.]

Mordecai Richler's representation of the Jewish response to the Holocaust in his fiction and his direct response in his non-novelistic writing vacillate between two opposing points of view. The Jewish individual moves between an obsessive aspiration to be assimilated into the Gentile world and a powerful need to confront the Gentile world with a straightforward accusation of terrible injustice committed against Jews. Paradoxically, he wishes to obliterate his Jewish identity by embracing the ideals of liberal humanism and, at the same time, experiences a powerful urge to assert his Jewishness and expose the hypocrisy of liberal ideals.

The dualism in the self-contradictory attitude of the North American Jew towards the Gentile world as depicted in Richler's work is by no means an isolated phenomenon in Canadian Jewish literature. On the contrary, an examination of this particular theme in the work of a group of significant Canadian Jewish poets and novelists reveals a similar preoccupation with the moral and emotional position of the North American Jew in the post-Holocaust world.

A comparison of Richler's world picture with the perception of other Canadian Jewish writers represents a useful method of reaching conclusive findings about the impact of the Holocaust on Jewish consciousness in his writing. The chapter presents the holistic literary response of Canadian Jewish writers to the tragedy of European Jewry. The comparison focuses on the collective response of writers who are historically and culturally connected to Richler, regardless of the various genres they might employ in their reaction to the Jewish predicament in the post-Holocaust world. Therefore, the primary considerations in this chapter are mainly historical and sociological.

The relevance of such comparisons is enhanced by the variety of common denominators that these writers share with Richler. Not only is their cultural and religious heritage identical—they were all raised in Jewish Orthodox surroundings—but their personal biographies also reveal similarities in historical time and sociological environment. The writers' preoccupation with Jewish moral existence originates in and relates to the formative circumstances of their youth.

The thematic pattern of Jewish ambivalence in relation to the world's anti-Semitic hostility first emerges in the writings of A. M. Klein (1909-1972), a leading Montreal poet and journalist in the 1930s and the 1940s. The theme continues to occupy a central position in the writings of the Jewish authors who followed Klein. The group includes Mordecai Richler (born in 1931) and his contemporaries: Adele Wiseman (born in 1928), Leonard Cohen (born in 1934), and Irving Layton (born in 1912) who is Richler's contemporary in terms of his literary work.¹

These writers belong to the generation of Canadian Jews born to immigrants who came to Canada the beginning of the century to escape pogroms and persecutions in Eastern Europe. They grew up in large cities—Klein, Richler, Layton and Cohen in Montreal and Wiseman in Winnipeg—where their childhood was imbued with anti-Semitic incidents. They all witnessed, in their lifetime, the Holocaust and the birth of the Jewish State.

The complexity of the historical events and the personal history of Jews growing up in Canada explain the thematic affinity which emerges from these writers' work. Though they watched the Holocaust from the safety of the North American continent, their work reveals the extent to which the knowledge of Nazi atrocities affected North American Jewish consciousness. Though none of them has made the State of Israel his or her home, their work often invokes the tremendous moral and emotional impact of Israel upon their North American identity.

The personal preoccupation with historical events that these writers experienced only vicariously seems to originate in their childhood which was shaped by the persistent atmosphere of anti-Semitism. Their youth was permeated with the notion that they were selected to be victims because they were Jewish. They were raised in a world where the stories of pogroms and persecutions told by their parents and grandparents coalesced with everyday experiences of anti-Semitism. Thus, childhood memories, infused with the sense of imminent danger and threat, provide a point of reference in the perception of contemporary Jewish history. Their early experience of discrimination has a profound influence on the way the writers see the Jew in relation to the Gentile world.

An examination of the psychological and sociological predicament of the North American Jew in the work of Klein, Richler, Layton, Wiseman and Cohen reveals common patterns of disillusionment with liberal humanism. In the reality affected by the event of the Holocaust, the Jewish humanist undergoes a process of ideological displacement. The humanist principle of cooperation among nationalities in building a just world which was cultivated by liberal Jews since the nineteenth century does not seem to be operative any longer; the horror of the Holocaust coupled with anti-Semitic sentiments demonstrated by the Western World during the War has severely damaged the hope of brotherly co-existence between the Jewish people and the Christian majority. In view of the moral disintegration of the enlightened world manifested in the cynical political manipulations and oppression of the innocent victim, it no longer makes sense for the Jew to trust that the humanist ideals adopted by liberalism will protect his right to maintain his Jewish identity.

In search of a new modus vivendi, a new pattern of Jewish attitudes toward the Gentile world emerges in Canadian Jewish writing. The Jewish character is seen to be moving within the spectrum of two mutually exclusive options: the ideological and emotional withdrawal from Gentile society through self-assertion as opposed to the ideological and emotional integration into the Gentile world through assimilation.

The notion of withdrawal implies a straightforward acknowledgement of a fundamental incompatibility between the Jewish people and the Christian world. It demonstrates a total disillusion with the principle of justice as it is implemented by Gentile societies. The repudiation of Christian morality on the part of the Jew requires the establishment of independent Jewish system of just retribution predicated on powerful assertiveness and self-sufficiency. Very often, these writers refer to the State of Israel as the representation of Jewish independence from the Gentile world.

At the other end of the spectrum, the notion of integration into the Gentile world implies obliteration of the Jewish demand to confront the world because of the Holocaust. The post-war liberal maintains that the potential for evil exists in every human being, and, therefore, the identity of the victim and the victimizer is determined mainly in terms of relativity rather then through an absolute distinction between good and evil. It follows, than, that through assimilation within the Gentile world the Jew renounces his identity as the innocent victim; he reduced the particularity of Jewish suffering at the hands of anti-Semites to an abstract symbol of general suffering under oppression. Thus, he accepts the notion of being as liable as the Gentile perpetrator to become the victimizer. In an ironic twist of reductio ad absurdum situation, the integration of the Jew in general society will be realized as the Jew becomes a ruthless tyrant and oppressor. Richler, Layton and Cohen claim that Jews have the potential to become as evil as their persecutors.

The suggested distinctions between the options confronting the Jewish character define the spectrum of the Jewish dilemma as presented in the world of Canadian Jewish writing. The Jewish character is constantly vacillating between the two positions, unable to make a definite choice. This dialectic provides a useful paradigm for the comparative study of the Jewish position in the post-Holocaust world. The paradigm will help to determine each writer's particular position on the spectrum and, at the same time, it will bring into focus Mordecai Richler's perspective in relation to each of the writers. An examination of the theme of the Jewish identity crisis in Canadian Jewish writing will, hopefully, provide an insight into the historical and psychological process of coming to terms with one's Jewishness in Canadian environment.

In his editorials and essays² which cover the War and the post-War events, A. M. Klein invariably perceives liberal ideology as a key to a better future for humanity. At the same time, however, his writing shows increasing disillusion with the moral standards of the liberal world view. The discriminatory attitude of the Allied governments toward European Jews evokes Klein's helpless rage against the Christian world and its blatant breach of liberal values. Optimistically, Klein's humanist vision of a better world extols the newly born State of Israel as a promise of the moral rebirth of humanity. Yet, the idealistic vision clashes harshly with the reality of everyday life in which the detrimental experience of anti-Semitism spells out the impossibility of the humanist dream of brotherly love among nations. In his editorial “The Mystery of the Mislaid Conscience” (1942), Klein lists the horrors committed against the Jewish people by the Nazis. He knows that what is happening in Europe amounts to “total destruction, the methodical and complete annihilation of a people.”³ Then he turns to the free nations with a strong moral exhortation:

Where, we ask, is the thunderbolt of invective which these events should call forth? Where are the keepers of the world's conscience, its intellectual leaders, guardians of the progress of the ages, and where the as-yet-unuttered “J'accuse” of our generation? … If silence continues, it can only be interpreted as the uneasy conscience of the democracies themselves. Certainly it is high time … that the German government is told … that the democracies are not indifferent to the fate of the thousands of Jewish hostages in Nazi hands. Liberty is indivisible; democracy is not a rationed article. Jews, although not represented as such among the United Nations, are also the family of mankind.⁴

The editorial presents an interesting example of Klein's political naivete embedded in strong humanist belief. The exhortation made in the name of the ideals of democracy and liberty and the attempt to explain the silence of the nations as an expression of “uneasy conscience” demonstrate Klein's self-deception about the motives for the lack of efforts to help save European Jewry. Steeped in the ideals of social liberalism which promise equality for everybody, Klein boldly claims his people's right to protection. He fails to see that the humanist argument is no longer valid in the struggle against anti-Semitic discrimination. Furthermore, a close examination of Klein's seemingly powerful exhortation reveals that his own argument is nothing but rhetoric. His actual demand that nations stand up to Nazi bestiality sound curiously ineffective in view of his dismay at the atrocities committed against Jews.

Klein identifies “the thunderbolt of invective” that should be raised against the Nazis, “the as-yet-unuttered ‘J'accuse’”; he decrees that the German government should “be told” that the United Nations know about its crimes. Although Klein makes it clear to the readers of his editorial that thousands of Jews are perishing in Europe, all he is demanding from the Allies is a verbal threat directed at the Nazis. The passivity of his argument manifests not only the inadequacy of the humanist approach at the time of the Holocaust, but also the pathetic helplessness of the Jew who sees in humanism the only channel of communication with the Gentile world. Total reliance on humanist morality results in total dependence on the good will of the Gentile world. Thus, when the war is over, Klein pleads with the world, reminding the leaders of the United Nations of their promises to declare Palestine the Jewish homeland:

… in a moral world one would have had the right to imagine—that the European conscience, the Christian conscience, would have been so plagued by the memory of what had been done to Jewry … that it would have sought every means to make amends.⁵

The righteousness of Klein's complaint about the immoral procrastination of the Christian nations in making amends to the survivors of the Holocaust cannot disguise the ineffectiveness of such demands. By pleading with the world, he inadvertently conveys passive submission to the world's decision about the future of the Jewish people. Any attempt to use military power in order to establish the Jewish State meets with Klein's indignant and forceful disapproval. Thus, on the grounds of Jewish traditional abhorrence of violence, Klein condemns the activities of the Irgun, the Jewish movement of resistance against the British in Palestine, as the “reign of terror.”⁶ Ironically, Klein invests those states which intentionally, out of their anti-Semitic bias, did so little for the Jews in the Holocaust with the sole legitimate authority to grant the Holocaust survivors their Homeland.

Consistent with his humanism, he practically ignores the significance of Israel's ability to defend itself. For Klein, the significance of the birth of the Jewish State lies in the fact that the Jewish people will henceforth be legitimized by a “seat in the councils of the world.”⁷ Klein believes that as a legitimately recognized nation Israel promises to become the centre of universal humanism.

The Second Scroll, Klein's novel based on his visit to the newly born State of Israel, is a most eloquent praise to the revival of Jewish religion and the Hebrew language. Yet, as Miriam Waddington observes, “the theme turns out to be secular and humanist, and not, as first appears, doctrinal in the religious sense.”⁸ The importance of the sanctity of human life and brotherly love among nations and religions seems to constitute the moral lesson of the novel. Thus, in the Sistine Chapel, Uncle Melech, the prototype of the universal Jew, learns from the Christian Michelangelo that murder is “the sin against our incarnate universality.”⁹ In “Gloss Dalid” the Jewish character invokes the common descent and heritage of Moslems and Jews when he claims “Admit to brotherhood a brother … Are we not one kin, one tribe, one race.”¹⁰

In the vision of Israel as the source and centre of humanist ideas rather than a politically independent and militarily self-reliant state, Klein's humanism assumes universal and messianic dimension. The rebirth of Israel becomes the symbol of the rebirth of the world. The metaphor of the intercontinental journey underscores the aspect of Jewish universality. Naim Kattan, in his analysis of the combination of Jewish and universal themes in Klein's The Second Scroll points to the centrality of the ideal of universal humanism in Klein's world picture:

Klein, parcourant le mode, circulant entre l'Asie, l'Afrique, l'Europe, et l'Amérique, retrouve le Juif dans son integralité, son humanisme universel.¹¹

The humanist ideal informs Klein's vision of the Jewish future in the post-Holocaust world. His solution to the question of Jewish identity is firmly rooted in the sphere of integration into the enlightened general society. Klein never advocates assimilation; he is fully cognizant of his Jewish origins. Raised and educated in the spirit of Jewish Orthodoxy, Klein sees himself as part of the Jewish tradition; his language and style reveal a deeply embedded Jewish cultural heritage. Nevertheless, he seems unable to conceptualize Jewish existence as distinct from the Gentile world. The concept of Jewish self-sufficiency and independence is acknowledged in the context of liberalism. In his view, Jewish survival is predicated on the humanist ideal of brotherly love to which both Jews and Gentiles ought to subscribe. The desire to be accepted by the Gentile world motivates the Jew to prove himself worthy of the ideal of the brotherhood of men. In his work, Klein proposes to educate his fellow-Jew in the spirit of pacifism and humanism. At the same time, he strives to demonstrate to his non-Jewish readers the scope of Jewish tolerance extended towards society in general. Thus, Klein's most famous collection of poems, The Rocking Chair was meant to represent the cultural and political closeness between the two Quebec minorities, the French Canadians and the Jews. Klein himself commented on the affinity between the two ethnic groups:

… we have many things in common: a minority position; ancient memories; a desire for group survival. Moreover the French Canadian enjoys much—a continuing and distinctive culture, solidarity, land—which I would wish for my people.¹²

In his efforts to show that Jews and French Canadians share humanistic values, he chooses not to acknowledge persistent French Canadian anti-Semitism. The extent of Klein's desire to manifest tolerance is even more clearly articulated in his editorial “The Tactics of Race-Hatred” (1944).¹³ The article deals with the opinion propagated by the press that Quebec is a predominantly anti-Semitic province. Klein argues that the phenomenon of anti-Semitism is universal and should be treated as such. Localizing the problem in one geographic area can hardly be justified; singling one province as the perpetrator of anti-Semitism detracts from the general importance of the issue and spawns even further racist sentiments. Klein lectures both his Jewish and non-Jewish readers about the universal nature of the humanist process:

The struggle of democratic principles is not a struggle between areas; it is a struggle between the forces of light, everywhere, against the forces of darkness, everywhere.¹⁴

However, the problem of anti-Semitism cannot always be defined in terms of the struggle of liberal progress against the obstructive elements of oppression, intolerance and injustice. In his autobiographical essay “Stranger and Afraid,” Klein clearly demonstrates that the humanist perspective does not assist him in his personal encounters with anti-Semitism. He describes his strenuous efforts to trivialize the anti-Jewish treatment he is continually subjected to by conditioning himself “into believing that these things are merely signs of an absence of breeding, vestiges of old practices …”; he keeps reminding himself that he is “living in a country that is free and civilized [where] these things are anomalies. …”¹⁵

As a humanist, Klein rationalizes anti-Semitism as a temporary setback or obstacle in Canadian democratic progress toward equality. As a Jew, he realizes with horror the formative effects of the continual exposure to racial hatred on his psyche. An honest self-analysis of his behaviour and reaction toward his fellow-Jews reveals to him that the long endurance of anti-Semitism has undermined the very core of his Jewish identity:

And then, as I pause to consider my Self, myself, the focus taken from off my environment, I am amazed to discover that these things have never passed through my consciousness, as through sieve at all, at all. They cling to my mind, and at the most unwelcome moments reveal themselves in the strangest forms. I meet a casual acquaintance on the street, engage in conversation, and am soon embarrassingly aware that he is talking too loud, his thoughtways, his inflections are objectionably Jewish. Objectionable to whom? I shudder at my revelation: objectionable to me. I consider the behaviour of my fellow-Jews, and find myself passing judgement upon them, not according to the general social code, but according to some unwritten laws which I apply to Jews only. It is I who am now passing discriminatory legislation … A horrible dialectics has taken place. The hater has converted the hated …¹⁶

The “horrible dialectics” diagnosed by Klein signifies the transformation of the victim into the victimizer. The process of assimilation in the hostile world involves erosion of self-identity and self-esteem and, eventually, results in emotional and ideological alienation from one's own culture and people. The prejudice of the anti-Semite is meant to present the Jewish individual as an untrustworthy, second-rate member of society. This degrading treatment signifies social rejection underscored by a threat of physical violence. The recipient of such humiliating treatment chooses not to respond. As shown in Klein's recollection of his own response to anti-Semitism, he persistently chooses to ignore the anti-Semitic incidents which he witnesses or experiences directly; not even once does he attempt to confront his persecutors. This reaction, or rather lack of reaction, is rationalized as appropriately civilized behaviour in a civilized country.

On the emotional level, however, the passivity of the victim coveys an acknowledgement of his helplessness which entails a degree of acquiescence to the anti-Semitic notion of Jewish inferiority. The victim's failure to retaliate increases his impotence and fear in contrast to the uninhibited freedom and potency of the oppressor. To escape such humiliating self-realization, the victim must regain the sense of potency. He does so by internalizing the anti-Semitic perception of the Jew. Klein's judgemental and critical attitude towards his fellow-Jews reveals the extent of his assimilation of the anti-Semitic patterns of thinking; this derogatory attitude towards his people exposes his unconscious wish to dissociate himself from the helplessness and impotence that his Jewishness imposes on him.

The Jew assumes the anti-Jewish perspective to compensate for his inadequacy and powerlessness in face of his persecutor. But powerlessness also implies defencelessness against acts of violence that anti-Semitism invariably communicates. It follows that the shift of perception also functions as a strategy to please the aggressor in order to avoid persecution. In her study “Identification with the Aggressor” Anna Freud examines the patterns of children's behaviour in threatening situations:

The child introjects some characteristics of an anxiety object and so assimilates an anxiety experience which he has just undergone. By impersonating the aggressor, assuming his attributes or imitating his aggression, the child transforms himself from the person threatened into the person who makes the threat.¹⁷

A similar emotional mechanism of defense is operative in Klein's unconscious assumption of anti-Semitic mentality. Identification with the aggressor provides a sense of deferment of imminent danger. Compliance with the oppressor creates in the mind of the victim an imaginary bond with the enemy, a safeguard against violence. At the same time, the perceptual shift to the world of the anti-Semite enables the victim to imagine that his potency has been restored.

The process of assimilation engendered by powerlessness, passivity and fear exacts the emotionally devastating price of loss of self-esteem. The sense of disloyalty towards his own people pervades Klein's recollections in “Stranger and Afraid.” The image of the anti-Semitic Jew that emerges from Klein's self-analysis enhances his sense of self-betrayal. Paradoxically, the identification with the Gentile hatred of the Jew has turned the assimilationist into a self-hating Jew. As such, he struggles with the sense of displacement of his identity. On the one hand, Gentile prejudice against his own people has alienated him from the Jewish world; on the other hand, his sense of self-betrayal and disloyalty towards the Jewish people prevents him from being completely assimilated into the Gentile world.

Albert Memmi, in his study of the relationships between the colonizer and the colonized, discusses the same patterns of assimilation. The victim of colonization adopts the model of the colonizer and wishes “to resemble him to the point of disappearing in him.” Renunciation of identity exacts an “exorbitant price” when the colonized “realizes that he has assumed all the accusations and condemnations of the colonizer, that he is becoming accustomed to looking at his own people through the eyes of their procurer.” The victim's disloyalty to himself and to his people undermines his moral integrity and self-respect. “Love of the colonizer is subtended by a complex of feelings ranging from shame to self-hate.”¹⁸

In “Stranger and Afraid” Klein presents an astute analysis of the split separating the Jew's sense of belonging to his people and his desire to escape his people's weakness and suffering. Klein's probing exposure of the Jewish existential dilemma confronts the naivete of his emphasis on humanism and democracy. Though he is fully aware of the irreparably damaging effect of anti-Semitism on the Jewish ego and conscious of the genocide carried out by the Nazi Jew-haters, Klein persistently clings to humanist ideals of brotherhood of men and peaceful co-existence of nations based on human good will. The underlying motif of passivity emerges from both Klein's exploration of the psychological effects of anti-Semitism and his life-long trust in the redeeming values of humanism. His passive endurance of anti-Semitic insults is channelled into identification with the aggressor, never into direct confrontation. His humanist activity is limited to that of a Jewish moralist who preaches to the nations about their moral obligations toward the victimized Jewish people.

Klein supports integration, recognizing and struggling against the danger of assimilation. Other Canadian authors, such as Layton and Richler venture into the other extreme in their exploration of actively forged Jewish self-assertion in the post-Holocaust world. Jewish assertiveness and independence are manifested in the work of Irving Layton and Mordecai Richler. The formative anti-Semitic experience in Montreal motivates them to focus on the independent existence of the Jewish State. Unlike Klein, who essentially follows the tradition of non-aggression and compliance practised by Diaspora Jews for centuries, both Richler and Layton interpret the submissive nature of Jewish interaction with the Gentile world as a sign of impotence and weakness. Israel's sovereignty and potential for self-defence are portrayed, in part of their work, as the ultimate model of Jewish self-sufficiency. Klein sees a possible fulfilment of the humanist ideal of world-wide spiritual and cultural unity and brotherhood in the context of the Jewish State; Richler and Layton see Israel as the symbol of the restoration of Jewish strength, dignity and freedom. They celebrate Israel's military victories as the most efficient deterrent of another Holocaust. Unlike Klein, neither author expects the democratic world to fight anti-Semitism and make sure that another Holocaust will not recur. In the morally corrupt post-War world, only the Jews can prevent further anti-Semitic persecutions by courageously standing up to their oppressors.

In his memoir “Waiting for the Messiah,”¹⁹ Layton vividly depicts the world of virulent anti-Semitism in which he grew up. He clearly remembers the everyday humiliating encounters with French Canadian anti-Semites, and the constant fights between French Canadian and Jewish adolescents.

Layton's anti-Semitic experiences resemble, to a great extent, Richler's memories of anti-Semitism. The constant exposure to anti-Jewish hostility has shaped the feeling of being different and unwanted in both writers. Richler describes the sense of alienation incurred by racial discrimination, which made the Jew feel that “this was still their Canada, not ours.”²⁰ Recalling Jewish suffering at the hands of anti-Semites, Layton remembers that “it was as if we lived in different worlds … The sense of being picked on, the sense of injustice, the sense that a Jew cannot expect protection or human decency, was very strong.”²¹ The oppressed Jews in Montreal could not expect the Canadian State to alleviate their plight, neither were they capable or ready to confront the anti-Semites. They knew that “to resist overtly was to invite further trouble” and, therefore, they “stood their ground and suffered,” and “ignored the abuse.”²²

Layton's observations of passive Jewish submission to the tormentors correspond to Klein's description of his own reactions to anti-Semitic phenomena. In spite of the tremendous emotional damage that constant exposure to anti-Semitism causes him to endure, Klein rationalizes the hostile incidents as vestiges of hard-dying prejudices and racial biases. In an attempt to uphold his belief in Canada as a civilized, free country governed by the principles of liberal humanism, he minimizes the significance of the frequent manifestations of anti-Jewish sentiments in his own country.

When focusing on the aspect of strong Jewish identity, both Layton and Richler praise and encourage defiance and self-assertion as a response to anti-Semitism in their native Montreal. They acknowledge that it is the manifestation of Jewish aggression in the establishment of the State of Israel that terminated the anti-Semitic oppression of the Jews in Quebec. Layton refers to the change when he claims in his memoir that “the Holocaust and the Israeli Air Force have changed all that.”²³ The new Israel which emerged from the ashes of the annihilated European Jewry has restored the sense of potency and freedom of expression to the Canadian Jew. The creation of the Jewish State is a milestone in terms of the position of the Jewish community in Montreal. It marks the end of the era where Jews could be tormented with impunity.

Layton's identification with the regeneration of the Jewish spirit of assertiveness and independence is manifested in his poem “On Seeing the Statuettes of Ezekiel and Jeremiah in the Church of Notre Dame.”²⁴ Layton who sees himself as a modern prophet, traces his roots to the potent, “sultry prophets,” the “arrogant men” of the time of the Judean Kingdom. He pledges to save them from the emasculating captivity of Christianity, restore their masculinity and bring them to “my hot Hebrew heart as passionate as your own.”

The tremendous change in the interaction between Montreal Jews and Gentile society is illustrated in Richler's recollection of the celebration which marked the passing of the Partition Plan by the members of the Jewish organization Habonim:

On the night of Nov 29, 1947, after the UN approved the partition plan, we gathered at Habonim and marched downtown in a group, waving Israeli flags, flaunting our songs on WASP neighbourhoods, stopping to blow horns and pull down street car wires, until we reached the heart of the city where … we put a halt to traffic by forming in defiant circles and dancing the hora in the middle of the street.

“Who am I?”

“YISROAL.”

“Who are you?”

“YISROAL.”

“All of us?”

“YISRO-YISRO-YISROAL.”²⁵

The display of Jewish presence in such a conspicuous manner stands in total opposition to the self-effacing, apologetic passivity that Jews used to exhibit in their relationships with Gentiles. The overwhelming pride and self-assurance of the Jewish demonstrators communicate not only joy and happiness on the historic occasion of the birth of the Jewish State; the demonstration constitutes also a statement of Jewish liberation from the fear of anti-Semitic oppression. In a sense, the establishment of the Jewish State indicates, for the Diaspora Jew a rejection of Jewish helplessness and impotence and marks the rebirth of Jewish identity and independence. Layton commemorates the transformation in his poem “For My Two Sons, Max and David:”

The wandering Jew: the suffering Jew
The Despoiled Jew: the beaten Jew
The Jew to burn: the Jew to gas
The Jew to humiliate
Be none of these, my sons
My sons, be none of these
Be gunners in the Israeli Air Force(26)

The sense of pride and self-sufficiency instilled with the creation of the State and its military victories informs the authors' treatment of the theme of the Holocaust. As long as they relate to the sphere of the strong, independent and self-reliant aspect of Jewish survival, both Layton and Richler manifest a strong tendency to withdraw from the non-Jewish world and to define their identity in terms of their Jewish heritage, history and suffering. The Holocaust seems to have engendered in both writers a patriotic sense of belonging and devotion to their people, coupled with a poignant condemnation of the Gentile world. The consciousness of the Holocaust made it possible to comprehend the irreconcilable disparity between the Jews and the Gentiles based on unmitigated hatred of the Jew which had been cultivated for thousands of years. The newly discovered and potent Jewish identity often expresses itself in the form of a forceful accusation of the oppressor and a call for Jewish revenge.

In their identification with Jewish self-assertion both writers emphasize the tragic uniqueness of the Holocaust. They vehemently refute comparisons of the terrible loss of their people to unrelated communal disasters or personal misfortunes of other people. The inhumanity of the Nazi treatment of Jews has no parallel in human history. Any attempt to draw such analogy aims at trivialization of Jewish suffering and detraction from the magnitude of the disaster. Layton points out that

To play the numbers game as some have done by pointing to the equally large or larger number of deaths in our century among Hindus, Moslems, Armenians, Russians, and others is to be … frivolously or foolishly irrelevant.²⁷

The scheme to deprive Jews of human dignity and to annihilate them physically did not start with the rise of the Nazis. Layton claims that the Nazi Holocaust was the result of the accumulated anti-Jewish teaching of the Christian church over many centuries:

By preaching contempt and hostility towards Jews for nearly two thousand years the Church prepared the way for the near-success of Hitler's genocidal attempt to wipe out European Jewry.²⁸

The deeply embedded hatred of the Jewish people did not cease with Nazi destruction of the Jews in Europe. In the post-Holocaust world anti-Semitism takes the form of denial and forgetting of the Holocaust. Layton laments the victims of the Holocaust whose “horrible deaths are forgotten; no one speaks of them any more”;²⁹ he adds that “everyone lives as if Auschwitz never happened.”³⁰ The persistent denial of the Holocaust, the unwillingness of the Christian world to acknowledge the terrible Jewish loss constitutes the proof that the menacing spectre of another attempt at Jewish annihilation may rise again. Watching the world's reaction to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust, Layton envisages how the Holocaust will be used by anti-Semites to begin another era of Jewish persecutions. They will not hesitate to have recourse to the slanderous excuse of a Jewish conspiracy in order to prepare for another attempt to annihilate the Jewish people:

… Tomorrow some “goy” will observe you never existed and the Holocaust your just desserts for starting wars and revolutions.³¹

This time, however, fortified with a strong sense of self-sufficiency, the Jews will not submit helplessly to their oppressors. The situation of the Holocaust in which Jews were murdered by the Nazis spurred on by the anti-Semitic “Polacks” will not be repeated. Jews will not act as “tamed bears / toothless tigers / caged lions …” as they did behind the ghetto gates “in Warsaw circa 1941.”³² They will be free and proud individuals capable of defending themselves, following the example of the Israeli soldiers who forged a new Jewish identity in “June 1967 / in Tel Aviv and Sinai.”³³

Richler discusses the concept of the new image of the Jewish fighter in the same context as the Holocaust and Israel's victory in 1967. In his essay “The Holocaust and After” he glorifies the Israeli Air Force and refers to Israel's ability to defend the Jewish people in case of another threat of annihilation. The existence of the Jewish bombers, Richler claims, “offers some assurance that, should they be required, there would now be planes to spare to destroy the railway heads leading into extermination camps.”³⁴

The strong accusation again the Allies' refusal to save Jewish lives during the War implies Richler's disbelief in the Gentile world's motivation to prevent another Holocaust. Like Layton, Richler observes increasing signs of the denial of the Holocaust, distortion of facts and trivialization of the horror. In Germany Richler discovers that the concentration camp in Dachau has become a tourist attraction where the German guides deny the existence of gas chambers.³⁵ In his survey of films and novels thematically related to the Holocaust he finds that the horror is often used to present the Nazis and Hitler as “glamorous and sexy.”³⁶ In total disrespect for the memory of the victims, the concentration camp frequently becomes the scene of sexual exploits and sensational adventures.

In Richler's novels the world's complacent blindness to the horrible Jewish suffering does not seem to relieve the protagonist of his anxiety about another outburst of anti-Semitism. In St. Urbain's Horseman Jake Hersh constantly relives the fantasy of Nazis murdering his children. In Joshua Then and Now, Joshua Shapiro actually encounters a Nazi. Both protagonists were raised in Montreal, in the anti-Semitic atmosphere of the 1930s and the 1940s, at the time of the rise of the Nazis and the event of the Holocaust. It seems that the sense of humiliation and impotence incurred by their childhood experiences results in the consuming desire for a violent confrontation with the Nazi, the archetypal oppressor of the Jewish people.

The formative encounter with anti-Semitic hostility has determined the writers' wish to assert themselves as Jews in front of the hostile Gentile world. The events of the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel constitute two crucial components in the process of self-assertion. The Holocaust represents a magnified reflection of the anti-Semitic phenomena in their native Montreal. To some extent, the murderous acts of the Nazis could not seem too remote in view of the virulent fascist movement in Quebec in the 1930s and 1940s. Israel, then, represents the assertive way to deal with anti-Semitism. Its daring initiative and will to defend itself become the model for the Diaspora Jew. In contrast to European Jewry's submission to its oppressors, Israel has paved the road toward Jewish liberation from anti-Semitic intimidation. In their work, Richler and Layton are aware and often preoccupied with the modern dialectic of the Jewish response to anti-Semitism.

When contemplating the history of Jewish suffering from the point of view of Jewish regeneration, both Richler and Layton endorse emphatically the right of Jews to determine their own destiny vis-à-vis the Gentile world. However, the insistence on the uniqueness of the suffering and on the claim of the Jews to avenge their losses does not represent the totality of the writers' perception of Jewish survival in the post-War world. In fact, a close reading of Richler's and Layton's work reveals the dialectical nature of their response to the Holocaust. When assuming the stance of liberal humanists concerned about the future of mankind, both writers tend to minimize the uniqueness of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust and doubt the validity of Israel's struggle for independent survival. As liberals, both Richler and Layton point to a solution diametrically opposed to the concept of Jewish proud dissociation from Gentile society. Both writers claim a special role for themselves: Richler sees himself as “the loser's advocate,”³⁷ while Layton defines the poet as “the interpreter of his age.”³⁸ As such, both writers clearly wish to scrutinize the problem of Jewish persecution in terms of the universal moralist conception of the victim and the victimizer.

It would appear that Layton's and Richler's vested interest in the victim should coincide with Klein's demand of compensation for the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Klein's expectation that the Christian world will make amends to the Jewish victims of the tragedy invokes the universal principle of justice. Since Jews, as members in the “family of nations,” have paid the ultimate price of the Nazi horror, the world must make sure that their security in the future remains inviolable. In Klein's opinion the injustice inflicted upon Jews by the Christian world ought to be redressed by the Christian world itself. Palestine must become the Jewish homeland and Nazi criminals must be punished for their nearly successful “Final Solution.”

Klein never doubts the validity of the Jewish claim as it is based on liberal ideals of equality and justice. Paradoxically, the same ideals of equality and justice as interpreted in Richler's and Layton's writing undermine the argument for the uniqueness of Jewish suffering and the Jewish claim for the punishment of their Nazi persecutors. Since both writers claim that all human beings are equally inclined to do evil and to destroy each other, it follows that the subscription of the German people to the Nazi ideology was purely circumstantial. In a similar situation any other nation, including the Jewish people, would have behaved in the same way.

As a humanist, Layton again assumes the role of the prophet. This time, however, he does not see himself as a descendant of the defiant Hebrew prophet. Layton, the liberal humanist, sees himself in the prophetic role of the supreme teacher of humanity who must “forge the wisdom his tortured fellow men need to resist the forces dragging them down into the inhuman and the bestial.”³⁹ Everybody is susceptible to wickedness; “man is a sick animal.”⁴⁰ Therefore, in relation to the German crime, Layton's role of a humanist prophetic poet compels him to teach the truth about human nature to his fellow-men. Although the Jewish poet admits that “a number of [his] immediate family ended up as chimney smoke,” he objects to placing the blame for war atrocities on the German people:

I've had a great deal of experience with human irrationality, cowardice, hypocrisy, arrogance and cruelty. I have found no people—even my own—entirely free from these vices. If the government of any country turned loose its criminals and psychotic elements without any opposition being possible, I do not think its citizens would behave very differently.⁴¹

(emphasis mine)

The recognition of human propensity to evil as a fundamental truth obliterates the distinction between the victim and his oppressor. In fact, from Layton's point of view, the Western World is as guilty of war atrocities as the Germans for not having stopped Hitler from obtaining power, and it should “acknowledge its own guilt and responsibility for the tragedy which overtook [the Germans].”⁴² Surprisingly enough, the responsibility of the democracies does not consist in making amends to the Jewish people, the main victim of the German oppression. The Western World, according to Layton, is morally obliged to remove the stigma of shame that has been attached to Germany since the war. The hatred and revenge that many Jews and non-Jews feel towards Germany seems to Layton “both wicked and foolish.”⁴³

Layton's insistence on forgiving and forgetting the German crimes constitutes a total contradiction of his poems which manifest his vehement hatred for the Germans and his conviction that even the post-War German generation is capable of the same kind of bestiality as exhibited by the generation of their parents.⁴⁴ Perhaps the most striking example of the range of contradictory attitudes displayed in Layton's work is the analogy in which he identified his own experience of anti-Semitic persecution with the sense of rejection that the Germans experience today:

It is precisely my Jewishness that makes me disavow such hatred and revenge … When I was a boy I heard a French-Canadian call me and my mother “Christ-killers.” I've thought a great deal about that episode ever since, and I have wondered—in light of how most of us have regarded Germany since the war—how many Germans must feel the same way today.⁴⁵

The disparate nature of Layton's reactions signals the total effacement of the distinction between the victim and the victimizer. The German who only recently served the Nazi plan to exterminate Jews is perceived by the Jewish poet as an innocent victim of post-War social discrimination and prejudice. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of the two examples of social injustice clearly belittles and trivializes the lasting trauma of anti-Semitism which Layton himself depicts so vividly in his memoir “Waiting for the Messiah.” After all, even if ostracized by other nations, the German people today are hardly exposed to the kind of fear, intimidation and powerlessness to which Layton, as a child, was constantly subjected.

The analogy marks Layton's dissociation from the idea of Jewish vengeance and his endorsement of the Christian principle of forgiveness as a redeeming force in a world of corruption and wickedness. As a humanist poet-prophet, Layton teaches mankind the need for reconciliation with the past to ennoble human nature and build a better world. As a Jew, he feels that his own experience of suffering and his readiness to make peace with his people's persecutors will communicate his humanist credo:

Whether we like it or not we must continue along the road indicated to us by the Enlightenment even though it has led through the fires of Bergen-Belsen and Hiroshima.⁴⁶

The emphasis on the importance of forgiveness points to the extent to which Layton has allowed the Christian prejudice to affect his humanist mode of thinking. He goes to the extreme of downplaying the tragedy of Jewish suffering so that he may commiserate and empathize with the unhappiness of the former oppressor. Moreover, the attempt to establish suffering as a common denominator between Jews and Germans signals an overwhelming motivation on the part of the Jew to be found equal to the Gentile even at the price of his righteous claim for justice. The powerful attempt to establish an affinity with the Gentile world reveals vestiges of anxiety and a fear of the recurrence of anti-Jewish persecutions. Layton tries to resolve the problem of entrenched Christian hostility toward Jews by espousing the ideal of the brotherhood of men promulgated by Christian humanism.

Layton's identification of himself as a liberal humanist operating within the humanist framework of the Christian world precludes the Jewish right to self-assertion and, consequently, modifies his attitude to the State of Israel. As a spokesman for assimilation, Layton no longer glorifies the military power of Israel as a necessary response to the Holocaust, neither does he see in Israel the symbolic rebirth of Jewish pride and self-respect. In fact, in his role of a humanist, Layton produces harsh criticism of the State of Israel. He claims that Israel's political structure does not represent a developing democracy; its society is conservative and does not allow for any deviation from the accepted conventions. He finds that “Israelis give the impression of walking around in a circle like the blinded ponies in the coal pits of the 19th c.”⁴⁷ and that their life style exhibits ghetto mentality which does not produce original culture or new ideas. Layton's major attack against the Jewish State deals with the relations between Israel and the Arabs. In the account of his interview with the mayor of a Druse village in Israel, Layton emphasizes the humanist approach of the minority group member towards Israel. The mayor's main concern revolves around the existence of minorities in the Middle East and their right of self-determination. The mayor conspicuously displays a friendly and supportive attitude towards Israel.⁴⁸

Israel's relations with its Arab neighbours however, prompt Layton to castigate the Jewish State. Israeli characteristics, as the poet sees them, of ruthless self-centredness in matters of self-defence coupled with total disregard of the international political scene and ostentatious disinterest in the Gentile world, both insult and disappoint the humanist in Layton. Israel has definitely not lived up to the ideal of the liberal humanist. Consequently, Layton identifies Israel's powerful response to the Arabs not as an act of self-defence, but as an act of oppression. As a country which denies the humanist ideal of the brotherhood of men, Israel is not fit to fulfil the role of the Jewish Homeland, the final stage in the history of Jewish dispersion. Its inability to live peacefully with the Arabs nullifies the hope for freedom that the State of Israel has initially promised. With obvious disregard of his own enthusiastic response to the Israeli victory in the Six Day War, Layton's impressions of the country in 1968 present a critical view of a detached, objective political observer who just happens to be a Jew:

In my harsher moments I have defined an Israeli as a Jew who has been stripped of all his Gentile friends and even as an ungoose-stepping Prussian. For all that, I am confident that the remarkable story of the Jew will not end on this note. That would be too much of an anticlimax … Israel's destiny is not to be that of a Switzerland or Belgium of the Middle East. The messianic mission has not been accomplished, Zionism did not put an end to the Jew's wanderings.⁴⁹

Mordecai Richler's writings display a dialectic almost identical to that of Layton. Like Layton, Richler criticizes Israel's inadequate humanist perception. Israel's social and religious reactionary conservatism is illustrated in the episodes in which two of his characters make an attempt to make Israel their home. Both Karp in A Choice of Enemies and Carlos in Joshua Then and Now are victims of terrible anti-Semitic persecutions. Karp is a concentration camp survivor, physically and emotionally mutilated by his experience. Carlos is one of the Marrano Jews who were forced to convert to Catholicism at the time of the Inquisition in Spain and who managed to preserve their Jewishness. Neither of the survivors is welcome in the Jewish State. Karp is not accepted by the Israeli society—“people suspect him because he survived.”⁵⁰ Carlos is ostracized by the religious authorities; the Israeli Rabbinate does not consider him Jewish since “his mother was officially a Catholic.”⁵¹ Therefore, he is refused the status of the returning Jew. In both instances, Israel is criticized for its particularist stance.

Richler's perception of the Jews in the post-Holocaust world seems to shift incessantly. Opposed to the personal pain of the Holocaust and the identification with the potency of Israel, the humanist identification with the general notion of human suffering and the condemnation of violent means to resolve political conflicts.

In St. Urbain's Horseman Jake Hersh's contradictory response to the Six Day War illustrates the perennial conflict regarding Israel as experienced by the modern Jew. Consumed by anxiety about the survival of Israel in the crucial days prior to the outbreak of the war, Jake prepares himself to volunteer to fight for Israel. In the wake of Israel's victory, however, Jake hesitates, because of his liberal conscience, to contribute money to Israel's war effort. Jake, the liberal, who was ready to support the victim is unable to identify with the victor. Israel suddenly appears to be the oppressor, and its soldiers are seen as violators of the code of civilized, humanitarian conduct among the nations.

Like Layton, Richler in his role of a liberal humanist seems to be preoccupied with the shifting definitions of the victim and the victimizer. As the example of the liberal humanist reaction to the Israeli victory in 1967 illustrates, the identity of the victim and the victimizer is purely circumstantial. Once the would-be victim has been successful in defending himself, the sympathy of the liberal shifts to the oppressor who appears to have become the victim. It seems that the Jewish liberal, in his eagerness to join the ranks of international humanism, is prepared to modify his concept of man's accountability to his fellow-man. Jake for instance, is ready to ignore the fact that the Arab nations, even though they lost the war, only a short while before were planning the destruction of Israel.

Noah Adler, the protagonist in Son of a Smaller Hero, is also eager to justify anti-Semitic practices in Quebec because of the brutal reality of life which sets one human being against the other. Noah claims that

The guy who wants to get into a restricted golf course or hotel and the other guy who won't let him in are really brothers. The fact that one is inside and the other outside is an accident. They could switch places just like that. Besides, there is a certain kind of Jew who needs a “Goy” badly.⁵²

(p. 70)

Interestingly enough, Noah does not object to the very existence of discriminatory restrictions directed towards Jews. His sense of justice seems to be satisfied with the notion that some Jews do not observe the rules of fair-play either. In Noah's view of the world, the human tendency to exploit others is universal and, therefore, it is impossible to discriminate between the victims and the victimizers; nor is it possible to apply strict moral norms which will distinguish between the guilty and the innocent. In fact, being human is tantamount to having a propensity to do evil.

Using the same argument of human liability to wickedness as Layton does, Richler's protagonist neutralizes the uniqueness of Jewish loss in the Nazi concentration camps. Revoking the humanist principle of equality of men, he explicitly invalidates the Jewish identity of the Holocaust victims. And, like Layton, Noah insists on blaming the Holocaust on humanity as a whole, not just on the German people:

The important thing is not that they burned Jews but that they burned men. It did not have to happen in Germany, either. A Zionist, who I know very well, sold scrap to Japan right up to '41. He didn't see the connection. Nobody in the family protested against non-intervention …⁵³

(p. 70)

In his attempt to show sympathy and understanding for the German people Layton compares his own suffering of anti-Semitic rejection with the German feeling of alienation after the war. In no less striking analogy Richler's protagonist also draws a comparison between Jews and Germans. Noah finds a common measure of hypocrisy between Germans who claim innocent ignorance of the Nazi bestiality and those Jews who conceal their faults and petty crimes while pretending ignorance:

At last Noah understood about the concentration camps. About the Goldenbergs and Harvey. The Germans have told the truth when they said that they hadn't known. They couldn't cope with knowing. Neither could the Goldenbergs. Their crimes varied in dimension but not in quality.

(p. 70)

Noah's insistence on comparing the negative qualities of his fellow-Jews with those of their worst persecutors reveals his own desire to blot out his Jewish uniqueness and merge into the brotherhood of men as promised by liberal humanism. He knows that complete assimilation requires complete renunciation of his Jewish identity. In rebellious reaction against his Jewish heritage, Noah nullifies his people's long suffering of anti-Semitism, neutralizes the uniqueness of the Jewish loss in the Holocaust, and discovers in every Jew not a potential victim of anti-Semitic persecution, but a potential exploiter of the Gentile.

Paradoxically, Noah's criticism of the Jewish people echoes the traditional anti-Semitic argument about the inherent immorality of Jews and their dishonest intention to use the Gentile world for their own self-interests. Noah's eagerness to assimilate leads him to identification with the anti-Semite and to blatant vilification of his people. A. M. Klein, in his memoir “Stranger and Afraid,” describes a similar phenomenon of the Jew taking sides with the persecutor. Klein shows how the destructive experience of anti-Semitism channels the anger and frustration of the humiliated Jew against his own people. Klein demonstrates consciousness of the emotional reasons for his self-manipulation toward assimilation and denounces, with dismay, his inclination to identify with the oppressor of his people. Richler's protagonist, however, rationalizes his wish to integrate into the Gentile world under the guise of a humanist social critic.

Klein's position is characterized by his efforts to make the Gentile world understand its responsibility toward the Jewish people. Klein does not advocate Jewish independent action to redress injustice, but he also steers away from the danger of assimilation. In spite of his disappointment and disillusion with the post-War world, he tries to preserve a vision of accepting the Jews as equals into the democratic system of the Western World. In relation to Klein whose stance, by and large, remains immutable, Layton's and Richler's writings display varying Jewish reaction to the post-Holocaust world. In contrast to Klein, both writers are capable of envisaging a strong, independent Jewish identity materialized in the State of Israel. At the same time, their humanist stance surpasses that of Klein. Eager to forgo the unique position of the Jew as an outcast among the nations and longing to merge into Gentile society, they are ready to renounce their Jewish identity and assume the role of humanist spokesmen for mankind as a whole.

Layton's and Richler's constant vacillations between the two mutually exclusive poles of assimilation and self-assertion manifest the phenomenon of split Jewish consciousness in the post-Holocaust world. None of the central Jewish themes is given a consistent representation. The reactions of the writers to anti-Semitism in Canada, the tragic destruction of European Jewry, and the historic event of the establishment of the State of Israel are characterized by constant contradictions. Each of the themes is treated in contrasting ways and, consequently, the world picture that emerges remains intrinsically disintegrated. The sense of unresolved duality in Layton's and Richler's work presents a picture of moral confusion and disorientation in Jewish relationships with the Gentile world.

Richler's novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz illustrates the fragmented world view of the Jewish community in Montreal. Although the novel does not deal directly with the theme of the Holocaust, the characters represent a split in the identity of Montreal Jewry. Uncle Benjy and his father, Simcha, personify two poles in Jewish orientation. Simcha's belief that “a man without land is nobody” (p. 70)⁵⁴ highlights the concept of security, identity, and independence. In the most fundamental sense, land cultivation implies one's competence to survive on one's own, independently of others. For a Jew the idea of land is naturally connected with the Biblical concept of the Promised Land which represents the eternal Jewish hope and yearning for independence in their own country. For Simcha, an old Jew transplanted from the atmosphere of anti-Semitic persecution in Eastern Europe into Canada, possession of land could possibly fulfill his emotional need for the regeneration of Jewish dignity and self-respect in the new country. Benjy's conception differs drastically from that of his father. He does not wish to establish his Jewish identity in the new country; on the contrary, he wishes to integrate into the Gentile world. In his continuous efforts to be assimilated, Benjy presents a paradoxical phenomenon of a self-made Jewish factory owner with strong communist sympathies, who nevertheless, has an overpowering inclination to emulate the lifestyle and values of a WASP gentleman.

In a deceptively symmetrical pattern, Lenny and Duddy, Simcha's grandsons, are expected to actualize the principles of their uncle and grandfather. Thus while Lenny is being groomed by his uncle to penetrate the world of the Gentiles as an enlightened gentleman-doctor, Duddy invests enormous resources of energy in fulfilling his grandfather's expectations of owning land. Where Lenny makes desperate attempts to ingratiate himself with his well-connected Gentile friends, Duddy does not hesitate to use his Gentile friends in order to become “a somebody” (p. 79).

Eventually, neither of the boys fulfills his mentor's expectations. Lenny undergoes a disillusioning experience when he realizes to what extent his Gentile “friend” took advantage of his inferior social position. Lenny's declaration of his intention to settle in Israel marks his negative reaction to his uncle's orientation and draws him closer to his grandfather's concept of an identity determined by the sense of belonging. It is significant, however, that Lenny's plan is embryonic in the sense that his conversion to Zionism remains only a verbally articulated project. Duddy misinterprets his grandfather's credo. He fails to understand the idea of moral and spiritual regeneration through direct contact with land. Duddy can see the land only in terms of the acquisition of property which will establish his identity as a powerful landowner and a successful businessman. The ruthlessness and immorality of Duddy's pursuit eventually estrange him from Simcha. Ironically, Duddy's struggle for power and wealth endears him to his uncle. Benjy understands Duddy's relentless ambition as an expression of a powerful wish to break away from the restricting boundaries and deprivations of the Jewish “ghetto.”

The process of entering the world of social and financial success exacts its price in terms of moral corruption and brutal mistreatment of other human beings. The insensitivity, insincerity and dishonesty which typify Duddy's relationships with Yvette and Virgil turn him into a ruthless oppressor of the innocent. The novel exposes the Jewish community's moral confusion and ambivalence in relation to the Gentile world. While Lenny becomes the victim of his Gentile friends, Duddy becomes the victimizer of the Gentile. The absence of a unified world picture is demonstrated by the older generations of Simcha and Benjy. The juxtaposition of the conflicting messages to assimilate and to assert oneself as a Jew is both disorienting and demoralizing. In this sense, Duddy's lack of conscience manifests the effects of the confused Jewish consciousness in the modern world. To some extent, then, Duddy can be seen as a casualty of the loss of direction in Jewish interaction with the world.

The polarities of Layton's and Richler's fragmented picture of the Jewish post-Holocaust world also inform the point of view of Leonard Cohen and Adele Wiseman. On the one hand, Layton's and Richler's work shows constant fluctuation between poles of self-assertion and assimilation. Cohen and Wiseman, on the other hand, establish themselves firmly each at the opposite end of the spectrum. Cohen distances himself from his Jewish background and nullifies the distinctions between Jew and Gentile. Wiseman embraces the Jewish tradition and focuses on the uniqueness of the Jewish identity. Both writers are aware of the contrasting option, and they address themselves to it in their writing. But their work represents, by and large, a consistent point of view in contrast with the shifting perspective in the work of Layton and Richler.

Cohen's three books of poetry—Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956), The Spice-Box of Earth (1961), and Flowers for Hitler (1964)—demonstrate a progression in the poet's withdrawal from the Jewish tradition which culminates in total identification with the morally corrupt post-War world. His attempts to break away from his background manifest themselves in his conscious effort to adopt an impartial view of mankind as a whole. Cohen's struggle to disengage himself, as a Jew, from the impact of the Holocaust is resolved in the apocalyptic vision of human society where all men are equally guilty of the recent horror and where every individual has already become a tyrant. Cohen deals with the effects of his childhood anti-Semitic experiences by adopting the humanist stance of a reconciler. “Let us compare mythologies,” he suggests to his Christian childhood friends who accuse him of crucifying Jesus.⁵⁵ As the humanist poet sees it, the era of hostility between Christians and Jews seems to be coming to its end:

Now each in his holy hill
the glittering and hurting days are almost done.(56)

Cohen's expectations of the termination of anti-Semitic hatred resembles Klein's humanist hope that the anti-Semitic phenomena that he experiences are only vestiges of hard dying prejudices. But Cohen's humanism also communicates his wish to withdraw altogether from the conflicting relationships between Christians and Jews. In his poem “I have Not Lingered in European Monasteries” he reiterates his emotional withdrawal from identification with any religious tradition. The European history of religious wars is foreign to him and so is the memory of the noble knights who died in battle. Significantly, the poet manifests the same measure of indifference to the history of his own people's suffering at the hands of the Christians:

I have not worshipped wounds and relics,
or combs of iron,
or bodies wrapped and burnt in scrolls.(57)

The strongest statement of Cohen's wish to liberate himself from the burden of his heritage is expressed in the prose poem “Lines from My Grandfather's Journal.”⁵⁸ Here Cohen's narrator struggles with “the old tyranny” of the Jewish tradition of learning, liturgy and religious ceremony. He makes desperate attempts to free himself from “a tradition composed of the excuviae of visions” in order to be able to project his own vision and to establish his freedom from his binding heritage.

Grandfather's rebellion is directed not only against the binding rules of his heritage; he rages against God who permitted his people to be murdered in the Holocaust. When the Jewish worshippers were murdered in their synagogues, “in Prague their Golem slept.” The fire and the chimneys of the concentration camp ovens undermine the validity of the Jewish religious tradition of worship and learning. Moreover, the narrator's growing detachment from the terror of the Holocaust exacerbates his feelings of despair and desolation. Making “peace with the numbers” of his brothers who were murdered in concentration camps, the difficulty of remembering the “past intensity” of the Holocaust and the efforts to “estimate [his] distance from the Belsen heap”⁵⁹ represent his reluctance in sharing the burden of the tragedy. However, the poem also refers to those who have not forgotten and responded powerfully to the Holocaust. Unwillingly, Grandfather admits that the Israeli soldiers “in a white Tel Aviv street” constitute “an answer to the ovens.” Although he does not approve of Israeli militarism, he feels compelled to admit that “there is only one choice between ghettos and battalions, between whips and the weariest patriotic arrogance …”⁶⁰

In relation to Jewish existence in the post-Holocaust world, a powerful Israel indicates the pole of Jewish assertion and self-sufficiency. Cohen's grandfather's argument that the military strength of Israel constitutes the Jewish response to the Holocaust coalesces with Layton's and Richler's view of Israel as a guarantee that the tragedy of the Holocaust will not recur. Both Richler and Layton, when focusing on the aspect of Jewish independent position in the hostile Gentile world, identify wholeheartedly with the idea of a strong Israel. In contrast to Richler and Layton, Cohen's acknowledgement of the Jewish right to self-defense reveals a strong undertone of criticism about the act of violence manifested in this particular form of response to the Holocaust and anti-Semitism. As a humanist pacifist, his narrator admits that

… it gives me no pleasure to see [Israelis] in uniform. I do not thrill to the sight of Jewish battalions.⁶¹

Paradoxically, Cohen's own response to the Holocaust as presented in Flowers for Hitler can hardly be defined as humanist. Cohen takes the suggestion of the universality of the human propensity to evil beyond the humanist concept of human fallibility into the realm of the absurd. Cohen's approach does not focus on criticism and correction of human weaknesses but, rather, on the acceptance of the existence of human wickedness as an integral and unchangeable part of human existence. In the opening poem “What I'm Doing Here,” Cohen establishes the existence of evil in every human being. He confirms that we are all guilty of crimes of conspiracy, torture and hatred of other human beings. The poet waits “for each one of you to confess”⁶² and acknowledge his inherent propensity to evil. Thus, the products of evil can no longer be isolated and considered to be transient historical phenomena such as concentration camps under the Nazi regime. Man's wickedness transforms the existence of every individual into a territory of pain and suffering and every individual into a persecutor.

Hitler the brain-mole looks out of my eyes
Goering boils ingots in my bowels
My Adam's Apple bulges with the whole head
                                                                                                    of Goebbels
No use to tell a man he's a Jew
I'm making a lampshade out of your kiss(63)

The particular issue of anti-Semitic persecution seems irrelevant in view of the universal evil force which penetrates and contaminates every aspect of human existence. The Nazi criminal is no longer seen as a fear-evoking, abject figure; Cohen's emphasis on the “normality” of the Nazi and his ordinary appearance implies that evil is not unique—any normal and ordinary person is capable of becoming a Nazi himself. In the poem “All There Is to Know about Adolph Eichmann” Cohen dismisses any feature which could qualify Eichmann as a monster, and mocks his reader's naive picture of evil which might include “Talons / Oversize incisors? / Green saliva? / Madness?”⁶⁴ The human capacity to become Eichmann and Goebbels is by no means presented as a hypothesis. Cohen refuses to blame only Germany for the atrocities of the war. Like Layton and Richler, Cohen accuses the free world of collective guilt. Stephen Scobie in his study of Leonard Cohen notes that “Cohen insists, with his reference to western pop figures, that Hitler was not an exclusively German phenomenon.”⁶⁵ The Western World assisted Hitler in his monstrous undertaking, and its complicity is reflected in its popular culture:

Captain Marvel signed the whip contract.
Joe Palooka manufactured whips.
Li'l Abner packed the whips in cases.
The Katzenjammer Kids thought up experiments.
Mere cogs.(66)

The element of terrifying absurdity in a world which has come to represent a vicious circle of suffering and oppression is further enhanced by the positive human qualities of affection and warmth that Cohen attributes to Hitler, the most inhuman of tyrants:

Braun, Rabual and him
these three humans
I can't get their nude and loving bodies out
                                                                      of my mind.(67)

The grotesqueness of the image of a loving Hitler is compounded by the fact that a Jewish poet has conjured up such a haunting scene in his mind. The image underscores the complete loss of moral judgement in a world that has experienced the terror of Hitlerism. Remembering Hitler for his human qualities signifies that, indeed, there is no limit to human capacity for distortion, monstrosity and perversion in the post-Holocaust world.

In Cohen's perception, the Holocaust has been internalized and, therefore, its horror continues to shape the individual's interaction with the world. The Holocaust has nullified the sense of morality and discrimination between good and evil; it has obliterated the sense of moral accountability and has invalidated the principle of justice and retribution. In Cohen's imagination the world assumes the shape of a global concentration camp where the distinction between the Jew and the Gentile has all but disappeared. Cohen transforms the humanist stance as represented by Klein, Layton and Richler into a demonstration of the anti-humanist aspect of human equality. The humanist perception of man which stresses the potential for good that all mankind shares is supplanted by the vision of evil common to everyone.

In her essay “Leonard Cohen, Black Romantic,” Sandra Djwa outlines the fundamental disparity between Klein's Hitleriad and Cohen's Flowers for Hitler. She claims that “Klein's Hitleriad invokes the rational Neo-Classical world where human folly can be reflectively chastised by the wit of righteous indignation … In [Cohen's] perspective, irrational evil is accepted as a normal part of the human make-up which can even come to have certain attractiveness.”⁶⁸ Klein's clear-cut distinction between evil represented by Hitler and innocence embodied by his victims stands in total opposition to Cohen's emphasis on the obliteration of any such distinction. The principles of justice can be exercised only when the norms which distinguish between the victims and their oppressors are operative. In Cohen's world where roles and personalities are interchangeable, justice and moral order have ceased to function.

Layton, too, believes that all men are capable of evil under certain circumstances. Like Cohen, he accuses the Western World of its complicity with the Nazis in allowing Hitler to carry out his threat. And, like Cohen, he sees the post-Holocaust world overtaken by forces of bestial violence and wickedness. Contrary to Cohen, however, Layton sees his prophetic role in terms of saving the world from another tragedy of senseless horror. Layton's exhortations for reconciliation with Germany communicates the vision of the world's rebirth in the spirit of Christian humanism. Cohen's absurd picture of the world precludes the humanistic expectation of humanity working together for a better future. Michael Ondaatje observes that Cohen's notion of evil communicates that “we all carry our own private hitlers.”⁶⁹ This perception of communal and individual guilt rules out the hope for redemption.

Some measure of affinity can be established between Cohen and Richler. The arbitrariness of the roles of victims and victimizers is dramatized in the absurd world of Richler's novel Cocksure. The characters in the novel are in constant pursuit of power. The principle of the survival of the fittest governs the novel's world. The Star Maker practically dismembers his victims to regenerate himself while his Jewish counterpart, Shalinsky, victimizes the Gentile protagonist, Mortimer, in his sadistic attempt to divest him of his identity.

In Cohen's picture of the world, the distinction between Jew and Gentile becomes obsolete. Human capacity for evil has, absurdly, become the common denominator which molds man's identity in the post-War world. In Richler's representation of the world in Cocksure, the ruthless, totally unscrupulous struggle for power defines the character's identity as either a victim or a victimizer. Richler's acknowledgement of and occasional enthusiastic subscription to the concept of a strong and assertive Jewish identity alleviate the pessimistic vision of the post-war world as represented in Cocksure. Cohen's treatment of his Jewish roots does not provide him with an alternative to his vision of the disintegrating world. Cohen proceeds from conscious rejection of the Jewish tradition into total immersion in a world which is continually experiencing a self-inflicted Holocaust.

Cohen's nihilistic picture of the world is firmly anchored in the spectrum of Jewish assimilation into Gentile society. Like Layton and Richler in their roles of humanist critics, prophets and teachers, Cohen dismisses the notion of a Jewish identity independent of the Gentile world. Adele Wiseman, both in her interviews and her literary work, repudiates the assimilationist approach predicated on the assumption of guilt and perversity shared by Jews and Gentiles. Wiseman establishes a strong Jewish identity through direct affirmation of her distinctness as a Jew. Wiseman has asserted her Jewishness since early childhood. In the biographical article “The Stubborn Ethnicity of Adele Wiseman,” Adele Freeman recounts Wiseman's reaction to anti-Semitism as a growing child in her native Winnipeg:

When she was eleven she asked her mother for something that would announce to her schoolmates unequivocally that she was Jewish and save her the pain of being teased when her religion was discovered. Her mother had a Star of David fashioned out of gold for her. Wiseman still wears it.⁷⁰

As an adult Wiseman has turned her literary work into the emblem of her Jewish identity. She sees her writing as a necessary act to confirm her sense of deep attachment and belonging to the Jewish heritage:

My consciousness is Jewish; it's a Jewish consciousness and I think I'm a flower in somebody's else's garden. I'm a different flower and my selfhood and my “otherness” I sing about …⁷¹

Deeply rooted in the Jewish tradition, Wiseman is openly critical of those American Jewish writers who wish to obliterate the unique identity of the Jewish people in order to integrate into Gentile society. Wiseman submits that the Jewish liberal ideology which exonerates the Gentile persecutors from their guilt toward Jews is both damaging and dishonest. Such an approach undermines the Jewish right to redress the injustice and suffering inflicted by the Gentile world; it also invalidates the sense of moral indignation of the Jewish victim toward the Gentiles. Instead of releasing his righteous anger at the perpetrators of his suffering, the Jewish individual represses his anger by incurring a sense of guilt for crimes he has never committed. According to Wiseman, the Christian attitude adopted by liberal Jews in the aftermath of the Holocaust which consists in “accepting the sins of the world and turning them on themselves”⁷² indicates the extent of self-humiliation that these American Jewish writes can put up with to ingratiate themselves with the Gentiles.

Wiseman categorically refutes the idea of interchangeability between the victim and the victimizer. In her discussion of the tragedy of the Holocaust, she forcefully accuses the Germans of their crimes against the Jewish people. It is true that, like Layton, Richler and Cohen, she denounces the complicity of the rest of the world in German bestiality. But on no account is Wiseman ready to accept the notion that the contribution of the free world to the terrible tragedy of the war is proof that the distinction between victim and victimizer is merely incidental, and that all human beings, under similar circumstances, display uniform patterns of cruelty and sadism.

In her unpublished play Lovebound—the tragic story of the German ships with Jewish refugees who in vain sought haven from the Nazi threat in 1939—Wiseman refuses to humanize the German characters. She finds nothing redeeming about the suffering that the Nazis inflicted upon their Jewish victims in spite of the indifference of the rest of the world to the Jewish plight. In that respect, Wiseman's attitude is similar to that of Richler and Layton in their phase of identification with the Jewish loss in the Holocaust and their call for Jewish revenge.

Both Richler and Layton exhibit strikingly inconsistent positions regarding Jewish suffering in the Holocaust. Wiseman's consistent point of view about the Holocaust highlights the extent to which Layton and Richler vacillate between the wish to assert themselves as Jews and the desire to merge with the Christian world by shedding their Jewish uniqueness. Wiseman remains adamant in her position on the principle of a particular Jewish identity. According to Wiseman, it is only from the standpoint of their own uniqueness that Jews can interact with the Gentile world:

… ecumenism is a way of evading the really difficult task of respecting each other. It's a way of saying: “Well, we're basically all alike.” But we can only say that if we accept that we also really have basically very different orientations.⁷³

In her novels, The Sacrifice and Crackpot, Wiseman is not preoccupied with the theme of Jewish assimilation in the Gentile world. Her interest focuses on the destructive effects of anti-Semitism on the emotional makeup of the Jewish individual and on the inner forces of spiritual and emotional regeneration that enable the Jewish survivor to re-establish his dignity and pride.

In his treatment of the traumatic effects of anti-Semitism on the Jewish psyche, Klein analyzes the emotional need of the victim to escape his suffering through identification with his oppressor. Layton and Richler struggle to restore the victim's potency by alternatively calling for Jewish revenge or subscribing to the Christian humanist concept of forgiveness. Cohen attempts to ignore anti-Semitism altogether by integrating Jewish suffering into the global moral disintegration of the world. Wiseman seeks remedy for the psychological injuries suffered by the Jew in the irrepressible vitality of the Jewish people. The emotional strength and moral perseverance of the Jewish tradition ensures the continually renewing bond between generations.

Many of Wiseman's characters are survivors who have escaped Eastern Europe and came to settle in Canada. In both her novels Europe is depicted as a burial ground for the Jewish people. In The Sacrifice, Abraham, his wife, and youngest son emerge from the grave-like cellar “blacker than night”⁷⁴ where they were hiding from the pogrom and find the bodies of the two other sons who were murdered by the Cossacks. In Crackpot Danile and Rahel are married in the cemetery, “the field of death.”⁷⁵ The wedding is supposed to stop the plague in their village and thus avoid a pogrom at the hands of the irate Gentile farmers who believe that the Jews have caused the disease. Lazar, the survivor of the Holocaust who eventually marries Hoda, Daniel's and Rahel's daughter, saves himself by crawling out of the pit under the bodies of his family murdered by the Nazis.

The personal ordeal of the victim isolates him from the rest of humanity. In his loneliness, he incessantly relives his personal disaster which he is unable to communicate to the rest of the world. The spiritual salvation of the victim is predicated upon his ability to break the self-imposed silence and relate his experience to the next generation. Only through the knowledge of the history of their parents will the children of the victims be able to establish a vital link with their heritage. The consciousness of suffering promises the hope of regeneration and renewal in spite of the despair and desolation caused by the long tradition of anti-Jewish hatred.

The final reconciliation in The Sacrifice between Abraham and his grandson, Moses, reconfirms Abraham's interpretation of the Biblical story of the Binding of Isaac which he taught to Moses in his childhood. In the story, God, who demands the ultimate sacrifice of the patriarch, Abraham, ends up reaffirming life by relenting and letting Isaac live. Abraham, the protagonist of the novel, sees the event of the sacrifice as

the moment that even God could not resist, and so He gave us the future … He said, ‘Kill the ram and let your son live. In him is your future!’⁷⁶

In a sense, the story of the patriarch who fought against the worship of idols which involved the sacrifice of children, and who almost sacrificed his own son at God's request is a very close representation of the protagonist's own ordeal. His two elder sons were the sacrifice, metaphorically speaking, required of the Jewish village to appease the Cossacks at the time of the pogrom. The subsequent death of Isaac, Abraham's lost son, is not caused by another pogrom; it is rather a reenactment of the Binding of Isaac story. It is as if God himself demanded the sacrifice this time—as Abraham sees it, Isaac died for the glory of God by saving the Torah scroll from a burning synagogue. In a terrible act of rebellion against God, Abraham kills a woman who has become the projection of his despair and desolation. This act symbolizes the spiritual loss of hope and faith for the Jewish people.

Redemption becomes possible only through the reaffirmation of the bond between Abraham and his grandson. In the last encounter between Abraham and Moses, the concept of faith and hope for the future becomes operative again. The murder of Laiah, rooted in Abraham's rejection of consolation and compassion, severed his ties with his God and his people. Moses who represents the future of the physically and emotionally mutilated Jewish people mends the link and establishes his connection with the history of Jewish suffering. At the end of the novel, Moses the son of Isaac reaffirms the Jewish moral principle of the sanctity of human life and the unseverable link between generations. The renewed bond with his grandfather confirms the validity of the lesson in the story of the Binding of Isaac about the undying existence of the Jewish people which in spite of its history of terrible suffering is constantly revitalized through unbreakable ties with its heritage:

And for a moment so conscious was he of his grandfather's hand on his own, of its penetrating warmth, of its very texture, that he felt not as though it merely lay super-imposed on his own but that it was becoming one with his hand, nerve of his nerve, sinew of his sinew; that the distinct outlines had disappeared. It was with the strangest feeling of awakening that he saw their hands fused together—one hand, the hand of a murderer, hero, artist, the hand of a man … It was as though he stood suddenly within the threshold of a different kind of understanding, no longer crouching behind locked doors, but standing upright, with his grandfather leading him, as he always did.⁷⁷

In Crackpot the link between Danile and his daughter, Hoda, is established through Danile's stories about his own past. In contrast to Abraham's despair and grief, Danile chooses to present his stories under the note of persistent optimism which neutralizes the horror of his story. Rahel's father's endless service in the Czar's army, the pogroms, the plague, Danile's mother's death, his own blindness and the wedding at the graveyard, all these facts are presented as miraculous events which eventually have led to Danile's happy marriage with Rahel and to Hoda's birth.

The naive and humorous point of view in Danile's story does not function merely as a defense mechanism to preserve sanity in a world full of hatred and persecution. The emphasis on the particularly unique circumstances of Hoda's birth instills a sense of identity and belonging in Hoda. The optimism that permeates the story gives her the hope and encouragement to survive. The history of her parents, as told by her father, becomes the story of continuity and survival, a celebration of life and love in spite of threatening anti-Semitic humiliation and hatred. Even the cemetery full of freshly dug graves for the victims of the plague becomes a symbol of affirmation of life through her parents' wedding.

With the strong sense of identity and pride that her past gives her, Hoda is strong enough to persevere through poverty, prostitution and incest. She seems to be forever mending the world through her attempts to offer love and compassion to other human beings. Hoda is the one who stubbornly picks up the “shards, permeated with sparks of the Divine, scattered thorough the Universe”⁷⁸ in her instinctive faith in the possibility of a better world. Her irrepressible vitality coupled with unabated optimism does not allow her to lapse into despair or to relinquish hope for a better future.

In fact, it is Hoda herself who personalizes the hope for the Jewish people's regeneration in the wake of the tragedy of the Holocaust. Lazar, the survivor of the Holocaust who practically rose from the dead, instinctively recognizes Hoda's vitality and compassion. He realizes that Hoda is capable of giving him the strength to continue to live, that she can relieve him of his memories and the burden of his guilt:

When the time came I was just like everyone else. Flesh of my father, flesh of my sister, flesh of the whole world, I gripped them and I crawled over them … that's all my past amounts to, a horrid, jellied, fleshy consistency in the terrain over which I will crawl for the rest of my life. How can you remember what can never become the past? Help me, Hodaleh … Just be with me.⁷⁹

Hoda is capable of offering a promise of a new life to the Jew who survived the Holocaust because her whole existence is, in effect, a reconfirmation of life in view of the world of death, persecution and disease in which she was conceived. Hoda is the living proof that renewal and regeneration are possible even in the wake of the most terrible experiences that a Jew may live through. In the union of Lazar and Hoda the history of the Jewish suffering has come full circle. But this time the union of the two survivors promises not death but rebirth, not desolation but regeneration and reconfirmation of Jewish life.

The comparative study of the work of Klein, Layton, Richler, Cohen and Wiseman in relation to their perception of the Jewish position in the post-Holocaust world reveals certain common patterns. All the writers see the Holocaust as a milestone in the history of Jewish interaction with the Gentile world. While some of them choose to react in terms of Jewish distinct self-definition and independence from the non-Jewish world, others choose to struggle together with the rest of humanity with the increasingly disintegrating moral picture of the post-War world.

Mordecai Richler, in his fiction as well as in his non-fiction alternates between these two diametrically opposed orientations. On the one hand, he considers the self-contained, self-sufficient Jewish society to be the answer to the Jewish problem; on the other hand, he seems increasingly attracted to the option of the obliteration of Jewish distinctiveness among liberal Gentiles. Richler no longer trusts the naive vision represented by Klein that the humanist principles of justice and equality will forge an equal status for the Jewish people among nations. Like Cohen, Richler has no illusions about the corruption of the human society whether Jewish or Gentile. And his liberal attitude will not allow him to side with the Jewish people whose members are, in his perception, as prone to corruption and evil as the Gentiles. At the same time, the emotional impact of the Holocaust does not allow him to exonerate the perpetrators of Jewish suffering. From a point of view which is very close to that of Wiseman, Richler cannot refrain from proclaiming his anger towards those who allowed the Holocaust to happen.

Richler's constantly shifting position between self-assertion and assimilation is very similar to that of Layton. It seems that the formative experience of anti-Semitism has affected both authors in similar ways. Social rejection and the threat of violence have created the conflict separating the desire for the sense of belonging and affinity with their people from the overwhelming wish to severe all ties with Jewish history through identification with the universal causes espoused by humanist liberalism. Richler's vacillations and his ambivalent world picture point to his inability to establish a true bond with either Jewish community or the Gentile society.

Notes

1. Usher Caplan in Like One That Dreamed: A Portrait of A. M. Klein (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd., 1982) observes that “though Klein was merely three years older than Layton, there seemed to be a generational gap between them”. (p. 100) Klein introduced Layton to the literary circles of Montreal and acted as his mentor in the beginning of Layton's career.

2. M. W. Steinberg and Usher Caplan, eds., A. M. Klein: Beyond Sambation: Selected Essays and Editorials, 1928-1955 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982).

3. Beyond Sambation, p. 155.

4. ibid., pp. 155-156.

5. ibid., p. 275.

6. ibid., pp. 307-309.

7. ibid., p. 320.

8. Miriam Waddington, A. M. Klein (Vancouver: The Copp Clark Publishing Co., 1970), p. 100.

9. A. M. Klein, The Second Scroll (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Ltd., 1969), p. 107.

10. ibid., pp. 133-134.

11. Naim Kattan, “A. M. Klein: Modernité et Loyauté”, Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 19, No. 2 (Sept. 1984), p. 26.

12. Usher Caplan, Like One That Dreamed, p. 149.

13. Beyond Sambation, pp. 230-231.

14. ibid., p. 231.

15. Caplan, p. 76.

16. ibid., pp. 76-77.

17. Anna Freud, “Identification with the Aggressor”, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, The International Psychoanalytical Library, No. 30, p. 113.

18. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (New York: The Orion Press, 1965), pp. 120-123, 35 passim.

19. Irving Layton, “Waiting for the Messiah”, Canadian Literature, No. 101 (Summer 1984), p. 12.

20. Mordecai Richler, “Their Canada and Mine”, The Spice-Box: An Anthology of Jewish Canadian Writing (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Denys, 1981), p. 231.

21. Layton, “Waiting for the Messiah”, p. 12.

22. ibid., p. 12.

23. ibid., p. 13.

24. Irving Layton, The Darkening Fire: Selected Poems, 1945-1968 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Ltd., 1975), p. 70.

25. Mordecai Richler, The Street, p. 127.

26. Irving Layton, The Shattered Plinths (Toronto: McClelland and Steward Ltd., 1968), pp. 50-51.

27. Irving Layton, “Foreword”, The Covenant (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Ltd., 1977), p. xiii.

28. ibid., p. xiv.

29. Irving Layton, The Tightrope Dancer (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1978), p. 49.

30. Irving Layton, Europe and Other Bad News (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1981), p. 59.

31. Layton, The Tightrope Dancer, p. 49.

32. Layton, The Shattered Plinths, p. 32.

33. ibid., p. 33.

34. Mordecai Richler, “The Holocaust and After”, Shovelling Trouble, pp. 90-91.

35. ibid., pp. 86-87.

36. ibid., p. 89.

37. Graeme Gibson, Eleven Canadian Novelists, p. 271.

38. Irving Layton, “Foreword”, Balls for a One-Armed Juggler (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1963), p. xxi.

39. ibid., p. xx.

40. Irving Layton, Taking Sides (Oakville, Ontario: Mosaic Press, 1977), p. 98.

41. ibid., p. 98.

42. ibid., p. 98.

43. ibid., p. 123.

44. In the poem “Hangover” (The Tightrope Dancer, p. 50) Layton expresses fundamental mistrust in the post-War German generation. He remembers the atrocities committed by the Nazis and experiences grief and rage at the sight of their children.

    I want to ask him
    whether his father
    had been a Storm Trooper
    or perhaps one of the guards
    in Buchenwald
    and whether his dear mother
    had gone to school with Ilsa Koch
    and I shudder
    so that people notice
    when he strokes an animal …

45. Layton, Taking Sides, p. 116.

46. Layton, The Shattered Plinths, p. 15.

47. Layton, Taking Sides, p. 143.

48. ibid., p. 141.

49. ibid., p. 139.

50. Mordecai Richler, A Choice of Enemies, p. 242.

51. Mordecai Richler, Joshua Then and Now, p. 335.

52. Mordecai Richler, St. Urbain's Horseman, pp. 360-361.

53. Quotations from Mordecai Richler's Son of a Smaller Hero are from the McClelland and Stewart edition, 1969.

54. Quotations from The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz are from Penguin Books edition, 1978.

55. Leonard Cohen, “For Wilf and His House”, Let Us Compare Mythologies (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 19560, p. 15.

56. ibid., p. 15.

57. Leonard Cohen, The Spice-Box of the Earth (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), p. 30.

58. ibid., pp. 88-93.

59. ibid., p. 92.

60. ibid., pp. 88-89.

61. ibid., p. 87.

62. Leonard Cohen, “What I'm Doing Here”, Flowers for Hitler (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1964), p. 13.

63. Cohen, “Hitler the Brain-Mole”, Flowers for Hitler, p. 43.

64. Cohen, Flowers for Hitler, p. 66.

65. Stephen Scobie, Leonard Cohen (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1978), p. 49.

66. Cohen, “The Migrating Dialogue”, Flowers for Hitler, p. 72.

67. ibid., p. 74.

68. Sandra Djwa, “Leonard Cohen, Black Romantic”, Canadian Literature 31 (1967), p. 34.

69. Michael Ondaatje, Leonard Cohen (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1979), p. 37.

70. Adele Freeman, “The Stubborn Ethnicity of Adele Wiseman”, Saturday Night, 91 (May 1976), p. W6.

71. Roslyn Belkin, “The Consciousness of a Jewish Artist: An Interview with Adele Wiseman”, Journal of Canadian Fiction, Nos. 31-32 (1981), p. 152.

72. ibid., p. 152.

73. ibid., p. 158.

74. Adele Wiseman, The Sacrifice (Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada, 1972), p. 62.

75. Adele Wiseman, Crackpot (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982), p. 21.

76. The Sacrifice, p. 178.

77. ibid., p. 345.

78. The epigram to Crackpot by Ari.

79. Crackpot, p. 301.

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