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REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS
| Henry Kreisel, The Rich Man (Calgary: Red Deer Press, 2006, first published 1948)
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| THERE'S NOTHING unusual about Jacob Grossman, the protagonist of Henry Kreisel's novel, The Rich Man, originally published in 1948. Grossman is a 53-year-old presser in a Toronto clothing factory, the same job he's held since his arrival from Galicia 33 years earlier. He's "a short, narrow-shouldered, pot-bellied man. His face was round and of a reddish colour, a bit flabby and wrinkled, and there was a large bald spot on the pate of his head." (12) In Grossman's imperfect English, "I am a ord'nary man..." (47) |
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In one way, though, Grossman is far from ordinary when the novel opens. By saving his meager wages, the Jewish widower has amassed several hundred dollars. He plans to take a few weeks' trip to Vienna in the spring of 1935 to visit his elderly mother and relatives. Defensively, he figures that once in a lifetime a man has the right to be a little extravagant. |
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Grossman is a captive of vanity. Moreover, as an immigrant, he wants his oldworld relatives to consider him a success. He's secretly pleased when his factory mates ironically joke that he's "J. Rockefeller Grossman" for asking Mr. Duncan, the manager, for several weeks' leave. (21) Grossman's daughter is bitter about her father's trip and sarcastically calls him "[a] rich man! A millionaire!" (16) He buys himself a fancy white suit, which he's long coveted, along with an array of presents for his mother and sisters, whom he hopes will view him "like a merchant arriving after long travels in foreign lands, bearing great gifts." (33) Though poor, he is trying to sustain an illusion and "the dream of every immigrant – he was going back, a settled, prosperous-seeming man." (42) |
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The first 23 pages of the novel, before Grossman takes a boat to Europe, provide sketchy glimpses of workers' lives in Toronto. The most thoroughly developed aspect is Grossman's noisy, steamy workplace: "The familiar smell of the factory, the stale smell of cloth, mingled with the steam of the Hoffman presses and the sweat of hundreds of workers, enveloped him, and a familiar noise, the steady, vibrating hum of whirring sewing machines broke against his ears." (20) Later, on the boat, the author tells us that Grossman "had never been aware of the sky and of floating clouds....The sky in the factory was a dull, grey ceiling, and there was no wind to waft a fresh breeze, but only hot, steaming, suffocating air that swished from the Hoffman presses and made the face grow crimson with heat, and drenched the body with a thick, unhealthy sweat." (45) Grossman has a nightmare that takes place in his factory: a monster attacks him in a cloud of steam. |
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Once reunited with his Viennese family, Grossman enjoys the illusion of being a rich professional designer. For poor European Jews, "anybody living on the North American continent must needs have money." (70) His white suit, along with a surreal painting he purchases from an artist on the boat, enhances the impression. |
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Meanwhile, anti-Semitic incidents are increasing dangerously. The painting, which portrays a Hitler-like demagogue with a booming voice, seems to presage trouble. The Jews of Vienna are sitting on the knife edge, debating their alternatives in the face of an expected Nazi takeover and their destruction. After all, as one relative says, "even if I didn't take an interest in politics, politics took an interest in me." (89) |
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As expected, Grossman's trip and modest savings eventually entangle him in painful conflicts. The accidental death of a brother-in-law precipitates Grossman's relatives' plan to borrow a substantial sum from Grossman to pay their debts. At last, "the wonderful illusion of the past few weeks had now suddenly come to a shattering, painful, ugly end." (253) He is forced to admit to his quarrelsome and mostly unpleasant relatives that "he was poor and insignificant and of no account." (267) All but one reacts with disbelief and scorn. Grossman leaves Vienna in terror of disappointing his mother. At the finish, he tosses the painting of the demagogue – a totem of trouble to come, of "millions of other people, caught and helpless" – out the train window on his way back to Canada. (293) |
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While the reviewer for the Communist Party's Canadian Tribune regarded The Rich Man as "sound working-class fiction," the novel's theme is truth and deception, and the difficulties Grossman brings on himself because of his desire to be seen in Vienna as a rich man. The novel is based on dualities, opposing forces in the lives of poor Jews in Vienna and North America: the old world and the new, wealth and poverty, Yiddish and English, exile and home, the idealized, romantic image of Vienna and the gritty reality. |
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The Rich Man's plot sometimes seems contrived, the characters one-dimensional. Still, the novel is a valuable contribution to the historically slim body of Canadian literature by Jews about Jewish life. The novel attempts to explain and defend elements of European Jewish life to a gentile audience. Kreisel explains the rich and expressive uses of the word "Noo": "this little sound was capable of expressing the profoundest emotions and the most delicate shades of meaning." (22) Of Grossman's mother, Kreisel writes, "She possessed fully the wonderful gift of her race, a gift acquired in centuries of persecution. It was the gift to endure an almost unbearable burden of suffering and to grow even stronger in the face of it." (217) And Kreisel obviously shows how attitudes toward money and material success are shaped by dire poverty. |
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The Rich Man was produced at the start of Henry Kreisel's successful academic and writing career. Born in Vienna in 1922, he fled to England in 1938. During the early part of World War II, he was interned in England and Canada as an enemy alien for about 18 months. An "accidental immigrant" to Canada, and inspired by Joseph Conrad's success in learning and writing in English, Kreisel studied at the University of Toronto and started teaching at the University of Alberta in 1947. Eventually he served as Chair of the English Department and Vice-President of the university. He became an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1988, three years before his death. |
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GENE HOMEL
BC Institute of Technology, Burnaby |
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