|
September 14, 2001
Mt. Moriah
Stories warm the heart (Book Review)
BAILA LAZARUS EDITOR
Escape From Mount Moriah:
Memoirs of a Refugee Child's Triumph
By Jack Engelhard
ComteQ Publishing, 2001
117 pages, $23.95
It's rare that a short story will make me laugh out loud. Smile,
yes - that knowing sort of grin that appears when you appreciate
a good joke or pun. But laughing out loud seems to be reserved for
listening to Jackie Mason tapes or watching Jerry Seinfeld steal
a marble rye. This time, the laugh came while reading a story about
St. Agathe - a town in the Laurentians outside Montreal. Those who
have ever summered in Montreal and visited the Laurentians will
know St. Agathe, a beautiful town on one end of a large lake.
"To spend a week in St. Agathe was a sign to your countrymen
that you were doing OK. Two weeks in St. Agathe and you were doing
very well. Three weeks meant you were getting up there with the
Gewertzes and the Bronfmans. A month in St. Agathe? You must be
a Gewertz or a Bronfman!" So writes Jack Engelhard in "A
Month in St. Agathe," setting up a wonderful tale about how
his own family spent a month in the town, but only because they
were too poor to leave once they got there.
Such is the bittersweet ending in many of the short stories in
Engelhard's latest work, Escape From Mount Moriah: Memoirs of
a Refugee Child's Triumph.
The title of the book derives from the part of the Torah read in
synagogue on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, about Abraham's near
sacrifice of his son, Isaac, on Mount Moriah, which resulted in
the covenant between God and Abraham.
In 1944, when Engelhard was four years old, his family escaped
Nazi occupied France and made their way to Canada. This was Englehard's
own "escape from Mount Moriah." The stories in the book
describe events in his life as a child living in Montreal. Engelhard
eventually became a best-selling novelist - his personal triumph.
His most well-known work is Indecent Proposal, written in
1993 and later made into a movie starring Robert Redford and Woody
Harrelson.
Englehard describes this latest book as a collection of sketches
about the life of a child refugee; a life shaped by the events of
their escape. His family had little money because his father, who
had been a successful leather goods manufacturer in France, could
not find success as a businessman in Montreal. This sad state results
in the first story in the book, "My Father Joe."
Other effects of being a refugee pop up in many of the 18 tales
- the excitement of welcoming relatives from New York because so
many of their relatives had died in Europe; the strain of sharing
a tiny apartment with another family on St. Urbain Street; the feeling
of being an outsider; his father's embarrassment of asking for money
from a man who used to work for him in France.
To be honest, however, there are many stories that don't fit with
the themes of escape and triumph. Most of the tales are cute anecdotes
of a young boy's experience in a new country - his first job, watching
his first World Series on television, getting into fights with children
his own age. There's nothing to imply that the child had escaped
death; nothing to suggest that there was any abnormal trauma suffered
by Engelhard at all. In fact, many of the stories could have been
written about any young boy almost anywhere in North America.
The pleasure of the book is in the writing itself. Engelhard's
prose is simple and lyrical, almost as though it were the six- or
eight- or 10-year-old boy telling the tales himself. And one can
almost hear the accents of his parents as he describes their conversations.
"Like Rockefeller was a rabbi, so was my father a businessman,"
Engelhard writes in "My Father Joe." "He used to
say, 'I don't know what it is with me. I can't work for another
man.' This was no weakness in his eyes. No, it was strength - a
sign of character. To which my mother would say, 'Yes, a character
you are.' "
Be careful when you pick this book up. You won't put it down until
all the stories are read.
^TOP
|
