The crime of murder is so rare in the Jewish community that when it does occur it becomes both a community tragedy and a whispered secret. The murder of Jack Horwitz in Ben Edelson’s jewelry store on a cold November 1931 night in Ottawa is one such lurid example.
In a startling new book, Alice in Shandehland, Scandal and Scorn in the Edelson/Horwitz Murder Case, Monda Halpern examines the tawdry steps that led to the shooting of Jack Horwitz. Halpern tells us that Ottawa’s small and insular Jewish community was horrified by the crime and frightened to even discuss it. It was simply expunged from their minds engaging in a form of “collective forgetting.”
Married in 1912, Ben and Alice had seven children while building up a successful business, Edelson’s Jewellers, located near old Union Station in Ottawa’s lower town.
On the surface the Edelsons were a well-liked Jewish middle-class family on the rise in Jewish social circles. Alice had what my late grandmother who knew her called “movie star good looks.” My mother who was friends with one of the Edelson daughters, Dina, told me that Alice looked like the 1930’s movie star Claudette Colbert.
However, lurking in the darkness was a shocking scandal. Alice Edelson was having an illicit affair with another jeweller, Jack Horwitz. Jack, also a married man with a young daughter, had met Alice eight years previously and had been carrying on the affair ever since. The “accident” that happened that night, Nov. 24, 1931, following a meeting between Ben Edelson, his wife Alice and her lover Jack determined to “settle the thing” became the stuff of spectacle and alleged murder.
The meeting at Ben’s Rideau Street store quickly took a wrong turn. Bitter words and accusations were exchanged. An angry Ben Edelson showed Jack his loaded gun and according to testimony given by Ben a struggle broke out in which a shot was fired. Jack was badly wounded dying a few hours later in the hospital.
Ben was charged later that evening with premeditated murder. The Depression-era tale of adultery, betrayal and humiliation played out within Ottawa’s Jewish community and well beyond, is told with a deft hand and keen insight by Western University Prof. Halpern.
It is by no accident I come to this book. A few years ago I was invited to London, Ont. to deliver an opening address to the Jewish community’s adult learning series. Following my talk I met Halpern who knowing I hailed from Ottawa told me of her latest research towards her new book.
She had only to mention the names Ben and Alice Edelson before I knew exactly where she was going; the garish and surreptitious story of the night Jack Horwitz was shot in Edelson’s jewelry store. Anyone of a particular age knew the families involved or their children. Those, like me, born well after the tragedy were told the story with the admonition never to make it public, to “sha shtill” because it wasn’t good for the Jews.
Indeed it wasn’t good for the Jews who during the early 1930s wanted only to fit in – to be seen as reliable, law abiding and respectful. Ottawa in 1931 was not without its anti-Semites so a strange and lurid murder that happened in the midst of the most cherished of families shamed and terrified the Jewish community.
Halpern spent years tracking down the saga no one wanted to talk about. Poring over stories of the sensational three-day trial as reported in Ottawa newspapers, interviewing surviving family members, many reluctant to talk, searching through archives and walking the streets of lower town and Sandy Hill where the Jewish community lived and where the shooting took place, Halpern has us enter her own beautifully constructed time machine.
She whisks us back to the years prior to the killing describing Ottawa and its Jewish denizens with such skill and beauty you feel as though you are part of the story.
The events leading up to that fateful November night are recounted with such clarity you feel yourself walking with Alice east on Rideau Street to the corner of Chapel Street then north towards St. Patrick Street where she met Jack who picked her up. Together they then headed to their final and fateful rendezvous at the jewelry store with Ben.
The trial portion of the book is as gripping as any John Grisham novel and the outcome as shocking.
Real characters are brought to life through a careful dissection of family history, Jewish community archival works, old and tattered photographs and the personal stories of the people who were present at the time.
The fate of Ben and Alice is telegraphed in the first few pages of the book. Why, because the story is as much about ethnicity, gender, and class as it is about the shooting itself. The story encompasses the manner in which Alice becomes the community’s adulterous scapegoat though she never pulled a trigger. It speaks to sexism, honour killing, misogyny and so much more. Indeed even decades after the killing it was Alice to whom the “shandeh” was applied, never Ben or her lover Jack.
For me, who knew the tale but never the details, it was a book that finally unravelled long-held furtive secrets. For those only learning of this story for the first time, it is a combination page turner, sociological study and spellbinding insight into the complexities of a new immigrant community, its hopes and fears. Either way it is a compelling must-read.
