If truth were told, not all past winners of the fiction prize in the annual Helen & Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Awards have been outstanding reads. Once in a rare while, a winner has been selected merely because it was the best of a bad lot and pickings were slim that year.
Fortunately, that’s not the case with The Winterhouse, the novel by Newfoundland writer Robin McGrath that has been named the winner of this year’s fiction prize, to be awarded at the Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre on May 27.
The Winterhouse (Killick Press) is a lovely book, full of memorable characters, sharp writing and plenty of history, folklore and rustic charm. It is mostly set in a rugged and scarcely populated island in the British colony of Newfoundland in the fall and winter of 1820.
The story revolves around two characters: Rosehannah, a strong-willed and independent 14-year-old daughter who is left to fend for herself after her mother dies, and her father moves away to cohabit with a widow; and Jacob Harris, a travelling Jewish sales agent who is shipwrecked upon his arrival from England and stays for the winter.
As the story begins, the father sells his store to the newcomer, who, much weakened from his ordeal, hardly notices as the man includes Rosehannah in the deal. The father hastily marries Rosehannah to the stranger so he can depart with a freer conscience now that his only child (step-child, actually) has a husband to care for her.
The subtleties of the developing relationship between the wise and capable Rosehannah and the quiet and gentle “mister” take a back seat to the demands that survival imposes upon them in their isolated fishing village along the ocean coast and the inland “winterhouse” where they retreat to better endure the winter.
McGrath commands an awesome knowledge of fishing and boating, plants and berries of the woods, how to skin and roast a variety of wild and domestic birds, and such diverse skills as snowshoeing, crafting metal objects in a home-made forge, and salting fish and game. To all of this, she adds a dollop of humanity as she paints the various families on the island who live in a necessary symbiosis with one another. Sociability, neighbourliness and tolerance are not just expected; they are mandatory.
All in all, it seems an astonishingly authentic portrait of a rustic community, comparable, say, to A. J. Cronin’s Welsh village in The Citadel, except much more rudimentary. The Winterhouse is made all the more lovelier by McGrath’s language, which is salted with delicious old words and aphorisms.
The novel features, as an epistolary subplot, a modern correspondence between some genealogical researchers who are delving into the Harris family tree and into the history of the Jews on the Newfoundland “Rock.” Through this expeditious device McGrath is able to introduce much fascinating material.
The Winterhouse is an impressive book that will appeal to patient readers willing to take the time to let a good book win them over.
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There Is No Other by Jonathan Papernick
In There Is No Other (Exile Editions), a collection of compelling stories by former Torontonian Jonathan Papernick (now of Boston), we meet a caretaker who has a vision of the Virgin Mary in a Reform temple in Boston; an angry Jewish kid who comes to a school Purim party wearing a Mohammed costume and a suicide-bomber apparatus; and an American Jewish businessman who wants to build baseball stadiums in Israel and the Palestinian territories in the hope that the game will bring on peace.
Like a speeding curveball, most of these stories have an ironic twist that spins them in an unpredictable direction. Papernick (unlike Robin McGrath) writes about Jewish tradition from the inside, with an insider’s comprehension of its quirks and contradictions, in a prose style tinged with dark humour and irreverence.
Comparisons have aptly been made with Nathan Englander and Bernard Malamud. Papernick is in the same ballpark, but at this stage he’s still hitting mostly singles and doubles, with not enough home runs to make it into the majors.
My favourite story is The Madonna of Temple Beth Elohim, which presents us with the hilarious conundrum of a rabbi who cannot keep the crowds out of his synagogue after word gets out that someone has seen the Virgin Mary in a piece of wood on the altar.
That rich irony is counterbalanced by the sense of discomfort generated in There Is No Other, when the kid in the suicide costume achieves his Columbine ambition. Papernick is nothing if not a literary iconoclast keen on exploding our idols, ideals and conceptions about ourselves and others.
Not all of the stories have Jewish characters. In What Is It Then, Between Us? a husband runs momentarily down the block to find a handyman to fix the radiator and ends up in a bar and, ultimately, a full-blown sexual liaison. Then he rushes home to find his wife, for once, “in the mood.”
The two worlds meet in Skin for Skin, when a non-Jewish boy forces himself upon a Jewish girl from the same high school. She is shocked, first by the crucifix dangling from his neck, then by another appendage – which she seeks to improve with a Japanese paring knife.
At times erotic as well as neurotic, and infused with a dark and sometimes-funny magic realism, many of these stories feature an array of semi-crazed, lonely people living on the precarious edge between reality, Jewish tradition, and their dreams.
