In Other Words

by Anna Porter

  IN OCTOBER 2006, while I was immersed in Kasztner’s Train, the CBC sent me to Budapest to be part of a documentary commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution. We visited plot 301 in the Rákoskeresztúr Cemetery, the burial ground of people killed by the state after Soviet troops put down the uprising in 1956. In the country I had come from, there was once a revolution and our prime minister had been betrayed, imprisoned, and executed.

  We walked through the House of Terror, once headquarters of both the Hungarian fascists and their successors, the Communist state police. My grandfather had been held in its underground cells pending his trial on trumped-up charges. I walked, again, the old streets of what had been the Jewish ghetto, where so many died that the dead had been stacked up like cords of wood in the small square where now children play.

  I had been curious about how my former country was dealing with its newfound democracy, how it was weathering the shift to capitalism and consumerism. How was it dealing with its horrific legacies of the Holocaust and of the Soviet occupation? How did it deal with the perpetrators and what justice could it bring to the victims?

  This experience is what led me to write my next book, The Ghosts of Europe. I wanted to explore how Central Europe was adjusting to its present realities twenty years after the end of the Soviet era. I wrote about Solidarity in Poland, the famous Round Table meetings that ended one-party rule and brought in free elections, about the Czechs and Slovaks deciding to put an end to Czechoslovakia, about the Library of Prohibited Books in Prague with its twenty-seven thousand books banned under Communist rule. Jiri Gruntorad, then the custodian of these books and periodicals, proudly showed me the packed shelves of Slovak, Czech, and Polish writers, including dozens of Josef Skvorecky’s novels, Vaclav Havel’s plays, Milan Kundera’s novels, Czeslaw Milosz’s poetry, Bohumil Hrabal’s scripts, and Ivan Klima’s novels and scripts. Now there was a free press, yet it was Ivan Klima who had remarked, “We asked for freedom and you gave us the market.”

  I interviewed former Polish prime minister General Jaruzelski, Hungarian prime minister Gyurcsány, legendary Czech resistance hero and first elected president Vaclav Havel, and former Slovak prime minister Vladimir Mečiar. After one of my visits to the Czech Republic, I brought Josef Skvorecky greetings from his old friend, Vaclav Havel, who told me he wished Josef would “come home” again.

  “I am already home,” Josef told me. Here. In Canada.

  Josef and Zdena were further estranged from their former home when a group of overzealous Czechs decided that more had to be done to punish the Communist regime’s informants and the collaborators. The Státní Bezpečnost, or StB as it was usually referred to, had been dispersed quickly after the fall of the old regime and little was done to retrieve its files. Havel believed that his people would be best served by moving on from the past. “Take care when judging history,” he said. “Otherwise you can do more harm than good.” The past is never black and white. No one was untouched by the system.

  However, the group of citizens published a list, an enforced “lustration” of StB informers, and Zdena’s name appeared on it. Devastated, she sued the Ministry of the Interior and won, but she felt from then on that her name had been muddied, that she would “never get rid of the dreadful suspicion.” Her health, Josef said, never recovered. The zealots who had compiled “the list” had shown as little regard for the truth as they did for the consequences of their actions.

  That was the story behind Josef’s novel Two Murders in My Double Life.

  Adam Michnik, one of the heroes of Poland’s resistance to totalitarianism, once said that it would be well to remember that in 1989 Central Europe came “as a messenger not only of freedom and tolerance but also of hatred and intolerance. It is here that the last two world wars began.”

  I finished writing Ghosts of Europe in 2009, twenty years after Central Europe joined Western Europe. I have been back to Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest since, and I am saddened at the turn away from some of the principles of democracy that led to the creation of the European project. I fear that too many of us have become so comfortable with democracy as a backdrop to our daily existence that we no longer see it as an ideal worth fighting for.

  Douglas & McIntyre published Ghosts and, as I discovered later, persuaded Tom Dunne at St. Martin’s to buy US rights.

  * * *

  THROUGHOUT THE WRITING of Ghosts and my next book, Buying a Better World: George Soros and Billionaire Philanthropy, George Jonas was my sounding board.

  For some years, George and I used to meet in the Coffee Mill, a Hungarian restaurant in Yorkville run by the very hospitable Martha, who had been married to a Hungarian wrestler called Laci Heczey, another Jonas friend. I had met Laci for the first time at one of Key Publishers’ annual Christmas parties that stretched through the warren of offices all the way from Front Street to The Esplanade. Laci, one of the grand unpublished stories of the decade, walked through the somewhat inebriated throng with two tigers he kept as pets.

  Over endless coffees, George talked about his own experiences with fascists in Budapest, and we debated his lingering appreciation of Hungary’s wartime governor, Miklós Horthy. He often accused me of being influenced by left-leaning writers and politicians, and he forced me to defend and sometimes rethink what I had written. I can almost hear him talk to me when I reread some of the passages about George Soros in Buying a Better World. Soros is, indeed, a left-leaner, one who has had the opportunity to influence world affairs, though, as my book posits, might not for long. He had spent about $16 billion, most of it through his Open Society Foundations, by the time my book was published. “He could have become the most hated man in Central Europe for a fraction of that,” George Jonas opined, “but he didn’t ask for my advice.”

  Being a true Central European, George Jonas could recite Heine and Goethe in German, Apollinaire in French, and Pushkin in Russian. Both of us had learned Russian, unwillingly, in school in Budapest, and both of us admitted that when reading Russian literature, it was not altogether useless. When the refugee or migrant (depending on your point of view) crisis began, he had dire predictions for Europe’s ability to survive. The year Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban (he had succeeded Gyurcsány) built a wall and called in the military to guard Hungary’s borders, George was the only columnist in Canada in Orban’s corner. In one of his last columns,I he said that a country “cannot accept foreign countries imposing an immigration model on it that would dramatically change its cultural composition.” Being a realist, however, he charted the downslide of Europe’s aging and shrinking population and the inexorable march toward a new Eurobia, a Europe ruled by Muslims.

  During the last months of his life, George wanted to hear Eugene Onegin again. He had, of course, heard it many times before, knew the melodies and the words in Russian, and he sang (very croakily) along with the soprano during the Letter Scene. We assembled his last book, Selected Poems 1967–2011, with the unusual method of my reading each poem from his collections and George indicating, sometimes impatiently, which ones he wished to leave out.II

  When a few of us gathered to celebrate George’s poetry at Harbourfront in 2015, my choice was “Landmarks,” about his arrival in Canada. These are its last lines:

  with cardboard trunks, torn clothes, needing a wash,

  an evil-smelling strange boy, tall and thin,

  had asked to spend the night. And god knows why

  they took me in.

  I remembered the handleless blue suitcase with all my worldly possessions, and like George, I was grateful that Canada had taken me in.

  * * *

  I. September 22, 2015.

  II. The book was published by Marc Côté of Cormorant, with Margaret Atwood’s introduction.

  Keep the Promise

  JUNE CALLWOOD’S DEATH was a shock. She seemed so vital, so ageless. Too many of us take for granted today the social initiatives she had started. In 2007, a group of June Callwood�
�s friends restarted June’s campaign to end child poverty, Keep the Promise. On November 24, 1989, in a unanimous all-party resolution, the House of Commons resolved to end child poverty in Canada by the year 2000. It hadn’t happened. In fact, child poverty had increased: now one in five children in Canada live in poverty.

  The last time I saw June was at a putatively celebratory lunch at Biff’s Bistro on Front Street. Her cancer had spread and she had not much longer to live. She was frail but very elegant in a soft blue outfit with a trailing scarf and shapely flat shoes. She ordered some kind of fish while she talked with considerable animation about her progress with the all-party parliamentary agreement, and how good she felt about that. She also felt good about her fundraising efforts on behalf of Casey House, a downtown Toronto hospice that specializes in HIV/AIDS care. We sat near the door as men of various shapes and sizes marched in, talking loudly on cell phones and demanding immediate attention from the hostess. June watched them with amusement, then she said, not too quietly, “Here come the big swinging dicks.”

  After our lunch she drove off in her small convertible—a gift from her children—and waved goodbye. There was her irrepressible smile and that glow June had when she felt she had accomplished something.

  Unfortunately, the politicians forgot their promises and everyone went on with their lives just as before. But this time it did not just end there. With June gone, we restarted the Keep the Promise campaign with theologian and social activist Mary Jo Leddy and Rabbi Arthur Bielfeld as our leaders. They had both been friends of June. We lobbied governments at all levels, mobilized thousands of children and teachers across the country. In November 2015 children from every province and territory came to the Keep the Promise National Summit in Ottawa. During the 2015 federal election, all major parties promised to take action.

  I do not know whether they will honour that commitment, but June would have been glad that we tried to hold them to it.

  June 2 is June Callwood Children’s Day in Ontario, a special day for a very special woman, a day, as my daughter Catherine wrote in the Toronto Star, “to imagine a better world and make a plan to achieve that. It’s a day to be unexpectedly kind to strangers.”I

  * * *

  I. Catherine was appointed the New York Times’s Canadian Bureau chief in 2017.

  A Footnote to Canadian Publishing History

  IN 2012, HAVING enjoyed eleven years of government financial assistance through its control of M&S, Random House Canada announced that it had now acquired the University of Toronto’s seventy-five per cent shares in M&S—for one dollar. Elaine Dewar’s 2017 book The Takeover is an interesting account of the loss of “The Canadian Publishers.” To some extent, the book answers my questions about how and names a few of the individuals who had so cleverly engineered the original deal.

  My one remaining question is what took them so long.

  In a long letter to Mordecai Richler, dated September 13, 1974, Jack McClelland wrote about his views on the American publishing presence in Canada.

  There is no doubt in my mind that US publishers (and for that you could read British publishers and any other publishers because it has nothing to do with the USA per se) are a real problem in Canada. . . . A publisher operating a subsidiary in another country does not identify with the culture of that country. His purpose in having a subsidiary can only be twofold. First, he is interested in moving his publishing product, and second, he is interested in making money. Those are his sole objectives. . . . Nobody can object to those objectives. The problem in Canada, however, is the almost total takeover of the industry by foreign interests; this means that many vital forces in the cultural growth of the country can be lost because of inability to compete with massive foreign presence.

  I am glad Jack was not alive to see “the house that Jack built” become part of a German subsidiary.

  The Inimitable Jack Rabinovitch

  IT IS UNUSUAL to become close friends late in life with someone you have just met. But Jack Rabinovitch had a unique talent for friendship. We met in November 1994 and remained friends for the next twenty-two years. Our friendship started with exchanging jokes, a few of them in Yiddish, and stories the evening of the first Giller Prize party. I loved his ability to size up people and situations, his silly jokes, his delight in new discoveries, new places where we could get lost, and new faces, such as the young priest’s who showed us around the pope’s private galleries in Rome. And I loved his stories.

  Jack’s father had been a ballroom dancing instructor in Bucharest: a dapper man with dark hair, charm, fast feet, and a determination to do better. Except for the colour of his hair, Jack inherited most of his characteristics. Jack’s mother and aunt had escaped across the Ukrainian border to Romania when another wave of Cossack pogroms threatened to end their youthful ambition to stay alive. The two sisters were barefoot but had the family’s wealth in jewels sewn into the linings of their threadbare coats. When the border guard’s wife told them how much they would have to pay, they pleaded abject poverty, and since they were both barefoot in the snow, she believed their lie.

  Had Jack’s parents not married and had three children so soon after they arrived in Canada, Jack’s father might have had a bright future as a businessman. As it was, he became a newspaper vendor on a Montreal street corner.

  Jack hawked newspapers at his father’s stand. Later, when his father opened a fast-food restaurant, he and his brother, Sam, helped out behind the counter. During those years, they ate well. Otherwise, it was his mother’s cooking, and she had an unerring talent for serving burnt, soggy, greasy, colourless food.

  Jack and his brother went to school with the kids of other immigrants. All except two families in Jack’s neighbourhood were Jewish. A few blocks over, the Catholic kids ran with their own crowd and provided lively exercise for Jack and his friends, who had to run the gauntlet of battle-scarred fists and metal-heeled boots on the way to school. It was a quick, if not painless, method of learning French, and Jack spoke a fine joual. His nickname was ’ti carotte, little carrot, because he was a redhead.

  His best friend back then was a kid called Archie, a small boy with big dreams about joining a band. He danced along the streets and up and down stairs, as if he could hear music. Archie’s father was a bookie, his older brother, a tank of a man, was the enforcer. One day, after Archie was bashed in the face by Tarzan, one of the school’s “repeaters,” Archie’s brother showed up at school and decked the guy. After that, Tarzan never touched Archie. It was a timely lesson for Jack on how to survive as a scrawny kid: ally yourself with a large protector. From then on, he traded his reading and maths skills for protection. It was a great incentive to stay ahead of the class.

  Without that incentive, Jack was not sure he would have made it to Baron Byng High, the school where most of the immigrant kids went and where Irving Layton had preceded him. And without high school, he would not have gone to university, studied literature, or fallen in love with books and with Doris Giller.

  It was at Baron Byng that Jack first met Mordecai Richler. They were not especially friendly to start with because Mordecai’s sole interest in Jack was Jack’s friendship with Lefty, or Hyman Berger as the class teacher insisted on calling him, the best athlete, the best ball player, runner, pitcher, pool player at school. There was no better way to acquire prestige than to be connected with Lefty.

  When Jack went to McGill to study literature, he lost touch with both Lefty and Mordecai. He rarely talked about his McGill years but did like to tell tales about working for the Steinbergs and what he learned as executive VP of Trizec. Later he became an independent developer and builder. Along the way he acquired some wealth. As a volunteer, he helped build the new Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, “on time and under budget,” he told us.

  It was only after Mordecai became a friend of Jack’s wife, Doris Giller, that the two men reconnected.

  * * *

  I HAD FIRST met Doris near the end of the seve
nties in the Roof Lounge of the Park Plaza Hotel. She was at that time entertainment editor at the Montreal Star, a fast-talking, opinionated, hard-drinking, hard-swearing buddy of Jack McClelland’s. She could match him for every “fuck” he tossed at her. She was also curvaceous, strikingly beautiful, flamboyant, a chain-smoking wonder of a woman who told funny stories and insisted that Canada needed less mealy-mouthed book reviewers. Jack McClelland, of course, agreed with her. Doris Giller and Jack Rabinovitch moved to Toronto in the mid-eighties and I met her again when she was assistant books editor at the Toronto Star. She was impatient with much of what she considered “the Toronto elite.” She had an unfailing nose for bullshit.

  Doris was the love of Jack’s life. They were inseparable. They had big parties and long sun-drenched holidays, went dancing, frequented the clubs, read books together. Doris died in 1993 and Jack never stopped mourning. The Giller Prize was to honour her memory. Jack first tried the idea on Mordecai at Woody’s on Bishop Street in Montreal. Woody’s used to be one of Montreal’s famous pubs, a dark room with wooden seats in narrow booths, a hangout for writers and other creative types. Though he was not enamoured of literary prizes, Mordecai liked this idea because he had been very fond of Doris and shared her discerning nose for the “fraudulent.” That’s why he agreed to be one of the judges. For the first year of the awards, Mordecai was joined by Alice Munro and literary critic and university professor David Staines.

  The Giller Prize is awarded to the best Canadian fiction work published in English the previous year. The prize, then, was $25,000.I The first Giller evening, Doris’s friend Joey Slinger was the MC. Jack, in his tuxedo, looked splendid, as did everyone else—writers, editors, booksellers, many of whom had never worn a tux or a long dress until that night. Yet despite the formal wear, the party was, somehow, less formal and more relaxed than other literary get-togethers because Jack, smiling, welcoming, easygoing in a great celebratory mood, put all of us at ease.