Generally speaking, there are only three Jewish narratives with commercially viable audiences in North American literature and film: Holocaust victim/survivor, Israeli pioneer and secular, even irreligious urban intellectual.  The highest accomplishments of Jewish literature in this corner of the Diaspora have tended to come from the exploration of the space between these three poles (not only because central to the Jewish dilemma is, inevitably, some kind of Pole). 

America’s greatest living Jewish writer, Philip Roth, has mined this space terrifically in works like “Eli, the Fanatic”, Operation Shylock, The Plot Against America and, most explosively, in the climactic scenes of Portnoy’s Complaint, wherein the thoroughly lapsed and sinful Alexander Portnoy, perverted by the Diaspora and an unhealthy obsession with shikses, makes a failed attempt to rape an Israeli army veteran and kibbutznik named Naomi.  Nevertheless, the three-point literary ghetto for Jewish protagonists remains a discursive space limited by secularity: Neither the stoic symbol of suffering, nor the brave tamer of wild Arabs, nor the wise-cracking liberal literati have to do with anything necessarily or essentially religious.  One of the fundamental ironies of recent Jewish history is that only after the defeat of Hitler does ‘Jew’ become accepted as a primarily racial (or, to be polite about it, ethnic) signifier rather than a religious one.

For Montréal author B. Glen Rotchin to choose as his protagonist a religious, Orthodox Jew with ambivalent feelings about Israel was a brave decision both politically and aesthetically.  Like Roth’s Operation Shylock, Rotchin’s outstanding first novel, The Rent Collector, works with the Diaspora as a physical-spiritual place, a real geography in itself rather than an absence thereof.  Telling both the story of Gershon Stein, a rent collector and building manager in the garment district, as well as of the rise and fall of the Montréal garment industry, Rotchin’s narrative is delightfully ambiguous as to which story acts as background: The garment industry itself becomes a protagonist, and one that holds the fate of Montréal’s Jews in its hands.  The successes and failures of Gershon and the industry are so intertwined and reflected in each other that one of Rotchin’s most beautiful passages echoes through nearly every paragraph of his novel:  “Why had the Jews built the clothing business?  Why not the Italians or the Greeks who’d also made mass migrations during the same century?  What was the reason for the Jewish fascination and expertise with fabric? […] Fabric facilitated two central Jewish pastimes: searching for greener pastures and making quick escapes.” [page 73]

Like the industry in which he works – the industry that has made his family and his community – Gershon finds himself at a crossroads, faced with challenges that, because of his propensity for self-doubt and inaction, he may not be able to meet.  When his father falls ill, Gershon tries to gather enough Jews in his building to form a minyan – “Theten righteous men… to form a quorum for prayer” [page 185] – so that his father needn’t leave the building.  Gershon’s attempt to stake a religious space on industrial further raises the question of what defines Jewish survival.

Rotchin’s prose is such richly woven stuff that one has to adjust one’s normal reading speed in order not to miss the myriad religious and historical metaphors and allusions knotted into the work.  With this enormously important first novel, Rotchin has accomplished what another Canadian author, Yann Martel, set out to do with his Life of Pi: to outline the incredible beauty of religious mystery and the profundity of religious experience.

For all the new ground it breaks, The Rent Collector also recycles tired old stereotypes about the Québecois, and fits very comfortably into a long, mutual tradition of holding Jewish and French-Canadian interests in Québec generally, and Montréal specifically, to be hostile and contradictory.  Given that Rotchin brings such intimacy and pathos to his explanations of Jewish behaviour as stemming from the natural fears of a minority afraid of being lost in a larger, hostile cultural body, it would have been refreshing for that understanding to have been extended to the Québecois, who are beholden to many of the same group anxieties.  Surely Gershon’s meditation on the Jewish eruv – a physical cordon surrounding a community of Orthodox Jews in order to facilitate life on the shabat – relates as well to the language laws and culture protectionism of French-speakers:

Gershon decided that the eruv walls were like so many structures that defined a person’s life, imposed and self-imposed limitations of sentiment and behaviour.  Barriers of the mind and heart that blocked views, stopping hands on one side from reaching across to hands on the other.  But such walls also bounded communities to their kin, families to their brethren and individuals to their sense of meaning and purpose.  The principal task of every person was to build their own eruv. [page 127]

Nevertheless, The Rent Collector is an outstandingly unique, important and engaging novel that marks the arrival of a serious new Canadian talent.  The ‘imposed and self-imposed limitations’ excluding religious Judaism from accessible, literary meditation have been lifted, and, in this case, that’s a very good thing.

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