Earth and High Heaven (2 page)

so long as thousands of helpless men, women and children are suffering intolerable persecutions and abuse in Germany, or being herded like cattle from one already crowded European country to another, while we continue to slam our door and refuse them admission, there will be little reason for anyone to think better of us. Beyond certain material contributions, Canada has done little or nothing for humanity as a whole. We merely exist, harming no one, and doing no one any good either. It is a record of mediocrity.

The Nazis jeer at us, say we make a great show of equality of race and creed, and criticize them for not wanting their Jews, while in actual fact we don't want them either.

Graham not only wrote to criticize this status quo, she acted on her principals. In 1934, upon arriving in Montreal, she worked for the Montreal Committee on Refugees (Cameron 155). Her activism and commentary is striking when set against the impact of anti-Semitism and the European refugee crisis on Canada in the 1930s and '40s. Like
The New York Times
' wartime record, Canada's official response to the dire need of refugees is a black mark on its history. Popular recognition of this fact was raised by the publication in 1982 of
None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933–1948
, by Harold Troper and Irving Abella.
None is Too Many
might be read alongside
Earth and High Heaven
, as it recounts the response by the Canadian government, press and clergy to events in Europe, and gives a clear sense of how anti-Semitism, the lack of influence among Canadian Jews, and the political machinations of federal and provincial leaders caused Canada to hold one of the worst records of response to German atrocity and the refugees it produced. Much of the blame for this response can be placed on F.C. Blair, who oversaw the Immigration Branch of the Department of Mines and Resources. Prime Minister Mackenzie King proved himself to be vacillating, and ultimately self-serving in response to calls for a more generous approach to the crisis. And certain provincial figures — in particular King's Liberal lieutenants in Quebec — repeatedly warned that their home populations would grow restive if Jewish immigration was increased.
None is Too Many
describes the immediate prewar atmosphere this way:

The Canadian government's success in withstanding pressure from pro-refugee groups, both Jewish and non-Jewish, was virtually complete. To the very end Blair was even proud of his achievements... . Thus, the unyielding opposition of certain key officials, the depression, the general apathy in English Canada, the outright hostility of French Canada, the prime minister's concern for votes and the overlay of anti-Semitism that dominated official Ottawa combined to insure that no more than a mere handful of Jewish refugees would find a home in Canada. (66)

By 1940, Troper and Abella add, “all the holes had been plugged; almost no refugees were gaining entry into the Dominion even if on their way elsewhere” (71).

Refugees have only a shadowy presence in
Earth and High Heaven
. They pop up, attracting comment, in gatherings of otherwise “native” Canadians. And when Marc Reiser's name is mentioned at the Drake's home, Erica's mother remarks, “His name sounded foreign so I suppose he's a refugee” (21). The word refugee, in this usage, is among the tactics of euphemism and evasion that Erica comes to hate in her parents' behaviour, since it is undoubtedly code for Jew. Still, just as
Earth and High Heaven
is not a book about the Holocaust, neither is it a novel about Canada's abandonment of Jewish refugees to the Nazis. This latter narrative was itself a new one for Canadians to absorb, and it might be fair to argue that the national consciousness only accepted the facts of the matter with the appearance of
None is Too Many
.

During the war, and in the immediate postwar years, discussions of the plight of Jewish refugees were found in the Yiddish and English-language Jewish press. A notable early literary exception in the mainstream culture is a pair of short stories by Mavis Gallant, which appeared in the December 1944 edition of
Preview
, a magazine published by a coterie of Montreal writers. In “Good Morning and Goodbye,” Gallant, making use of an early version of her trademark succinct style, describes the inner life of a young Jewish experience in Canada:

In the beginning, Paul understood nothing. He could say yes and no, please and thank you. They talked to him and at him and about him, but all he could do for [an] answer was smile. Twice, he had tried to speak of himself. The first time was the most important. He told them that he had changed his name. “Paul, now,” he said. It had taken all his strength and courage. Then he had spoken once more because he wanted to share and explain a great burden which was so overwhelmingly his own. He showed them his passport. There was a large red “J” stamped on each page. (1)

In 1948 Henry Kreisel's
The Rich Man
would be the next important expression of the Jewish experience in Canadian literature. Graham was clearly concerned about the refugee problem, but
Earth and High Heaven
is a wartime narrative about the Canadian scene, at a time when there were, thanks in part to F.C. Blair, very few refugees to meet.

Gallant's stories and Graham's novel must be viewed as early contributions to writing about the Jewish experience in Canada. They are breakthroughs in terms of subject matter and sensitivity to Jewish themes, predating Kreisel's
The Rich Man
and A.M. Klein's ground-breaking 1951 novel,
The Second Scroll
. Klein's novel has acquired an archetypal role in Canadian Jewish literature, as a dynamic and experimental model for later works. But upon publication, and for a decades afterward, it enjoyed none of the popular success of
Earth and High Heaven
. (Was Klein's novel, as Jackie Mason might say, too Jewish?) And when Klein himself won the Governor General's Award in 1949, it was for his collection
The Rocking Chair and Other Poems
, which excludes Klein's usual wealth of Jewish reference, and concentrates instead on iconic symbols of Canadian culture at mid-century, such as the prairie grain elevator and the frigidaire. It seems ironic today that Klein was rewarded for writing in his most native vein, while Graham — a non-Jew from the Canadian literary and social establishment — was lauded for her effort to humanize Jews and argue against the hypocrisies of wartime stereotypes. The circumstances that accounted for these authorial roles have been swept away with the increasingly important role of Jews in public life, the rise of an open and thorough discussion of the Holocaust, and, as well, with the rise since the 1970s of a Canadian willingness to view the nation in multicultural terms. Between 1944 and 2004 a Canadian Jewish literature in English joined the broader tradition, and Graham's novel reads today like a shadowtext, or countertext to the now established tradition of Canadian Jewish writing in English. Considering the absolute absence of such a tradition when
Earth and High Heaven
appeared, and the official atmosphere in wartime Canada with regard to Jews as citizens, Graham's novel can be characterized as a fulcrum, a wedge placed against the Canadian mainstream that forced it to regard itself with some suspicion.

When Eli Mandel wrote in 1960 to introduce
Earth and High Heaven
as the thirteenth volume in McClelland & Stewart's New Canadian Library, he praised the novel for offering a reflection of “contemporary events.” Among these he included Swastika paintings, synagogue bombings, all the dreadful accompaniments of renewed Nazi activity, and our own continual snickering about class, position, and race ... (v). Four decades after Mandel considered the novel's relevance, readers may feel that this is part of the contemporary context that makes
Earth and High Heaven
worth reading. For those with an interest in recognizing the variety and particularity of Canadian literature,
Earth and High Heaven
contributes to our understanding of a time of great malevolence and strangeness, following which Canadian Jews would begin to seek new cultural and social roles, while asserting their own voice as part of the country's literary tradition.

Norman Ravvin
Montreal, July 2003

FOR FURTHER READING

Abella, Irving and Harold Troper.
None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933–1948
. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1982.

Cameron, Elspeth. “The Wrong Time and the Wrong Place: Gwethalyn Graham, 1913–1965.
Great Dames
. Ed. E. Cameron et al. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. 145–64.

Frankel, Max. “Turning Away from the Holocaust.”
The New York Times
. November 14, 2001. 10.

Gallant, Mavis. “Good Morning and Goodbye.”
Preview
, December, 1944. 1–3.

—-. “Three Brick Walls.”
Preview
, December, 1944. 4–6.

Graham, Gwethalyn.
Earth and High Heaven
. New York: J.B. Lippincott, 1944.

—-. “Economics of Refugees.”
Saturday Night
, Nov. 18, 1938. 8.

—-.
Swiss Sonata
. London: Jonathan Cape, 1938.

Kreisel, Henry.
The Betrayal
. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1964.

—-.
The Rich Man
. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1948.

Mandel, Eli. “Introduction.”
Earth and High Heaven
by Gwethalyn Graham. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1960. v–xi. 2.

I

One of the questions they were sometimes asked was where and how they had met, for Marc Reiser was a Jew, originally from a small town in northern Ontario, and from 1933 until he went overseas in September, 1942, a junior partner in the law firm of Maresch and Aaronson in Montreal, and Erica Drake was a Gentile, one of the Westmount Drakes. Montreal society is divided roughly into three categories labeled “French,” “English,” and “Jewish,” and there is not much coming and going between them, particularly between the Jews and either of the other two groups; for although, as a last resort, French and English can be united under the heading “Gentile,” such an alliance merely serves to isolate the Jews more than ever.

Hampered by interreligious distinctions to start with, relations between the French, English, and Jews of Montreal are still further complicated by the fact that all three groups suffer from an inferiority complex — the French because they are a minority in Canada, the English because they are a minority in Quebec, and the Jews because they are a minority everywhere.

Thus it was improbable that Marc Reiser and Erica Drake should meet, and still more improbable that, if by some coincidence they did, that meeting should in any way affect the course of their lives.

Leopold Reiser, Marc's father, had emigrated from Austria to Canada in 1907 and owned a small planing mill in Manchester, Ontario, on the fringe of the mining country five hundred miles away; Charles Sickert Drake, Erica's father, was president of the Drake Importing Company, a business founded by his great-grandfather which dealt principally in sugar, rum, and molasses from the West Indies. Marc was five years older than Erica; when she was beginning her first term at Miss Maxwell's School for Girls in Montreal, he was starting his freshman year at a university in a town about halfway between Manchester and Montreal. When he entered law school four years later, the original distance of five hundred miles had shortened to nothing; on the night of her coming-out party at the Ritz, he was within three blocks of her, sitting in his room in a bleak boardinghouse for Jewish students, hunting down the case of Carmichael vs. Smith, English Law Reports, 1905. They must have passed in the street or sat in the same theatre or the same concert hall more than once, yet the chances of their ever really knowing each other were as remote as ever, and it was not until ten years later, when Erica was twenty-eight and Marc thirty-three, that they finally met at a cocktail party given by the Drakes in their house up in Westmount.

During those ten years their lives had ceased to run parallel; some time or other, Erica had jumped the track on which most people she knew traveled from birth to death, and was following a line of her own which curved steadily nearer his. When she was twenty-one, her fiancé had been killed in a motor accident, two weeks before she was to be married; not long after, she awoke to the realization that her father's income had greatly shrunk as a result of the depression and that it would probably be a long time before she would fall in love again. She got a job as a reporter on the society page of the Montreal Post and dropped, overnight, from the class which is written about to the class which does the writing. It took people quite a while to get used to the change. In the beginning, there was no way of knowing whether she had been invited to a social affair in the ordinary way, or whether she was merely there on business, but as time went on, it was more often for the second reason, less and less often for the first. When, at the end of three years, she became Editor of the Woman's Section, she had ceased to be one of the Drakes of Westmount and was simply Erica Drake of the Post, not only in the minds of others, but in her own mind as well. She had no desire to get back on the track again, but it was not until the war broke out that she realized how far it lay behind her.

In June, 1942, she met Marc Reiser.

None of the Drakes had ever seen him before; he was brought to their cocktail party by René de Sevigny, whose sister had married Anthony Drake, Erica's older brother, two months before he had gone overseas with the R.C.A.F.

Almost everyone else had arrived by the time René and Marc got there. Having caught Erica's mother on her way to the kitchen, where the Drakes' one remaining servant was having trouble with the hot canapés, René had introduced Marc, then got him a drink and went off in search of Erica, leaving Marc with no one to talk to.

He found himself all alone out in the middle of the Drakes' long, light-walled drawing-room, surrounded by twenty or thirty men and women, none of whom he knew and all of whom appeared to know each other, with René's empty cocktail glass in one hand and his own, still half full, in the other. At thirty-three he was still self-conscious and rather shy, and he had no idea what to do or how to do it without attracting attention, so he stayed where he was, first making an effort to appear as though he was expecting René back at any moment, and when that failed, trying to look as though he enjoyed being by himself.

He finished his drink, having made it last as long as he could, and then attempted to get his mind off himself by watching the other guests gathered in small groups all around him. When you look at people, however, they are likely to look back at you. Marc hastily shifted his eyes to the plain, neutral-colored rug which ran the full length of the room, transferred one of the glasses to the other hand so that he could get at his cigarettes, and then realized that he needed both hands to strike a match. He put the package of cigarettes back in his pocket and went on standing, feeling more lost and out of place than ever.

He had had an idea that something like this would happen, and when René had phoned to ask him to the Drakes' he had first refused, and then finally agreed to go, only because René said that he had already told Mrs. Drake that he was bringing him. Marc disliked cocktail parties, in fact all social affairs at which most of the people were likely to be strangers; if the Drakes had been Jews he would have stayed home regardless of the fact that they were expecting him, but the Drakes were not Jews and that made it more complicated.

A dark girl of about twenty suddenly turned up in front of him asking, “Aren't you George ...?” then broke off, smiled and murmured, “Sorry,” and disappeared just as Marc had thought up something in order to keep her there a little longer. There was another blank pause of indefinite duration, then a naval officer swerved, avoiding someone else and jarring Marc's arm so that he nearly dropped one of the glasses, apologized and went on.

The scene was beginning to assume the timeless and futile quality of a nightmare. He glanced at his watch and found to his amazement that it was only six minutes since René had left him, which meant that, adding the ten minutes spent in catching up with their hostess on her way to the kitchen and finding their way to this particularly ill-chosen spot in the middle of the room, they had arrived approximately a quarter of an hour ago.

What is the minimum length of time you must stay, in order not to appear rude, at a party to which, strictly speaking, you were not invited, and where it is only too obvious that no one cares in the least whether you stay or not?

“Excuse me,” said Marc, backing up and bumping into an artillery lieutenant in an effort to avoid someone who had bumped into him. He turned and said, “Excuse me,” again, and then identifying the lieutenant as a former lawyer who had been at Brockville on his O.T.C. in the same class as himself, although Marc could not remember ever having spoken to him, he said with sudden hope, “Oh, hello, how are you?”

The lieutenant looked surprised, said, “Hello,” without interest or recognition and went on talking to his friends. It did not occur to Marc until later that if, like himself, the lieutenant had happened to be out of uniform, Marc would not have recognized him either. Having been turned down cold by the only human being in the room who was even vaguely familiar, Marc abruptly made up his mind to go, only to find when he was halfway to the door that René had vanished completely and that Mrs. Drake was blocking his exit, standing in the middle of the hall talking to an elderly man in a morning coat. He would either have to wait until she moved, or until the hall filled up again so that he could get by her without being noticed. To return to the middle of the room and the lieutenant's back was unthinkable.

“... glasses, sir?”

“What?” asked Marc, jumping.

“Would you like me to take those glasses, sir?” asked the maid again.

“Yes, thanks. Thanks very much.” He put the two glasses on her tray, lit a cigarette at last, and having worked his way around the edge of the crowd, he finally reached the windows which ran almost the full length of the Drakes' drawing-room, overlooking Montreal.

The whole city lay spread out below him, enchanting in the sunlight of a late afternoon in June, mile upon mile of flat grey roofs half hidden by the light, new green of the trees; a few scattered skyscrapers, beyond the skyscrapers the long straight lines of the grain elevators down by the harbour, further up to the right the Lachine Canal, and everywhere the grey spires of churches, monasteries, and convents. Somehow, even from here, you could tell that Montreal was predominantly French, and Catholic.

“Hello, Marc,” said René's sister, Madeleine Drake. “What are you doing here all by yourself?”

“I don't know, you'd better ask your brother. How are you, Madeleine?”

“I'm fine, thanks,” she said, but she looked tired, and sat down on the window seat with a sigh of relief. She was twelve years younger than René, with fair hair and a quiet, self-contained manner; her husband had been overseas since late in January and she was expecting a baby in August.

“Where is René?”

“Out in the diningroom.”

“Oh, so that's where they all went,” said Marc. “I was wondering. Can't I get you a chair?”

“No thanks, don't bother. I can't stay long. Have you had anything to drink?”

“I had a cocktail when I came in. It's all right,” he added quickly as she made a move to get up again. “I don't drink much anyhow, and I'd much rather you stayed and talked to me.”

“You must be having an awful time,” said Madeleine sympathetically. “These things are not amusing when you don't know anyone.” Her parents had died when she was a small child and she had grown up in a convent, so that her English was more precise and less easy than her brother's. She smiled up at Marc and said, “It's a long time since you've been to see us — could you come to dinner on Tuesday next week?” “Yes, thanks, I'd love to.” “About seven?” He nodded and she asked, “Have you met any of my husband's family?”

“Just Mrs. Drake. That's a Van Gogh over the fireplace, isn't it?”

“Yes, ‘L'Arlésienne.'”

“It must be one of those German prints, it's so clear.”

From the Arlésienne his eyes moved along the line of bookcases reaching halfway up the wall, across the door, past more bookcases and around the corner to a modern oil painting of a Quebec village in winter, all sunlight and colour and with a radiance which made him think of his own Algoma Hills in Ontario. Walls, furniture, and rug were all light and neutral in tone; Marc liked their room so much that he knew he would like the Drakes when he got to know them. Apart from all the strangers clustered in groups which were constantly breaking up and re-forming as some of them drifted out into the hall and the dining room beyond, and others drifted back again, and apart from the fact that he would be stranded again with no one to talk to as soon as Madeleine left, he was beginning to feel quite at home. More at home than he had ever felt in the bleak rooming house for Jewish students where he had continued to live from a combination of inertia and indifference to his own comfort, ever since he had arrived in Montreal to go to law school thirteen years before. The rooming house was large and dusty, with high ceilings, buff walls trimmed with chocolate brown like an institution, and uncomfortable, leather-covered furniture; during the college term it was so noisy that he usually worked in his office downtown at night, and during holidays it was like a graveyard. About twice a year the place got on his nerves and he determined to do something about it, but after spending several evenings looking at other rooming houses which were worse, and apartments which were not much better and had the added disadvantage of having to be kept clean some way or other, he always gave up and went on living where he was. Now it was no longer worthwhile moving in any case, since he would be going overseas in a short time.

“It's nice to be in a house again,” he said to Madeleine. “Most of the people I know live in apartments. I was brought up in a house.”

Out in the hall, Madeleine's brother, René de Sevigny, was starting his fourth cocktail, while waiting for Erica to return from the kitchen. He was about Marc's age but looked older, with dark hair, an aquiline nose, and fine, highly arched eyebrows which gave him a slightly satanic expression. At the moment he was leaning against the staircase with his long legs crossed, staring thoughtfully into his martini and doing his best to overhear as much as possible of a conversation between two men and a woman in the doorway leading to the library. They were obviously English Canadians, not necessarily because they were speaking English, but because they had devoted most of the past quarter hour to a discussion of Quebec and the war in language extremely unflattering to French Canadians.

“I don't understand them,” said the woman, who was wearing a red hat, which, René had already decided, would have looked much better on Erica, who was several inches taller, a great deal thinner, and who had hair which was naturally blonde. Except, thought René, sighing inwardly, that Erica took no interest in hats, even very chic red hats with coq feathers; she never wore one except in winter or on the regrettably rare occasions when she went to church. “Surely they must know that the war is going to be won or lost in Europe and the Pacific, so why all this ridiculous talk about being perfectly willing to fight for Canada provided they can stay on Canadian soil?”

“Because they don't want to fight for Canada,” said the man on the right, yawning.

The man on the left was a young officer with a good-looking, but not particularly intelligent face. What he lacked in intelligence however, René realized, he made up in prejudice, and he now rendered judgment. “I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it,” he said. “Quebec knows that the war isn't going to be lost if they don't fight. But, on the other hand, if enough English Canadians make suckers of themselves and get killed, then the French who had enough sense to stay home will be that much nearer a majority when it's over.”

“Tiens,” observed René admiringly to himself. “Now why didn't I think of that? Eric!”

“Yes?”

“Wait for me.” He caught up with her just inside the drawing-room door and asked, “By the way, where's your father?”

“Upstairs in his study. He always gives up after the first half hour.”

“Have you seen Chambrun?”

“Who on earth is Chambrun?” asked Erica, taking advantage of the pause to sit on the arm of a chair for a moment. She was one of the few women René had ever seen who could wear her hair almost to her shoulders and still look smart. Seven years of working on a newspaper with erratic hours had given Erica a strong preference for tailored clothes; she wore her fine, well-made suits on all possible occasions and on some which, like the recent large, and very formal wedding of one of his innumerable cousins, to René were definitely not possible.

“He's just arrived from Mexico — escaped from France two years ago on a coal boat.”

“Why must it always be a coal boat?” inquired Erica, closing her eyes.

“He's a de Gaullist. I think he hopes to do propaganda in Quebec for the Free French.”

“What an optimist,” said Erica, and then asked hastily, “Friend of yours?”

“Well,” said René cautiously, “I've met him a couple of times.”

“Don't tell me you're committing yourself to something ...”

“Certainly not,” said René, looking amused. “Your mother knows him and said she was going to invite him today. I just thought you might have seen him around somewhere,” he added with a vague gesture which included the drawing-room, the hall, the dining room, and the library.

“Maybe he's hiding,” suggested Erica.

“Are you asleep?”

“Practically.” She opened her green eyes wide, blinked, gave her head a shake, and asked, “What does he look like?”

“Like a Michelin tire with a drooping black mustache,” answered René, after due consideration.

“Oh, there are dozens of those running in and out of the woodwork in the dining room,” said Erica. “You might go and see if one of them is your Free Frenchman — and bring me back a drink, will you, René?”

“Rye and water?”

“Yes, please. You haven't got a ‘Do Not Disturb' sign on you anywhere, have you?” He shook his head and she said sadly, “I was afraid you hadn't.”

She stood up for a moment when René had gone, looking over the room to see if everyone had drinks and someone to talk to, then collapsed into the chair with her legs straight out, and closed her eyes again.

She was aroused a minute later by her mother's voice saying, “Oh, there you are, Erica. I've hardly seen you since you came in. I'm so glad you were able to get away in time for the party, darling.”

“I have to go back to the office after dinner,” said Erica, yawning. “Special Red Cross story — they sent us the dope but the morning papers will use it as it is, so we'll have to rewrite. After that there's a Guild meeting.”

“I didn't know you'd joined the Guild,” said her mother, looking startled.

“I joined last month, as soon as they really began organizing.”

“Why?”

“Partly on general principles and partly because Pansy Prescott fired Tom Mitchell after he'd been on the Post for ten years, because he went on a five-day drunk after his wife died of TB up at Ste. Agathe.”