Page 10-Thc Canadian Jewish News, Thursday, June 5, 1986
M-T
nion
^-Relationship) of Canada an hag been my contribution^^
SHELDON KIRSHNER
TORONTO - —
Forty eight year$ ago come July, a young, frightened Jewish reffigee from Vienna who would one day be the vice-president of a Canadian university and a respected writer got off a boat in Dover. England..
It never occurred to Henry Kreisel, then 16, that Canadai would become his home. "Canada meint nothlrig to ihe," he recalled one recent sunny afternoon. "It was nothing but a big red splash on the map. I knew then that,, for Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism, Canada was an impossible country to get into. To me, Canada was really terra incognita."
Kreisel, whose novels and .short stories have been translated into seveifal European languages, and are on university and high school courses, couldn't have even guessed th^t he would be in Canada within two years of sighting the famous white cliffs of Dover,
It all happened because Britain declared Kreisel an enemy alien in May of 194Q; He had been granted sanctuary in Britain as a -'refugee from Nazi oppression." But by the spring of 1940. when the fear of a Cerman invasion was uppermost in the minds of British oifficials^ parainoia set in and innoceiit Germanic Jews like Kreisel were branded enemies of the state.
In that year, Kreisel and a group of enemy aliens were shipped off to Canada and.interned in labor camps in Quebec and New Brunswick.
Released in the aummn of 1941, he entered Toronto's Harbord CoUeg iate. On the strength of his marks in senior matriculation exams, he won a 4-year scholarship to the University of Toronto. He studied English literature, leading his class for four years and winning 11 major scholarships. After completing his MA degree, Kreisel joined the English department of the University of Alberta.
A.M. Klein
a.
showedme
it was possible''
A year later, in 1948, he published his first no\e\iThe Rich Man. He completed his PhD in 1954 and returned to the University of Alberta. By 1959, he was made a full professor. Two years later, he was chosen to head its department of English, only the second jew in Canada to reach this academic sununit. In 1964f he published Uie B^rraya/, his second ■novel.
Meanwhile^ hewas producing a steady stream of scholarly articles on literature and culture and contributing plays to the CBC. In 1970, he was appointed vice- president of the university. Ki-eiselsays he had a good chance to succeed Max Wyman, a Jew, as president. But, having had enough of administrative duties, and longing to get back to teaching and writing, he declined to be a candidate for'Wyman's job.
Kreisel does not regret his decision. By turning his back on the prestige of a university presidency, he found ihc lime to y/hie The Almost Meeting, acollectibn of short stories inspired by two vain attempts to rneet the reclusive Montreal novelist and poet, A.M. Kleiii.
Kreisel, who regards himself as a writer who bridges the disparate worlds of Europe and Canada, says, -'Klein showed me that it was possible to.use within a Canadian context one's total experiience, that I didn't have to write in , some artificial way abouta Canadian topic. Hie became one of my great culture heroes, .because he shovi'ed me that you could use your own tradition as a writer." He had a very important: psychological impact on me.'' ,
Born in Vienna, of East European parents, Kreisel was raised in the Leopoldstadt neighborhood of that sophisticated city. "My entire family spoke Yiddish. My mother arid my father, who were from Poland and Romania, used to speak German toeach btheir and we spoke German to my grandmother. But she spoke Yiddish to us, and I knew Yiddish from the Very beginning. I was surrounded by Eastern European Yiddish culture. I don't come from an assimilated family but from a very strong Yiddish family and my roots emotionally go back to the shtetl."
Kreisel, a man of soft, kindly appearance, studied in acheder for many years. **I hiad a fairly strong traditional Jewish education, just short of a yeshiva."
Henry Kreisel as a teenager.
Although nearly five decades have elapsed since the Anschluss, Austria's incorporation into Germany, Kreis^el remembers very well the fear that it triggered in the Jewish community. "When Hitler took over Austria, there was no period of grace. The full fury Of theanti-semitic attacks begain. literally, the day af^er the German armies came in.' It was a very traumatic experience because the Austrian population moved very strongly over to Hitler. The endemic anti-semitism burst into flames. We were physically ; attacked in school and this was a terrible shock, because here were people We thought were our friends, boys who had been with us for 10 -years." --■ /
"It was clear to the Austrian JeWs, from the beginning, that there was no hope," he adds. "But we were lucky. My mother had relatives in England. She had a niece there, and her family immediately began to work to get us out."
Six months after Kreisel's flight from Vienna, Kurt, his brother (now a wealthy developer in the U.S.). emigrated. Two months before the outbreak of World War. II, his parents, after a number of harrowing experiences,'came to Britain.
Kreisel began writing, in English, while art apprentice worker in a clothing factory in Leeds, where his parents evennially settled. After he was ihterned. he recorded the event ina diary. Internment deprived him of his freedom, but also exfXDsed him to a welter of new ideas, given the inmates' eclectic backgrounds. ;.
From his early Toronto days, knowing he would never return to Austria, he wanted to be a writer in English.
"I knew I would not go back under any circumstances. I cut that off, I kjiew that I wanted to live my life in Canada, and for pi5ychok)gk:al, emotional reasons also^I wanted to shed that other life. I didn't, as some people, turn against the German language. I felt: why should they take Goethe and Schiller away ft-om me.
n't want
to get lost in nostalgia
"On the other hand, I wanted to integrate myself into a living culture and not get lost in nostalgia."
Not everyone could understand Kreisel's desire to study English literature. "Most people thought I was rather mad to do it. Whoever heard of someone studying English around College and Sjjadiha, where I lived? I was asked: 'What kind of a mishagas is that, studying English? What are you going to do with that?' As you know, universities had not hired anyone for years at thiat time. And they certainly never hired Jews."
kreisel's parents couldn't understand either. "I kept getting letters saying why don't you study law or medicine or accounting, and I would hive to defend myself and say this is what I wanito do.".;:; ■/
A few years after the-war, Kfeisiel, hearing that university -teaching jobs were available, approached his advisor at the University of Toronto and asked him whether he could recommend
hirn for a position. He wanted to get married and he needed the money.
Despite his Jewish background, he got the job. . And he has remained at the University of Alber-. ta, in Edmonton, ever since, teaching m the department of comparative literature today. In addition.to teaching, which he enjoys greatly, he has been president of a wide variety of organizations, including the Association of Canadian University Teachers of English, For a 3-year period, he served on the Governor-General's Award jury for literature.
A former member of the University of Alberta's board of governors. Kreisel. in his capacity as a writer, is particulariy interested in the concepts of exile and alienation. Indeed, he wrote his 500-page PhD on writers who had been through siich wrenching experiences — Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. "I was interested in the topic because, in a sense, that would tell me something about myself. I mean I was, in one way, an exile," ■ :
Not surprisingly, his two novels deal with these themes. The Rich Man, for example, tells the story of Jacob Grossman, an elder presser in a garment factory who visits the family he left behind in Europe: Jacob impresses his relatives as a wealthy man by their standards. Biit when a desperate situation forces them to ask for financial help, the truth comes out. Jacob returns to Toronto shaken, unhappy, and expoised for the poor man he really,.is. ■
"My novels are not autobiographical in any full sense," he explains, but they make use of the European experience and they make use of the Canadian experience. Looking at my own work, I think writing about this relation^ ship of Canada and Europe has been my contribution."
Kreisel's most recent work. Another Country (NeWest Press, $9.95), was published last year, and contains his uncollected writings. It includes excerpts from his internment diary, some early poems and stories, personal essays and a selection of his letters to his wife Esther and his editor.!
Kreisel, who has been considerably influenced by Writers like Manny Kafka, Hemingway, Tolstoy and Faulkner, is very discriminating about what he publishes. "I don't publish everything I write. There are major pieces, consisting of about 1,000 pages of material, that I haven't published."
He doubts whether these writings will ever see
Henry Kreisel
the light of day. As he puts it: "To some extent, I'm remote from.that'materiail now;"
When he was writing The Betrayal, he recalls, he eliminated several hundred pages from the manuscript. "I can be very ruthless," he says.
Kreisel, whose work has been reprinted in Best American Short Stories, The Oxford Anthology of Canadian Literature and The Spice Bo.x: An Anthology of Jewish Canadian Writing, says it is very possible that he will produce a third novel. "I'm always toying around with ideas," he observes.
Usually, he mulls over ideas for a long time. But once he knows what he wants to do. he writes relatively quickly.
Henry Kreisel, who describes hiniself as a Jew with "a very strong Jewish consciousness.'' doesn't .seem to mind thiat he has failed to achieve the celebrity status of a Mordechai Richler or a Margaret Atwood.
A reflective man, he takes solace from the fact that, unlike the majority of writers, a//his books are still in prirtt and are being read by a new generation of Canadians.
Says Kreisel, "This gives me great satisfaction."
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I Camp Ogama cabinm I
are you now r
By
ELAINE KAHN
. My husband spent 10 idyllic years at summer camp, both as a camper and a counselor. Camp anecdotes are his equivalent of war stories and I'm pretty bored with them by now, but our children . remain enthralled and anxious to follow in , his footsteps. They have already memorized all the details of all his camp pranks.
With me, it's a slightly different story. ■ I was packed off to camp at age 11, kicking and screaming, sent "for your own gcxxi" on the advice of one of my.mother's well-meaning friends worried over my . retarded social development.
On the advice of that same friend., my dufflebag contained" the shleppiest, dowdiest items iiiy mother could find: "shrunken blankets my family had used on the farm when they first came from Germany, ratty little kerchiefs for my Hair, a faded cotton swimsuit with a little,skirt and. the greatest treasure, a separate bar,, of soap to wash my hair with.
My cahinmates, bless them, had fancy straw .suntonnetS;. the latest stretch bikinis, ; fluffy new Hudson's Bay blankets. gor-geous Shabbat whites, guitars — even, in one. case, a mink! The idea of that mink still bothers mc — but 1 wouldn't have minded some shampoo.
VVe arrived in the middle of a July i heat wave. The routine medical check on arrival showed I had a high fever — the camp nur.se attributed this to the weather. Two days later I. was confined to the infirmary, crying for my mother and listening to the boy in the next room hack his way through pneumonia for a
day and night before he was rushed to hospital.
All the giris in my cabin sent me get \y:ell . notes, which I kept until a few years ago. Still I question the humanity of the counselor who.forced: kids who didn't ■ know me from borscht to sit inside in beautiful weather and do that, when they should have been out falling off horses and getting rof)e bums at archery, like I did upon my release from the infirmary a couple of days later. --
I've always wondered whether it was the same counselor who told a mentally handicapped girl in the cabin that, if she continued to refuse to go swimming because . she had her period, the counselor would announce her reason to all the boys in the camp.
My other counselor, however, was a gem. She took time to talk me through the new things — like communal showers. She took me for long walks, she didn't mind that 1 couldn't work up any enthusiasm for anything, least of all the upcoming athletics day. '■'.[.'■':■
And then she was fired. Actually, first I became the first person in the history of the camp to go home after lOdaysbecau.se of homesickness and then, in keeping with the prevailing jungle morality, she was '\ fired. ,
I've often wondered what became of her and the girls in my cabin. The mystery of Camp Ogama. If you were there and 11 in 1964 and have vague memories of a miserable c^binmate Who never quite fit in and may not havereal-: ly wanted to, drop me a line. Possibly we've all changed for. the better.
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