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PAGE 16 THE SOUTHERN ISRAELITE January 24, 1986
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by Joseph Cohen
In 1974, when the film "The
Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz'’
came to New Orleans, those of us
who knew about it had to scramble
fast to see it. It played to an empty
house. There couldn’t have been
more than six viewers the night I
saw it. The run didn’t last more
than 72 hours. Yet that movie
turned out to be an award winner—to
this day some of its scenes with
Richard Dreyfuss remain fresh and
clear in my mind—and it established
Mordecai Richler, the Canadian-
Jewish author, as a major talent.
“Duddy Kravitz” was directed
by Ted Kotcheff and he and Richler
have collaborated again to produce
one of the most entertaining and
interesting films of the 1985-86
season, “Joshua Then and Now,”
based on Richler’s recent novel of
the same name.
Richler did the screenplay, and
while the movie is sometimes slick,
glib, and, for some, earthy to the
point of offending—it’s rated R, of
course—it’s also a marvelous re
enactment of some fundamental
American-Jewish themes: the rise
out of the ghetto, making it in
America, filial devotion, breaking
away from tradition, reacting to
both coarse and subtle anti-Semitism,
coming to terms with one’s own
Jewishness, and marrying not merely
out of the faith but to the snow
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queen, the golden upper-class shicksa
who epitomizes the final success in
the stereotypic literary image of
the Jew’s effort to triumph in his
passionate love affair with America.
By and large, the movie is faithful
to the book. That is to say the
subject of both is the human condition
in the throes of abuses of power
and the vulnerability of love.
In flashbacks Joshua Shapiro
reviews his life from his young
years in St. Urbain’s Street, the
heart of the Montreal ghetto, living
‘The sources of the Jew
ish dimension in both the
movie and the novel are
obvious enough: they are
straight out of Richler’s own
experience of being reared
in the streets of Montreal’s
ghetto.’
with his parents, his father a prize
fighter and small-time hoodlum,
often away hiding out or serving
time; his mother, a free spirit, a
Jewish girl from a good family who
marries beneath herself and who,
fancying herself an actress, becomes
a strip-tease artist from which she
“graduates” into being a porno
queen. No dull trip to the movies
or kids’ games for her son at his bar
mitzva party! The few 13-year-olds
whose parents allow them to come
are treated to her performance of a
real strip-tease, while a red light
throbs off and on and the phonograph
bumps and grinds out “Snake Hips.”
On into his young manhood, we
see Joshua, through the flashbacks,
living by his wits, becoming infatuated
with the mystique of the Spanish
Civil War, turning into a writer,
discovering girls, finding a literary
mentor, being down and out and
finally up and successful in London,
and coming back home to Canada,
a famous if controversial author,
with his beautiful gentile wife, the
daughter of a Canadian senator,
and their three children. The pace
is rapid, there is a lot of humor, the
story is always engaging.
The sources of the Jewish dimen
sion in both the movie and the
novel are obvious enough: they are
straight out of Richler’s own
experience of being reared in the
streets of Montreal’s ghetto. As
rich and variegated as this experience
is, it is balanced by two equally rich
strictly non-Jewish sources that
not only influence but come to
dominate this particular work of
Richler’s.
H emingway, because of his infat ua-
tion with Spain and the Spanish
Civil War, is the writer most
frequently mentioned in the book.
However, it’s not Hemingway whose
writing informs and fleshes out
“Joshua Then and Now.” The writers
whose spirits hover over, around
and through the novel and the
movie are W.H. Auden and F.
Scott Fitzgerald, principally the
latter.
Portions of Auden’s famous poem
“Spain" are quoted in the novel.
They contribute to a sense of loss
and help to set the tone and the
mood of exploitation and desperation
that permeates the action That
exploitation and loss are Richler s
intended subjects is confirmed by
his choice of an epigraph, another
poem of Auden’s. It is his most
famous love poem which begins:
“Lay your sleeping head, my love,/
Human on my faithless arm,” a
beautifully sensitive threnody made
perverse by the poet’s well-known
aggressively destructive homo
sexuality.
Yet the mood of perversity
underlying “Joshua Then and Now”
is determined not by Auden’s homo
sexuality but by the more sinister
predatory proclivities, economic as
well as variously sexual, of F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s characters in “The Great
Gatsby” and “Tender Is The Night.”
Joshua’s wife, Pauline Hornby,
appears at first to be an updated,
amoral Daisy Buchanan though
we find out that, unlike Daisy, she
is morally responsible, capable of
love, and basically selfless. Her
friend Jane Trimble is a closer
incarnation of Daisy.
The large, flashy parties thrown
by the nouveau riche Trimbles are
comparable to Gatsby’s parties,
and Jack Trimble, like Gatsby, is a
fraud who has gone to astonishing
lengths to hide his obscure origins.
He and Gatsby even sound alike.
Indeed, much of the party dialogue
in Richler’s story authentically
imitates Fitzgerald’s characters’
speech patterns.
While “The Great Gatsby” sets
the tone and mood for “Joshua
Then and Now,” some essential
plot structures come from “Tender
Is The Night.” In that novel the
protagonist’s sexual identity is put
into question at once by his appearing
in an early scene at a beach on the
Riviera wearing a pair of black
lace-trimmed panties. The same
joke is reproduced in “Joshua Then
and Now,” though for both Dick
Diver in “Tender Is The Night”
and for Joshua the charade has
serious consequences.
At the heart of Fitzgerald's story
is the mental breakdown of Nicole
Warren, who becomes Dick Diver’s
wife. Her breakdown is occasioned
by an incestuous relationship forced
on her by her widowed father when
she was entering adolescence.
Like Nicole, Joshua’s Pauline
has a nervous breakdown also
occasioned by an early incestuous
relationship not with her father, but
with her ne’er-do-well brother who,
facing a possible 10 years in prison
for securities fraud, commits suicide.
The incest is only briefly made
explicit in the book; the movie
gives us still less than a bare hint,
but just as the guilt and sorrow of
incest dominate “Tender is The
Night,” so the same heavy burdens
explain much of the meaning of
“Joshua Then and Now.”
The movie version of Richler’s
novel has been widely praised in a
number of recent reviews in the
American Jewish Press. And so it
should be. The one thing that I
discovered — because I hadn’t read
the novel before—is that the book,
with its Canadian-Jewish strain,
written in the American grain, is
even better.