Once a month, under the pen of writers from Quebec, Le Devoir de literature offers to revisit in the light of current events the works of the ancient and recent history of Quebec literature. Discoveries? Proofreading? Different look? A choice. An initiative of the Académie des lettres du Québec in collaboration with The duty.
Recent debates around cultural appropriation or the prohibition of certain words encourage reflection on the question of otherness. Now, isn’t it the very essence of literature to be interested in difference, in the Other, in the stranger? What about today, for a writer, if he chooses to explore a world different from his home community?
There are, however, many precedents. Let us think of Homer or Borges, who did not hesitate to put people and characters from abroad into stories. Closer to home, think of the Montreal poet AM Klein, who, in his collection The Rocking Chair (1948), describes his French-Canadian neighbor with empathy and delicacy. Think of Monique Proulx’s most recent novel, Take away the night (Boréal, 2022), which depicts a young itinerant fleeing his Hasidic community to live in the “fresh world”, as he says in the new language he must forge. In this novel, Monique Proulx shows great tenderness for her characters and for their aspirations to freedom, a desire that will not go without difficulty.
However, in 1954 already, our link to the Jewish community had been questioned in the novel Aaron, by the writer Yves Thériault (1915-1983). Thériault produced, as we know, an abundant and diversified body of work, made up of screenplays, radio and theatrical texts, dramas, novels, above all. It aroused critical interest and was a resounding success. The author has also won the Governor General’s and France-Quebec awards for another of his novels, Ashini, which has seen several reissues. Thériault also received the David Prize for his body of work in 1979.
Thériault’s interest in other cultures and other minorities never wavered, and he treated them with kindness and respect. Several texts by Yves Thériault deal with Aboriginal people. The novel Agagukwhose action takes place in an Inuit environment, which has been translated into several languages and has been read by several generations of readers, remains to this day his most famous book.
What emerges from reading is an attention to human adventure treated in a romantic way. Thus the author will say: “I did not want to write anything other than a novel of the Great North by writing Agaguk. Those who wanted to see in it an indictment or an analogy of arctic life are all wrong,” reads the back cover of the Last Havre edition. And here thatAaron features a drama set in the Jewish community of Montreal.
The old man and the child
Aaron is named after its main character. Aaron is the grandson of Moishe, who went through the vicissitudes of war in Europe, the pogroms, the Shoah, exile to the United States (San Francisco), before settling in Montreal. Aaron’s parents, Sarah and David, died prematurely; Moishe is now responsible for his grandson. Both live in a small, dilapidated apartment near Saint-Urbain Street, one of the main axes of Montreal immigration.
The patriarch earns his bread by doing work for other tailors or, more generally, in the clothing industry. Aaron and Moishe live frugally. The neighborhood is made up of Poles, Germans, English and French Canadians. The days pass to the rhythm of work and the precepts of the Torah. Aaron receives a religious and strict upbringing, which he accepts quite well as a child. The Law punctuates the days. Both speak Yiddish at home, and the bar mitzvah ceremony, by which he becomes of age and acquires “the right to be a man”, an adult recognized by his community, marks a defining moment in his life. .
However, as he got older, Aaron drifted further and further away from his grandfather’s teaching. The teenager doubts more and more and distances himself from Moishe. He will know love and will be confronted with racism. The shock will come from a French Canadian, Léon Lemieux, who one day will treat him as “damned disgusting Jew”.
The intergenerational conflict escalates over the pages, as Aaron grows up and desires power and wealth. Aaron will eventually change his name to rise socially and fit into the very life of “Gentiles”, that is, non-Jews. He will leave town. Moishe will be devastated and will find himself alone facing death, at the end of the novel: “Even the life of the body slowly left the gaze which became dull. »
The feeling of betrayal felt by the grandfather is often treated in many North American Jewish writings. We see it in the early novels of Mordecai Richler, for example. The anglicization of names is also a widespread phenomenon, which marks a gap, if not a radical break, with the community of origin. This was the case for French Canadians who emigrated to the United States; the case also for the poet Irving Layton, whose original name was Lazarovitch.
Aaron illustrates the eternal conflict between tradition and modernity, between the Old and the New World, and it shows a complex reality. Beyond the Jewish community, it tells the drama of a broken continuity. Thus, Moishe: “He had lost the wife of this son David and the only thing left to him was this grandson with the big deep eyes, the nervous speech and the immense emotions. »
Live, go, understand
Aaron is a convincing and uncompromising novel, in which the author keeps the reader spellbound less by the events told than by the psychological complexity of the two protagonists and the perspectives offered to them through the fiction. Yves Thériault does not judge his characters, letting them live their drama. From the opening, he places the old man and the child in the geographical setting of the novel: the avenue des Pins, the urban effervescence, the horns, “the purring of thousands of cars”.
Moishe recites “the great truths handed down from generation to generation”. If the old man seems austere, very quickly we feel his tenderness for the child. From the ancestor’s point of view, his people are falling apart. Thus, the image of the pious Jew is deconstructed to give us access to the human drama of the grandfather. Likewise, the young Aaron will be attracted, for a time, by the great certainties of Judaism, before questioning the tradition and wanting to leave the community to live his life.
Thériault’s novel invites us to a real exercise in understanding, and its reading remains, even today, when the communities should strive to understand each other, since we live side by side, in the same space. Thériault does not evade the problem of the ostracism from which the Jews suffered on the part of certain actors of the French-Canadian community, while situating the problem on a more intimate scale. The novel allows the non-Jewish reader to enter an unknown world: it gives access to another scheme of thought.
Some may find the character of the grandfather somewhat caricatural, but the description that is given reflects the vision that we had at the time of the Orthodox Jewish community. Since the 1950s, however, our view of the community has been refined, in particular thanks to the work of Pierre Anctil, which is still in progress. The character of Moishe belongs to the Orthodox Jewish community. Other waves of migration have since shifted our gaze on this community, which is much more heterogeneous than we thought. Although dependent on the vision that French-Canadian society had of his time, Thériault goes beyond stereotypes by bringing the characters into the intimacy.
As Naïm Kattan wrote in his preface to the new 2003 edition: “The universe he depicts is that of the Other and it is admirable and surprising that he grasped it so well and so powerfully rendered. Further on, he will say: Aaron is a novel that is part of the literary history of French Canada, I would even say in its social history, and which has lost none of its force today. The confrontation it exposes is permanent and is still taking place before our eyes in other skies and within other religions. There is no better way to formulate the problems facing contemporary societies.
Some 70 years later, what about this novel when Quebec has changed profoundly and immigration has become an issue in the evolution of Quebec society? According to Pierre Anctil, whose research has focused on the Jewish community for 40 years, the book reflects the vision of the time, which has long since ceased. But the intuition of a possible openness present in Thériault holds promise for the future.
Since the 1950s, with the intellectuals André Laurendeau and Naïm Kattan, in particular, reconciliations and occasional encounters have taken place, books have appeared; literature often paves the way for a rapprochement between communities. Anctil’s work clearly shows the contribution of the Jewish community to Quebec’s social and cultural life.
That said, we can just as well read Aaron for the sole pleasure of reading a good novel that takes us into a world that is not well known… by non-Jews, let’s not forget.