By Rubin Friedman
Shot Rock
By Michael Tregebov
New Star Books
220 pages
Shot Rock, Michael Tregebov’s new novel is a kind of Yiddish
cultural tragedy. It deals with inevitable change as people age and find
themselves passing into the memories of the next generation, a narrative
sparked and energized by both anxieties for what will be and warm comic relief.
And at the end, it still leaves open many of the questions posed in the story
for the future to answer, a smaller perhaps more optimistic version of Tevye
the Dairy Man.
Tregebov introduces us to the main character, Blackie, and some of the
sources of his pleasures and anxieties in the first page. The curling season is
late in starting while his wife has left him. Soon his anxieties and the
reader’s are increased. Max Foxman, the wealthy president of the only Jewish
curling club in the North End of Winnipeg announces the building will be sold
to a grocery chain.
Like two stones dropped into water, the subsequent ripples move outward
to drive much of the plot forward. Another stone drops when Tino, Blackie’s son,
also moves out to live with his friends.
While the story is fiction as the author notes, “This story is a story,”
it resonates with events in the real world. The Jewish community in Winnipeg
went through a shift of its population from the North End to the South End
where newer developments of larger houses were being built in the late 1960s
and early ’70s. Thereafter, many of the city’s Jewish institutions, including
synagogues and the Jewish Community Centre followed suit.
Blackie and many of his friends, at the time of this story, would have
been in their late 40s or early 50s. They came from a generation of mostly
small business owners or employees of other Jewish business owners. Some,
through luck or ambition, had become large business owners and wealthy.
The main plot focuses on Blackie’s coterie of friends agreeing to fight
the sale of the curling rink and to take on the money and influence of the
“South Enders” led by Max Foxman.
The humour in the story comes from the quick dialogue exchanges, especially
among Blackie, Duddy, Suddy, Chickie, Oz and their advisers, two student
Trotskyists, Tino and his mentor, the wealthy non-Jewish Michael.
Duddy and Suddy interrupt a discussion with an observation that leads
into another topic before it is brought back again to what was originally being
talked about. They use odd Yiddishisms, not always correctly or spelt to be
easily understood: “Mishlockt Yiddin”; “It’s noch nila”; “Shockling his leg.”
And I have no idea what “a sol chen van” means.
The structure of the exchange becomes like an interwoven strand of DNA
rather than a straight line talk driven only by logical progression. Some of
these excursions are crass and sexist but are typical of what some Jewish males
of that milieu and background sounded like. It was very familiar to me and even
though I wince, I find it accurate and the efforts to control it, amusing.
Blackie and Oz generally represent the calmer and more rational approach
to the issues and are assisted by the two young men who help keep the group
focused on what can be done. The tension in this effort is built as each side
in the fight over the future of the building tries to counter the other’s moves
to obtain the largest number of votes.
In tandem with this is the effort of Blackie and his team to qualify for
the Brier, the curling championship. Tregebov does an excellent job of
describing each game building the tension. If they win the championship, it
will be harder to sell the building.
These plotlines are resolved by the end of the book as is the plot
concerning Blackie and his wife. Only the future of the son, Tino, is not
firmly decided by the end of the novel, but there are strong hints about
whether he will stay to study math and science or run off to Toronto to be a
poet.
While it seems that the strong and warm bonds among the original group
will withstand the shocks and strains of this exercise, only the future will
tell.
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