Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

with a minimum of authorial editorializing.
In his description of encounters from
his 1962 visit, characters and incidents that
made their way into his fiction—primarily
the 1971 novel St. Urbain's Horseman—are
given an arresting non-fictional presentation.
And in his candid description of the
contrasting influences of his family and the
non-Jewish friends who guided him to
"goyish culture," Richler explores how he
linked his own cultural and religious background
with the tradition at large. Richler
also captures the way his youthful Jewish
commitments were coloured by Hollywood,
leading him and his St. Urbain crowd to
admire, along with actual pioneers, "elite
desert fighters like Gary Cooper, Ray
Milland and Robert Preston in Beau Geste!'
Drainie's book is lacking in all such complexities,
ambiguities, and self-revelations.
We learn very little about how the writing
of My Jerusalem affected the author's sense
of herself as a writer, as a non-practicing
Jew, as a Canadian. She is quick to speak
for and sum up those she meets—Israelis
and Arabs alike—but rarely distances herself
from these judgments to consider how
her own assumptions colour her outlook.
Jewish orthodoxy is a favourite target of
Drainie's, but the reader learns nothing
from her report of "black-suited" and
"baby-making" figures who observe "obscure
family-centred rituals." Israel as a whole is
dealt with in My Jerusalem in Stereotypie
terms: Claustrophobia. ... It is a feeling all
Israelis share as they sit hunkered down on
their slim dagger of a Mediterranean coastline
. .. ." Drainie also seems to have
decided to exclude from her account any
anecdotes or information learned by way of
her partner's involvement with the international
press. A more personal look at the
way the media views and influences the
Middle East might have led Drainie to
material she felt more enthusiastic about.
Instead, we find out what it's like to buy a
Volvo in Jerusalem and how Israeli supermarkets
compare with Canadian stores.
The best chapter in Drainie's book
describes the friendships she developed
with Arab women who work in a West
Bank sewing co-operative. Here she restrains
her brooding authorial voice and lets her
acquaintances speak for themselves. Through
much of the remaining chapters of My
Jerusalem one gets the feeling that Drainie
was asking, throughout the two years she
spent in Israel, "What am I doing here?"
Richler's This Year in Jerusalem is far
more successful than Drainie's book at conveying
the most heart-breaking outcome of
the Zionist dream—its creation, in the words
of Amos Elon, of a "mirror-image of itself:
Palestinian nationalism—the longing of a
dispossessed people for their own state." By
examining his ambivalent allegiance to a
distant land and to his grandfathers' world,
Richler provides us with a compelling portrait
of himself as "a Canadian, born and
bred, brought up not only on Hillel, Rabbi
Akiba, and Rashi, but also on blizzards,
Andrew Allan's CBC Radio 'Stage' series, a
crazed Maurice Richard..."
Recurrent Themes
Sollors, Werner, ed.
The Return of Thematic Criticism. Harvard UP
$32.50
Reviewed by Roger Seamon
The Return of Thematic Criticism is a useful
reference work for anyone interested in the
concept of theme. It is composed of historical
overviews, theoretical essays and "Case
Studies" in which one learns, respectively,
about the history of theme as a literary
concept (helpful), current efforts to establish
thematology as a discipline (confusing),
and the critical consequences of thematic
approaches (mixed, as one would expect).
The essays are flanked by eighteen pages of
quotations that use the term "theme" and a
twenty page "selected" bibliography, the
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