A Gift of Rags

Norman Ravvin is the author of Café des Westens (which won the Alberta
Culture New Fiction Award) and Sex, Skyscrapers, and Standard Yiddish.

Like some of Abraham Boyarsky’s earlier fiction, A Gift of Rags is set
in 1950s Quebec. Its cast of characters are survivors of the Holocaust
who gather at a hotel in the Laurentian mountains, where they try to
relax, but spend most of their time erupting with pent-up rage, shame,
and guilt. The narrative sets the saintly Zushe, a man who is not quite
what he seems, against the boorish Asher, whose past may (or may not)
hold an ugly secret. These wary enemies spar over the value of religion
in postwar society; numerous characters in A Gift of Rags hold
fiercely—even hysterically—to the belief that Judaism, in the wake
of the war’s events, has been proven a “deception that ... cost them
their families and their souls.”

This dispute has been addressed in many other works of Holocaust
fiction, and Boyarsky does not develop any radically new ways of viewing
the issue. His novel’s strength lies in its terse, filmic renderings
of locale and the changing atmosphere of a summer in the Quebec
countryside. There is a tendency, at times, toward strange language
(sunlight “slithers,” walls are “piebald”), and important
characters remain enigmatic (one survivor, for instance, is said to be
unable to read English as late as 1959).

The narrative world of A Gift of Rags is one of extremes: there are
countless emotional outbreaks, cathartic scenarios, and petty violences
committed without reason. In this, Boyarsky confronts the difficulty of
living with the Holocaust as part of one’s past. But readers new to
this material will require a larger context and further reading to
appreciate the meaning of this world of extremes. We do not come to know
either Zushe, with his religious parables, or his fiercely
anti-religious adversaries well enough to recognize what it is the
author would have us understand about this world of psychic suffering.