I read Scott Disher's account of Mordecai Richler's career (November) agreeing with some of what he wrote, disagreeing with much. But one remark went way beyond critical analysis, that in which Esther is seen as Richler's mother: the "insufficiently maternal Esther from whom he [Jake Hersh] is permanently estranged-much like Richler, who was not fond of his by-all-accounts difficult mom." I object to nothing in that except "by-all-accounts". I understand they were "permanently estranged" ("by all accounts"), I don't care whether he was "fond" or her or not, but by my "account" he was the one who was difficult and she was far more supportive (financially too) than most parents would have been of a loutish, dishevelled (a father-son trademark), scowling, sulky, sullen, opinionated, offensive, pimpled, pugnacious, miserable youth. He and I were "staff" during Passover, 1950, in Ste Agathe when his mother, Lily Rosenberg, divorced daughter of a Rabbi, was running a kosher hotel for mostly poor, mostly recent immigrants from Eastern Europe. Ste Agathe in March is cold, cold as winter, not a sign of spring; the hotel was run-down, drafty, miserable. The guests were poor enough to worry about getting their money's worth and religious enough to insist on the proprieties. Mordecai came down to serve breakfast half dressed, less than half washed, and almost literally threw the food at these poor people. Maybe Lily chastised him in the privacy of their own rooms (though I don't think there was much privacy anywhere) but I don't recall any unpleasantness from her. Frankly he deserved to have his ass kicked. This job, and the later poorly-paid jobs she worked at, paid for his departure (by all accounts) for England shortly after Rosenberg's Lakeside Inn was sold.

And Lily (or Rosie, as many of us called her) had a sense of humour probably inherited by the son. The Orthodox guests were worried by the goy (me) working in the kitchen. How could the place be kosher with such a one mixing the towels and pots and pans? How to placate them? Lily took them aside and told them my mother was Jewish, my father Christian (completely fabricated). It was heartbreaking for me who wanted to claim my Jewish heritage; so sorrowful she is that she can't bear to talk about it, says Lily. From then on, the formerly hostile glances turned to ones of pity and commiseration.

Yes, there were many comic moments (Duddy Kravitz records some of them); and yes, they make great comedy and satire, and Richler mines it well. And yes, we, our little group of students at Sir George Williams all keen on poetry and politics and fun, loved Mordy and cheered him on his way. But I, for one, still remember Lily, his mother, with affection and admiration.

Kathleen Tudor

Lockeport, N.S.

Afrocentrism's Sources

Reading Nathan Greenfield's November 1997 review of Towards Freedom: The African Canadian Experience, by Ken Alexander and Avis Glaze, I found myself wishing that he had exercised greater rigour in critiquing those "who have adopted the Afrocentric belief that blacks have a racially determined consciousness and that Western history is a conspiracy against them." Indeed, while one must chastise Afrocentrists for their distortions of history, one must also acknowledge that volkisch notions of a "black collective consciousness" and of the "inherent (anti-black) racism" of the West evolved out of the actual experiences of slavery, segregation, and anti-black violence, all of which occurred in Canada (though politely, of course), as they did in the United States and throughout the Americas. The Malcolm Xs and, for that matter, Martin Kings do not arise ex nihilo. Likewise, in Canada, black "activists" (what an ugly word!) like Dudley Laws in Toronto, Burnley Jones in Halifax, and Juanita Westmoreland-Traoré in Montreal respond to real griefs suffered by real people in real time. (See the reports of the 1989 Royal Commission into the Wrongful Prosecution of Donald Marshall, Jr., for evidence of corrosive racism in-at least-the Nova Scotian justice system.)

Nor is it plausible to argue that "nothing in Canadian history warrants" the use by Alexander and Glaze of a photograph of a 1968 U.S. civil rights march (with its attendant military paraphernalia) as a potential symbol of race relations in Canada. The photograph is stupid, gratuitous, and sensationalist, but racial violence has a long history in Canada, from the Christie Pits riot in Toronto in the 1930s to the current fisticuffs at Cole Harbour High School in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. And we all remember Oka.

To conclude, if we are to understand the history of African Canadians, the whole of our history must be excavated. Forensic analysis of our past is our best defence against both a glib Afrocentrism and a louche Eurocentrism.

George Elliott Clarke

Durham, North Carolina

Matthews on Grant

George Elliott Clarke's review (October) of the new book on George Grant, edited by Arthur Davis, brought this long-time mildly contrarian admirer and teacher of Grantiana to want to make three major points (which require, I admit, a book). All relate in part to Grant's position as a "nationalist"-a word which always needs on-the-spot definition and rarely gets it.

First, the connection of Grant to Heidegger, and through him to Céline, requires that we realize Heidegger's Being & Time was published the same year as Mein Kampf and The Decline of the West in a Europe in pieces and trying to bring the pieces together. A number of attempts-like Being & Time-were at least in part an attempt to answer the powerful secular voice of Marxism. How to forge a non-Marxist secular world-view? Heidegger was always and unrepentantly anti-Left. Grant was, too. I well remember in the 1968-1974 surge of teach-ins the presence of George Grant. He was asked more than once a telling question. Given the inability of Centre and Right to salvage the country Canadians wanted, would he support a Left force for that purpose? On one platform Jack McClelland paused, considered, and said, "Yes," if it meant the survival of Canada.

Imperious, impatient, and annoyed, Grant was adamant. He would support no Left force even facing the implications of the question. An interesting nationalism.

Like Heidegger, Grant shared a nationalism that was elitist and class-bound in its sense of leaders in force. When the question of employing neglected Canadian excellence in education came up, Grant had a few "nationalist" things to say that have been noted. But commentators have not researched what I believe to be true-that when he was hiring and in a position to influence hiring at McMaster, his preference was for U.S. scholars. They were, at the time, considered the "cream" of scholarly production: you hire them.

Finally, a word about the Dennis Lee connection, about which much sentimental comment is written. When I watched the young Dennis Lee, I was watching a liberal nationalist in a liberal nationalist circle. George Grant says somewhere that we are all in the modern age, in part, liberals. There is very little of traditional conservatism in Lee's Civil Elegies and other works. He is closer in spirit to the U.S. Black Mountain writers and their search for the legitimacy of place and the authenticity of region. That is fine, but it is an expression of displaced liberalism as much as it is of conservative values. Clearly, in what George Elliott Clarke calls the "Grant industry" (a nice, liberal phrase), there is still room for investment and expansion.

Robin Matthews

Vancouver

Twice Reviewed

It is certainly flattering to have one's book reviewed twice in the same journal. Now readers of Books in Canada can choose between Wayne Grady's review of Dictionary of Prince Edward Island English for the hard-cover, and Richard and Deirdre Greene's for paperback (November); between "a superbly readable dictionary that reverberates with the real, living language of a people and yet is scholarly enough to satisfy the most ardent wordmonger", and one with a "poorly supplied and poorly documented evidence corpus". I know the review I prefer-which happens also to be the one without misquotations and quotations out of context.

T. K. Pratt

Charlottetown