Today’s slide show: Images from Montreal.
Today the temperature in Montreal falls to a low of minus 8 degrees Fahrenheit. Winds? You betcha. Even the weather in my original hometown of St. Petersburg, Russia, is balmy by comparison. The key here is obviously to fortify ourselves. We ask again what would Barney Panofsky, the narrator of Mordecai Richler’s final novel, Barney’s Version, have done? Two ideas present themselves: 1) meat; 2) booze. With meat in mind, we head for Wilensky’s Light Lunch in the Mile End district, smack in the heart of Richler’s old neighborhood. Along the way, we drop by the Square St. Louis, the Plateau’s most attractive parcel of greenery (currently buried in snow, of course). Victorian houses with colorful tourelles and ornate wrought-iron balconies line the square, while surrounding thoroughfares such as Avenue Laval are a 19th-century snow-dusted fantasia.
Braving the wind that, like a skillful snake, sneaks its way inside our coats and under our hat flaps, we walk up Boulevard St. Laurent (also known as “The Main” and home to Schwartz’s Deli and Moishe’s Steakhouse), taking a look at the great vintage stores that line the boulevard and the quietly hip Avenue du Mont-Royal. I have picked up terrific vintage bargains here on every visit (Cuban guayabera shirts, distressed-looking pants, and all sorts of other crap) for less than $25 Canadian per shmatte. Unfortunately, I’ve gained too much weight in the last couple of days to squeeze into anything appropriate this time around.
Which takes us to Wilensky’s Light Lunch. Do not be fooled. There is nothing even remotely light about Wilensky’s. Their famous special is a grilled-salami-and-bologna-with-onion-roll served on a napkin alongside a cherry soda. Immortalized in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (both the novel and the movie), Wilensky’s is essentially a simple lunch counter with hard seats that do no wonders for one’s ass and a stack of junky paperbacks along one wall. The place is run by some of the gruffest Canadians in existence, but the salami is something else. In his novel St. Urbain’s Horseman,Richler’s protagonist Jake Hersh lives in London but misses Montreal’s spicy native treats. At one point, he attends a proper English dinner, but, worried that the food would be too bland, Hersh “sneaked into the bathroom and immediately reached into his jacket pocket for the salami on rye.”
As we linger over Wilensky’s counter, a steady stream of visitors from Toronto come in to pick up a half-dozen specials to go. I get the sense of the mass exodus to Toronto that has taken place in the last few decades and of the nostalgia many of these mostly Jewish customers have for the city they’ve left behind. “Walking around here, things really mean something,” one youngish woman says to Ruth, the 80-plus-year-old proprietor of Wilensky’s. “I wish my kids could be here more often. In Toronto nothing means anything. It’s just a city.”
Satiated and a little meat-drowsy, we head back for the Ritz-Carlton. I can think of no better example of how to write comedy than the scene in Barney’s Version where Barney gets married to his second wife at the Ritz-Carlton, while trying to figure out the night’s hockey scores (his beloved Canadiens are playing for the Stanley Cup), and scamming on a woman he’s just met whom he would like to have “daubed in Essence of Smoked Meat. A maddening aphrodisiac, made from spices available at Schwartz’s Delicatessen. I’d call it Nectar of Judea.” This is farcical writing at its finest, down to Barney’s policeman father carrying on about Montreal’s whorehouses of yore to the shocked, proper rabbi. “Some of them whorehouses was elegantly furnished. … Clean? Rabbi, you could eat off the floor.”
The Ritz-Carlton today is, well, the Ritz-Carlton. Prim, elegant, appropriately stuffy, given its age and history, which began in 1912. At one point, during the Depression, residents were allowed to cook in their own rooms, but the hotel is better known for the 1964 wedding of Elizabeth Taylor and one of her husbands (Richard Burton, I believe). The view from my room is splendid. The downtown skyscrapers are huddled around the Cathédrale Basilique Marie Reine du Monde, a scaled down version of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. In the early mornings, I look out of my hotel room window to watch the sun set light to the copper dome of this miniature St. Peter’s lost amid a tangle of glassed-in North American towers. A combination of Old and New World that sums up Montreal more eloquently than I can.
In his last years, Richler ambled around a small perimeter of downtown drinking holes and restaurants, all within blocks of his castlelike apartment building. The bar at the Ritz was one such location, and many of the others went by names like Winnie’s, Grumpy’s, and Ziggy’s. We head to Ziggy’s Pub on Rue Crescent, owned by the joke-spewing proprietor Ziggy Eichenbaum, whose business card identifies him as the chief toxicologist. Ziggy’s is the kind of shamrock-friendly old pub that puts boxing gloves behind glass and posts signs reading, “We don’t serve women here, you have to bring your own.”
When we show up at Ziggy’s, we run into a small family just returning from the wake of a close family member, but as soon as they hear we’re on the trail of Mordecai Richler, there’s laughter and joking and smiles up and down the bar. “He had a big head!” someone says.
“He looked kind of like you,” another fellow tells me. “He never combed his hair.” Photographs of Richler in his later years show a stocky man with a wonderfully bulbous nose, droopy eyelids, and several helpings of unkempt hair, but I manage to take the comparison as a compliment.
“Yeah, but you press your pants,” another tells me. “Mordecai never pressed his.”
“He had an eye for the ridiculous,” a younger patron says.
“He loved his wife,” another adds. “He’d always bring her food.”
“And he was a Grand Prix fanatic,” Ziggy tells us. “When his TV was on the fritz, he made me open up the bar at 8 in the morning.”
Ziggy pauses to add: “He was a great Canadian and a great Quebecer.”
“Well put!” the patrons shout. “And most of all,” an older gentleman says, “Mordecai loved this city.”
We end the evening at Le Mas des Oliviers on Rue Bishop, one of Richler’s favorite restaurants, a short (albeit freezing) stroll from Ziggy’s. A rustic-looking French restaurant, this is where Richler’s family came after the unveiling of his tombstone. The owner recalled a vivacious Richler who would start off some meals with a bottle of champagne, and a cognac, and a cigar. “He was an adventurous orderer,” I am told. We are sitting at Table 28, Richler’s usual table, watching patrons stuff themselves with plates of luscious deer and tender scallops. When Richler’s favorite waiter at Le Mas des Oliviers heard of the writer’s death, he nearly fainted and had to be carried to the nearest chair.
Richler may not have been the most well-known writer in the world, but it is hard to imagine one more loved and admired by an entire community. As we eat and drink and toast to his memory with the people who knew him, we feel welcomed and warm, safe from the minus-8-degree temperature outside. Walking in the footsteps of this opinionated comedic genius, it feels, somehow, that we are shielded from the strange new world we live in. “Another round, please,” we say, ordering our Macallan straight, sighing with pleasure as the heat of the Scotch find its way around us.
