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By Root 512 0

far more intelligent than I am, but charged with discontent. Sour. Abrasive. Cursed with a ferocious temper, which I take to be a most unattractive quality. But he is also blessed with something of Miriam’s beauty. Her grace. Her originality. I adore him. Before graduating magna cum laude from McGill, he condescended to sit for a Rhodes scholarship competition, and, having won one, declined it in his own incomparable style. “Cecil Rhodes,” he told the committee, “was a vicious imperialist and his scholarship fund would be more honourably used making restitution to the blacks he exploited. I don’t want anything to do with his blood money.” Eschewing Oxford, Saul went on to do his postgraduate work at Harvard. But, naturally, my boy did not accept his degree, which in those days he considered a bourgeois stigma.

My sons short-circuited somewhere. Crossed wires. Mike, a militant socialist, is sinfully rich and married to an aristo. But Saul, born again a neo-conservative, is dirt-poor and lives in squalor in New York, in an East Village loft, where the infatuated girls come and go, cooking and sewing and boiling his underwear. Saul ekes out a living of sorts writing polemics for the right-wing trades: The American Spectator, The Washington Times, Commentary, and National Review. A volume of his essays has been published by The Free Press, and I never pass an out-of-town bookshop without slapping three expensive art books down on the counter and asking, “Would you happen to have a copy of Saul Panofsky’s brilliant Minority Report?” If they answer no, I say, “Well, in that case, I won’t be needing any of these.”

Saul’s a raver. His right-wing diatribes, inarguably well written, are offensive, homophobic, totally without compassion for the poor, but they also amuse me no end, because back in 1980, when he was a mere seventeen-year-old, Saul was a Marxist firebrand. He was a passionate supporter of Quebec’s independence, which he pronounced a rite of passage, necessarily brief, that would yield to North America’s first workers’ state, after his bunch had marched on Quebec City’s Winter Palace, though not before eleven a.m. He also spoke at thinly attended meetings denouncing Israel as a racist state and demanding justice for the Palestinians. “If God bequeathed Canaan to the descendants of Abraham, then that also included Ishmael’s progeny.”

In those days Saul was no longer living at home, in the house I had acquired in Westmount after Michael was born, but was rooted in a commune, largely composed of middle-class Jewish kids, in a cold-water flat on St. Urbain Street, right in my old neighbourhood. I wander down there occasionally in unavailing quest of familiar faces and old landmarks. But, like me, the boys I grew up with moved on long ago: those who prospered to Westmount, or Hampstead, and the ones who are still struggling to the nondescript suburbs of Côte St-Luc, Snowdon, or Ville St-Laurent. These streets now teem with Italian, Greek, or Portuguese kids, their parents as out of breath as ours once were, juggling overdue household bills. Signs of the times. The shoeshine parlour where I used to take my father’s fedoras to be blocked has been displaced by a unisex hair stylist. The Regent Theatre, where I could once catch a double feature for thirty-five cents, and enjoy three hours of uninterrupted necking with the notorious Goldie Hirschorn, is boarded up. The lending library where I took out books (Forever Amber; Farewell, My Lovely; King’s Row; The Razor’s Edge) for three cents a day no longer exists. Mr. Katz’s Supreme Kosher Meat Mart has yielded to a video-rental outlet: ADULT MOVIES OUR SPECIALTY. My old neighbourhood now also boasts a New Age bookstore, a vegetarian restaurant, a shop that deals in holistic medicines, and a Buddhist temple of sorts, all of which cater to the needs of Saul and his bunch and others like them.

Some bunch that was that Saul was involved with. Posters of the usual suspects hung on the walls. Lenin. Fidel. Che. Rosa Luxemburg. Louis Riel. Dr. Norman Bethune. FUCK PIERRE TRUDEAU was