“The Immortals” by Ed Kleiman

The Immortals, Ed Kleiman’s collection of 14 short stories, is an attempt to freeze in time the experiences of the inhabitants of Winnipeg’s North End. One of them, Mr. Greenspan, is a photographer whose darkroom becomes a metaphor for capturing the changing processes of life. But his display window becomes a metaphor for still life, immortalizing life by preventing change. Geographically located on Selkirk Avenue, at the centre of the North End, his studio combines the contradictions and complexities of the people he is trying to describe, or to frame.

The photographer’s darkroom is a mysterious place. Kleiman envisions it as the space between the rational world and the imaginative realm, where magical transformations occur as the image becomes concrete. The studio and its contents—the negatives, abandoned prints, photographs of bar mitzvahs, graduations and weddings, are truly “an archive of the human imagination.” The photograph has immortalized the North End, capturing its black and white tonal gradations, its shifting perspectives and the matte and glossy human surfaces that begin to read as depth. In this developing world, Michael, the central character, moves into manhood.

Michael Buchalter is the narrator in the first nine stories. Derived from the Yiddish buch-halter, his name means “book-holder,” one who loves books; at the same time he is buck-alter, “book-aged.” His growth is shaped by his experiences within the North End community, and measured through the stories he tells.

At times tragic, sometimes angry and often full of joy, these stories draw into the photograph’s foreground the individuals who made up what is recognized to have been a vital, energized core of this nation. Entertainers David Steinberg and Monty Hall notwithstanding, Kleiman recently commented that the North End contained “more political thinkers per square yard than Russia did before the Revolution” (NeWest Review, Nov. 1982). It was impossible to grow up in this environment and not be changed. Escaping religious persecution, poverty, and eventually, the Holocaust, these Jewish immigrants brought with them from places as remote as Odessa and Kherson a smattering of Old World ways and New World dreams:

Mischa Bloomberg the carpenter, unable to read or write, trying to build houses without a yardstick, build by eye as a bird its nest… and Harry Silverman, keeping his telescope well above the dust as he stands on the roof of his father-in-law’s factory and buries his head among the stars.

Michael’s maturation corresponds with the disintegration of the North End: the themes of the stories become increasingly grimmer and Michael more removed from the narrative process. Many of the final stories about isolation, thwarted dreams and suicide are related by a narrator removed from the experience of the stories. One is told through the guilt-ridden yet distant eyes of a suicide’s wife.

Kleiman’s final story is about Harvey Greenspan’s return to Winnipeg from Los Angeles for his father’s funeral. Harvey, who has imagined Winnipeg unchanged through his father’s photographs, discovers that the North End has changed after all. There is a “For Sale” sign tacked onto the door of Greenspan’s studio; the photographs have faded. From the plane carrying him back to Los Angeles, Harvey surveys Winnipeg from above in the morning liglit:

Gradually there emerged from the darkness—as if in a giant photograph—vague outlines of public buildings, major thoroughfares, sleeping neighbourhoods, all continuing to take on more and more definition as the light brightened about them.

The final image is visionary: Harvey leaves the past behind by fixing his eyes on the present world. His vision is freed to compose on its own without his father’s camera. He learned to frame his world, but not to freeze it.

While Harvey leaves Winnipeg, Michael stays behind to reflect back to the reader the images of the past. The stories successfully frame the North End by focussing on and distilling lives that were. The North End, at once ghetto and oasis, imaged as a star “about to explode,” is a source of energy and inspiration.

Kleiman’s use of mythological allusion is occasionally heavy-handed, although “The Sea Shell,” Michael’s quest for origins, is nothing short of mythic:

He saw his grandfather moving through the white water—those strong arms, that effortless movement—bringing the shell as if from the depths of the oceans he had once crossed and offering it to Michael so that he, too, could hear the roar and swell of the sea.

The sea-shell, like the photograph, is enigmatic; the mystery of its origin is manifest by the simple, yet profound fact, of its presence in the world. ■

Nancy Masarsky is a Winnipeg freelance writer.