Letters Across the Sea by Genevieve Graham (best short novels of all time txt) 📗

The smoke-filled meeting room on Beverly Street was crowded with men young and old, taking up chairs and leaning against the walls. His father pointed a thick finger toward the other side of the room.

“I’ll be over there with Saul,” he said. “You stay here.”

“Fine with me, Papa. There are too many thick grey beards up there for my taste.”

His father chuckled, stroking his own salt-and-pepper chin as he walked away. Max scouted the crowd for familiar faces, then he heard his name, and an arm clamped around his shoulder.

“What, I can’t go a month without seeing your sorry face?”

Max grinned at the sight of Arnie Schwartz, his roommate from McMaster. Arnie was a half foot shorter than Max, with thick black eyebrows that arched up in a way that gave the impression he was laughing at everything. He always looked disheveled, but he was smart and he had a wonderfully dry sense of humour.

“I could say the same,” Max said. He held out a hand to Arnie’s younger brother, Samuel. “It’s good to see you, Sam.”

Samuel shook his hand. “Welcome to the assembly of the League for the Defence of Jewish Rights, where all the important men in town meet.”

“And they let you two in?” Max teased.

“Oh yes,” Samuel said, rolling his shoulders back. He was even shorter than Arnie, but his big personality made up for that. “We make all the big decisions. Those old guys up front just take the credit.”

“Arnie tells me you’re getting married, Sam. Mazel tov. When’s the big day?”

“Next spring, she says. Lucy is in charge of everything, of course. I hope you’ll come.”

“If I can,” Max said. “So, what else is new? Arnie and I have been living under a rock at school.”

Samuel happily filled him in on all the gossip about their old friends. Some were married, a couple had moved out of the city, but most were working in the textile industry on Spadina, alongside Max’s father’s factory.

“You need to come out from under your rock more often,” Samuel advised. “Or you’ll never find a wife.”

“Don’t worry about that, little brother,” Arnie said. “What girl is not going to want to marry a tall, dark, handsome doctor?”

From behind Max came a voice he hadn’t heard in a while—and one he’d rather hoped not to hear again. Glancing over his shoulder, he spotted tall, spindly Yossel Abelman making his way toward them.

“Here we go,” Arnie said under his breath.

Yossel was a few years older than Max, with a scraggly beard and a nose that looked as if it had been broken at least twice. He was a passionate Zionist, and ever since learning that Max wasn’t, he delighted in starting arguments with him.

“Yossel. It’s been a while.”

“Tell me, Max. Have you had your fill of persecution yet?” Yossel asked right away, settling into a seat across from Max. “Shall I tell you again about our homeland? It would have no Irish, no Italians, no Catholics, no goyim at all. It would be a place of peace and strength. We are always running. There, we would never run from oppression again.”

Max straightened, aware of curious faces leaning in to hear what he would say. “I didn’t know you’d been running, Yossel. No wonder you’re so thin. Tell me, are we Jews to hide away for the rest of our existence? Run away, as you say, with our tails between our legs? I say no. We travelled thousands of miles to get here because we want more out of life.”

Yossel let out a sharp laugh. “More of what? More torment?”

“More than just ourselves,” Max replied. “You Zionists want to shut yourselves off from everybody else. If it were up to you, you would be an armadillo, curled into a ball to keep all your soft bits safe. You’d only talk with like-minded people, excluding yourselves from the rest of the world—”

“And that is somehow worse than being in another man’s world but living in fear and humiliation the entire time?”

Max had no plan to live in either fear or humiliation. Since being home, he had tried to ignore the signs populating the city and the glares from people like Phil Burke, knowing that if he let those things get to him, they won. He wasn’t afraid of them, just annoyed. In this world there would always be bad people, but good people existed too, like Molly, Jimmy, and Richie. Max chose to believe his friends were part of the quiet majority.

“Come on now. We all know we need a homeland,” Yossel was saying. “Even you, Maxim. A home is where one feels safe to be himself. He can believe what he believes and worship how he wants to worship, and he has no fear of being persecuted. There is no home here for us.”

Max didn’t agree, but he and Yossel would never see eye to eye, so Max decided to lighten the conversation.

“I don’t know,” Max said, folding his arms. “You kvetch all the time, Yossel. I want this. I want that. If you get your own homeland, you’ll never have anything to complain about. What will you do with yourself then?”

“Yossel will always find something to complain about,” Arnie said, and the young men around them laughed.

Yossel leaned toward Max and gestured for him to come closer. “Maxim, my friend,” he said, lowering his voice. “I admire you. You are a mensch who knows what he wants. If they let you, I am certain you will be a great doctor someday.”

“If they let me?”

“If they let you. I understand the quota for medical school at the University of Toronto is even lower this year. Isn’t that where you plan to go?”

Max hesitated a beat. “That is where I will go.”

“Sure, sure.” Yossel moved back again and waved his hand in front of his face, like he was batting away a fly. “But you know, we all like you, Maxim Dreyfus. So don’t worry. When you have to start sewing