IT IS UNUSUAL to become close friends late in life with someone you have just met. But Jack Rabinovitch had a unique talent for friendship. We met in November 1994 and remained friends for the next twenty-two years. Our friendship started with exchanging jokes, a few of them in Yiddish, and stories the evening of the first Giller Prize party. I loved his ability to size up people and situations, his silly jokes, his delight in new discoveries, new places where we could get lost, and new faces, such as the young priest’s who showed us around the pope’s private galleries in Rome. And I loved his stories.
Jack’s father had been a ballroom dancing instructor in Bucharest: a dapper man with dark hair, charm, fast feet, and a determination to do better. Except for the colour of his hair, Jack inherited most of his characteristics. Jack’s mother and aunt had escaped across the Ukrainian border to Romania when another wave of Cossack pogroms threatened to end their youthful ambition to stay alive. The two sisters were barefoot but had the family’s wealth in jewels sewn into the linings of their threadbare coats. When the border guard’s wife told them how much they would have to pay, they pleaded abject poverty, and since they were both barefoot in the snow, she believed their lie.
Had Jack’s parents not married and had three children so soon after they arrived in Canada, Jack’s father might have had a bright future as a businessman. As it was, he became a newspaper vendor on a Montreal street corner.
Jack hawked newspapers at his father’s stand. Later, when his father opened a fast-food restaurant, he and his brother, Sam, helped out behind the counter. During those years, they ate well. Otherwise, it was his mother’s cooking, and she had an unerring talent for serving burnt, soggy, greasy, colourless food.
Jack and his brother went to school with the kids of other immigrants. All except two families in Jack’s neighbourhood were Jewish. A few blocks over, the Catholic kids ran with their own crowd and provided lively exercise for Jack and his friends, who had to run the gauntlet of battle-scarred fists and metal-heeled boots on the way to school. It was a quick, if not painless, method of learning French, and Jack spoke a fine joual. His nickname was ’ti carotte, little carrot, because he was a redhead.
His best friend back then was a kid called Archie, a small boy with big dreams about joining a band. He danced along the streets and up and down stairs, as if he could hear music. Archie’s father was a bookie, his older brother, a tank of a man, was the enforcer. One day, after Archie was bashed in the face by Tarzan, one of the school’s “repeaters,” Archie’s brother showed up at school and decked the guy. After that, Tarzan never touched Archie. It was a timely lesson for Jack on how to survive as a scrawny kid: ally yourself with a large protector. From then on, he traded his reading and maths skills for protection. It was a great incentive to stay ahead of the class.
Without that incentive, Jack was not sure he would have made it to Baron Byng High, the school where most of the immigrant kids went and where Irving Layton had preceded him. And without high school, he would not have gone to university, studied literature, or fallen in love with books and with Doris Giller.
It was at Baron Byng that Jack first met Mordecai Richler. They were not especially friendly to start with because Mordecai’s sole interest in Jack was Jack’s friendship with Lefty, or Hyman Berger as the class teacher insisted on calling him, the best athlete, the best ball player, runner, pitcher, pool player at school. There was no better way to acquire prestige than to be connected with Lefty.
When Jack went to McGill to study literature, he lost touch with both Lefty and Mordecai. He rarely talked about his McGill years but did like to tell tales about working for the Steinbergs and what he learned as executive VP of Trizec. Later he became an independent developer and builder. Along the way he acquired some wealth. As a volunteer, he helped build the new Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, “on time and under budget,” he told us.
It was only after Mordecai became a friend of Jack’s wife, Doris Giller, that the two men reconnected.
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I HAD FIRST met Doris near the end of the seventies in the Roof Lounge of the Park Plaza Hotel. She was at that time entertainment editor at the Montreal Star, a fast-talking, opinionated, hard-drinking, hard-swearing buddy of Jack McClelland’s. She could match him for every “fuck” he tossed at her. She was also curvaceous, strikingly beautiful, flamboyant, a chain-smoking wonder of a woman who told funny stories and insisted that Canada needed less mealy-mouthed book reviewers. Jack McClelland, of course, agreed with her. Doris Giller and Jack Rabinovitch moved to Toronto in the mid-eighties and I met her again when she was assistant books editor at the Toronto Star. She was impatient with much of what she considered “the Toronto elite.” She had an unfailing nose for bullshit.
Doris was the love of Jack’s life. They were inseparable. They had big parties and long sun-drenched holidays, went dancing, frequented the clubs, read books together. Doris died in 1993 and Jack never stopped mourning. The Giller Prize was to honour her memory. Jack first tried the idea on Mordecai at Woody’s on Bishop Street in Montreal. Woody’s used to be one of Montreal’s famous pubs, a dark room with wooden seats in narrow booths, a hangout for writers and other creative types. Though he was not enamoured of literary prizes, Mordecai liked this idea because he had been very fond of Doris and shared her discerning nose for the “fraudulent.” That’s why he agreed to be one of the judges. For the first year of the awards, Mordecai was joined by Alice Munro and literary critic and university professor David Staines.
The Giller Prize is awarded to the best Canadian fiction work published in English the previous year. The prize, then, was $25,000.I The first Giller evening, Doris’s friend Joey Slinger was the MC. Jack, in his tuxedo, looked splendid, as did everyone else—writers, editors, booksellers, many of whom had never worn a tux or a long dress until that night. Yet despite the formal wear, the party was, somehow, less formal and more relaxed than other literary get-togethers because Jack, smiling, welcoming, easygoing in a great celebratory mood, put all of us at ease.
From the very start, the Giller represented literary quality. The first three winners were M. G. Vassanji, Rohinton Mistry, and Margaret Atwood. Mordecai did not win until 1997, when he was no longer a judge. Alice Munro followed a year later. Rohinton Mistry, the 1995 winner, also won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. He commented after the evening that the crowd of guests had swelled to five hundred, that the tables had been moving closer and closer together to make room for more, and now also for the television cameras bobbing about filming the evening. No one minds, he said, because they are also here to celebrate literature.
I read Rohinton’s winning book, A Fine Balance, while travelling in India and called to tell Jack that the book had ruined what I had planned as a relaxing, sightseeing journey. All I could think about each day as we visited temples and bazaars and tea plantations was the fate of the benighted characters who were the anti-heroes of the novel. I had so desperately wanted a different ending that one evening I asked Rohinton whether he had ever considered a less terrible fate for those two. He said, no. He hadn’t.
Both Margaret Atwood (a winner for Alias Grace) and Alice Munro (winner for Runaway and The Love of a Good Woman) won other prizes—Margaret, the Man Booker Prize, and Alice, the Nobel Prize in Literature. One evening, years before the Booker and the Nobel, I told Alice that she was only one of two Canadian writers I had read before I arrived here. She was amused and wondered why, after reading her stories, I had persisted in staying.
The 2001 winner was Richard B. Wright’s Clara Callan, published by Phyllis Bruce at HarperCollins, the same Phyllis who had urged me to start publishing fiction when she was at Key Porter. The 2011 winner was Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues, a book that had been scheduled to be published by Key Porter Books before H. B. Fenn declared bankruptcy. The 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize winner was Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing, and in 2017 the winner was Michael Redhill’s Bellevue Square.
People talk of the Giller effect. It’s evidenced by all the books on the short lists. Zsuzsi Gartner (her All the Anxious Girls had been published by Key Porter) told me that the prize changed her life. She is now invited to festivals around the world. The awards ceremony is viewed by 1.3 million people. There is even an anti-Giller faction and a big, casual-dress Giller-Lite fundraising party for all those who have not been invited to Jack’s glamorous gala.
Every year, at the Giller party, Jack repeated the same simple suggestion: “For the price of a meal in this town, you can buy all the short-listed books. So eat at home and buy the books.”
Is it any wonder that I loved him?
I. In 2005 the Giller was renamed Scotiabank Giller, and the award has been increased to $100,000.