Keefer Street
Keefer Street
By David Spaner
Ronsdale Press, 2004; 320 pages; $24.95
Reviewed by Trevor Carolan
If the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 receives comment nowadays it’s for its approximations with the ongoing nightmare in Ukraine. Canada’s role in the civil war has been studiously neglected as not-fit-for-discussion. World War II that began only five months after the Fascist dictator Franco’s triumph in Madrid seized the nation’s attention, and Spain’s doomed Leftist cause was quickly forgotten. What couldn’t be ignored were the horrific tactics used there. Hitler and Mussolini supported Franco to test out blitzkreig warfare — carpet-bombing cities, panzer tank assaults, new weaponry, and to harden their troops in battle. Franco’s concentration camps and massacres were also instructive.
BC’s Depression-era sympathies for organized labour and the unemployed made it a recruiting zone for the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, Canada’s contingent in the International Brigades. From around the world, thousands volunteered to aid Madrid’s besieged Republican government. Hastily trained and armed, they fought like heroes against the rising wave of European fascism. If you’re of a certain working background in Canada, you may have met Mac-Pap survivors in their blue berets. David Spaner’s excellent novel Keefer Street employs a dual narrative that begins in East Vancouver in 1932 and parallels a 1986 International Brigade commemoration in Spain.
At seventeen, Jake Feldman, from an immigrant Lithuanian family, has grown up in Strathcona’s Jewish neighbourhood after the pogroms in Russia drove his family out. Their life in the garment trade is lean but soulful. If you’ve read Mordecai Richler, you’ll get it. If you haven’t, the old synagogue on Pender where K.D. Lang used to live when it was repurposed as condos will make sense now. Mom’s chicken soup, dollops of Yiddish, local street dynamics, and the eternal tang of Strathcona’s political dialectics shape an insular world where a young man inevitably ends up looking for love and a sense of purpose. It’s the Dirty Thirties. What can a poor boy do? Head to the Relief Camps and dig roads at twenty cents a day.
Fast-forward to ’86: a cohort of Brigade vets convene to honour the old struggle. Jake’s there — he’d made it over as a fighter and served. Spaner’s account recalls the socialist-communist activism that motivated most into action. Love was often involved too, he reminds, and pure democratic urgency. Jake recalls the writers and speakers who inspired him — Dreiser, Dos Passos, Emma Goldman. Vets talk and remember how their governments mistrusted them and refused to commend their fight against evil. Yet old political grudges still crackle among them, harking to the deadly Leftist divisions within Spain’s anarchic Republican cause that George Orwell depicts brilliantly in his Homage to Catalonia.
Wisely, Spaner doesn’t try to retell the frontline tragedy of the Spanish War; it’s present, but he creates a mélange of sidebar stories that move the novel along. There’s details of how the Mac-Paps entered Spain when even liberal governments embargoed them and, tellingly, how their lives fared once the struggle ended, along with their eventual fates. Shifts in time address other things that mattered: sports headlines, the historic On To Ottawa trek, the Feldmans’ own shifting fortunes that see Jake heading north to supervise his father’s haberdashery shop that will lead to his own family story.
Spain mattered. This is a chance to read why and Spaner weaves in diverse historic incidentals — Norman Bethune and a young Dave Barrett earn mentions, as do the folk singers Ian and Sylvia, and La Pasionara, the voice of Spanish Resistance. We learn about the Sylvia Hotel’s origins and of the grotesque Vancouver visit of Hitler’s swastika-blazoned Karlsbad warship in 1936. Compelling stuff with a surprisingly poetic conclusion.