‘A Book of Great Worth’ by Dave Margoshes

Reviewed by Lee Kvern

The worst thing to do in reading any book… is to read the ending first.

Under the guise of checking out the voluminous accomplishments of Saskatchewan author/journalist Dave Margoshes: twelve books, plentiful prizes in fiction, poetry and non-fiction, not to mention an entire shiny career in journalism, I happened to flip back to the “Afterword: Listening to My Father,” and with great trepidation I read it first.  And I’m glad I did, in fact, I’d recommend it. Margoshes sets the stage for his Book of Great Worth, this writer’s ode to his beloved Jewish father, Harry Margoshes (Morgenstern) 1893-1975. Margoshes tells us:

All the stories in the series walk that precious tight rope between memoir and fiction. Of course, they’re not true memoir –they’re about my father, not me, though I sometimes appear briefly, as a child, listening to my father’s tales.

An apt description of what from the surface appears to be a short story collection, but here is where A Book of Great Worth deviates from the usual norms of short fiction in that the collected stories here offer little tension that is the precious milestone of short stories.  Better though to leave off thinking fiction, think instead memoiric (if there is such a word), a series of delightful vignettes, a fascinating glimpse into a world long past, a father long gone ­– the paternal, journalistic world of Harry Morgenstern, and as a bonus, the backdrop that produced a novelist himself in Dave Margoshes.

Beginning in New York City, Harry Morgenstern the wanna-be-novelist, sets the stage for the stories that follow. In “The Proposition,” we are introduced to the world of Jews and rabbis and gangsters in the beginnings of Morgenstern’s journalistic career on the blue-collar beat.

‘I did something stupid,’ the rabbi told my father.

It was 1925, New York City, a bar on the Lower East Side. My father was a few years away from marriage, fatherhood, respectability, and so was prone to do stupid things himself: stay up late, sing off-key – which really was the only way my father knew how to sing. But a rabbi doing a stupid thing?

With his reporter feet in many worlds: rabbis, poets, playwrights, socialists, communists, anarchists, people with little use for religion, Morgenstern is able to negotiate, amicably, it seems, on behalf of the beleaguered rabbi.

The stories loop in and out of Morgenstern’s career, love, family, marriage, and the moderate quandaries that arise from living in general. Not much within A Book of Great Worth feels particularly precarious, or dangerous, but that’s all right, there is a certain charm and gentleness to the stories that make you not care. One of my favourite stories in the collection is “Music by Rodgers, Lyrics by Hart,” a lovely ditty of a story about Morgenstern’s wife and a struggling-to-make-ends-meet friend who together write jingles and slogans for a contest that the husband clearly thinks is a waste of time.

‘But what does it hurt?’ my mother asked absently, brushing away a lock of chestnut hair as she looked up. She gave my father a crooked little smile, half-innocent, half-impudence. ‘Is my jingle any more foolish than your sherry? Now really.’

And when a jingle goes on to win second prize (money!) in the contest, the skirmish that occurs over the money division between the wife and the friend an—outwardly more important—Morgenstern’s dim view of it all until the end, when he realizes why his wife was spending her time and energy on behalf of their down-on-his-heels friend, and Morgenstern learns to read between the lines: a tender-at-heart, lesson in kindness story.

A thread that runs through the collection is that Morgenstern longed to be a novelist: “There he was in Cleveland. My father liked to use this expression for his life in those days: ‘I was still chasing the donkey, trying to pin the tail to it.’” And chasing his own tail too; his father did that throughout his colourful journalistic career, but alas no novels. These stories come full circle, the young, listening son who used to tag along on his father’s adventures into the eclectic world of journalists, intellectuals, freethinkers, the thought-provoking people that no doubt made the beloved father, and also made the beloved son.

Says Margoshes in the Afterword: “More importantly, I tried hard to honour my father. The best way to do that, I knew, was to get it right.” Spoken like a true journalist, written by a true writer.

Coteau | 256 pages |  $18.95 | cloth | ISBN #978-1550504767