Local Author Ventures Out of the Neighbourhood

Montreal author, Norman Spatz recently released his fourth novel on Amazon/Kindle. This is his first story where the main part of the narrative takes place outside of Montreal.

Spatz was originally inspired to try his hand at writing a novel after he signed up for fitness training. The trainer was an elderly gentleman in his eighties who worked out of a gym which he had originally founded. That trainer, Jimmy Caruso, had a long career in the fitness industry which dated from the Thirties.  Caruso had worked with Arnold Schwarzenegger as well as the Weider Brothers. Spatz, who was an English teacher at the time, was challenged to put the man’s fascinating story to paper.

Eventually, however, as the project advanced, Jimmy Caruso read the manuscript and did not agree with Spatz over important parts of the story. He asked Spatz to abandon the project… temporarily as it turned out. Rather than stop writing, Spatz turned the story into fiction and took great liberties with the narrative. All the names were changed, characters were added and a story of an elderly fitness trainer in an imaginary gym and some of the people whom he trained began to emerge. Blending fact and fiction allowed Spatz to dramatize events in order to make a more vivid and memorable story. Caught in the midst of the Covid quarantine, Spatz had lots of time to write. The title of the book that resulted was ‘Training for Trust”.

Writing his first novel gave Spatz a survival strategy for the long days of quarantine. Another activity that proved to be rewarding was the development of online historical walking tours of the neighbourhoods west of downtown with a significant Jewish population. The tours were originally offered by the Men’s Club of his synagogue, but during the pandemic Spatz moved them online. The lectures became very popular, vastly more widely attended than the original physical walking tours. A series of online presentations were offered through the Jewish Public Library, and then the Cummings Centre for Seniors and one tour even through the alumni association of Washington University in Saint Louis, Missouri. After finishing ‘Training for Trust’, Spatz took on a new writing project, a historical novel based on the information that had been researched for the walking tours, the urban development of the areas in his neighbourhood, Notre Dame de Grace (NDG) alongside the Cities of Cote Saint-Luc and Hampstead.

In the resulting novel, ‘Greed and Opportunity’, the fictional accounts of real people whose lives were important in the urban development of the area came to life. Several major characters emerged. These included Sir Herbert Holt, entrepreneur extraordinaire, who was instrumental in the development of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, the Royal Bank of Canada, Montreal Light Heat and Power, the Circle Road District of Montreal and the City of Hampstead. Another star in the story was Michael Hornstein who escaped to Canada from a transport to Auschwitz. In Montreal, he purchased land in a detached piece of territory of the City of Cote Saint-Luc resulting from Herbert Holt’s creation of the City of Hampstead. There he constructed a line of unimaginably profitable high rise apartment buildings.

By the time Spatz finished ‘Greed and Opportunity’, the pandemic was drawing to a close. A decision was made to leave the synagogue that he had been a member of for many years. In trying to make a firm decision, Spatz began listing the pros and cons of remaining a member and realized that his list was turning into another novel. Spatz eventually did move to another synagogue and the resulting novel became his most successful novel ever in terms of sales ‘Shul for Scandal’.

By this time, Spatz realized that writing novels had become a major activity in his retirement. He was looking for another writing project. In casting about for a subject, he decided to tackle the story of his maternal grandfather’s immigration journey from Poland to Newark, New Jersey, where Spatz had been born. Spatz was determined to try his hand at non-fiction rather than writing a historical novel.

There were new challenges in researching material for ‘Passing through Prince Street’ that Spatz had not encountered in his earlier projects. For one thing, the documentation was in foreign countries or worse yet, not available. Spatz began to realize why he had used the formula of historical fiction in his earlier works. If segments in the biography of his grandfather, Harry Pittl were missing, he could bridge from one fact to another with fiction. Although the story might not be one-hundred percent true, it would be more coherent than the disconnected series of historical facts at Spatz’s disposal.

One invaluable resource in the research for ‘Prince Street’ was The Gombin Society. Gombin was the village in Poland where Harry Pittl had been born. Descendants of the original immigrants had organized to finance the renovation of landmarks of the Jewish community that remained, notably the cemetery, as well as to research the records of the town to make information about Gombin’s Jews more accessible to their descendants.

In researching his subject, Spatz also looked into records in Newark, New Jersey where Harry Pittl eventually settled. Although the Jewish population in Newark is now almost non-existent, at one point, in the first part of the Twentieth Century, the Jewish population there represented almost forty percent of the city’s residents.

In this segment of his research the author discovered an interesting fact. The Jewish and Black communities in Newark had settled next to one another and had made their adaptations into the culture of Newark as neighbors.  Their geographical proximity had resulted in a degree of cultural blending between the two communities. The music researcher, Henry Sapoznik, had exposed the lively history of Black Yiddish music, particularly that of a vaudeville star in that genre who had been singing in the 1920s. This was the Schwarzer Chazzan. Intrigued by the cultural dialogue between these two communities, Spatz attended an online lecture by Jack Hirschberg on The Jews of Africa.

Dealing with so much information about the black community which was not directly related to the story of his grandfather, Spatz, once again, decided to veer off of the path of strict non-fiction and into the realm of historical fiction. A narrative arc was necessary to create a link between the two communities’ stories and Spatz created it by establishing a friendship between his grandmother Lena and the mother of the Schwarzer Chazzan.

As Spatz discovered more facts about both the Black and Jewish communities living in Newark at the turn of the Twentieth Century, he developed more specific goals for his novel. The first was to bring the Jewish Immigrant World of Newark at the turn of the Twentieth Century alive for the reader. The challenge was to select aspects of the immigrant community’s communal life, such as their synagogues and rabbis, businesses, institutions and streetscapes so as to bring the conditions of that very special time to life for the reader.

The second goal was to explore a limited number of the effects of the Great Migration on those Black families who arrived in Newark. More specifically, the story focused on those Blacks who were Jewish, either from birth or culturally assimilated into the Jewish community that was around them.

The third goal was to sample the musical worlds of traditional cantorial music, vaudeville, Yiddish musical revues and the Fifties music scene in Asbury Park, New Jersey into the story. These ‘musical cultures’ were only hinted at but played an important role in the telling of the story.

The final goal was my initial inspiration to write the book: to get to know more about my grandparents and the early lives of my parents. I knew a lot before I started the book, but after writing the novel, I feel like I have gotten to know my grandparents as young adults. I have grown to understand them better.

Passing through Prince Street is available on Amazon/Kindle. The eBook costs CAN$ 9.99 and the hardcover edition is available for CAN$ 17.00.