Solomon Gursky Was Here Author:Mordecai Richler Moses Berger is love-hate-hooked on the Gursky family -- the most imperial, baroque, mad, and millionairish (bootleg money exquisitely laundered, even ironed) Jewish family in Montreal. Ever since Moses, at age eleven, was shown a Gursky moppet's heated architect-designed, decorator-furnished multilevel treehouse, he has been appalled,... more » mesmerized, totally Gursky-driven. Now, at fifty-two, he is thirty years into research for a biography of Solomon - the disdained, disgraced, and dead Gursky brother. Moses can't leave the subject alone. And no wonder. He's uncovered evidence to suggest that Solomon was involved in some of the most momentous events of the twentieth century: the Long March in China, the last phone call of Marilyn Monroe, John Dean's Watergate testimony, and the raid on Entebbe, to name but a few. Why, Moses has to wonder, are all the local newspaper files on Solomon missing? And why does everyone who ever knew Solomon act as if the mere mention of his name might cause an explosion? And what is Moses to think of the first Canadian Gursky, Solomon's grandfather, Ephraim, who made his original landfall in the Arctic, where there has since been seen a tribe of (more or less) Jewish Inuit?
And what is Moses to make of himself -- a Rhodes scholar gone bad, a passionate lover unlucky in love (with a Gursky girl, among others), his life given over to booze and a biography that, even assuming he ever finishes it, can surely never be published?
What Moses finds out - about them and about himself -- and how he finds it out through a wonderland of clues and impossible happenings in at least two hemispheres and through at least two centuries, fuels this amazingly rich novel. The complications are Byzantine (that's Byzantium by way of Canada) and teeming with Gurskys. As their story unfolds, with Moses' own story gallivanting in and out of it, the history of a nation is lovingly and riotously rewritten.« less