Ringmaster

By Stefan Kanfer

SOLOMON GURSKY WAS HERE

by Mordecai Richler

Knopf; 413 pages; $19.95

"How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" inquires the psalmist. With reverence, replies Mordecai Richler. Plus a few gags ("What's black and white and brown and looks good on a lawyer?" "A Doberman"); a couple of philosophical digressions ("Liquor, once you're hooked on it, is a hard habit to break. Like God, Henry thought . . ."); some manic riffs on fame ("That dumbbell the Duke of Windsor he threw in the sponge for a tart. You want the Duke and Duchess for a charity ball, you rent them like a tux from Tip-Top"); and the most furiously original cast of buccaneers, entrepreneurs, intellectuals and whackos north of Niagara Falls.

First among them is Moses Berger, a former academic who seems to regard the slogan DRINK CANADA DRY as a moral imperative. As a child in Montreal, he is introduced to a local clan of mysterious origin and unlimited wealth. Forty years later, Berger finally discards alcohol for a fresh obsession: writing the saga of the strange and indomitable Gurskys.

Ephraim Gursky begins it all in the 19th century. The fugitive from Minsk becomes the thief of London and the prisoner of Newgate. Deported, he turns into the con man of the Klondike. This ultimate survivor begets 27 unacknowledged offspring, plus Aaron, who begets the predatory Bernard and the doomed and mysterious Solomon. The brothers beget a liquor business that makes them the intimates of gangsters during Prohibition and the cynosure of politicians ever after. Their descendants become various refractions of the founder: vulgar, sensitive, avaricious, undirected, lost.

But Solomon Gursky Was Here is far more than family saga. On the journey from rawhide to velvet, the Gurskys participate in nearly every event of global importance, from Arctic exploration to the rescue at Entebbe, from Mao's Long March to Nixon's Watergate. Despite the obvious temptations, Richler never reduces them to mere symbols of Jewish persistence or the Canadian past. Each member of his large and hilarious cast has three dimensions and at least two faces.

Then again, so does the author. Throughout a bright literary career -- most notably in St. Urbain's Horseman and Joshua Then and Now -- Canadian novelist Richler has employed a unique blend of humor, history and myth. Here his mixture is richer and darker than before. He is a ringmaster, making his performers do dazzling backflips without missing a beat. At the same time he is a moralist, recoiling from those who would sentimentalize the Holocaust or make power a sacrament. In the middle of the journey, Bernard Gursky seeks a biographer. "For this job," he booms, "I don't want a Canadian. I want the best." He got both.