Strathcona to the Spanish Civil War
November 25th, 2024
For a good introduction to 1930s Vancouver, pick up a copy of David Spaner’s novel, Keefer Street by David Spaner (Ronsdale Press $24.95). It follows the life and times of Jake Feldman, a Jewish kid growing up in the neighbourhood of Strathcona, home to people of Chinese, Irish and Jewish descent.
Review by Grant Buday
The young Jake is interested in baseball and shooting pool, but the hard times soon politicize him. It is, after all, the “Dirty Thirties” when most countries around the world entered into deep recessions. By 1931, unemployment reached 28 percent in British Columbia — the highest in Canada. Thousands of unemployed men went to rural BC work camps, including Jake. These make-work programs didn’t pan out.
While employed at a government relief camp, Jake joins a protest over the lousy wages where two weeks of moving dirt earns him less than two dollars.
He falls in with a group of his fellow dissatisfied workers. “We unveil a black and yellow banner: Relieve the Relief Campers. Workers Not Beggars,” Jake recounts. He and 208 others soon find themselves in Oakalla Prison for the night. His life as an activist has begun. He also reads Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, about the sweatshops of Chicago. In Germany, Hitler is on the rise.
Jake’s youth is counterpointed by chapters set in 1986 at the fifty-year reunion of the “Mac-Paps” in Spain. The Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion was the Canadian contingent of volunteers who went to fight General Franco and fascism in the years 1936 to 1939. The Mac-Paps were named after William Lyon Mackenzie and Louis-Joseph Papineau. Mackenzie led a revolution against something called the Family Compact in Toronto in 1837; Papineau did the same in Montreal. The Family Compact was a group who were thought to be preventing democracy from flourishing by keeping control of land and politics to themselves.
Jake’s early years are the most dramatic in Keefer Street. For example, when the Nazi warship, Karlsruhe, docks at the Ballantyne Pier in March 1935, Jake joins a mass protest. The range of the people standing against the Nazis in Vancouver is fascinating.
Cover art of David Spaner’s Keefer Street (Ronsdale Press)
David Spaner sets the scene: “The waterfront is decorated in banners: Relief Camp Workers Against Fascism, One Big Union, Finnish Organization of Canada, International Typographical Union, Red International, Railway Carmen, Communist Party, Chinese Unemployed Association, Anti-Nazi Coalition, Mayday Committee, Pacific Coast Fishermen’s Union, Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, Ukrainian Anti-Fascist League, Waterfront Workers Association, Order of Sleeping Car Porters, Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union, Jewish Workers Circle.”
In one of the book’s most intense incidents, Jake and others board the Karlsruhe and a battle ensues. Fighting his way to the prow he burns the Nazi flag before getting punched out and waking up in jail for the second time.
Such scenes as this, as well as the book’s cover, which shows a man with his right fist defiantly raised, implies that Keefer Street is a novel about war and protest. Yet it’s not until halfway through that Jake sets off for Spain’s civil war, and the novel is nearly finished before we see any action—he gets shot in the leg and is tended in the hospital by an American nurse named Rebecca.
When Jake returns to Vancouver, he finds himself blackballed for having volunteered in support of the Spanish Civil War’s Republican cause and can’t find work. In fact, he can’t even volunteer for the Canadian Forces to return to Europe for World War II.
His personal life is just as disheartening. Lena, with whom he’d been in love, has gone to Toronto. Jake’s friends who stayed home are thriving. His father, who abandoned the family some years earlier and returned to the fictional northern town of Fort Harold, is running a successful clothing store and is involved with a new woman. What’s Jake going to do? For a while he contemplates changing his name to Jack Fields to skirt the antisemitism he feels is holding him back. As for his interest in politics, it seems to have faded and he has no particular desire to do anything else other than shoot the occasional game of pool. Eventually he marries Polly, an old friend, and when his father dies they move to Fort Harold, take over the store and raise three kids. The decades pass. Yet Polly, an aspiring actress, is bored. She finally takes the kids and leaves for Los Angeles; when Jake eventually follows, she says it’s over.
Keefer Street is solidly written and full of interesting historical detail. The depiction of Jewish life and the links with family members in Toronto and New York give the impression of a strong and pervasive ethnic interconnectedness.
The bright spot in Jake’s otherwise bleak life is his reunion with Rebecca, the nurse who tended him when he was recovering from his gunshot wound in 1936. Rebecca is still politically active. They visit a Spanish hospital where she is invited to give a talk. “When Rebecca is called to the microphone, it is the first time I’ve heard her speak in public and I’m taken by her eloquence and her manner,” says Jake. “Talking with her hands as much as her voice, in Spanish as much as in English, she tells of the urgent needs for medical supplies in Nicaragua, likening its conditions, under bombs and bullets, to Spain.”
Even fifty years later, she’s fighting the good fight. Jake finds strength in this. He and Rebecca connect and fall for each other. In the final scene they are in British Columbia together on serene and bucolic Hornby Island.
“Rebecca and I turn onto a dirt road to a cottage on the water, set in a garden of fern, bramble, violet.
“And we rest.” 9781553807209
Grant Buday’s historical fiction novels, Orphans of Empire (Brindle & Glass, 2020) and In the Belly of the Sphinx (Brindle & Glass, 2023) tell of the late 19th century lives of settlers in Vancouver and Victoria respectively.
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