Sunday Morning! “Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted” by Gary Barwin

The fortunes of the cowboy in popular culture seem to rise and fall in relation to how Americans think of themselves. The 1950s upstanding Western lawman with a crisp white hat and smile, and forever-pressed shirts, probably rode off into the sunset with Roy Rogers and Gunsmoke. The Spaghetti Westerns that came after were dirtier and sweatier and a lot bloodier, and hewed closer to noir with tales of double-crosses and heists gone bad. No doubt, someone’s already tied 60s anti-establishment cynicism with the taste for outlaws like Butch and Sundance. And, in the modern era, we’re more atuned to the westward imperialism and ethnic cleansing underlying the white-hatted cowboy. We like ’em bleak, pardner.

But, the cowboy never really dies. And despite our mixed feelings, it’s quite easy to understand the straightforward appeal of the cowboy life- freedom, independence, riding the open range with a sky as vast and unimpeded as your own thoughts. Even as we can imagine the loneliness of that life, we yearn for its freedom, especially now that life is narrower. Who wouldn’t like to light out for the territories for a few years?

Certainly, we can understand “Motl the Cowboy” in Gary Bawin’s recent novel Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: the ballad of Motl the Cowboy: a middle-aged Jewish bookworm in Lithuania, whose testicles were shot clean off in the first World War (accidentally, by Tristan Tzara, naturally), he is up to his nose in cowboy novels and dreaming of freedom and heroism and all of those things in short supply for the Jews in Europe in 1941. Looking to escape the Nazi hordes, he flees with his mother and sister and a horse named Theodor Hertzl (he goes wherever he wants), but is separated from them, and has a picaresque series of adventures hoping to find his relatives and save his missing nards (frozen in the Alps, apparently) in hopes of procreating. As Motl defines himself, he is: “a wandering cowboy, an indigeneous knight, a Litvak rambling from the Pale, aiming to outride the sorrows of the world.”

Motl is a devotee of German cult novelist Karl May, a writer also beloved by Hitler, but he’s closer in spirit to Don Quixote of La Mancha, with his endless books of knightly chivalry and madcap misadventures. However, Motl’s also a bit of a nebbish and, as his mother puts it: “If parking his tuches all day and all night on a chair doing nothing but reading is action, he’s a man of action.” Nevertheless, he rises to the occasion and finds his true love along the way. He becomes a mentsch.

All of which, let’s be honest, could be handled very poorly in the hands of a lesser writer. After all, this is a suureal and comic picaresque about the Holocaust, the one subject that is impossible to joke about. It helps that Barwin is a genuinely talented artist.

Gary Barwin

And, as with all the centuries of Jewish humor he draws on, the jokes are how the soul lives with sadness. As the novel tells us, the Jews invented one-liners because they were easier to carry while fleeing. So, it is a book filled with jokes, puns, wordplay, and slapstick, but one that never loses sight of the fact that being a Jew in the European diaspora was a painful struggle at the best of times and these were the very worst of times. Gary Barwin never makes light of the Jewish plight, as such, and never forgets the “Fritzes” pursuing our characters are carniverous beasts. When the horror arrives, there are no punchlines. Finally, the verbal pyrothechnics are in services of truth, which is what matters. Motl seeks to bring life into a broken world, and Barwin does as well.

But, it’s quite a schlep he’s making. Along the way, Motl and his new love Esther find themselves teaming up with an Oneida from Ontario and a Lakota Sioux from America. And, as they find, Jews and Indigenous people have much the same history: “One narrow escape after another. One damn unbelievable thing after another.” The story follows suit: they pose as Karaites with a message for Himmler, perform in a circus, jump trains, stowaway with Nazi gold, and survive one damn thing after another. Gary Barwin is a writer of seemingly boundless energy and invention, and it does admittedly get a bit overwhelming at times. It’s difficult to keep up this pace and tone without losing some depth of characterization. Esther is a bit of a manic pixie shaina maidel. There is an epilogue section that fleshes the characters out a bit, but I’m not sure it wasn’t another digression too many.

Nevertheless, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted is a masterful novel, and I want to recommend it because I’m not sure how many of our regulars will have heard of it- Canadian publishing is a bit of shetl of its own. Gary Barwin is an accomplished poet, composer, children’s writer, and novelist; his last novel Yiddish for Pirates made quite a splash north of the 49th parallel, and perhaps beyond. He’s also a local Hamilton resident and quite a charming fellow from what I’ve heard. There’s a lot of charm in this shaggy mentsch story, and enough flights of imagination to fill the Texas sky.

So, what are YOU reading, writing, creating, pondering, watching, playing, or roaming this weekend, pardner?