The Island Gospel According to Samson Grief: Steven Mayoff What Makes Samson Run?

Patiently waiting for Godot and Kafka on Prince Edward Island, J.J. Steinfeld may now welcome Steven Mayoff to his heroic Cradle of Confederation. Yet Mayoff’s exuberant novel, The Island Gospel According to Samson Grief, resembles more closely the peripatetic fiction of Gary Barwin. Where Barwin gallops at a zany pace, Mayoff canters smoothly in his picaresque across PEI. His epic gospel begins with two epigraphs: the first from Socrates, the second from Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Socrates’s words apply directly to this novel: “The greatest blessing to mankind comes by way of madness, which is a divine gift.” Mayoff’s madness includes blessings linking mankind to divinity. Samson Grief’s apprenticeship owes much to Duddy Kravitz’s, as Mayoff changes Richler’s phrasing of “a man without land is nobody” to “a land without man is nowhere.” A painter, Samson Grief is more than just somebody on his Island.

Mayoff’s magic realism brings three historic Jewish figures to contemporary PEI: Judas Iscariot, Shakespeare’s Shylock, and Dickens’s Fagin. These illustrious magi appear at various moments in the narrative as agents of the Supreme One who delivers a message for a synagogue to be built on the island. This madcap trio may be identified by their head coverings: “The blue baseball cap, the coral bucket hat and the yellow porkpie hat.” Leonard Cohen’s CD, The Future, serves as background music for this visionary company: “Through the boom box speakers the gentle croak of the Jewish lo-fi blues poet made the deceptively simple observation that everything has a crack which functions as an aperture, allowing light to enter.” This, in turn, occasions a wisecrack from the sometime crackpot narrator, Samson.

Samson layers his canvas with Jewish iconography over the geography of PEI: “Normally a narrow strand of ruddy, stone-encrusted shoreline tapers toward a divide where the waters of the Northumberland Strait meet those of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.” His painterly eye veers from normal and narrow towards a broader canvas: “In my painting, rather than merging, the two bodies of water part – waves rising in rapid brush strokes of shimmering aquamarine tinged with yellowish-white streaks, climaxing into a silvery Biblical scroll of oceanic sputum.” Combining the confluence of biblical scroll with straits and gulfs, The Island Gospel enters the mainstream of Canadian Jewish literature, as Samson Grief undergoes his own belated rite de passage. Into that climactic sibilance and Künstlerroman, Samson dips his brush, slathers confederation, and creates a Starfish of David with six arms. During the course of the novel the starfish multiplies its arms to coincide with eventful reaches and grasps.

Combining the confluence of biblical scroll with straits and gulfs, The Island Gospel enters the mainstream of Canadian Jewish literature, as Samson Grief undergoes his own belated rite de passage.

Samson’s earlier painting, Anne of Bergen-Belsen, conflates Anne Shirley of Green Gables and Anne Frank. Lucy Maud Montgomery’s red-headed heroine has her hair dyed green by a Jewish pedlar, and Mayoff’s colourful scheme features red Jews historically. Samson’s painting “had her dressed in rags and sporting a yellow Star of David armband. Her left forearm, skeletal and pale, was imprinted with blue tattooed numbers.” Jewish identity oscillates between this Star of David and the multi-pointed Starfish of David, between concentration camp and the open Atlantic. Anne’s eyes have “Simmering orange-green embers for irises with dilated coal-black pupils at their centers, like twin abysses of unspeakable terror.” These binocular cinders and sibilants twin towers of European Holocaust and Canadian freedom. Samson’s portfolio also includes watercolours of a swaddled infant Moses in a dory floating past channel markers and buoys on Malpeque Bay, “Joseph wearing his rain slicker of many colours,” and “a model of Noah’s Ark made entirely out of lobster traps.” Mayoff’s buoyant prose lifts into magic realism.

These biblical forebears cross the ocean to a new Promised Land – Samson’s PEI filled with grief, narrative mirth, and satire. He lives in Mount Russet, a displaced Mount Royal, thirty kilometres west of Charlottetown, in an apartment known as “Body Parts.” Mount Russet alludes to PEI’s potatoes, while Body Parts refer both to anatomy as synecdoche featured prominently in satire, and parts of an automobile also featured throughout this picaresque ride across the island. The six-armed starfish adheres to this expansive novel with its many colours and voices. Mayoff’s ventriloquism nets and projects the voices of Judas, Shylock, and Fagin, the figments of the protagonist’s imagination. Instead of John Milton’s Samson Agonistes which pulls down the temple’s pillars, Mayoff’s modern anti-hero tries to build a synagogue on the site of a garbage dump.

What makes Samson grieve? The figments of his imagination, the corrupt politics of PEI, and a millennial inheritance of antisemitism all contribute. He summons Kafka for his grief and guilt: “I couldn’t help but feel I was the one on trial in a Kafkaesque nightmare.” His gospel of grief continues in the island’s politics and ethnicities from Shylock’s trials to green gables: “now here was a different relationship, not so much reciprocity as a Kafkaesque metamorphosis, involving cultivation of a different sort.” The novel explores the cult in cultivation, multiple metamorphoses, and different relationships where Samson becomes involved with various women who depart from the Delilah model. Maggie Beairsto runs the local bar; Aziza Arsenault changes identities; her mother Zania has a mixed background; and Frieda Greenglass is the Latke Lady of Charlottetown. “It was enough to send Gregor Samsa scurrying back under his bed for good.” Samsa and Samson stretch their appendages (whether biped, quadruped, or six-sided starfish) across the diaspora from Prague to PEI and Montreal where Duddy Kravitz gets distorted into “a land without man is nowhere.” Samson’s long-suffering grief is anything but brief and is overcome by comic relief in “Island Freilach,” the novel’s epilogue.

The novel poses the question of what it means to inhabit a mythology. “Nowhere” may be a dystopian place, but once a landsman enters no-man’s land and breathes life into it, then somebody turns PEI into an island unto itself and beyond. From away, Mayoff populates his land and gospel with a host of memorable characters from Indigenous and immigrant backgrounds. All of them experience the cataclysmic devastation caused by the Supreme One – a re-enactment of Genesis and Exodus in the Island’s odyssey.

The final part of the novel, “Samson Ex Machina,” prepares for the tikkun or repair of PEI after the apocalyptic hurricane. Part of this repair involves Samson’s visit to his friend and poet Nelson, as they both stare far off “into the deeper silhouettes between dappled pine needles and layered shades of dishevelled greenery.” A lyric impulse penetrates these thick woods: “following his line of vision, I shifted my focus to where dangerously crosshatched twigs and branches jutted off in all directions – not unlike the ten-armed starfish – pointing toward false trails and dead ends.” Layering many shades of green, Mayoff’s multi-directional fiction focuses on the local, even as it resonates toward the universal. His sleight of hand conjures up ancestors to celebrate a wedding where Shylock crowns the Shakespearean comedy: “a newly structured identity! Present thyself … as Samson Ex Machina.” This machine in the garden of PEI includes the marriage of Frieda Greenglass to Shylock.

From Anne of Green Gables to Frieda Greenglass in “Freilach,” The Island Gospel extends beyond Charlottetown to its publisher in Regina, Radiant Press, and to Jack Hodgins’s magic realism on Vancouver Island. From epigraphs to epilogue, Samson Grief’s apprenticeship follows in the footsteps of Mordecai Richler’s St. Urbain’s Horseman, The Incomparable Atuk, and Solomon Gursky Was Here. From away, Samson Grief was here, pulling down pillars, restoring paintings, and redeeming his Island, as Mayoff’s tempest stirs a salmagundi of porkpie hats and lobster traps.

Steven Mayoff (he/him) was born and raised in Montreal. His fiction and poetry have appeared in literary journals across Canada, the U.S. and abroad. He is the author of the story collection Fatted Calf Blues, winner of the 2010 PEI Book Award for Fiction; the novel Our Lady of Steerage; and two books of poetry Leonard’s Flat and Swinging Between Water and Stone. Steven lives in Foxley River, PEI.

Publisher: Radiant Press (Oct 17 2023)
Paperback 5.5″ x 8.5″ | 340 pages
ISBN: 978-1-9892-7497-2

Michael Greenstein

Poetry Editor

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English at the Université de Sherbrooke. He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.