Lake Burntshore Novel Excerpt
News:
My long-form essay, “Jewish Fiction After October 7th,” is available to read now at The Temz Review.
The e-book of my novel, Lake Burntshore, is on a massive sale, through July 7, wherever you get your e-books!
Hi everybody:
For this month’s newsletter, and in honour of the start of the summer and the sleepover camp season—in all its problems and glory—I’ve decided to share an excerpt from my novel, Lake Burntshore (and as mentioned above, the e-book version is on a huge sale through July 7). The excerpt is from near the beginning of the novel, when a larger-than-usual number of staff have gotten kicked out for smoking pot, and the head staff have to decide what to do, setting the stage for the coming confrontation between antizionist Ruby and the Israeli soldiers that arrive to make up the staffing shortfall. If you like the excerpt, and haven’t yet bought or borrowed it, get yourself a copy!
Excerpt From Lake Burntshore, Chapter 3: BAGELS! SOLDIERS! (AND LATER, A CANOE RIDE)
It was the period before lunch on the fourth day. A bunch of counselors were sitting at the bench beside the volleyball court, their campers at swim lessons on the docks. The sun was high and hot. The kids splashed and yelled from the lake. It was a perfect summer day; the machine of camp was well oiled, moving smoothly. As most of the talk when campers were not in earshot the past two days, they were discussing the booted counselors, who, contra to Tom’s announcement, were not caught leaving camp without permission but smoking pot in the swim shed, and, as rumour had it, caught by Tom himself. What a scene that must have been, Ruby thought, sitting on the end of the bench, wearing her heavily tinted movie-star sunglasses, painting her toenails a pre-dawn blue.
“Kraftchuk is such a nut,” Danielle said, Andre Agassi’s Open sitting on her lap. Was such a nut, Ruby almost corrected. “Remember that time for his birthday, when he went to all ten What A Bagels in the city, got his free birthday dozen, shaved his beard, then went back to all of them and got another dozen?”
“The birthday bagel bonanza! Who could forget it? Entrance was a tub of cream cheese or a tomato or a cucumber, and then it was all you can eat!”
“And all you can bagel!”
“Fuck, what do you mean who could forget—I was constipated for a month.”
“Sounds like a shitty party,” Casey Mustard exclaimed. “Toronto bagels suck. Like, what even are they? Subpar New York knockoffs, that’s what.” Ruby looked up—did he purposefully overpronounce the second t in Toronto, or was that honestly how people from Montreal said it?
Most heads nodded in agreement. “It’s Montreal or New York in the final bracket,” Casey continued, flashing his heart-melting grin, “and the winner is undoubtedly Montreal.”
“Nope. Nuh-uh. You’ll never change my mind,” Barry Blum said emphatically, shaking his big scruffy head. “New York bagels are the best bagels.”
“Are you out of your freaking mind?” Danielle exclaimed, slamming the Agassi memoir shut. “It’s Montreal all the way! How can you beat the chewy, nutty, golden dough joy that is a fresh Montreal bagel?”
“I’ll tell you how: by eating a heavy, mountainous onion NYC bagel loaded with a full pound of whitefish salad!”
Ruby, who had moved on to painting her fingernails the same dark blue, hadn’t gotten involved in the discussion yet, though she was tempted to accuse Danielle of being a traitor for favouring Montreal over Toronto.
Ruby had been quiet since Phil and the others got fired, and not only because she hadn’t smoked any weed in nearly two days—she was seriously thinking of abstaining for the rest of the summer—and was in the grumpy stages of withdrawal. She had been smoking with the ex-counselors in the swim shed when an uncustomary nighttime need to shit soured her stomach, so she’d passed the joint to Aimee without a word and hustled to the Monolith. Tom must have caught them just as she was wiping. Now, she was spooked, mad at herself for being so careless, feeling guilty she didn’t ask Aimee to go with her to the Monolith (which she very nearly did), pissed at Phil for what she assumed he was already up to back in Thornhill, even though they were most certainly broken up.
“Toronto has its own bagel, and it’s pretty good,” Ruby declared, blowing on her fingers. If nobody else was going to, she’d have to stand up (as always) for the unfairly maligned, for the dispossessed, the forgotten.
Looking up from her nails, she caught sight of Debs, run-walking across centre field, clipboard in hand, her walkie-talkie swinging on her cargo-panted hip, her unkempt orange curls frizzed, frazzled, floating.
In Tom’s office, Tom, Jenna, Brett, and Tova were waiting impatiently. The sounds of kids playing baseball, splashing in the lake, laughing and shouting, wafted in through the open screen door. Tom had his arms crossed, was focused on a big chunk of shale sitting on his desk. Brett was looking down, his head in his hands. The mood was tense. Finally, Debs rushed into the office.
“Well,” Tom said once Debs was sitting and everybody had readjusted.
“This is an unfortunate situation. We’ve never lost this many staff in an entire summer, let alone in the first week.” Tom’s expression, composed, sagacious, was familiar to everybody in the room: Tom undertaking the serious work of dealing with a camp crisis. “This marijuana epidemic is out of control. It would seem our out-of-sight-out-of-mind policy when it comes to the . . . activities of the staff at night is no longer sufficient. But it’s the staff shortage we need to resolve, and soon.”
“We’re pretty strained,” Jenna said, agreeing with her husband. “We expect to lose a few CITs over the course of the summer due to drugs or alcohol, but five staff members in the first three days?” She shook her head emphatically. “No good.”
“There was that summer we had to fire the entire swim staff,” Debs said, correcting Tom. What she didn’t say, partly because it didn’t need to be said, partly because it would just be a distraction, was that the entire swim staff had to be fired because Brett, who was then head of swim, had got them all drunk during a social the second last week of the summer.
Tom kept them to finish the Bronze Cross swim tests the next day and then fired them all, even his son, heir to the camp. It was one of Tom’s few sore spots. After the firing, Brett cut off his ponytail—which consisted of the same lustrous black hair that Tom still had a full head of—and disappeared for a couple of summers before his illustrious return. (Depending who you believed, he spent his time away backpacking through Israel, living in an Ashram in India, visiting the death camps of Europe, or learning Spanish in Bolivia. All Debs knew was that for two blissful years he was absent from both camp itself as well as the camp’s Toronto offices, where he normally would hang out during the fall and winter.) Now, Brett was quite clearly being groomed, once again, to take over Burntshore. Debs thought Tom could announce it as early as next year.
There was an uncomfortable silence. Brett stared intently out the windows at the row of oak trees that lined the office road. Tova coughed. “Well, that was at the end of the summer,” Tom said, ending the awkwardness, “and this is the beginning.” He turned to Debs. “How are we managing?”
Debs looked down at her chart. “Right now, we have Ari covering Margolis’s and Glazer’s old cabin instead of running Landsports, I have two staff floating between cabins 4 and 6. Aimee’s cabin has fifteen girls, Talia is pretty strained. Until Stolow gets his CIT placement, he’s all alone on Ropes. They’re all being stoic about it, but it’s an untenable situation.”
Nods all around.
“Have we thought about hiring more staff?” Debs asked. This was the obvious, though difficult solution. “There must be somebody in the city who’d be willing to come up on short notice.”
Tom glanced at Brett, and then his wife, before settling his gaze on Debs. “Brett has a, shall we say, rather unusual solution.”
Brett was passing around pamphlets.
“Israeli soldiers?” Debs exclaimed, looking at the image of a smiling Israeli in full fatigues paddling in a canoe with a young girl, the sun beaming down on them.
“Not only do lots of camps have representatives from the IDF for the summer,” Brett said, launching in like it was a shpiel he had been practising for days, “it’ll substantially save on costs. I spoke to somebody at that office,” he pushed his finger onto the contact section of the pamphlet, “and, though it’s highly short notice, the lady there thinks they should be able to gather six or so soldiers to ship over. Possibly by the end of the week.”
“Yeah, but . . . soldiers? It doesn’t really seem in keeping with the Burntshore experience . . . does it? Won’t it send the wrong message to the kids, and to the parents? Not to mention future potential campers?”
“What message is that?” Brett asked, feigning politeness. Debs paused. She wasn’t exactly political—or apolitical, depending how you looked at it—but she generally shied away from guns or uniforms or anything like that, even when they were Jewish guns or Jewish uniforms. It was something she had always avoided, at Brandies, in all the Jewish organizational spaces she had moved through, and especially at camp. She didn’t want to explain that. “Just, that . . . well, c’mon, we all know what it would mean!”
Tom looked at Brett. Debs remembered years ago when Brett tried to be Orthodox for a couple of summers, wore a kippah, started a prayer club in the dining hall basement; she also recalled, the summer before Brett got fired, constant talk about making aliyah, moving to Israel. For Brett, always forcefully manifesting his Jewishness in one way or another, this newest plan wasn’t a surprise. Debs did a quick calculation of which Jewish camps had visiting Israeli staff: Camp George, yes. Camp Biluim, yes. Northland, no. Gesher, yes. White Pine, Tamarack, New Moon, Manitou, Sumac, no, no, no, no, and no. There was that one summer Camp Tzedek, in the Catskills, hired fifty Israeli shlichim for one season—but that was preplanned, under different circumstances, the kind of thing that became legend. Debs didn’t want that for Burntshore; Burntshore should not be a case study in the next academic monograph on Jewish summer camps, that was not Burntshore’s style.
“Frankly, I think this is bullshit,” Tova said, speaking for the first time. Debs was glad Tova was there. Head of trip, she was one of Tom’s most trusted staff members. Tova had been Tom’s student in a graduate geology seminar; he had poached her from her summer job at Outward Bound to build up Burntshore’s tripping program, which she had done with characteristic excellence. Tova was every camp program director’s dream. In meetings she was usually quiet; the fact that she was speaking up at all was momentous in and of itself. “Why bring in soldiers from a faraway land?” Tova continued, almost coming out of her seat, “Why not hire some teenagers from the reserve? They’d love the experience, not to mention the money.”
“Calling them soldiers isn’t exactly accurate, is it?” Brett answered quickly, his butt raised out of his chair as well. Brett’s disdain for Tova had never gotten past Debs, but the jealousy written all over his face was a new discovery. “They’re Israeli. They’re our Israeli cousins. It’s not like they’re going to show up with their Uzis and automatics! Though that would be cool. Anyways, technically they’d be ‘Israeli emissaries.’”
Debs looked at the pamphlet, skimmed the middle panel. The phrase “Israeli emissaries” did come up multiple times, but Debs quickly noticed that the “emissaries” would also all be enlisted soldiers. Brett was still talking: “We’ve been saying we’ve been wanting to up our Jewish cultural activities here, haven’t we, Pa? What better, more economical, way than this? Think about how proud Grandpa would be—real Jews from the real Jewish homeland. And it won’t cost us a dime!”
Tova scoffed. Tom looked at Jenna. Jenna gave Brett an encouraging smile. Debs closed her eyes, tried to picture it.
It would be a change, that’s for sure.
They were still arguing about bagels. Ruby had found herself quite involved by this point, was talking in her yelling-into-a-microphoneat-a-protest voice. “What you’re missing about Toronto is that there isn’t just one kind of Toronto bagel. You can get anything you want in Toronto. A regular Toronto bagel from What A Bagel or Bagel World, a flat, a twister. C’mon, Toronto must be the only city with a true twister bagel—the Toronto Twister!” Ruby knew it was an uphill battle; she was vastly outnumbered by Montreal- and New York–bagel diehards. Bagel ideologues. Bagel turncoats.
“All pale imitations!” Casey enthused, his baseball cap recently flipped backwards, his Oakleys—which were never far from his face or hands—perched on top. “There ’s literally nothing like going into the original St-Viateur at dawn, that smell of the wood-burning oven, the seeds, the raw dough, freshly born circular miracles popping off those long wooden paddles right in front of your eyes, buying a half dozen, eating them right there on the sidewalk in Mile End while the sun comes up.”
“I’m not denying that Montreal bagels are fantastic, I’m just saying that Toronto has bagels too, and that I happen to prefer them.”
“Listen. I enjoy Toronto bagels, and, yes, I acknowledge they exist. But it’s impossible to deny that Montreal bagels are simply the best. They are simply unique, simply perfect. The end. Period. The end.”
“What about New York bagels?” Barry Blum asked.
“New York bagels are trash,” Ruby pronounced. This sent everybody into an uproar. The argument started over again, in a yet higher key.
In Tom’s office, no decisions had been reached.
Finally, Tom spoke. “When my father bought this land and started this camp, he wanted it to be imbued with the same Jewish warmth he grew up with in his parents’ house. There were Shabbat dinners, Saturday morning prayers, blessings at every meal, lessons on Jewish history and tradition, even a Torah for a few summers in a makeshift arc in the dining hall basement.
When he handed the camp to me and Jenna, we let that stuff slide; to keep up with the other private Jewish camps, we needed to embrace the secular, cultural parts of our heritage. Which I feel we succeeded at.
More than succeeded at. Burntshore is, of course, still Jewish, but only nominally religious. This is how it’s been for twenty years now. It works.”
“This is the future, Pa.”
Tom sat back. For centuries natural scientists were adamant that the geological world was static, created according to God’s plan. But, as it turns out, they couldn’t have been more wrong. The planet was constantly changing. The plate tectonic revolution was in the ’60s, for Christ’s sake! Endless dynamism, long periods of shifting calm followed by rocking cataclysm, is the name of the game. Shouldn’t he, as an owner of a mid-sized Jewish sleepover camp in Central Ontario, harness the same principles as the globe? As Jenna had reminded him last night, the camp was going to be handed off to Brett soon enough. He understood Tova’s anger, appreciated Debs’s ambivalence—he felt it himself!—but didn’t he owe it to Brett to take a chance?
“I think it’s worth giving it a try,” he said. “What do you think, Debs?”
Debs looked down at the shiny pamphlet again. The soldier’s face was chiselled, his eyes proud and knowing. The girl was radiating strength, comradery, joy. Now that Tom had given it his approval, she’d have to have a legitimate reason to not be okay with it. Which, in the moment, she did not. Debs’s allegiance was to Tom, was to camp. To Burntshore.
Brett, watching all this closely, smiled: he had them.
“I guess it wouldn’t hurt to have a couple trained tacticians to round out the Ropes staff,” Debs said, laughing at her own bad joke.
“Fuck this. Sorry, Tom, I’m out,” Tova said, already standing. She left through the screen door, closing it halfway. Debs watched her walk off the porch: nobody at this camp, excepting his immediate family, would have gotten away with talking to Tom like that.
A slow minute passed.
“Okay, then.” Tom nodded, the decision reached. “Brett, will you call this outreach office and see what you can arrange?”
Brett was standing, already opening the door that led into the front office. “Sure thing, Pa! You’ll see, we’ll turn this camp around in no time!”
Tom turned to Jenna, raised an eyebrow.
The future generation, remaking the world as they saw fit.
The bagels discussion had devolved into chaos. Casey and Ruby were yelling at each other, Danielle and Barry were play-fighting, the others were staring daggers.
Tova walked by, heading towards the lake, her legs pumping, her face set, her dark cherry canoe paddle in her hands. “Hey,” Casey called out, “hey, T, what’s your favourite bagel, Montreal or New York?”
“Or Toronto?!”
“Booooo!” Casey and Barry.
Tova stopped short, put her paddle blade on the ground, leaned on the shaft. She smiled wickedly. “Did our ancestors really travel across the shark-infested oceans with nothing but a dream and a recipe in their pockets for us to argue about what is the one true bagel? Fuck that univocal bullshit! I’m a bagel pluralist. Every bagel has something to say, to offer. To give.”
Ruby stood up. Her nails were done, dried in the day’s brittle heat.
“Guys, I think that’s it. Tova has spoken.” She left the bench and walked towards the docks. A stalemate; fine, she’d take it. At least she didn’t have to concede.
Besides, it was almost lunch. Time to collect her girls.
There’s Tova at the canoe docks. She pulls her favourite canoe—a beat-up fifteen-foot canvas Chestnut, one of the only surviving boats from the camp’s original fleet—down from the rack, portages it the thirty feet to the dock, flips it off her shoulders directly into the water.
She gets in. She pushes off. She paddles gracefully, steadily, hard. She paddles past where the river empties into the lake, along the Crown land, her canoe getting smaller as she moves beside the vast tracts of undeveloped forest that the government supposedly kept in trust but really did with as it chose. She paddles past the black sand beaches opposite the camp’s shore, the beaches that gave the lake its current name and which lent its sand to souvenir jars on windowsills across the world. There she is, rounding the northwest corner, paddling past the Town of Spitsville, named after the town’s founder, Holleander Spitz, a Dutch settler who bought over ten thousand acres here in the mid-1800s. Tova’s getting bigger now, coming closer. She glides past the Black Spruce First Nation reserve, the cottagers renting the reserve’s cottages splashing in the water. On the first Friday of the first summer of camp, in 1963, Tom’s father personally brought over trays and trays of Jewish food to the reserve, deli and chicken soup and kreplach: a story the people of the Spruce tell to this day. Now Cindy and her staff come from the reserve every morning to cook the camp’s food. This one lake, one among hundreds of thousands, carries enough history to spend a lifetime unravelling.
Tova will pull back up to the camp docks just in time for dinner. She will have worked up a powerful appetite.