Remembering Montreal playwright Aviva Ravel, 98, who created stories about the city and seemingly ordinary people

Ravel brought a rare, female perspective to the English-language, Canadian Jewish literary canon. The post Remembering Montreal playwright Aviva Ravel, 98, who created stories about the city and seemingly ordinary people appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News .

In playwright Aviva Ravel’s acclaimed Dispossessed (1977), Seymour, one of the play’s three characters, proclaims: “I only read King Solomon: He knew what he was about. He said: ‘Everything counts for nothing.’

You don’t count, I don’t count, money doesn’t count, the snow doesn’t count...” And yet Ravel’s work consistently argues the opposite. Again and again, she returned to the seemingly ordinary lives of Montreal Jews, whether in the old immigrant neighbourhoods along Saint Lawrence Boulevard or in the postwar suburb of Côte Saint-Luc.

Aviva Ravel, who died June 24, at the age of 98, leaves behind a body of work that insists there is nothing ordinary about ordinary lives. Born Eva Borenstein in Montreal in 1928, Ravel was the eldest daughter of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania and Romania who worked in the city’s garment industry. She grew up on Clarke Street in the densely Jewish neighbourhood that would later provide the setting for much of her writing.

As a teenager she joined the Socialist-Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair and, with her first husband, Nahum Ravel, made aliyah in 1947. There she adopted the modern Hebrew name ‘Aviva’ and helped establish a kibbutz. Even her earliest publications foreshadow the themes that would occupy her throughout a career spanning more than thirty plays, as well as short stories and poetry.

At 13, she published the anti-Nazi, pro-British poem “Never Say Die” (1941) in the Montreal Star . Theatre, too, entered her life early. In 1944, the Montreal Gazette reported she starred in Commercial High School’s production of Cranford opposite the future actor John Colicos.

In her 2016 memoir, Through My Misty Window , Ravel recalls finagling a ticket to the original Broadway production of A Streetcar Named Desire (starring Jessica Tandy and Marlon Brando), only days before sailing for Palestine. This experience sealed her lifelong devotion to the theatre. Her writing, however, truly came into its own only after she returned to Montreal with her family in 1962.

Wider recognition followed in 1967 when Mendel Fish, a comedy set during the Depression in the Saint Lawrence Boulevard area, won a playwriting prize at the Dominion Drama Festival in Toronto. Over the decades that followed, Ravel established herself as a vital Jewish and Canadian literary voice, drawing on the textures of Montreal Jewish life and on her own experiences, including her time living on a kibbutz. One of Ravel’s greatest gifts was dialogue.

She faithfully captured the rhythm and cadences of Montreal Jewish speech, infused with Yiddish inflections and syntax. Her characters talk over one another and speak in vivid colloquial language. Ironically, early reviewers criticized her precisely for these qualities, describing her dialogue as too “true to life, with its heavy accents and idioms” and “too natural” that it seemed insufficiently theatrical.

If much of the English-language Canadian Jewish literary canon has been dominated by male writers, Aviva Ravel offered something comparatively rare: a distinctly female perspective. Speaking before the premiere of Dispossessed at the Saidye Bronfman Centre in 1977, she described her style as one of subjective realism, remarking, “My best plays are Montreal-based.” Indeed, more than a backdrop, the city of Montreal serves almost as a character in its own right through her work.

This observation also resonates alongside a passage from Through My Misty Window , in which she recalls a lesson imparted by her mother: “Remember child, you can only depend on yourself. If you have to do something, do it yourself. Alaynenyou , always alaynenyou .”

This, Ravel writes, became her personal credo. Its spirit animates many of her heroines: they are often self-sufficient, self-reliant women. In Dispossessed , Roochel and Seymour, an unmarried couple who spent decades together, share their home with Roochel’s 40-year-old son Benjie, who has squandered his life in a cycle of gambling and unemployment.

Emotional and economic precarity binds all three. Seymour survives on a meagre pension, while Roochel, still working, bears the family’s financial burden. The death of Feldman, a wealthy “uptown” Jew with whom Roochel once shared a youthful romance, forces each character to confront long-buried regrets and unfulfilled dreams.

An unmistakably biblical tone runs through the play. Its characters invoke Ecclesiastes, meditating on the meaninglessness of worldly possessions and the apparent futility of life’s trials and tribulations. Roochel in particular embodies an unsatisfied existence; she is haunted by the love she never truly had, by the respect she never garnered, and by decades of sacrifice rewarded with neither comfort nor recognition.

Her eventual psychological collapse recalls King Lear . There is no consoling resolution, only the recognition that not every immigrant story culminates in upward mobility and material success. Vengeance (1988) covers wholly different territory.

Stephania, an elderly Polish gentile and former opera singer who emigrated to Canada after the Second World War, is seeking a caregiver. Anna arrives for an interview. Unbeknownst to Stephania, her visitor has spent years searching for her: she is the daughter of Jews betrayed by Stephania and her Nazi-collaborator husband during the Holocaust.

This dark yet powerful one-act play gives a female face to what historian Hannah Arendt famously called the banality of evil. The proverbial Chekhov’s Gun alluded to early in the play never goes off. Instead, it functions as a red herring that deceives both Stephania and the audience, instead producing something more unsettling than violence: admissions of truth and guilt, and a profound sense of cathartic terror.

Although it cannot heal the impossible wounds of the Holocaust nor deliver genuine justice, Vengeance grants righteous anger its full dramatic force. Ravel’s comic gifts are no less impressive. In My Rumanian Cousin (1991), Ravel’s skill for capturing the complex inner lives of middle-aged women is on full display.

The play is set in a Côte Saint-Luc home on Kildare Road, where empty nesters Max and Ethel prepare for the arrival of Ethel’s Romanian cousin Clara (a role originated by Ravel’s sister, Bena Singer) for an indefinite stay. Clara arrives determined to find husband number four, and quickly fixes her sights on Max’s longtime business associate Sam. While the routine-oriented Max and spontaneous Clara clash, Ethel’s long-dormant desires and needs are rekindled by her cousin’s encouragement.

Through a series of farcical events (possibly orchestrated by the two women), long-held secrets surface and domestic power dynamics are unexpectedly overturned. For all its absurd familial antics, My Rumanian Cousin feels heartwarmingly real. Once again, Ravel centres a female point of view, and a particular kind of frustration born of having one’s needs subordinated to caregiving and domestic responsibilities.

The rhythms and details of the play are unmistakably Montreal Jewish, yet its themes remain universal. And it is, quite simply, a wonderfully entertaining script. Reading Ravel’s most prominent works today, I am struck not just by their relevance and depth, but something more remarkable.

Within these pages are the lives of so many kinds of Canadian Jews being treated as lives deserving of dramatic seriousness. Yet while we can admire Ravel’s writing on the page, plays are ultimately meant to be performed. The Roochels, the Ethels, the Claras, the Annas, and so many others remain suspended on the page, waiting to be brought to life once again before audiences.

Consider this my call to arms: It is time for our theatres, our schools, our classrooms, and our community centres to mount new productions of these important works and allow them to live again as they were always intended: on the stage. The post Remembering Montreal playwright Aviva Ravel, 98, who created stories about the city and seemingly ordinary people appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News .