FICTION

A GOOD PLACE TO COME FROM by Morley Torgov (St. Martin’s: $12.95). This collection of short stories is for anyone who ever left a hometown behind. For Morley Torgov, a writer now based in Toronto, the place is Sault Ste. Marie, across the border from Michigan. In a book first published 11 years ago in Canada, the author looks back on his boyhood before World War II (“arid, penny-pinching times”) and sees a community of Middle-European Jewish transplants who remind him of “upside-down weeds,” struggling but never succeeding to invert themselves and pass as indigenous plants.

Torgov’s “Soo” is a desolate town. The weather is variable--six months winter, six months rain. The city streets are all potholes and puddles. And only Gentiles own houses with lawns.

Neighbors in the Jewish ghetto where he lives have no heritage, no temple and, worse, no delicatessen. But if this sturdy bunch cannot rise above it, they can rail against it, wring a buck out of it, rename it something closer to Yiddish-- “Sault Shtunk (for stinker) Marie.”

From the beginning, the boy who narrates these comic vignettes seems to see himself as a visitor. At age 10, when his mother dies of kidney failure, he can only get close enough to describe the event in terms of the weather. “Five miles from downtown, in a cemetery in West Kildonan, on that blistering day, my mother was buried.”

Sharing an apartment above their clothing store with his father and new stepmother, he watches his life unfold with wonder. An upright piano, a $35 bargain, arrives in his bedroom one day, and he reluctantly learns to play it. A housekeeper named Annie takes him home to meet her non-Jewish family and feeds him a full pound of his beloved bacon, a forbidden food in his father’s house.

As much as Torgov’s stories define a time and place, they define a relationship--between a boy and his father. This was a “tidal wave” of a man, the author recalls, a man filled with “self-pity and vituperations.” When the boy wants to date Gentile girls who wear Evening in Paris perfume, the father threatens, “Keep this up and so help me God we’ll cut you off without a cent to your name.” When the boy decides to be a lawyer, the father announces he wants a doctor.

But when one is old and dying of cancer and the other, a lawyer, confesses, “I’m worried that you’re going to die and neither of us will really have understood each other,” the father reasons, “You don’t have to understand me. Just live your life and remember me. To remember is necessary. To understand is not.”