Jakob and Josef
Jakob Josefsohn had once asked his father why he kept all the Jewish books hidden away in a back room of his store, as if they were pornography.
“Superstitious nonsense!” the father had told his son. “I keep it only for your mother’s sake.”
Roger McAllister added this exchange to his stump speech in the third week of his book tour, acting out Josef Konrad Josefsohn’s voice in a heavy German accent, and the voice of his son Jakob in an accent somewhere between mid-Atlantic and mitteleuropa. McAllister knew full well that the accents were absurd, because both father and son, in the original conversation, would have been speaking educated Hochdeutsch, the only dialect permitted in Konrad Josef’s bookstore. McAllister justified his dramatic choice as a means of conveying, to a popular audience, just how rooted Josef Konrad Josefsohn had been in the Old World, and just how thoroughly his son Jakob would try to embrace the New. This was the theme of the next chapter in McAllister’s story: the journey of the Josephson family to Canada. Once he had firmly established how assimilated the Konrad Josef bookstore had been, how proud its owner had been of his Germanness, McAllister would take a deep breath, shake his head, and describe the events of November 9, 1923.
In the early morning of that day, a putsch—a riot, an uprising, an insurrection—spilled forth from a Munich beer hall into the streets. For a few terrifying hours the young National Socialist German Workers’ Party—“We would later know them as the Nazis,” said McAllister—seemed to control the municipal government. Just before dawn, Josef Konrad Josefsohn ventured out to barricade the windows of the Konrad Josef Bücherregal. Three young men were waiting for him. He was shoved from behind, knocked down, and kicked repeatedly, until his son Jakob, wielding a wooden rod, chased away the three cowardly brutes.
“We know you are Jews...” they shouted as they ran. “We know!”
“In one way, we were lucky,” Jakob would later tell his daughters, “We learned the truth early on.”
When Miriam Josephson Cohen heard Roger McAllister tell a version of this story on TV, she called her sister, Leah.
“Turn on your TV,” said Miriam.
“Dorothy just called me,” said Leah. “I’m already watching it.”
Josef Konrad Josefsohn’s broken ribs began to heal, but his spirit did not. He had recognized the Jew-hating toughs who beat him: they were the sons of one of his closest friends, an organizer of the bricklayers’ union. “A good communist family,” he muttered sadly to his son. Jakob Josefsohn also knew the young men—he remembered vividly how they had treated the other children in the school yard.
“They’re no good,” he told his father. “They’ve always been rowdies. Ruffians. Ordinary bullies.”
But that was no consolation to Josef Konrad Josefsohn, who each day dragged himself down to his desk in the bookstore, and sat there sullenly reading Schiller, ignoring the customers.
“He has no right!” said Miriam on the phone to her sister.
“Well, it’s not… technically… false… ” said Leah.
“Hold on,” said Miriam. “I’ve got another call… ” She clicked a button on her handset. “Dorothy? Are you taping this?”
After the beating, Josef Konrad Josefsohn never regained the vitality needed to run a small business, and it fell upon his son to keep the shop open. After several months, Jakob made the heart-wrenching decision, with his mother’s support, to close the bookstore and leave Munich. His mother had relatives in the Pacific Northwest, the sons and daughters of traders who had followed the various gold rushes. From these distant cousins, Jakob borrowed the passage, and brought the family to Canada: his mother, his father, and his young pregnant wife. His four older sisters were already married—“Not to Christians,” his father would proudly say, “but to Socialists!”—a distinction that did not matter to Jakob, who offered to borrow more money, and bring them all with him. But his older sisters decided to remain in Munich. Neither they, nor their children, would survive the coming decades.
“Did you tell him that?” said Miriam.
“It had to be Leah—she must have...” said Dorothy.
“He never told me anything about his sisters… ” said Miriam.
In leading the family to Canada, Jakob also led them back into observant Judaism, except of course, for his father, who never lost faith in the perfectibility of human society through human agency alone, even as his own engagement with the world around him grew more and more tenuous. During the long train ride across the plains, Josef Konrad Josefsohn became disoriented. He forgot about the beating and the Beer Hall Putsch, and told the other passengers that he had been kidnapped by dwarves, and was being taken to the Andes Mountains, to work there as a slave in the silver mines, a life of endless subterranean toil without pay, until his hands and feet would wither into claws and nothing would be left of him but a blind featherless underground bird, squawking in the depths of the earth. In more lucid moments, Josef would accuse his son of being a capitalist, a monotheist, and a lifelong victim of constipation. Fortunately, no one else on the train, as it rolled across Saskatchewan and on into Alberta, could understand a word of German.
Josef Konrad Josefsohn died on May 12, 1925, one week after his first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean, on the same day that Paul von Hindenburg became President of Germany.
“Well I didn’t... tell him,” said Leah. She and her sisters had gathered at Dorothy’s house, on Beach Drive, to review the tape of McAllister’s interview. “He must have found it and read it.”
“Found what?” said Miriam.
“A college paper I wrote,” said Leah.
“You wrote a college paper about this?” said Miriam.
“It was a bad idea. I got a C-minus. It almost kept me out of law school. The professor wasn’t interested in personal narratives.”
“Now don’t be silly!” said Dorothy, “I remember that! It was the best paper of the year! And it was published in the Jewish Center newsletter. Father was so proud.”
“You were very young and gullible,” said Leah. “Father’s the one who got it published. To make me feel better.”
“I don’t remember any of this at all,” said Miriam.
When the family arrived in Victoria, British Columbia, Jacob anglicized the family name, and began to spell his own name with a “c”. He wanted to start another bookstore, but first he needed work, any work. He took every job his cousins offered him, often several at once. He learned the business of hotels, the business of lumber and hardware, the business of dry goods, the business of printing. After five years, Jacob had paid off his debts. He bought a small printing shop from a cousin who could no longer afford to keep his employees—this was 1930, and the Depression was deepening. For years, Jacob ran the shop by himself, until his daughters were old enough to help. Later, his sons-in-law joined him. With admirable industry, aided by a few well-timed strategic decisions, the extended Josephson family built the tiny print shop into JKJ Graphics, the largest, fastest, and most efficient producer of four-colour mail-order catalogues in Canada. In 1985, in consultation with his daughters, Jacob Josephson approved the sale of JKJ Graphics to the Swedish conglomerate.
Two years later he died, at the age of 91. He had never moved from the modest house in Fairfield, which he bought in 1934, the first year that the print shop turned a profit.
“Father never really wanted to start another bookstore,” said Leah. “But otherwise… what he’s saying is factual… on the whole. There’s not much we can do. Legally.”
“It just sounds so horrible,” said Miriam, “coming from that Irishman’s mouth.”
“McAllister’s not Irish,” said Leah. “Scottish maybe. Or is he English, from Manchester?”
“He’s not anything,” said Dorothy. “When it suits him, he’s a fisherman’s son from the Maritimes, or he has oil money from Edmonton, or he grew up in a diplomatic family in Botswana. It’s all bullshit. Especially the parts that happen to be true.”
“How do you know so much?” said Miriam.
Dorothy shrugged. “I slept with him,” she said. “That fucking pervert.”
At the time, her sisters refrained from asking what Dorothy meant by that last remark.
Next episode: Guilt
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