Norman Levine’s Lowertown

Nancy Miller Chenier

For people who live or have lived in Lowertown, reading Norman Levine’s books and short stories is like taking a stroll along streets with familiar names but to places that have changed over time.

Norman Levine (1923-2008) left Lowertown physically behind when he won a fellowship to King’s College London in 1949 but he returned often in his writing. He wrote that Lowertown had a magnetic effect, making him unable to stay away and bringing him to visit whenever possible.

When Levine’s parents Moses and Annie arrived in Ottawa from Poland, they settled in Lowertown near other Jewish families. Levine has written about the three streets where the family lived. All were within a short distance above or below St Patrick Street, Lowertown’s main street.

From St Joseph Street speaking only Yiddish, he walked with his mother to start his English education at York Street Public School. At the house on the corner of Guigues and King Edward, he remembered boarders that helped pay the rent, and skating between the trees of the boulevard after a freezing rain. But it was the third house on Murray Street where he relives the most memories.

The 363 Murray Street home was in a block close to many Jewish families and within viewing distance of Anglesea Square, then a treeless, grassless, dusty playground. Levine’s father was a fruit pedlar and his son remembers the other pedlars on the street –the Slacks, Blacks, Tallers, Gunners, Kirshners, and Glusteins. The Goldfield kosher butcher and the Ages ice vendor were located nearby.

Levine was part of a Murray Street gang of young male adults that played hockey, softball and rugby on teams sponsored by local businesses. The sponsors were usually Jewish businesses like that of the Smoke Bar Kosher Deli on Rideau Street near Nelson.

The family attended the Murray Street Synagogue at the corner of King Edward. Levine recalls the rewards of being brought up Jewish where religion associated with synagogue, festivals and food was interwoven with childhood events.  Key memories included the richness of the Hebrew chants on the Sabbath and the food associated with holidays.

Levine served in the Royal Canadian Air Force and then, as a veteran, was admitted to Carleton College and later McGill University. When a 1949 Beaver Club Scholarship enabled him to study in England, he left Canada, returning only for visits. On one longer visit in 1956, he undertook a three-month cross-country journey that led to his controversial book, Canada Made Me, published in England in 1958 but not in a Canadian edition until 1979.

By the late 1960s, Levine’s father was in long-term care and his mother was living in the newly built Macdonald Manor on Cobourg Street. Levine writes about one winter visit where he looks out from her second-storey unit at the snow and dark trees in Macdonald Gardens. Later walking along Murray Street, he is nostalgic as he watches a kid playing hockey in front of the house where he grew up. On a subsequent visit, he observed that the house had been demolished as part of urban renewal and the streets changed.

In 2001, Levine was the winner of a Writers’ Trust award in celebration of his writing life. The award citation noted that “there is no doubt that Norman Levine is one of the most accomplished and important writers that Canada has made.” And so much of what made him was Lowertown.