Free Solomon Gursky Was Here by Mordecai Richler Page A

wandering band of Eskimos sufficiently advanced to have a rudimentary form of a written language. Then one day Jock Roberts, hard-pressed for cash to support his drinking habit, took the satin skullcap to the curator of the northern museum in Edmonton, rambled on at length about its origins, and speculated that such a rare Eskimo artifact was worth plenty. The curator, who happened to be a doctor of divinity, denounced Roberts as a lying drunkard. “Don’t take us for fools here,” he said. “These so-called symbols embroidered into the fabric are not Eskimo, but Hebrew. For your information the inscription on the outside says, ‘Observe the Sabbath, to keep it Holy’ and inside we have what I take to be the rightful owner’s name. ‘Yitzchak ben Eliezer.’ I suggest that you return it to him immediately. Good day to you, sir.”
    That was not the end of it, however. For the skullcap, soon to be celebrated as “The Jock Roberts Yarmulke ”, was not the only Hebraic artifact to be found in the Arctic. Another was discovered by Waldo Logan of Boston, captain of the whaling barque Determination, wholanded at Pelly Bay in 1869. Logan was met by a friendly band of Netsilik Eskimos. One of them, In-nook-poo-zhee-jook by name, claimed to have found a second lifeboat on King William Island with a large number of skeletons strewn about. Some of the bones had been severed with a saw and many of the skulls had been punctured the easier to suck out the brains. He had taken a book back with him from the site for his children to play with and it was the remnants of this book, later established to be a siddur or Hebrew prayer book, that Logan would bring out of the Arctic.
    Logan, an observant man, noted that the parkas worn by this band of Netsiliks differed in one significant detail from the usual. Four fringes hung from the outermost skin of each one, the fringes made up of twelve silken strands. One of their number, Ugjuugalaaq, told him, “We were on King William Island to hunt seals when we met a small party of whites pulling a boat on a sledge. They all looked starved and cold. Except for the young man called Tulugaq, and his older friend, Doktuk, none of them wore furs.”
    Here, in Life With The Esquimaux, A Narrative of an Arctic Quest in Search of Survivors of Sir John Franklin’s Expedition, Logan noted in parenthesis that tulugaq meant raven in Inuktituk.
    â€œWe camped together for four days and shared a seal with the whites. Tulugaq was short and strongly built with a black beard and was most concerned about Doktuk who seemed very sick.”
    Ugjuugalaaq was careful not to say anything about Tulugaq’s struggle to the death with the officer who dressed like a woman or about the miracles wrought by him. Neither did he mention the death of Doktuk, who was buried beneath a wooden head-board that read:
    Sacred
    to the memory of
    Isaac Grant, MD
    assistant-surgeon
    HMS Erebus
    Died Nov. 12, 1847
    My God, my God, why hast thou
    forsaken me? why art thou so
    far from helping me, and from the
    words of my roaring?
    Psalm 22
    A hundred years later academics were still squabbling over the enigma of the Hebraic artifacts, ventilating their theories in learned essays that appeared in The Beaver, Canadian Heritage, and The Journal of Arctic Studies .
    Professor Knowlton Hardy, president of the Arctic Society, put forward his hypothesis at the meeting in the spring of 1969 that led to Moses’s expulsion. The so-called Jock Roberts Yarmulke, he said, was not a bona fide Franklin clue but a red herring. Or, he added, looking directly at Moses, more properly, perhaps, a schmaltz herring. It was inconceivable that it had ever belonged to any member of the Franklin expedition or even a native. Most likely it had been the property of a Jew on board an American whaler.
    â€œPossibly,” Moses said, “the keeper of the ship’s ledgers.” Then, improvising on a