Free Solomon Gursky Was Here by Mordecai Richler Page B

bellyful of Scotch, he advanced a proposition of his own. One or more members of the Franklin expedition had been of Jewish extraction and the artifacts had been among their personal possessions.
    â€œFiddlesticks!” Hardy said.
    Moses, acknowledging Hardy with a lopsided smile, pointed out that more bizarre objects than a yarmulke, or a siddur, had belonged to certain of the officers or crew. This was proven by understandably unpublished but meticulously itemized accounts (available to serious scholars at Admiralty House) of articles found in searches of Beechey and King William Islands. They included a filigreed black suspender belt, several pairs of frothy garters, some silk panties, three corsets, two female wigs, and four diaphanous petticoats.
    â€œI don’t have to sit here and listen to this drivel,” Hardy shouted, slamming his fist against the table. The latter items, he protested, catalogued with such a typical drunken smirk by Berger—casting doubts on the sexual proclivities of brave officers and men—impugning the honour of the dead—were in fact absolutely innocent. Theywould have been the property of either Lieutenant Philip Norton or Purser John Hoare. Both of them had been to the Arctic with Parry, on the HMS Hecla, and had distinguished themselves on the boards of the Royal Arctic Theatre that had been set up in Winter Harbour in 1819. Norton had played a saucy young lady in a number of farces and harlequinades and Hoare’s interpretation of Viola had earned him five curtain calls as well as the sobriquet Dolly. “As for Jews having signed on with Franklin,” Hardy charged, “nonsense!”
    â€œAnd why not?” Moses asked.
    â€œLet me be direct with you, Berger. It is a well-known fact that Jews who immigrated to this great country in the nineteenth century did not risk the Arctic Circle, but tended to settle in cities where there was the most opportunity for trade and advancement.”
    Rising uncertainly to his feet, Moses drifted over to Hardy’s place at the U-shaped table, picked up a jug of water, and attempted to empty it over his head. Hardy, leaping free, knocked it out of his hand.
    I N THE SUMMER of 1969 a scientific expedition was flown out to the Isaac Grant gravesite on King William Island. The expedition, led by Professor Hardy, included a forensic scientist and an anthropologist, as well as a support group of technicians armed with the latest in mobile X-ray equipment. They lifted the body of Isaac Grant, undisturbed for more than a century, out of its resting place and defrosted it. Grant had been buried in a narrow plank coffin. But his body, unlike the other three previously exhumed, was wrapped in a curious shroud. The anthropologist pronounced the shroud disconcertingly similar to the sort of shawl that had once been the everyday outer garment of ancient nomads and farmers in the Near East. The shroud or shawl was made of fine woven wool with occasional black bands, its corners pierced and reinforced to take knotted tassels or fringes. When photographs of the shawl, taken from every possible angle, were later distributed among Arctic buffs, Moses Berger pounced. He wrote to the Arctic Society, identifying the garment as a talith, the traditional prayer shawl common to the Ashkenazi Jews of Northern Europe.
    Professor Hardy was outraged. Moses’s letter seemed to confirm his outlandish theory that one or maybe even more members of the Franklin expedition had been Jewish. However, an examination of the startling documents buried with Grant belied that notion. There was, for instance, a letter from a vicar, addressed to the Reverend Isaac Grant, praising him for his diligent work on behalf of a mission to the savages of the Gold Coast, and beseeching other Christians to heed his plea for charitable contributions. Other documents and letters, tied with ribbon, were even more impressive. There was a letter, uncharacteristically