Critical Loss

When Joel Yanofsky died from cancer in December 2020, Canada and, in particular, Montreal suffered an irreparable loss. A novelist, essayist, autobiographer, and university teacher, he was also a devoted literary columnist and reviewer. In four decades of writing, he penned much more than “a half-million words about writers and their work — book reviews, profiles, essays,” as he once put it. “All those words would fill a fairly long shelf dedicated to the literary life — to the variety of ways writers write and readers read.” His astute commentaries appeared in, among many places, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the Village Voice, the Literary Review of Canada, and, above all, the Montreal Gazette.

In his long-form literary profiles, including the award-winning Mordecai & Me, from 2003, he attempted to enter his subjects’ frames of reference, aiming to both celebrate and criticize. His was a unique ability to unite a thorough knowledge of an individual and an innate understanding of his or her milieu, all overlaid by his wry sense of humour. His dispassionate study of Mordecai Richler exudes his unparallelled study of all of Richler’s writings, both fiction and non-fiction, with the intention of creating an honest assessment of the whole.

Yanofsky never failed to support the writing community, of which he was an integral part. Donald Winkler, a Montreal translator and documentary filmmaker, saw him at one of his launches. They spoke a few words, then Yanofsky apologized for having to leave. He had another commitment. When Winkler asked why he had come if he was busy, Yanofsky simply shrugged: “Loyalty.” And loyal he was to authors and their worlds. “Joel was very generous with his time and energy,” Cynthia Davis, his wife, recalled at the Montreal launch of How to Move On, in November. “He always showed up, not only for established writers but for people who were just starting out.”

This posthumous collection, expertly edited by Elaine Kalman Naves and Bryan Demchinsky, gathers fourteen personal reflections that Yanofsky intended for his memoir. A follow‑up to his Bad Animals: A Father’s Accidental Education in Autism, from 2011, the planned book would have continued the story of his life with Davis and their son, Jonah, who was born on the autism spectrum. “The challenges were always present,” Demchinsky notes in his introduction to this volume, “but the balance was tipping more and more in favour of rewards.”

Underneath Yanofsky’s pleasant exterior loomed a man burdened by his family’s tragedies. A month after he turned twenty-one, he suffered the death of his mother from cancer. His father died of cancer eighteen months later. Then in 2013, his sister Renee died of cancer; another sister, Marilyn, did too, in 2018. “Each time the loss becomes harder to make sense of,” he told his agent two years later. “It also becomes more important to try. This book is about trying.”

The tone of his literary pieces is evident now in his personal pieces, all of them searching his own life. “He was intelligent and tremendously well read, but he also had a gift for saying things in a deeply personal way,” Mark Abley, one of his editors at the Gazette, said in 2020, shortly after Yanofsky’s death. That’s borne out in How to Move On.

“A long-established bad Jew, a God-fearing atheist,“ Yanofsky poignantly and humorously remembers his mother’s shiva. “In those days, the fall of 1976, shivas were all-day and all-evening affairs; people showed up whenever they chose; there were no designated two-hour windows for visitors as there routinely are now. Everyone simply let themselves in and stayed indefinitely.” These people “were the shiva enthusiasts, relishing the opportunity to be extra helpful. Some threatened to come again; a few did.” Yanofsky also finds humour in his early relationship with Davis: “From the start, we joked about making a big deal of our mostly minor differences: how she was an avowed vegetarian; how I’d never met a broccoli I liked; how she was deeply spiritual; how I only believed in God so I could continue to hold a grudge against Him; how we were as different as apples and toaster-ovens.”

Yet overall, the mood of How to Move On is reflective and intensely personal. Gone are Yanofsky’s usual perspectives on writers and writing. Present now are his wise and challenging thoughts as he tries to put down his own commentaries on his existence:

A leader of Montreal’s anglophone literary community, Joel Yanofsky held an undeniable place. And he is irreplaceable.