Share on Facebook
Share on X
Share by Email
Share on Google Classroom
Robert Majzels, novelist, playwright, poet, translator, professor (born 1950 in Montreal, QC). Robert Majzels is one of Canada’s most versatile and inventive writers. His innovative and critically acclaimed works bend form and genre to his unique vision, at the heart of which is a complex investigation of justice and morality. Almost all his works engage his Jewish heritage and are set in Montreal, whose streets and history are as developed as a major character. A leading Canadian avant-garde writer, Majzels is also an award-winning translator of French Canadian writers such as Nicole Brossard, Anne Dandurand and France Daigle.
Early Years and Education
Robert Majzels grew up in Montreal during the Quiet Revolution, which immersed him in questions of sovereignty and social reform. He held various odd jobs and was a political activist in the theatre and in his community. These experiences provided a wealth of knowledge from which he later drew in his writings.
In 1986, Majzels earned an MA in English from Concordia University. He subsequently taught creative writing at Concordia and creative writing and English literature at the University of Calgary. From 2000 to 2002, he and his partner Claire Huot, lived in Beijing, where Majzels studied Mandarin. The experience inspired his multi-media poetry project, The 85 Project, co-authored by Huot.
Notable Works
Hellman’s Scrapbook (1992), Majzels’ ambitious first novel, is written from the perspective of David Hellman, a patient in a psychiatric hospital. In his journal David addresses his father, a Holocaust survivor, trying to make sense of his own life of misadventure. David interweaves autobiographical stories with letters by a 16th-century explorer and newspaper clippings. The various narrative threads create a postmodern pastiche in which the reader discovers echoes of the original moral dilemma of David’s father, set in motion by the murder of a Kapo. Majzels’ play, This Night the Kapo, develops a similar dilemma, in which two brothers are haunted by the memories of their father, a Holocaust survivor.
City of Forgetting (1997) continues Majzels’ taste for the incongruous: historical, literary, and mythical characters (such as Che Guevara, Lady Macbeth and Clytemnestra) wander like anachronistic ghosts through contemporary Montreal. Homeless and destitute, they camp in a makeshift shelter on Mount Royal, reminiscing and bickering. They are trapped in a limbo between their own dramas and a grimy, indifferent city oblivious to its cultural and historical legacy. Their ambitions absurdly play out against the backdrop of mundane commerce and bureaucracy, such as when Guevara takes a job as an insurance adjuster to fund his revolutionary cause. Episodic rather than plot-driven, City of Forgetting poetically renders the collective amnesia of a city and the possibility for the resurrection of its heritage.
In Apikoros Sleuth (2004) and The Humbugs Diet (2007), Majzels uses the framework of detective fiction. The Humbugs Diet manifests the genre more traditionally, while the more formally inventive Apikoros Sleuth is a murder mystery written in the form of Talmudic inquiry. The Talmud, a palimpsest of generations of Jewish scholars discussing such issues as ethics and theology, is akin to detective fiction — both scholar and sleuth seek the truth. But in Apikoros Sleuth, their juxtaposition also generates tension. The open and non-linear qualities of the Talmud shape Majzels’ equally inconclusive and meandering mystery. Humourous, philosophical and poetic, Apikoros Sleuth is a profound exploration of the relationship between self and other.
Honours
Apikoros Sleuth won the Alcuin Society’s first prize for book design. This Night the Kapo won first prize in the Dorothy Silver Playwriting Competition and the Canadian Jewish Playwriting Competition. The Quebec Writers’ Federation shortlisted City of Forgetting for the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction.
