The Secret Mitzvah of Lucio Burke

by Steven Hayward

The Secret Mitzvah of Lucio Burke is a hilarious and memorable first novel about youth and passion, family and community, miracles and violence and baseball. This moving love story, also a richly imagined chapter of Toronto history, begins on a summer afternoon in 1933, when Lucio Burke knocks a great ungainly bird out of the Toronto sky with a single perfect throw of a baseball. Thus it is that Lucio, a careful seventeen-year-old whose father died the night he was born, is drawn out of himself and into a complicated world.

“Lucio Burke, there’s more to you than you think.”

That same night, beautiful Ruthie Nodelman, “Ruthie the Commie,” asks Lucio out on a date. Ruthie is gorgeous, committed and convinced that both love and the Revolution are just around the corner. She and Lucio have been neighbours on Beverley Street for as long as they can the Burkes live between the Nodelmans and the Diamonds in three adjoining houses. Lucio was born on the same day as Dubie Diamond (and Lucio’s cousin Dante), indeed, on the same kitchen table. But this summer everything between them changes.

Desperate to do something to change the world, Ruthie is organizing a walkout of garment workers on Spadina Avenue, a wildcat strike into which Lucio finds himself enlisted. All around the city is in fervour, with new immigrants – whether Jewish, Italian or Chinese – dreaming of and working their way to a brand new life, and coming into sometimes violent collision with the city’s older, established British and Protestant cliques. Along with labour unrest, there’s also a new kind of anti-Semitism on the rise, inspired by the example of the new Führer in Nazi Germany, as well as Italy’s Il Duce.

Ruthie and Lucio’s romance blossoms, with Ruthie very much taking the reins; and as they fall more deeply for each other we discover the complex web of family and chance that brought them from Abe Nodelman’s past as a union organizer, to Lucio’s father’s courtship of Francesca; from Lucio’s grandmother’s long journey from Italy to Toronto, accompanied by a statue of her village’s patron saint, to the invention of the knock-knock joke in New Jersey. The book’s vivid description of family life, with all its profound love and equally profound eccentricity, is gently humorous but also very moving; it is a portrait of community amidst diversity, another way of living in a city bubbling with ethnic and political tension.

“If not for Dubie Diamond cutting off his index finger a week later, the two very well might have lived happily ever after.”

Pitching Greenstein’s Remarkable Knives at his father’s stand at the St. Lawrence Market, Dubie Diamond catches sight of Ruthie smiling at him, cuts off his finger, and tells Ruthie he loves her. After the accident–which he says, afterwards, may have been no accident – the newly aggressive Dubie takes Lucio as his competitor in a Darwinian struggle for Ruthie. The tension between Ruthie and Lucio rises when, later, Lucio finds Dubie trying to set fire to the kitchen table on which they were both born. Covering up for Dubie, Lucio stands Ruthie up; inadvertently, he also triggers a series of events that will become known as the Beverley Street Miracle.

Lucio fights the new distance that has opened between himself and Ruthie while being tracked by an assiduous Irish priest who is investigating the “miracle.” Then, with the city rocked by fighting between Jews and the Swastika Club, he finds himself on the mound as pitcher in what will become most infamous baseball game in Canadian the riot at Christie Pits. Events there bring this alternately funny and moving, magical and deeply realistic novel to an explosive climax, brilliantly wrapping up its portrait of the hopeful and passionate lives of the ordinary men and women of a world gone by.

Genres: Fiction, Book Club, Historical Fiction, Canada, Judaism, Baseball

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this story. The writing is warm and personable and the characters are vivid and alive, without ever becoming caricatures. And the story unfolds for the reader in cinematic fashion. There are so many books - both fiction and non-fiction - that talk about the experience of Jewish immigrants to the US in the early 20th century. Taking place in Toronto, this book adds a new dimension to all of those as well. Highly recommended.

[Martha · Rating 3 out of 5]

fictionalized 1930's history of my neighbourhood

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a wonderful book. Right from chapter one, I could not NOT read on.

That summer Bloomberg is everywhere. [...]
    "There'll be an infield and an outfield," Bloomberg tells people, " and an umpire'll make the calls. It'll be a real game—except there'll be one hit and the guy who gets it gets the ball." [...] All that summer the people of Toronto [...] find themselves staring at their empty hands, thinking about that baseball. (chapter 1)
~ ~ ~ ~
It is at this moment that twenty-year-old Ruthie Nodelman arrives at the playground. Ruthie is a pretty girl with wide, dark eyes, exceptionally straight teeth and long red hair, which she is wearing today tucked up under a red baseball cap that has a large yellow letter C on its front. In addition to the baseball cap, Ruthie is wearing a plain white blouse, a plain black skirt, dark stockings and shiny black high-heeled shoes. These fancy shoes belong to her sister, Esther [...] Ruthie disapproves of the shoes she is wearing this morning out of principle. What is worse, with the shoes on she feels like her sister. They are the kind of shoes no self-respecting Party member would be caught dead in [...] But Ruthie had no choice. In the early-morning darkness of the house she was unable to find her own shoes. She rummaged around in the narrow front hallway of her parents' house on Beverley Street, nearly knocking over the coat rack, and Esther's shoes were simply there. She put them on, for time was of the essence. If she was going to hit Bloomberg's ball, she had to be near the front of the line. The heels might not be the worst thing, thought Ruthie, [...] Bloomberg would not expect the batters to be wearing high heels. The heels would unsettle him. Perhaps she would also take her hair down. Let it flow down onto her shoulders. That would unhinge him, thought Ruthie, who had more than once noted the effect taking down her hair had on boys. And then she would hit the ball. (chapter 1)
~ ~ ~ ~
In left field is Grief Henderson, whose name, the result of a spelling mistake on his birth certificate, has created in him the ambition to become a magician. (chapter 1)
~ ~ ~ ~
Bloomberg is the pitcher. He pitches underhand, in the old style. By 1933, almost all major-league pitchers are throwing overhand, bringing their knee up to their chest and firing the ball at the plate as fast and as hard as they can. But there are a few holdouts. A few pitchers who still believe the way to get the ball across the plate is with subterfuge rather than speed. (chapter 1)

I read non-stop. And suddenly, I found myself already at chapter 5. Unable to put the book down.

That is how it begins. It is how such things always begin. This is a simple story, despite the complications, with a predictable beginning, a certain muddiness in the middle and a happy ending. Or at least it should be. From here the story of Lucio and Ruthie might have moved along te tracks that such stories usually move along. A first kiss, a second kiss—and then, history. And it nearly did. (chapter 5)

And. Wow. Who knew that things like this went on in Toronto! How on earth did Toronto get the nickname "Toronto the Good"?

Below has to be one of my favourite passages. If you haven't read the book yet, wait!! Don't spoil the story.

"Play ball," calls the ump, throwing the ball to Elmer Querques.
    Ruthie Nodelman steps back into the batter's box, and as she does, she lets down her hair. She runs her fingers through it, and at that moment the ballpark lights snap on, shining down on the field, catching the redness of Ruthie's hair, just as the sun did that morning at the Elizabeth Street playground.
    Helpless, Elmer throws the slowest, weakest, easiest-to-hit pitch of his life.
    Ruthie's swing starts, and it stars from the centre of her being. It starts twenty years before, when Abe and Sadie Nodelman are trying to convince the Timothy Eaton Company to pay its employees a living wage. It starts some sixty years before that, when Marx writes of a spectre sweeping through Europe, with the streets of Paris on fire, with revolution everywhere, and with Mary Wollstonecraft on the other side of the English Channel, pregnant but still vindicating the rights of women. I suppose it begins even before that, hundreds of thousands of years before, when people started telling each other stories with happy endings.
    Elmer Querques's pitch does not have a chance.
    The crowd rises to their feet, gazing at the ball as it soars over the centre-field fence, even over Bloor Street, blown by the wind all the way to College Street, where it bounces off the roof of a streetcar. (Chapter 15)

[Kay · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great read - the story is fantastic and is funny without making light of the characters. I loved getting an insight into 1930s Toronto. Hayward does a great job linking all of the characters and even going back to retell events as they overlapped for different people. There is one passage that summed up so well a feeling I get sometimes that I've never really put my finger on. It doesn't work so well as a quote because it is pretty specific to the character/event, but it is: ".. to find suddenly, that he is able to [do something unlikely/random/positive] runs so contrary to the current of his life that it makes no sense. It robs the moment of any joy, and makes him regard the mystery of [the good things that result] as a predicament, as something needing repair." I guess it's just another way of describing overthinking things, but it just rang so true. There is also a description of something I do that I always thought I was getting away with, but which now seems unlikely: "Ruthie, who has been staring absently in their direction, tries affecting the blank gaze of the blind, looking straight ahead, but it is too late - they have already seen her seeing them."

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this novel a few years ago and I thought it was pretty good. I liked the characters and the plot was enjoyable for the most part. However, I had a few issues with the way it was written. I could tell the author was really trying to write a creative and interesting novel, but I felt that the plot was a little uneven at times. It was almost like he didn't really know where he wanted the story to go and was just making things up as he went along. This was especially evident at the end of the novel because it made absolutely no sense.

Note: If anyone reading this review is unsure of what a mitzvah is, it's a good deed. Steven Hayward did a really good job of researching Jewish customs and traditions for this novel and he explained them very well.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this story of baseball, prejudice and young love in 1930s Toronto. Hayward gives us a good idea what the city was like for Jewish and Italian teenagers. I grew up playing baseball at Christie Pits so this story really hit home for me.

[Mckinley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this varying in holding my attention; all the various story threads were a bit uneven.

[Leah · Rating 1 out of 5]

I did not finish this book; I tried and tried but somehow the story just did not interest me that much.

[Melanie Moore · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a quirky little read that I really liked. You can't take it too seriously just read and enjoy the ride.

[Danah Ashcroft · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved the history covered in this book. I did have a hard time distinguishing between what was real and what was fiction. I also wasn't a fan of Ruthie.

[Publius · Rating 1 out of 5]

No idea what the "point" of this book is. To illustrate Nazi tensions in Toronto during the 1930s? Fine. Not much else.

[Cassandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Found this book most interesting for the descriptions of the city of Toronto in the 1930s.