The Book

The Secret Mitzvah of Lucio Burke (Vintage Canada, 2005)
The Secret Mitzvah of Lucio Burke (Knopf Canada, 2005)

From a stunning new writer, a rich, beautifully textured novel of Canada in the thirties, of the passions of youth, and of the looming black shadow of the Nazis' swastika, that conjures up the glorious humanity and humour of St. Urbain's Horseman and the storytelling imagination of Fifth Business.

It is a summer afternoon in 1933 when our hero, Lucio Burke, knocks a great bird out of the Toronto sky with a single, perfect throw. Thus it is that Lucio finds himself pulled into history - into contact with a radicalized labour movement, anti-Semitism, Mussolini's fascism, and onto the mound as the pitcher in the most infamous baseball game in Canadian history at the riot at Christie Pits. This is a city of new immigrants, of Jews, Italians and Chinese, who are dreaming and working their way to a brand new life; of the thrill of the talkies, and the fear of welfare.

On hand to observe this incredible chain of events is 19-year-old Ruthie the Commie, as she's called by everyone (gorgeous, fearsome, committed, and convinced that love and social justice are both just around the corner) - who seduces Lucio at the same time as Lucio's best friend and next-door neighbour, Dubie, declares his love for Ruthie. What follows is a story about young love, friendship, the nature of the miraculous, and a quest to change the world - a story driven by the question of what was and might have been possible in the 1930s, a turning point in history when history was in the making.

Unfolding against the background of depression-era Toronto, The Secret Mitzvah of Lucio Burke is alternately funny and moving, magical and real, alive with the energy of a new city. It gives us a brilliant portrait of a world gone by, and of the lives of ordinary men and women who lived in those different days.

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Reviews

Praise for The Secret Mitzvah of Lucio Burke:

"An absolute pleasure… Hayward's Ward has all the charm and colour of Richler's St. Urbain Street… [The Secret Mitzvah of Lucio Burke] is as powerful a rendering of the early 20th century immigrant experience in Toronto as is Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion."
-Toronto Star

"Powerful… Hayward often achieves the insight and wit of Ring Lardner's baseball stories, as well as the whimsical magic of W. P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe… The charm of this novel is in its easy-going humour and well-crafted sentences… Hayward's characters are always engaging, and he does a splendid job of revealing their quirks and amusing contradictions… A novel with note-perfect dialogue, evocative descriptions and laugh-out-loud funny bits."
-The Globe and Mail

"A comic, picaresque tale filled with colourful adventures… The ease with which Hayward combines baseball, social history, comedy, family sagas and a love story suggests that he may crack CanLit's starting lineup in the years ahead."
-Winnipeg Free Press

"The Secret Mitzvah of Lucio Burke is a wonderful novel, funny and touching, and full of more sheer invention than most novelists stretch over a career. It is a great achievement."
-Paul Quarrington, author of Galveston

"The Secret Mitzvah of Lucio Burke is full of colorful, larger-than-life characters and richly rendered action. Steven Hayward has created a mythic Toronto that will live vividly in the reader's imagination."
-Dan Chaon, author of You Remind Me of Me

Praise for Steven Hayward:

"The genius of Toronto writer Steven Hayward… is to take the daily slipshod passage of trivial- to- traumatic events, present it as pure storytelling and distil from it the essence of what it means to live, through times both terrible and transcendent… Hayward takes things we hope aren't possible, things we hope won't happen, and shows that their happening is precisely what it's all about - and we're as blessed as we are cursed by it… It's been years since I've seen this much fresh talent and wisdom."
-The Globe and Mail

"Hayward sneaks in the back door, pulls out your heart and hands it back on a plate for examination."
-Canadian Literary Review

"Hayward is already an accomplished storyteller, whose work is filled with enough bright bits of truth and compassionate humour to make whatever he tries his hand at next well worth looking out for."
-Toronto Star

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Excerpt

PROLOGUE

This is a true story. My grandmother told it to me, and for her I suppose it was a kind of love story - a tale about how she met my grandfather one August afternoon after a baseball game. This was in 1933, and the baseball game was in Toronto. At the end of the game, seconds after the final pitch had been thrown, a group of boys who had been watching the game unfurled a massive swastika flag. A riot followed, and in the midst of that riot my grandparents met.

No matter how many times my grandmother told me the story of that day - of those different days - she seemed to think there was no way to make me understand what it had been like back then, and for that reason always included as part of her story a good deal of extraneous material: dates that have been long forgotten, histories of sewers, the names of dead people and what they looked like. And there's no question, parts of it she got wrong. One of the things she got wrong is the name of one of the teams that had been playing that day.

"It wasn't the Lizzies," I told her once. "St. Peter's was there, but not the Lizzies - it was the Harbord Street Playground team that was playing."

"Wait until you're my age," she replied. "Then tell me."

For the most part I haven't changed a thing; this is her story, and I tell it the way she told it, with everything she made up or imagined left in.

Before you read it, though, you need to know she didn't get it all wrong.

It is true that for a brief time in the summer of 1933 young men wearing swastikas could be seen walking through the streets of Toronto. It is true that there was something called the Swastika Club, and that they performed several very public and well-publicized acts of anti-Semitic violence. And finally, it is true that during a baseball game at Toronto's Christie Pits there broke out a riot that would stretch across the city.

But there is no indication, no record, that any of the people my grandmother told me about were there that day - not Lucio Burke, not my grandmother, not even my grandfather, who swore up and down until the moment he died that he was not only there but was there managing a baseball team that did not - as far as I can tell - play at Christie Pits that day. So I suppose I don't believe a word of this story myself.

But I will say this: until my grandmother started talking, I knew nothing about that day at Christie Pits. It seemed impossible to imagine such a thing occurring in Toronto. Like miracles, I thought, Nazis happened elsewhere. And so I suppose I've come full circle. If at the end of the story I've decided, finally, that there is no way I can believe what my grandmother told me, I must confess it was in disbelief that I began, not believing that such a thing as the riot at Christie Pits could happen, could ever have happened, in my own placid, infallibly polite Toronto.

ONE

It is the summer of 1933. The year of the New Deal. The decade of the night of broken glass. Joe Zangara, a bricklayer from New Jersey, attempts to assassinate Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Instead of Roosevelt, Zangara hits Chicago's Mayor Anton Cermak and Margaret Kruis, a showgirl from Newark. In a frame farmhouse on the outskirts of Callander, Ontario, Elzire Dionne and her husband, Oliva, are talking about having a child. The great dirigible the U.S.S. Akron crashes near Philadelphia - falling, say witnesses, like a meteorite. Gandhi starts his fast. And Bloomberg, pitcher of a team named the Lizzies, walks the streets of Toronto, saying he's going to give away a baseball.

That summer Bloomberg is everywhere.

On King and Dundas and Queen and Richmond and Bloor streets. On the Bathurst streetcar. In front of the ferry docks for Centre Island. Underneath the basketball hoops at Bellwoods Park. Outside Maple Leaf Gardens and behind the old Maple Leaf Stadium at the foot of Bathurst Street, where the sharps play dice on sheets of cardboard they fold up when the cops come. At Kew Beach, where there are white signs saying no jews allowed. In line at the St. Matthew Mission on Morse Street. On Saturdays outside Holy Blossom synagogue. On Sundays in front of St. Patrick's Church. In the foyer of the Ontario Oddfellow's Home and Orphanage on Davenport. Behind the Encyclopedia Britannica in the main branch of the Toronto Public Library on Lowther. At the Rose Theatre on College Street, during newsreels.

"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."

He wears thick bottle-cap glasses that make his eyes seem absurdly large, like the eyes of a fish that lives near the bottom of the ocean; the kind of fish that breathes through its eyes, for whom blinking is a way of taking a breath.

"Single," Bloomberg says, pushing the baseball into people's hands, "double, seeing-eye single, infield dribbler, Texas leaguer, stand-up double, line drive, triple, home run, inside-the-park home run - it doesn't matter. You don't get two balls if you get a double. There ain't two balls. There's one ball, and if you hit it, you get it."

When he finishes talking, he takes the ball back.

He grabs it away, wrenching it out of the other person's hand. It is a calculated gesture; one meant to underline what separates people with baseballs from people without baseballs. It works. All that summer the people of Toronto find themselves staring at their empty hands. There is nothing extraordinary about Bloomberg's baseball, it should be said. It is not gold-plated. It has been autographed by no one. It is not even new. In fact, by the time Bloomberg is ready to give it away, its white leather has turned a dark, dirty grey and its red stitching has started to sag. Still, people find themselves looking at their empty hands, thinking about that baseball.

"That's right, it sounds easy," Bloomberg tells people, "all you've got to do is hit a Bloomberg Special."

All of this is taking place at a time when Toronto is a city of corned beef and boiled potatoes and soda biscuits. The city is ninety percent British, and Protestant. The Loyal Orange Order can be seen marching twice a year down the middle of the city, down Yonge Street, which cuts the city in two. The Union Jack flag flies over City Hall. Schoolchildren sing "God Save the King." The city's policemen and judges and magistrates and lawyers and most of its doctors and every one of its mayors are members of the Orange Order. The rest of the people are pressed into a dirty corner of the city called the Ward. There is nothing unusual about this designation. Or at least it does not seem so in 1933. Toronto's Ward extends from College Street down to Queen Street and as far east as Bay Street. It is where the Italians and Jews live - the wops and the kikes, as they are mostly called by most of the city - and this is a story about them. Because that is where Bloomberg says he is going to give away his baseball, it begins in the middle of a large, mouse-grey concrete rectangle known as the Elizabeth Street playground.

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