Dog Dance Days
Dog Dance Days
A Tale of Kabbalists, Quebecers and the Virtual Messiah
Michael Godfrey
edited by Jacob Godfrey and Lou Marinoff
Michael Edward Godfrey (1939-2018) was a Montreal poet, painter, chess master and long-time professor of English at Dawson College. Discovered and published after his death, Dog Dance Days is a masterpiece of Jewish-Quebecois literature that communes with the spirits and ranks with the works of Irving Layton, Mordecai Richler and Leonard Cohen.
Ten stories from the Virtual Kabbalah interweave upon the tree of life as ten people and their doubles circle simple Simon, who in exile wanders the border of the promised land. In ten harmonic overtones their paths overlap and resolve as each dancer is driven to build a golem, their virtual messiah, who will absolve them of the responsibility of living.
Simon sketches the Dog Dance naked across history, where Jewish mystics in medieval Europe live alongside English professors in late 20th century French Canada. A dance that moves in a circle to a song that ever rises in fury, it will pull you in as characters reel from bedroom to bedlam to prison to stage, a distorted ritual of the new age fueled by wanton abuse of once-sacred tools: sex, drugs and Torah.
