‘Humble in the rumble’

The East End Rules: An East Van Memoir
by Norman Nawrocki

Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2026
$24.99 /  9781551648347

Reviewed by Grahame Ware

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“I am aware that, once my pen intervenes, I can make whatever I like out of what I was.”
– Paul Valéry, Moi.

Norman Nawrocki’s latest book effort is an easy-to-read, memoirish romp about his first twenty-some years of growing up in Vancouver’s East End. As such it reads more like a script rather than a memoir per se. He does however, lays his cards on the table in the intro by saying that he’s “changed a few names of some of the characters, including my own to Joey, to give myself enough distance as an author to remember and recreate, attempting to rewrite actual thought processes.”

Thus, this is Joey’s book. More on this fundamental and structural aspect of the book later in the review.

Through the eyes of a forever-questioning young East Ender, Joey, we’re offered a counter narrative. Where the history and culture, dreams, challenges, and family life of this community are remembered and honoured. When everyone living and working there knew: the East End rules.

His adolescent, tribal pride comes through here with this statement but, again, it is back-filtered through his Joey persona. What follows in the book are a series of events or confrontations that alienate him. The cultural programming of school was for him, as with many others, traumatic.

Possibly the most traumatic event is the following. As Polish/Ukrainian immigrants, his parents held onto a certain class shame and that was conveyed to their children. As a young schoolchild on his first day of school (grade 1 for the first time), much to the chagrin of Miss Plaskett, his WASP teacher, Joey interrupts her rendition of the Lord’s Prayer to tell her that she’s not doing the true version. On his knees and crossing himself, he shows off to her and the class that he knows the Lord’s Prayer only he does it in way that he’s been taught by his mother— in Ukrainian. After five seconds or so Miss Plaskett blows a gasket and tells him to “Stop! Stop right there Joey!” spewing spit on the kids in the front row next to her desk. The teacher’s umbrage towards his seemingly sacrilegious act, crushes him.

In one vicious blow the English Voice of Authority dismisses and whacks the Ukrainian Holy Spirit out of Joey’s reverent and pious grasp.

“I don’t know what your mother has taught you, but it’s wrong. Do you understand me?”

She cocks her head. No smile.

From his still kneeling position, Joey nods.

“Now get up off your knees please,” she intones, pointing at him.

Twenty seconds earlier when he first raised his hand Joey was happy to be here. Eager to please. To demonstrate and share a family ritual that he thought would be appreciated. He rises shocked and humiliated now, and shrinks into his clothes back into his seat, head bowed. He’s filled with immigrant-son shame and feels it wash over him like a pot of his mom’s scalding borscht soup. He tries to make himself invisible without success. There is nowhere to hide but inside.

At this moment he is no one. Nothing. No more than the ant he squashes with his finger on the sidewalk.

He is angry and ashamed of his mother for teaching him Ukrainian nonsense. Ashamed for daring to question the teacher. For making a fool of himself in front of twenty-nine other kids—including “white” ones—all whispering about “the dumb kid.” Ashamed for being here, pretending to know something other than what he is expected to know. For daring to challenge the culture of the obviously smarter “white” English.”

I quote this section in full to emphasize the indelible imprint this trauma had and how it would come to define Joey’s rebellious posture. But there are more stings from the Anglo Wasps including the Queen Bee herself.

High above the front blackboard is a three-by-four-foot gold-framed picture of the Queen. Elizabeth herself, in this classroom. Slack-jawed Joey has only seen tiny black-and-white pictures of her, never colour. On her head, a silver crown; around her neck, a heavy pearl necklace. She wears a faint smile, enough to charm him. Momentarily.

The conformity that was instilled was underlined by the rigidity of the classroom layout and structure.

Like the twenty-nine other students, he sits on a hard oak seat polished by hundreds of squirming buttocks. The desks are mounted on ornate cast-iron green legs screwed into long, narrow wooden runners and arranged in rows. Eight desks per row, five rows across, face the front.

Right next door to his school, Lord Nelson Elementary, and not very far away in both time and space from where Nawrocki went to school was Sir Mathew Begbie Annex #2, the elementary school that I went to. He describes exactly the structure I experienced at my school (now Thunderbird elementary on Cassiar and 8th Avenue). In the ‘50s, we all felt the sting of conformity that ruled the East End. It was very important then for schools to inculcate children with what authority was and instilling conformism counted as success in the minds of the schools and their trustees.

Here’s a wonderful example on what was called “streaming” in BC public education at that time. ‘You’re dumb you go there and do this— you’re smart you’ll stay here and do that’ approach was exactly what I saw and experienced. As Nawrocki explains:

“For those of you entering the academic stream, you will need to choose between three language electives: French, Spanish, and German. For those entering the non-academic stream, you will choose—as girls or boys—whether to take shop training or kitchen training. Within those fields you will further choose to specialize in subjects such as either automotives, building trades, or metal works for the boys, or for the girls, cooking, hairdressing, or sewing. I will hand out forms for you to take home to have your parents sign with your choices. Is this clear?”

A collective “Huh?” sweeps the classroom. Jaws drops. Eyebrows wiggle, heads turn, each face scrunched into an uncomprehending, somewhat anxious and stunned portrait of someone looking into their possibly doomed and damned future.

The teacher looks round the room and says, “Good!” This from the once unassailable Greek god look-a-like now transformed with this utterance into a death-sentencing emissary from the Dark Side.

“Now… let’s return to yesterday’s lesson about past perfect precepts and the particle noun.”

This is on the order of Monty Python with its delicious absurdity. Nawrocki is at his best when he spins these deadpan, Buster Keatonesque scenes— moments of truthful memory specific to ‘50s Vancouver. This is what makes the book work. The historical details are unvarnished yet amped up with his telling. But as we go along in Joey’s story, the memoir suffers from editorializing of a predictable nature that gets in the way of the stories despite moments of excellent scenarios.

But what also becomes apparent as the book goes along is that there is practically no mention of neighbours and relationships with them. His piano-playing dad was work-worn, suffering from that near invisible social dynamic, male work oppression. The Nawrockis were not atypical postwar immigrants. They stuck to themselves, head down, “in irons” (an analogy to a workhorse) and just got on with it.

For Joey/Norm and his dad, one of the few moments of pleasure away from the grind was tiptoeing out early Sunday mornings to play on the Stanley Park tennis courts.

But Joey is beginning to love tennis, especially since it gives him time with someone he never sees enough. He sometimes dreams of turning tennis pro one day to make Dad proud. And to buy everything his family always struggles with. Then Dad could quit his job and play tennis with Joey full time in Stanley Park.

This seemed like the only “quality time” he had with his dad and his love for his dad and moments like this fully shine through. As mentioned above, his immigrant parents held onto a certain shame and that was conveyed to their children. He badly wanted to neutralize that and with this book he may have done it.

His writing is effortlessly droll yet engaging, a comic energy often missing in our cloyingly slapstick world. This is Nawrocki’s elemental anarchism—simply, that he sees the shit yet treats it with the vaudevillean disdain of his omniscient Joey voice—the filtered yet authentic Norm attempting to recapture Joey with love and power, going back in time in a benign regression to love that spirit, that boy. Him. Norm.

This is where we get to the question of the book’s structure, namely, that of the autobiografiction. British literary scholar Max Saunders has likely done more valuable work in this area than anyone: “Modernism is often characterized as a movement of impersonality; a rejection of auto/biography. But most of the major works of European modernism and postmodernism engage in very profound and central ways with questions about life-writing.”

Saunders notes, “the ways in which modern writers from the 1870s to the 1930s experimented with forms of life-writing—biography, autobiography, memoir, diary, journal—increasingly for the purposes of fiction. He identifies a wave of new hybrid forms from the late nineteenth century and uses the term ‘autobiografiction’—discovered in a surprisingly early essay of 1906—to provide a fresh perspective on turn-of-the-century literature, and to propose a radically new literary history of Modernism.” (Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature, Max Saunders, Oxford University Press, 2010)

Whilst I’m not fond of categories per se (and certainly Nawrocki isn’t constrained by them either), I feel this is a useful term for discussing the book.

I’m not sure that it is necessary to have—as Nawrocki says in the intro—“enough distance” to remember in detail one’s deep experiences of portal and social figures. It seems to me that getting closer would be more to the point. I also question why, for instance, he believes that his recollections “attempt to rewrite actual thought processes.” Does distance erase doubt about memory? Have these memories been locked away for so long that he doesn’t have the key anymore and needs the freedom to “rewrite”? Is this why he uses the blend of autobiography and fiction in an autobiografiction? Given that Nawrocki is able to use these scenes to describe things so well, why did he have to structurally insulate himself with this device?

Nonetheless, Nawrocki believes then that he can better channel the experiences of his inner child by assigning himself a different name. It also allows himself to embellish and, quite possibly, have more creative freedom to tell the tale in a livelier and more entertaining fashion. Is this what Paul Valéry meant? It’s like Norm Nawrocki as the emcee of The Joey Show. Or, is it Joey that’s got the mike and is in charge of introducing Nawrocki’s “act”?

I wonder how the use of Joey instead of himself (Norm) serves only to shield himself making it emotionally easier to entertain himself, his audience, and to lighten the inevitable melancholy? Does this make it easier to for the reader to digest? At hand in the loose memoir is the liberation of the spiritual anarchist that Nawrocki’s creative self  had sought since his first realizations about himself and his culture. We see and hear all about the external events but not many of the internal and emotional scenes. Yet, we know they happened. With the coming-of-age Joey-being mediated by his (Norm’s) adult version, there is bound to be convolution and transference—fallen leaves of past memories and trauma clogging up, then decomposing in the forgotten eve troughs of his recollections.

Regardless of these structural (and emotional) quibbles, it most certainly makes for some great writing that reads and sounds more like a film script despite this autobiografiction. However, I can’t shake-off the feeling that his use of Joey dims the amplitude and significance of his story. But, there’s a lot here and it’s worth reading, high drama or not.

In Part II/1966, Joey picks up the book, The Anarchists (Dell, Horowitz, 1962) and is totally wowed by it. For two days he can’t stop reading it. The subject completely wins him over and he now charmingly identifies himself as

a new, self-baptized young anarchist. He feels reborn, overjoyed, and basks in this new sense of self. Then one day something important occurs. This chunky little anarchist pocketbook was instigating a pivotal psychic shift in his youthful brain. It’s what he’d been searching for these past few years of incessant questioning, reading, thinking, and wondering about the meaning of it all. This book is answering his hunger to know. It’s anchoring him. Giving him a new lens to view the confusing reality around him…

…He felt as if Anarchism, the Idea, was already inside him. This way of looking at the world, (was) already his vision, too. The book (brought it) to life, coaxed it out of him, helping him discover and define himself as a new, self-baptized young anarchist. He felt reborn, overjoyed, and basked in this new sense of self.

This then would be a turning point in his life. Nawrocki’s embrace of the anarchist ethos underlines his fundamental egalitarianism. But he doesn’t want to just look smart or talk smart.

As he matures, he soon understands that he wants to communicate with everyday people in everyday language and connect them through his lens to this variety of radicalism, anarchism.

Anarchism’s black flag grew over him like a shawl giving him that warmth of identification to neutralize his alienation. However, poring over Nawrocki’s other writing and cultural work, I have to ask: Is Nawrocki really an anarchist or a working class, socialist/activist? The more that one looks at his work, the more one realizes that categories are of no value either to the reader or the reviewer.

Nawrocki has never stopped being a writer of some kind. From a cheapy school newspaper (TRY or Templeton Radical Youth), to working on the SFU student newspaper, The Peak, to the ground-breaking Open Road, he was definitely an underground anarchist journalist. In fact, his first solo publication was something called BC Blackout, a calendar of events (including demonstrations, benefits, etc.). It was an 8 1/2” x 14” folded-in-half thing that was 4 pages (typed out, cut and pasted, then photocopied) and distributed for free. After moving to Montreal in 1982, he did the same thing with Les Pages Noires (LPN), also free, but a bilingual, bi-weekly anarchist news sheet that pre-dated free weeklies such as The Montreal Mirror and VOIR.

It has since become the name of the umbrella organization for all his publications. He explains on his website: “It (Les Pages Noires) is a non-profit Montreal publishing, recording, production & distribution project dedicated to helping create & disseminate dissident, freedom-loving, anarchist-inspired culture that promotes social justice.”

His work in so many areas has been prodigious from establishing tenants’ rights and protesting inner city gentrification. These efforts are laudable but none of this would be possible if it weren’t for his work in theatre and music.

The music scene in Vancouver then was an inspiration for what he now does. Whilst still in high school, Joey and his buddies step out together to the Pender Auditorium to see Mock Duck and the Collectors. Joe Mock and Bill Henderson were two of the best musicians and personalities of the era. Good teachers.

Inevitably Joey is influenced and inspired by the Georgia Straight.

It’s the first newspaper in Vancouver to write about birth control, abortions, the new wave feminist movement, Yippies invading the US, environmental concerns, and legalizing pot. What any budding Vancouver neophyte shit disturbers need to know to help challenge the system and the lies and fight for a better world.

Part III/1971 covers his period of union organizing, a smattering of jobs and his involvement with a community newspaper. There are many modules or chapters that will be of interest to the reader. Chapter headings read like this: Freedom Wall, TRY Temp, Pender Street Tenants Fight Back, The Gastown Police Riot, Student Power, The Georgia Straight, Yippie!, Carport Roof Takover, etc.

There are plenty of stories and laughs along the way as well as what things he stumbles across that he feels a need to change.

Drifting away from underground writing, his first “serious” foray was with music and performance in the form of folk punk. His early musical vehicle, Rhythm Activism, morphed into cabaret and other performance configurations. Room does not allow us to list all these creative ventures over the past decades but one thing is clear— they mostly took place not in Vancouver but Montreal. He found his métier in Montreal. It would seem that Montreal’s cultural sensibilities and history was, and very likely is, more receptive and conducive to his anarchic leanings. By the early 1980s he’d left for Montreal only to return in ‘86 with his Quebec buddy Dem Stink to participate in the first Black Wedge tour and the following year they did one from Vancouver to Toronto accompanied by, among others, David Lester (before he became a top graphics man in Vancouver) as a Mecca Normal band stalwart. In fact, they used the arch punk band DOA’s bus for this tour.

It seems entirely possible that Nawrocki needed a change of scenery to find his thirty something self—a new, non-Vancouver Norm Nawrocki. With the skenk of the Gastown police riot and the pall cast over serious but non-violent protestors by the actions of the Vancouver 5, it likely was. In Montreal, it seems he found critical mass in the underground arts community. Nawrocki’s work in a number of projects led him (organically it seems) to become a master of creative resistance. Empowering others has, in fact, empowered himself and he’s found a second calling doing these kinds of things at workshops and at post-secondary institutions such as Concordia U.

There is something humble in the rumble of Nawrocki’s book that is charmingly working class. The last word regarding his ethos of anarchy goes to Nawrocki. This statement can be found it on the web of the Montreal International Anarchist Writers Festival, an organization he helped found.

I consider anarchism to be an outlook that is fundamentally opposed to the existence of capitalism and the state, regardless of what forms they may take. (I’ll) also go further and say that anarchism is opposed to all forms of social hierarchy, authority, and/or domination. And, to be more specific, anarchism in (my) eyes does NOT and CANNOT include (either) ‘anarcho-capitalism’ or ‘national anarchism.’

One can’t help but think that Nawrocki’s version of anarchism is of a gentler, custom-made type. There have been a number of “gentle” anarchists that have caught the attention of the public’s imagination over the years: the erudite George Woodcock, the leading British art critic Herbert Read, the painter Georges Seurat. Anarchism is a way of looking at the world without stopping at the Marxist stop sign; or, just giving up and whizzing onto the capitalist roadway towards the inevitable traffic jam of the clamouring mob of affluent-seeking wannabes only to find out too late there’s no off-ramp, no exit.

Still, a vaunted anarchist such as Nawrocki has had to take his “place on the chain” to quote Leonard Cohen. But somehow, inside the bow of his violin, I think I see his anarchist’s hacksaw blades. I think I discern a cheeky grin and him saying: “That’ll take care of the chains!”

Throughout the book he manages to cleave out his life’s themes and their causes without being terribly anarchic, just human. Ahhh, but he’s just getting started with the Joey project. Word has it that Norm Nawrocki will trilogize Joey. Get ready to be entertained.

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Grahame Ware has been a regular contributor to The British Columbia Review since its inception as The Ormsby Review. As well as book reviews, he has contributed four memoirs, The Sonics at the Grooveyard, On the road with Sir Kenneth, My Private Italy, and My Private Chinatown. He is a member of the SFU-based Canadian Association of Independent Scholars. Grahame lives on Gabriola Island and makes wooden sculpture from forest refugees and driftwood detritus. [Editor’s note: Grahame Ware has also reviewed books by Aaron Chapman, Ira Nadel, John Moore, Ken Smedley, and Mike Lascelle for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster