How author Oren Safdie fell back in love with the Canadiens

Author Oren Safdie grew up in Montreal obsessed, like so many kids here in the ’70s, by those great Montreal Canadiens teams of that golden era. His favourite player was the legendary goalie Ken Dryden, who died last fall.

Safdie’s enthusiasm as a youngster for the Habs is one of the main themes in his new book Beyond Ken Dryden, a memoir just launched by Montreal-based Linda Leith Publishing. But it’s just as much about how that fandom was his way of dealing with the collapse of his parents’ marriage during the 1970s. His parents are renowned architect Moshe Safdie and Nina Nusynowicz.

Safdie, who has lived in the U.S. for decades, has written a number of plays and also penned the screenplay for the 1998 film You Can Thank Me Later. He actually wrote Beyond Ken Dryden first as a play, which was produced at the Fringe Festival here in 2024, but he felt the story should be told in more fuller detail in book form.

In a recent interview at an N.D.G. café, Safdie admitted he lost touch with the Canadiens for a while there and is only now renewing his passion for the team he loved back in the day here.

In the days of Ken Dryden, “it was rare that a player would be traded and you could really feel that the players were part of the community,” says author Oren Safdie. Dave Sidaway / Montreal Gazette

“I went to the first game at the Bell Centre and something died for me back then,” said Safdie. “The team, and many hockey teams since then, were trading players (all the time) and with free agency and all that, you could never feel that there was a unit you could latch onto. That’s what I write about in the book. In those days it was rare that a player would be traded and you could really feel that the players were part of the community. You could root for them and know they wouldn’t be gone tomorrow. But now I think we’re back to the fundamentals. You build from the ground up.”

He is referring to the current Canadiens management team of Jeff Gorton and Kent Hughes, who are crafting the team by drafting key players and hanging on to them for the long term. For the first time maybe in decades, this Canadiens team is built around a core of young players — Nick Suzuki, Cole Caufield, Juraj Slafkovsky and Lane Hutson — who look likely to be wearing the bleu blanc rouge for years to come and also happen to be mighty exciting star players. Safdie also loves that there is such a strong bond between these players. It’s often said they’re like a family, and they are, as corny as it sounds.

“People are falling in love with this team because they all love each other,” said Safdie. “They’re such great personalities and they love the city. It’s a love affair, which I don’t think is something that’s existed for many many years. It’s creating a sense of community. It’s more important than the game. Back then the team was even more ingrained in the community because so many of the players were from Quebec.”

Turns out the starting point for writing Beyond Ken Dryden was not the legendary Montreal Canadiens goalie. That came later.

“I started out thinking I wanted to write about my childhood and the thing that really dominated my life at the time was the breakup of my family, which took pretty much the whole decade of the ’70s,” said Safdie. “Then I started making connections. (I thought) Well if it was so miserable, why do you remember it as the best time of your life? And there were other things happening other than my family. The province was splitting up. I remember in the third grade I came to school and half my class had moved to Toronto. That was traumatic. Some of my best friends. My family was falling apart. And the province was like, ‘Are we moving? Are we not moving?’ “

Then he started to think of the role of the Canadiens in his life at that time.

“I thought one of the things that held my life together, and maybe the province’s, (was the Canadiens),” said Safdie. “That all of this squabbling between French and English, nobody really cared when the Canadiens were winning. And they won year after year. These are French players and English players together. Nobody had any problem with that. Kind of like now, nobody has any problem that two of the best players (Cole Caufield and Lane Hutson) are American. All nationalities dissipate when you’re on the same team, which I find quite funny and ironic. It’s the big equalizer.”

Oren Safdie joined Habs fans from Moncton at the Bell Centre on April 24. “All nationalities dissipate when you’re on the same team, which I find quite funny and ironic,” Safdie says. Dave Sidaway / Montreal Gazette

But ultimately the book is Safdie’s story, not the story of the Canadiens.

“It’s personal and I’ve always written quite personal stories in my plays and my films,” said Safdie. “It’s got me into trouble before, but it’s also the only way I know how to write with any sort of passion. This is about establishing history through my eyes as I saw it. It was important for me to claim my history. I think that was part of the drive to write this.”

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