“No matter how high he climbed, he never forgot where he came from and he was never intimidated by title or by success.”

That humility referred to by Bob Rae was one of the overriding traits family and friends remembered in eulogies at the funeral of businessman and philanthropist Jack Rabinovitch, founder of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, who died Sunday at the age of 87 after a “catastrophic” fall at his home in Toronto.

In the depth of summer, dignitaries and luminaries including Rae and his wife Arlene Perly Rae, former Ontario cabinet minister Gregory Sorbara, Ontario Lt.-Gov. Elizabeth Dowdeswell, editor Douglas Gibson, writers Nino Ricci, Alison Pick, media mogul Moses Znaimer, friends Anna and Julian Porter, and so many others gathered to remember his philanthropy and business acumen, yes, but, mostly, his humour, zest for life and his friendship.

Rabbi Adam Cutler and Cantor Aviva Rajsky officiated at the Wednesday morning funeral at the Beth Tzedec Congregation on Bathurst St.

“It was a testament to the friendship and love he had given to so many people,” remarked Louise Dennys, the executive vice-president of Penguin Random House Canada. “He was truly beloved.”

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What emerged was a portrait of a family man, a lover of books and of life, a man who was as generous with his friendship as he was in his philanthropy.

His three daughters stood together in front of the gathered mourners, side by side as if to gain strength from each other and hold each other up, from youngest to eldest, Elana, Daphna and Noni, his legacy, as one of them pointed out.

Noni talked about the different “acts” of her father’s life — Act I being his early life in Montreal and Act II being the Doris Giller years.

She remembered his leaving for work when she was a child in his gold-coloured Buick with the 8-track tape deck playing Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. To get offered a lift to their parochial school was a big deal.

She also remembered Doris Giller, Rabinovitch’s second wife, saying the former Toronto Star books editor had a hard time understanding three little girls who didn’t drink scotch, didn’t smoke and needed to be fed before the civilized hour of 8 o’clock at night.

The Giller Prize was established by Rabinovitch after his wife’s untimely passing in 1993. It brought glamour to the Canadian literary scene, offering the winning author a prize of $25,000 — these days, the winner claims $100,000.

“You can tell how important Jack Rabinovitch was to the world of books in Canada just by looking around the funeral,” said editor Douglas Gibson after. “Publishers, authors and many others in the book world were there, paying tribute to the man who made Canadian novels popular.”

“Miraculously, he found a way to create ‘the Giller Effect,’ which induced hundreds of thousands of Canadians to become excited about our books, and to buy them,” Gibson added.

Daphna Rabinovitch recalled her and her father’s shared love of good food, and of him sitting in the kitchen with a stack of newspapers by his side — he read five a day, we were told — and television remote at the ready nearby so he could watch his beloved sports. He was a spectator but also an athlete, playing tennis only recently.

Elana Rabinovitch, now the executive director of the Giller Prize, met weekly with her father to talk about the prize — meetings she looked forward to, even if they did end up yelling at each other sometimes.

“He fostered in all of us a wonder about and love for — as he put it — the arsenal of language,” she said. “I will always be grateful that he showed us the value for and understanding of the wider world.”

Through all the eulogies, those several hundred people in the synagogue learned about Jack Rabinovitch’s mother Fanny, a seamstress who escaped from Ukraine to Romania and Bucharest in the 1920s. We heard about his early life in Montreal, where he grew up poor in the Main district around Saint Laurent Boulevard and how he learned his math skills by counting coins for the family business.

We heard of his time at Baron Byng High School — where he was at the centre of a story referenced by a number of his family and friends in relation to throwing a teacher’s desk out a window.

Jack Rabinovitch came down the “Rene Levesque” highway from Montreal to Toronto in 1985 to Toronto where he and his family made a life — and had an impact.

Bob Rae, former Ontario premier and once acting leader of the federal Liberal Party, gave a eulogy commenting on their 25 years of friendship.

He spoke of how Rabinovitch had talked with him about the idea of building the new Princess Margaret hospital before the 1990 election, which saw Rae become premier. They worked together to bring it into being in 1996.

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Rae said no matter how high he climbed, Rabinovitch never forgot where he came from, nor did he lose his playful spirit.

“He cared about his friends, he cared about all of us. And it was never a club with a closed door,” Rae said in his eulogy.

Former TTC chairman and lawyer Julian Porter recalled travelling with his close friend to London, sitting in the Lord Mayor’s pew in Westminster Abbey. Rae also regaled about tales of travels with him and his wife Arlene Perly Rae. Julian Porter quoted from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, struggling to hold back tears — “I didn’t cry,” he said as he walked off to the open arms of Rae and of Rabinovitch’s family.

Writers were quoted liberally — Auden, Yeats, Shakespeare — and Madeleine Thien whose book Do Not Say We Have Nothing, was the last Giller Prize winner that Jack Rabinovitch would ever read, a rabbi pointed out.

“The funeral was a great reflection of the kind of person Jack was. The speeches mixed funny stories with tributes to Jack’s tremendous skills at business and philanthropy,” remembered Jack Batten, writer and friend, after the funeral.

“That combination described Jack to a T, but if he were around, he’d say, ‘Gimme more jokes.’ He took serious things seriously but sooner or later in any discussion, sooner most often, he would insert a funny line. Jack was the least stuffy businessman you would ever meet.”

Elana Rabinovitch began and ended her commemoration with words from the W.H. Auden poem “Twelve Songs”:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

. . .

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.