The Street (16 page)

Irving went in for rakishly pegged trousers and always carried prophylactics in his billfold.

“How would you like to come down to Habonim with me tonight? If you like it, maybe you’ll join.”

“Sure,” I said.

The Habonim meeting house was on Jeanne Mance Street, not far from my grandfather’s house, and I recalled that on Friday nights the old man glowered as the
chaverim
passed, singing lustily. The fact that it was the sabbath was all that restrained my grandfather from calling the police to protest against the racket the
chaverim
kicked up. My grandfather was uncompromisingly orthodox. Switching on lights, tearing paper, were both forbidden on the sabbath. So late Friday afternoon it fell to one of my aunts to tear sufficient toilet paper to see us through
shabbus;
and one of my uncles had devised a Rube Goldberg type apparatus, the key part of which was a string attached to a clock that turned off the toilet and hall lights when the alarm sounded at midnight.

Now I would have to risk passing the house with the others. Shoving, throwing snowballs, teasing the girls, singing.

Irving, chewing on a matchstick, picked me up after supper and on the way we called for Hershey and Gas. I was flattered that Irving had come to my house first, and in the guise of telling him what fun Hershey and Gas were, I let him understand that I was a much more desirable boy to have for a friend.

Walking to Habonim with Irving, Hershey and Gas, became a Friday night ritual that was to continue unbroken through four years of high school.

The war was done. Cousins and uncles were gradually coming home.

– What was it like over there?

– An education.

We read in the
Star
that in Denver a veteran had run amok and shot people down in the street; the
Reader’s Digest
warned us not to ask too many questions, the boys had been through hell; but on St. Urbain the boys took off their uniforms, bought new suits, and took up where they had left off.

IS HITLER REALLY DEAD
? was what concerned all of us. That, and an end to wartime shortages. Sugar, coffee, and gas, came off the ration list. The Better Business Bureau warned housewives not to buy soaps or combs from door-to-door vendors who claimed to be disabled veterans. An intrepid reporter walked the length of Calgary’s main street in an S.S. uniform without being stopped once.
HAVE WE FORGOTTEN WHAT THE BOYS DIED FOR
, he wanted to know. Ted Williams was safe, so was Jimmy Stewart. Mackenzie King wrote, “It affords me much pleasure both personally and as Prime Minister, to add a word of tribute to the record of the services of Canadian Jews in the armed forces in the recent war.” Pete Grey, the Toronto Maple Leafs’ one-armed player, was made a free agent. A returning veteran took his place in the outfield.

Harry, our group leader in Habonim, had served in the R.C.A.F, where it had been his job to show returned fighter pilots the combat films they had taken. Each time a pilot fired his guns, Harry explained, a camera in the wings took pictures, which was how it could be established if a pilot’s claim to a kill was true. Some of the films, he said, showed enemy aircraft bursting into flames. But on the flight home most of the pilots swooped low over German streets to shoot up cyclists for sport. These films would end abruptly – just as the cyclists crumpled.

Hershey’s father, gone into the war a scrap dealer, a rotund good-natured man whose sporting life had once been confined to cracking peanuts in the Delormier Downs bleachers at Sunday afternoon double-headers, now flew army ordnance corps colonels and their secretaries by chartered aeroplane to his hunting and fishing cabin on a lake in northern Quebec. He emerged as a leading dealer in army surplus trucks, jeeps, and other heavy equipment. Hershey’s family moved to Outremont.

Duddy Kravitz drifted away from us too. Calling himself Victory Vendors he bought four peanut machines and set them up on what he had clocked as the busiest corners in the neighbourhood.

Irving and I became inseparable, but his father terrified me.

“You know what you are,” Irving’s father was fond of saying. “Your father’s mistake.”

Irving’s father was a widower – a wiry grey-haired man with mocking black eyes. He astonished me because he didn’t eat kosher and he drank. Not a quick little schnapps with honey cake, head tossed back and eyes immediately tearing, like my father and the other men at the synagogue when there was a bar-mitzvah.

– This is quality stuff. The best.

– It warms you right here.

– Smooth.

Irving’s father drank Black Horse Ale, bottle after bottle. He settled in sullenly at the kitchen table, his smile morose, and suddenly he would call out, “Pull my finger!” If you did he let out a tremendous burp. Irving’s father could fall asleep at the table, mouth open, a cigarette burning between his stubby blackened fingers. Sometimes he sat with us on Saturday nights to listen to the hockey broadcasts. He was a
Canadiens
fan. “You can’t beat the Rocket or Durnan when the chips are down. They’re money players. Real money players – heeeey, here it comes …” He lifted himself gently off the chair. “SBD.” A self-satisfied pause. “Know what that means, kid?”

Irving, holding his nose, would open the window.

“Silent But Deadly.”

Another time Irving’s father said, “Here,” shoving a finger under my nose. “Smell.”

Scared, I had a whiff.

“That’s the one that went through the paper.”

Irving’s father ridiculed Habonim.

“So, little
shmendricks
, what are you going to do? Save the Jews? Any time the Arabs want they can run them right into the sea.”

On the occasional Friday I was allowed to stay overnight at Irving’s house and the two of us would sit up late to talk about Eretz.

“I can hardly wait to go,” Irving said.

I can no longer remember much about our group meetings on Fridays or the impassioned general meetings on Sunday afternoons. I can recall catch-words, no more. Yishuv, White Paper, emancipation, Negev, revisionist, Aliyah. Pierre Van Paasen was our trusted ally; Koestler, since
Thieves in the Night
, was despicable. Following our group meetings we all clambered down to the whitewashed cellar to join the girls and dance the hora. I seldom took part, preferring to puff at my newly acquired pipe on the sidelines, and watch Gitel’s
breasts heave. Afterwards we spilled exuberantly on to the street and either continued on to one of the girls’ homes to neck or drifted to the Park Bowling Academy.

On Saturdays we listened to speeches about soil redemption, we saw movies glorifying life on the kibbutz. All of us planned to settle in Eretz.

“What’s there for a Jew here? Balls all squared.”

“Did you hear about Jack Zimmerman’s brother? He came third in the province in the matrics and they still won’t let him into pre-med school.”

Early Sunday morning we were out ringing door bells for the Jewish National Fund, shaking tin boxes under uprooted sleepy faces, righteously demanding quarters, dimes, and nickels that would help reclaim the desert, buy arms for Hagana and, incidentally, yield thirty-five cents off the top – enough for the matinee at the Rialto. We licked envelopes at Zionist headquarters. Our choir sung at fundraising rallies. And in the summertime those among us who were not working as waiters or shippers went to a camp in a mosquito-ridden Laurentian valley, heard more speakers, studied Hebrew and, in the absence of Arabs, watched out for fishy-looking French Canadians. Our unrivalled hero was the
chalutz
, and I can still see him as he stood on the cover of God knows how many pamphlets, clear-eyed, resolute, a rifle slung over his shoulder and a sickle in his hand.

After the meeting one Friday night Irving pulled me aside. “If my father calls tell him I’m staying at your house tonight.”

“Sure,” I said, delighted, and I offered to invite Hershey, Gas, and some of the others over for a blackjack game. Then, looking into Irving’s apprehensive face, I suddenly understood. “Oh. Oh, I get you. Where you going, but?”

Irving put a finger to his lips, he gave me a meaningful look. For the first time, I noticed Selma strolling slowly
ahead of us down the street. She stopped to contemplate a shop window.

“Go to hell,” I said vehemently to Irving, surprising myself.

“You’ll do it, but.”

“Sure, sure,” I said, hurrying off in the opposite direction.

Selma was reputed to be hot stuff – crazy for it, Stan said – but all I saw was a shy dark girl with blue-black hair, a manner that was somewhat withdrawn, and the loveliest breasts imaginable.

“You know what she told me,” Hershey said. “She broke it jumping over a fire hydrant when she was a kid. Oi.”

Even Arty, who was as short as me with worse pimples, claimed to have necked through
The Jolson Story
three times with Selma.

On Friday, having managed to walk all the way to Habonim without once treading on a sidewalk crack, I asked Selma to come to a dance with me. But she was busy, she said.

On the night of Nov 29, 1947, after the U.N. approved the partition plan, we gathered at Habonim and marched downtown in a group, waving Israeli flags, flaunting our songs in
WASP
neighbourhoods, stopping to blow horns and pull down street car wires, until we reached the heart of the city where, as I remember it, we faltered briefly, embarrassed, self-conscious, before we put a halt to traffic by forming in defiant circles and dancing the hora in the middle of the street.

“Who am I?”

“YISROAL.”

“Who are you?”

“YISROAL.”

“All of us?”

“YISRO-YISRO-YISROAL.”

Our group leaders, as well as several of the older
chaverim
, went off to fight for Eretz. I lied about my age and joined the
Canadian Reserve Army, thinking how wonderfully ironic it would be to have Canada train me to fight the British, but in the end I relented and decided to finish high school instead.

In the febrile days that followed the proclamation of the State of Israel, we gathered nightly at Habonim to discuss developments in Eretz and at home. A distinguished Jewish doctor was invited to address the Canadian Club. To our astonishment, the doctor said that though he was Jewish he remained, first of all, a Canadian. Israel, he warned, would make for divided loyalties, and he was opposed to the establishment of the new state.

Tansky’s regulars were in an uproar.

“He’s what you call an assimilationist.”

“You’d think what happened in Germany would have taught such people a lesson – once and for all.”

Sugarman pointed out that the doctor was already an O.B.E. “My son says he’s sucking after something bigger on the next Honours List.”

The
Star
printed the complete text of the doctor’s speech.

“If Ben Gurion speaks,” Takifman said, “maybe they can fit in a paragraph on page thirty-two, but if that
shmock
opens his lousy mouth.…”

Punitive action came quickly. The editor of the
Canadian Jewish Eagle
wrote that the Star of David will long outshine the
Star
of Montreal. We collected money so that A.M. Klein, the poet, could reply to the doctor on the radio. We also, I’m sorry to say, took to phoning the doctor at all hours of the night, shouting obscenities at him, and hanging up. We sent taxis, furniture removers, and fire engines to his door … then, as one event tumbled so urgently over another, we forgot him. Baruch, we heard, had been interned in Cyprus. Lennie was a captain in the army.

One day we opened our newspapers and read that Buzz Beurling, Canada’s most glamorous war ace, had joined the Israeli air force. That night at Habonim we were told, yes,
but the price was a thousand dollars a month. We had outbid the Arabs.

Beurling never got as far as Eretz. His fighter plane crashed near Rome.

Abruptly, our group began to disintegrate. We had finished high school. Some of the
chaverim
actually went to settle in Eretz, others entered university, still more took jobs. Irving, who had been in charge of our J.N.F. funds, was forced to leave Habonim in disgrace when it was discovered that nearly two hundred dollars was missing.

We made new friends, found fresh interests. Hershey entered McGill. My marks weren’t high enough and I had to settle for the less desirable Sir George Williams College. Months later I ran into Hershey at the
Café André
. He wore a white sweater with a big red M and sat drinking beer with a robust bunch of blond boys and girls. Thumping the table, they sang loudly,

My companions were turning out a little magazine. I had written my first poem. Hershey and I waved at each other, embarrassed. He didn’t come to my table; I didn’t go to his.

Mordecai Richler’s grave is in Montreal’s historic Mount Royal Cemetery. It’s in the Rose Hill section, on the eastern flank of the mountain, high above the city. From there one can look down and see, not too far away, his street – St. Urbain.

In November of 1958, I was dispatched to that street by Mordecai, who was living in London. “I know you’re damned busy,” his letter to me said, “[but] could you take an hour or maybe two off and drive down to St. Urbain Street and take some photos for us? What we need … are:

1. Some shots of outside staircases.
   
2. Outside shots of a cigar & soda store. Inside, too, if possible, and details of window displays.
   
3. Ditto a garage.
   

And anything else you can thk of. Area I had in mind is St. Urbain corner Fairmount, Laurier Street from St. Urbain to Jeanne Mance, anything ard there.”