Passages: Welcome Home to Canada (18 page)

This is bad news. Our longed-for emigration to Canada depends on passing our medicals. So, prior to
mine, I am literally tied down to keep me from jumping about, and on board ship, and later on shore, the hernia is suppressed with a truss.

Remember, I was born in the early 1940s in wartime Tajikistan—not the most developed place in the world even today—where, needless to say, health conditions were not what they might have been. Infant mortality was murderously high. Modern Western medicines, vaccines, and even simple preventatives like clean water and sterilized instruments were not readily available. As a result, unprotected from some of the world’s most dangerous diseases, I immediately, in the first hours and days of my life, contracted—and, in a curious way, was thus inoculated against—malaria, hepatitis, TB and who knows what else.

I survived, obviously, and in fact grew up quite robust, thereby demonstrating the truth of the old adage that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. The only problem was that the antibodies I had acquired were still present in my system, and my anxious parents feared that I would test positive for TB and the rest. Quite rightly, they suspected that the Canadian authorities would not be very interested in the fine distinction between my unusual condition and that of a carrier of some extremely dangerous diseases.

As a result, Aron and Chaja hatched a scheme, as ingenious as it was brazen, to get me past the famous TB patch test, which I would surely fail. They simply substituted another child—a boy about my age, the son of
DP
camp friends and neighbours—and presented him to the authorities in my place. He passed with flying colours, and it was his certificate that finally got us on board the
Marina Falcon
. Apparently, he and his family left for what would soon become Israel around the same time that we sailed for Canada.

While the hernia caper and the TB switcheroo make for great stories today, both ruses troubled my parents, in particular my mother. It’s probably a common fear among would-be emigrants, especially refugees, that at some stage in their difficult and dangerous escape, one overzealous official, or a small bureaucratic detail, will block their passage and make them return to what they are so desperately fleeing. My mother was never entirely free of this nightmare, and even in the safety of Montreal, years after our escape, she lived in apprehension of being caught. This insecurity isn’t something you can shake, forget or leave behind; it infiltrates dreams, and the habit of constant worry and vigilance never goes away. My mom always half expected to hear the proverbial
knock on the door. She was haunted by the worry that someone, somewhere, would notice a discrepancy, would compare two forms and say, “Hey wait a minute …”

The substitute boy’s name was Yosel. That’s all I know: not a family name, not a nickname, not a single distinguishing feature. It’s a measure of just how spooked my parents were about the entire episode that they never told me anything more. I guess they thought the less said the better, lest something inadvertently slip out of a child’s mouth at the wrong time, in the wrong place.

In fact, I might have gone to Israel too, like Yosel, but for the Jewish politics of the day. In his youth, my father had been a passionate member of a Jewish self-defence organization whose founder also led a centre-right party in the then nascent Zionist movement. The big point of dispute between the right and the dominant left wing of that movement was whether or not Jews should fight. The majority argued that militarism was not in the tradition. My dad and the party he belonged to felt that the precarious, too often persecuted condition of Jews around the world could only be alleviated if Jews too had a territory to call their own and a strong army to protect them.

With the end of World War II and the full realization of the extent and horror of the Holocaust, this argument was joined with particular ferocity. Where were the Jewish survivors to go? Who would take them in? How would they get there? Many dreamt of the peace and economic prospects of the New World, but Zionists believed that Jewish life could only become “normal” in the Promised Land. As Palestine was then under a British mandate, and as the British responded to Arab resistance to increased Jewish immigration by allowing in only a legal trickle, illegal immigration boats were organized to run the blockade. Some boatloads made it ashore. Many didn’t, and Jewish refugees once again found themselves behind barbed wire, this time in British detention camps on Cyprus. These boats were under the control of the Zionist left, who, moreover, controlled much of the civic machinery of what would eventually become the State of Israel. But they reserved those desperately scarce, desperately wanted places for their own partisans. So, no room for Dad. No room for us.

Instead, we went sailing, legally, into the eerie calm of Canada—a country without conscription—while Yosel and his family sailed off into the Israeli War of Independence, followed by the Six Day War,
which was followed by the Yom Kippur War, which was followed by the Iraqi Scuds of Desert Storm, all accompanied by the never-ending wear and tear of constant terrorism. I wonder if Yosel ever made it. I wonder if that boy who, for a few crucial hours, pretended to be me is still alive, and if so, where?

I also wonder what would have happened if the Znaimers had never got out of the Soviet Union in the first place. I shudder to think how I, a free-enterprising, freethinking nonconformist might have fared amid the anti-Semitic paranoia of Stalinist Russia, with its ubiquitous secret police; or in the stultifying collectivism of the period that followed; or during the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. There but for the grace of God …

Of our two-week passage to Canada on that converted troop carrier, I remember a stormy Atlantic, my parents deathly seasick down below and me on my own, hanging out with the sailors, including the very first black man I’d ever seen. I remember the vast sheds where we new arrivals were slowly processed; then another long train trip; and finally, Montreal.

Immediately, I was sent to a hospital for my hernia. Cut off from the Yiddish, German, Russian, Polish, Latvian, Hebrew and God knows what else that flew around my milieu, I came out, two weeks
later, with a functional command of English and quite a few colourful words of French.

Aron’s first job in Canada was as a pants and blouse presser, and Chaja began work in a bakery. We settled into a third-floor walk-up on St. Urbain Street. Libby and Sam, my sister and brother, were born. Chaja continued to work. Aron was reunited with his sister Becky, who had managed to escape to Northern Rhodesia. Of that generation she was the only surviving sibling on either side.

Eventually, Aron was able to open a small shoe store, but his heart wasn’t in business. Every spare moment, his head was in a book; he could savour a newspaper all day. Although Saturday was the busiest day of the retail week, he would be happiest if there were few customers so that he could sit in the back listening to
Live at the Metropolitan Opera
.

Chaja became a waitress, or at least that was her title. She essentially ran a successful steak house for a Damon Runyon character whose clientele included Jimmy the Book and Obie the Butcher. In addition to serving, she did the ordering and bookkeeping, and played mother confessor to a staff worthy of a soap opera. She was always grateful to be working and never dreamed she was being exploited, though we were convinced she was. Chaja never got over the loss
of her entire family. It was a black hole she didn’t let us into, and we barely know the names of all the Epelzweigs. However, she built a new extended family, the “Kollezshankes,” a group of immigrant women who were like sisters to her until the day she died.

Our parents lived for their children, working endless hours at jobs they did not love. They gave us a great education, a sense of independence, and a love of learning and Jewish culture. Though they were earning breadcrumbs—she as a waitress, he as a presser and shoe salesman—still they found a way to send me to the United Talmud Torah. U
TT
was a “parochial” or private school, and cost precious extra money we didn’t have. In the Quebec education system, all schools were held to be denominational, with the world crudely divided into Catholic and Protestant school boards. If you weren’t Catholic and couldn’t afford or didn’t care to go to a Jewish school, you could go to a public one, called Protestant even if 99 percent of the student body were Jewish. That was the case at the famous Baron Byng High School that Mordecai Richler attended, which was around the corner from our own Herziliah, the high school extension of U
TT
. I stayed in the parochial system all the way through matriculation, until I started at McGill.

Looking back on it now, I see I was lucky to have that experience. The education was rigorous: half a day in Hebrew, for religious and cultural studies; half a day in English, pursuing an enriched form of the standard curriculum. On Saturdays we held our own “junior congregation” in the school gym. I led the services as cantor and was pretty good at it. In fact, I developed a bit of a following, mostly Orthodox girls who would come every week to catch my solos. It was my first taste of performing, of being in the spotlight, and of what we would today call groupies.

The overflow of American McCarthyism into the Canada of the day threw a few more elements of a non-traditional upbringing my way—most notably in the person of the great Canadian poet Irving Layton. Temporarily denied access to the universities, where he properly belonged, and unable to make a living solely from his writing, he taught English literature and history and grammar at Herziliah. He was an enormous influence on me, and indeed on many of the students. He had an extremely powerful personality—one that I was actually wary of, because I didn’t want simply to ape him, as several of my classmates did. Layton was the centre of a kind of literary cult, and I’m not much of a follower. But I was happy to be inspired by him—inspired to believe that
words, ideas, art and education matter; inspired to believe that thinkers, writers and doers matter. Layton demanded that we read a wide range of material. He interrogated us, debated with us, performed for us. He was also my first real connection to the world of media, which would later become my life. I remember him returning to class in triumph after having been “all the way” to Toronto, mixing it up with the celebrated theatre critic Nathan Cohen on the nationally televised
CBC
program
Fighting Words
.

Another part of my education derived from outside school. In fact, my extracurricular activities were probably as formative as my long days and years in class. I worked as a delivery boy, as a tutor, as a pin boy in a bowling alley. I worked as a waiter in a country club set up by wealthy Jews who’d been turned away from establishment W
ASP
clubs. Most Sundays I sang at weddings—a dollar and a half if in the choir, three bucks if I did the solo, plus all the hors d’oeuvres I could eat. I got to wear a white silk caftan and a high domed cap, but even so grandly attired, and especially because my rendition of that great Mario Lanza hit “Because” invariably stole the show, I knew I was being exploited by what Layton called the “Booboisie.” So I took full advantage of the privileges of the hors d’oeuvres table, once managing to
eat sixty cocktail hot dogs between two engagements. Sweet revenge! Terrible tummy ache!

In the middle and late 1950s, Montreal was justifiably called the Paris of North America. Despite its apparently oppressive Catholicism, it was open and full of excitement, sophistication, exoticism, grit, sleaze. The city had theatre and jazz and a joie de vivre that distinguished it from the pinched cultural wasteland that was Toronto. One of my jobs landed me pretty much at the centre of Montreal nightlife. Friday and Saturday nights, I worked as a busboy at one of the city’s most notorious nightclubs, the Chez Paris, on Stanley Street. It had pretty much everything: strippers, homosexuals, gamblers, the soap opera that was the kitchen staff, the rich rounders as well as the poseurs, and the endlessly entertaining night owls who frequented such an establishment. I loved it, and being underage and quite cute, I made out like a bandito.

When my school found out I was working there, I was called into the principal’s office and informed that a worthy member of the community had agreed to cover my school fees in order that I would not have to spend any more time at so disreputable an address. I was aghast and refused on the spot, and was promptly expelled for three days to contemplate
my ingratitude. But I hung on to my gig until a year or two later, when the club was smashed up in a gang war.

Thus, education was for me an adventure rather than a hardship, whereas for my parents it was a reward for long years of struggle. After seven years of night school, Aron earned a B
A
in Jewish Studies from Concordia University. He was seventy-two. It was his proudest achievement. After retiring, Chaja studied for two years and received a diploma in Gerontology from Collège Marie-Victorin. As usual, she developed close friendships with people from different backgrounds, including an Anglican priest who became a regular at our Passover Seders.

Aron and Chaja were devoted to each other. While caring for Aron in his final illness, Chaja ignored her own health. Aron died in February 1992, Chaja in November 1993. They did not live to see what would have been their greatest joy—the birth of their grandchildren, to my brother, Sam, and his partner, Lesley Stalker. Leith Aron was born three weeks after Chaja passed away. His sister, little Chaya, arrived in May 1997.

For a child, being “stateless” and on the run is not all bad. You see the world, you pick up languages, you hear different styles of music and eat a variety of
foods. You begin to understand the richness of the world and the joys to be had from being open to all kinds of people and cultures. Even before starting grade school, I’d already lived through aspects of a world war and taken a hazardous trip that crossed many borders. These experiences left me a cocky little kid with a strong sense of self.