A Good Place to Come From Read online

  When it came to male trade, it was a different story. Here the merchant himself took over exclusively because this aspect of the business involved a fine art known as "sidewalking." My ·father would position himself on the sidewalk directly in front of his emporium, standing well out towards the curb so that he had a commanding view of the eastern and western approaches. His competitors up and down the street stationed themselves similarly on the sidewalk in front of their establishments. All of them pretended not to notice each other. Then, from a distance, the merchants could spot the first contingent of spenders. They might be steel workers just finished the night shift, still grimy and sweaty, carrying their empty lunchpails and bearing those most important fortnightly pay cheques in their wallets. Or they might be lumberjacks just arrived in town on the Algoma Central from the "bush", desperately needing hot baths and fresh clothes, their pockets bulging with a winter's pay. Whether or not the steel worker or lumberjack had a familiar face was immaterial. As soon as the fellow was within hooking range, my father would call out to him, "Hey, Mike! [It was always assumed that the man's name was Mike] ... Mike, come on in. I got some real good buys for you today. Gotta nice suit for you for Easter. C'mon, Mike!" The next thing Mike knew, he was standing before a full-length mirror draped in the latest blue sergor black pinstripe. The fitting of such a garment involved a degree of ingenuity and virtuosity never dreamed of in Saville Row. These smalltown Jewish merchants had learned the art of fitting in the "tuck-and-pull" school where a suit was literally yanked, stretched, jammed and cajoled into shape in an exercise that amounted to an outright assault upon the customer's sagging body. The physical effort was accompanied by grunts, sign language, quips in the customer's native tongue, Yiddish oaths. Finally, sighs of relief from both vendor and purchaser as the last pin was pressed into place in the trouser cuffs. When the ordeal was over, the merchant would stand back to admire his handiwork. "Mike," he would assure the fellow in the mirror, "you'll be the talk of Queen Street on Easter Sunday, believe me." Before Mike had time to agree or disagree, he was choosing a shirt, matching tie, socks, shoes. The split-second Mike was out the door, having left behind him a fair chunk of his pay, the shopkeeper was back once again at his sidewalk stand, calling out to the next available steel worker or lumberjack, "Hey Mike, c'mere ..."

  The social life of the Jewish community revolved around a suite of two rooms rented in the second storey of a building near the corner of Queen and Bruce. Located within easy reach of nearly all the Jewish stores and homes, the nshul had the advantage of convenience. But that was all.

  The smaller of the two rooms was occupied as a cheder for the children as well as a place for memorial services. H·ere the young were instructed and the dead remembered, all in an atmosphere of mustiness and overcrowding. The room constantly reeked of cigarette smoke and ancient mildewy prayer books. Even when the windows were opened wide, fresh air refused to venture within; instead it hung outside in the bright sun, beckoning children to come out and play. The men, swaying idly to and fro as the rabbi murmured and chanted, stared longingly out of the windows and daydreamed of sitting in rowboats, fishing and munching hardboiled eggs.

  The larger of the two rooms was much too large for the average community function. Therefore, it was used very little, mostly for special occasions—High Holiday services, Bar Mitzvahs, weddings, benefits. Long wooden benches ran along the walls of this chamber, leaving a vast empty space in the middle. Thus it was quite impossible to make an entrance or exit without the entire congregation's eyes falling upon you and without attracting comment. "Look at that, he just got here and already he's running back to the store" . . . "Look at Queen Esther, if you please, sneaking in a minute before the service is over so God should think she was here all day" ... On Yom Kippur, late entries and hasty exits were dead giveaways: "Aha, the bastard's just come from breakfast" ... "There she goes, couldn't wait like the rest of us until the rabbi blows the shofar" ... It was a seating arrangement designed for conspicuous prayer only; private sacrilege was quite out of the question.

  The worst feature of the larger room was that it lacked exclusivity, since it was also the local headquarters for the Independent Order of Foresters. Indeed, the Foresters had the main claim to the premises and filled the walls with their regalia. There were photographs of officials all posing stiffly and sternly as if guaranteeing posterity that the Foresters would always be independent and stand for order. Huge framed charters, adorned with red wax seals and gold ribbons, proclaimed the legitimacy of the local branch. Shields were mounted in recognition of noble collective efforts, and plaques honoured all sorts of individual acts of self-sacrifice. Only a dull cabinet that cried for a coat of varnish belonged to us. It stood against the east wall of the room and housed the two Torahs during High Holiday services and Passover. All the rest was Foresters' property, in Foresters' territory.

  The two rooms were connected by a dimly-lit corridor where the boys gathered to exchange dirty jokes and tease the girls, and where everyone gathered occasionally as a diversion from religious devotions, to listen to a Finnish husband and wife who occupied an apartment on the same floor, screaming at each other in their native cacophony.

  In 1946, after years of fund-raising, planning, debating (put ten Jews together and you immediately had ten architects), the first synagogue was consecrated. At last the congregation possessed its own building, a modest red brick structure on a modest plot of land on-where else?—Bruce Street, not far from its intersection with Queen.

  I wonder: in all the years preceding the opening of the new synagogue, how many little Jewish kids were convinced, as I was, that God was actually a member of the Sault Ste. Marie Lodge of the Independent Order of Foresters?

  Why did we, the children of the smalltown Jews, leave home? Why this perpetual motion eastward?

  There are a thousand and one reasons, but they all boil down to a single reason: we left because our parents counselled us to leave, begged and pleaded with us to leave, even ordered us to leave. Only yonder in the big city, they insisted, could one be a truly big person; here in this town, one could be no more than a large fish in a tiny pond. Better to be the tail of a lion in a great city, than the head of a jackal in Sault Ste. Marie.

  We, the children, resisted at first. Life seemed so simple, so attractive in the small town.

  There was little, if any, overt discrimination against the pocket-size Jewish community. Happily for us, the Gentile population was too engrossed in a civil war of its own to pay us much attention. It was a cold war, waged between the Anglo-Saxons of the East End and the Italians of the West End. The latter group, who numbered many thousands, were beginning to look eastward from the Latin Quarter towards Simpson Street. Dr. Mancini, recently graduated, preferred to live in the same fashionable part of town as old Dr. Macmillan. Old Dr. Macmillan was prepared to tolerate Dr. Mancini at meetings of the local medical society, but having Dr. Mancini and all the little Mancinis residing next door to the Macmillans was another matter. So totally did this conflict occupy the two principal racial establishments that somehow we 1ews were able to slip out from between the two sides and maintain a state of neutrality. Besides, a handful of 1ews such as we could scarcely pose any threat even if we had become partisans in the struggle. So we kept our feelings to ourselves, smiled compatibly at both major factions, and simply carried on selling them noncombat merchandise-clothing, furniture, scrap metal-in return for which they were gracious enough to pay their bills and leave us in peace.

  And what of the eternal quest to earn a decent livelihood—wasn't it easier in the small town? Our fathers had planted the saplings for us, had endured the Depression, had prospered through the war years; now all that remained for us to do was to nourish the orchards and harvest the fruits. Every afternoon there was lunch at home and a short nap. In the summer, you could close your store at six and be sitting down to supper at your cottage at Pointe-aux-Pins by six-thirty. Wednesday afternoons there was fishing at
Garden River or Echo Bay, a few miles down Highway 17. Who needed fancy college· degrees? Who needed the urban rat race? Who needed suburbia?

  On the surface, it was an effortless, uncomplicated existence.

  But our fathers and mothers knew otherwise. Beneath the paper-thin crust of their serenity, volcanoes were boiling. Gone were the days of "sidewalking;" now there were petty jealousies and, sometimes, bitter competition as business rivals strove to consolidate the gains of the war years and expand their tidy fortunes. Fathers and mothers stewed privately and publicly about the love affairs of their sons and daughters: how could young David ever find and settle down with a Jewish girl if, instead of venturing forth to Detroit or Toronto, he stayed put on Queen Street and took out schiksas on Saturday nights? What could be done to prevent young Miriam from becoming too involved with that shaygetz from Pim Hill, the fellow with the Irish surname who kept taking her to Hi-Y dances and Boat Club regattas? The same people saw each other all the time. They did the same things all the time. The men played cards around the dining-room table, while the women sat in a circle in the living room and gave each other recipes (often deliberately omitting a key ingredient or a crucial measurement, a favourite bit of one-upmanship). Old-timers who knew each other intimately, too intimately in fact, were getting on each other's nerves. The neighbourly pat on the back was beginning to leave claw marks.

  How ironic it is that the years from 1939 to 1945-in many ways the best years of their lives—had left these smalltown 1ews stale and worn out, fiercely determined on the one hand to hang onto the narrow but secure patches of life they had cultivated for themselves, but equally determined that their children should cultivate far different patches in far-away metropolises.

  Thus, my father, surveying all he had accumulated, did not turn to me and proclaim, "Some day all this will be yours." Rather, he looked about him at the racks of suits and dresses that were in style today and out of style to morrow; at the Inspector-Generals who still managed to make their rounds despite their arthritis and fallen arches; at the bleak, black silence of Queen Street on a February night when it seemed that the only thing stirring in the whole world was a solitary snow plough. And all he said was,. "Get out, get out before it's too late".

  And I did. I got out before it was too late.

  Semper Paratus,

  Semper Fidelis,

  Semper Annie

  We thought she was dying. She stood at the door of our apartment that Saturday morning pale and shivering. With both hands she gripped a badly worn suitcase that had been tied round with twine for reinforcement.

  "Don't tell me you walked on a morning like this!" my mother said. It was February, the harshest time of the year in Sault Ste. Marie. All life was deep in the annual winter standstill, caked in ice, buried in snow. "Come in, come in for heaven's sake." My mother waved the girl in. "You can put your suitcase down in the hall for now. Sit down and warm up for a few minutes," she said, gesturing toward the kitchen.

  Slowly, carefully, as if fearing to damage the cheap wooden kitchen chair that was offered, the girl sat down. Her hat and coat and gloves were still on. She rubbed her gloved hands together, uttering low hissing sounds as the told burned its way out of her fingers and the numbness departed telling her she was still alive.

  I took a chair at the kitchen table where I sat appraising our new maid. She looked at me, but her face hadn't thawed sufficiently to permit any form of recognition that I was there. After a long minute of silence, I asked, "Do you know the words to 'Red Sails in the Sunset?' "

  She nodded no.

  "Do you know the words to 'The Isle of Capri?' "

  Again she nodded negatively.

  "I learned some new words," I said. I began to sing, "Twas on a pile of debris that I met her ..."

  The girl began to laugh. She laughed self-consciously, without parting her lips, stifling herself so that she would not appeal;" too forward in the strange household.

  I followed the girl as she went to the closet and withdrew a hanger. She placed her coat on the hanger, hooked the hanger over the closet bar and closed the closet door-doing all these acts with the same slow, careful motion with which she had sat on the kitchen chair. It was as if everything in the apartment was sacred and fragile.

  "Are you Italian?" I asked.

  "No," she answered quietly.

  "Our last girl was Italian. She taught me some funny words in Italian. Do you know how to say 'Kiss my behind' in Italian?"

  The girl flushed—the first sign of colour in her face-but before she could answer, my mother intervened. "Don't listen to him," she said to the girl. "He's got an awfully big mouth for a nine-year old."

  I was determined to track down the girl's racial origin. "Are you Ukrainian? We had a Ukrainian girl once. And before her we had a Croatian girl and before her—"

  "I'm Ukrainian," the girl said, interrupting my short history of family domestics.

  "Can you teach me some Ukrainian? The last Ukrainian girl that worked here taught me how to say-"

  "Never mind," my mother cut in again. To the girl she said, "Come, I'll show you to your room and you can unpack. You'll stay in our son's room." My mother talked as she led the way, like a tour guide. The girl followed her, walking with timid steps lest she should disturb the precious linoleum underfoot.

  I sat on the edge of my bed watching her unpack. Why she needed twine to secure the suitcase I don't know; there were very few items within.

  "How come you've only got that much?" I pointed to the small pile of clothing she had arranged on what was to be her bed. "The last girl, the Italian one, she needed two whole drawers in my dresser to put her stuff into."

  "I guess she was pretty fancy," the new maid replied.

  "She wasn't so fancy. I heard my mother and father talking after she left. My mother said she left some underwear in the dresser and was it ever dirty." ·

  The girl turned and smiled at me. "You've got awfully big ears too." She had small teeth, white and even, and when she smiled, her wide face with its high cheek bones seemed to become even wider, giving her a pleasant countenance. I decided I was going to like her.

  "Is your name Annie?"

  "Yes. How did you know?"

  "I took a guess," I said, proud of my acumen. "Most of the maids I've seen in people's houses are called 'Annie.'"

  She made no comment on this observation. A small boy's generalizations, right or wrong, flattering or insulting, had to be accepted when one was just starting a new job with the small boy's parents. She continued laying away her clothes in one of the drawers.

  "We're Jewish," I said. "We eat a lot of things that Ukrainians eat, like stuffed cabbage for instance."

  "I know. Except you people put meat in yours. We just put rice in ours. I know some girls who work in Jewish homes and they've told me. They say Jewish people eat a lot of meat. Every day, too."

  "Is that why you're coming to work here?"

  She made no response.

  I guessed what part of town she came from. "You're from Bayview, I bet." She nodded; I was right again. "They all are," I said.

  I knew Bayview well. It was in the extreme west end of town, the section that lay in the soot and shadows of the steel plant. The streets there were unpaved, and in the summer, dust rose from the roadways to meet the yellowish smoke descending from a multitude of plant smokestacks nearby, the two combining to smother people and animals and houses in a dense, ugly pall. In winter there was no dust on the roads; instead there was slush hardened into tortuous ruts that defied pedestrian feet and automobile tires. In all seasons the yellowish smoke and the smell of sulphur lingered heavily in the air.

  I had gone often to Bayview, travelling there twice a month with my father while he made the rounds collecting—or attempting to collect—bills that had been owing by his customers for weeks, months, even years. I would wait for him in the car, playing behind the steering wheel and making furious speeding noises, while he entered one unpai
nted house after another, his accounts books in hand. In warmer weather his customers would come out to the car to greet him, extravagantly complimenting him on his clever, hand some boy, occasionally offering cookies or fresh produce from their backyard gardens, but almost never tendering cash. It was always the same frustrating pattern on those visits to Bayview: a few words exchanged between merchant and customer in some Slavic tongue or in broken English, a pat on the back, and goodbye, see you next month. On the return drive to the centre of town my father would always mutter, "Didn't collect five cents and now I've got to wash the goddam car again."

  That was Bayview. That was where they were from, these girls in their late teens or early twenties who worked for the Jews "downtown." Their own families were hopelessly overpopulated and underfinanced in these Depression years. As soon as each girl was old enough to scrub an acre of floor and wash dishes for ten people—a state of the art usually reached early, say, at fifteen or sixteen—she immediately became available for domestic service. Through a mysterious grapevine that transmitted "Help Wanted" cries all the way from Queen Street East westerly to Goulais Avenue in Bayview, news of such a girl's availability quickly spread. If the girl's older sister had preceded her into the market, the faults or the virtues of the elder—telegraphed along the same grapevine—usually influenced the speed with which the younger found employment.