The Life of Jane - Chapter Five continued

                                   Jane Meets Jeanne


     Jane didn"t go out with Ron Shapiro after he told her he couldn't take her to his house and meet his parents. Still, the talk she had with him about Jews and Christians set her thinking. Jane started to notice how Jews and Christians didn't mix much at McGill. The crowd that gathered in the smoking room outside the main library was made up mostly of Jews and Christians. And neither group spoke much to each other.
      "They call the smoking room 'The Gaza Strip"" Ron told her once. "And that's because it's named after the Gaza Strip on the border of Egypt and Israel where Jews and Arabs fight each other."  Little by little Jane learned about the class-ridden, ethnically split city of Montreal.
     In the streets of the city she heard French, English, Italian and other languages. She met people who came from the Caribbean, Greece, Italy and other parts of Europe. She went to school with Jews, Christians, and even some Moslems.
    But these groups didn't seem to hang out with each other. "America's a melting pot," Ron Shapiro once told her. "You had a Jew on the U.S. Supreme Court back in the 1920's. Many of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's aides were Jews. It's not like that in Canada. So we Jews keep to ourselves. So do others."
      But Jane soon realized that things in New Brunswick weren't too different than the set-up in Montreal.
 Her father told her how the French speaking Acadians in northern New Brunswick didn't exactly hang out with the English speaking people who lived mainly in southern New Brunswick. Then there were the Indians stuck  in some of the poorest parts of the province in what were called 'reserves', or 'reservations'.
    "Some of the natives are livng in places that are as poor as some of the villages I've seen in India," her father once told her. "Those poor people have it real tough."
     Then there was the Acadian woman  Jeanne Mercier who Jane met at  a dance at one of Jane's  McGill
classmate's house.  "Oh you come from Fredericton," this woman who called herself  Jean, said to Jane. " I'm glad to meet you . I'll tell you one thing," she continued in a French-accented English. "At least here in this city I can speak French. You've got to be careful if you do that back home."
    "What do you mean by that?" Jane asked.
    Jean then told Jane about how she lived in a part of Bathurst . But she and her brother had to cross through an adjoining area to get  to school. Often English speaking rowdies who lived in the neighbouring area would attack the two Acadians when they crossed into the English -speaking area. "They'd throw stones at us, punch us and  yell at us 'Speak English you dumb assholes'"
Jean said. "I'm telling you I'm glad to live in Montreal, although even here, some people don't like it when I speak French .
     Jane has heard talk about French-English clashes in New Brunswick. But she'd never seen one up
close. Slowly she realized that all places in Canada had their  own conflicts and problems."No place is perfect," her mother used to say. Jane smiled to herself while going to class one spring afternoon.and remembered her mother's saying. "Well, she sure got that one right," Jane said out loud.