Chapter Eight - Part Two.
From the first day I saw my co-op apartment I was overjoyed. Yet not all people who moved in to Eight Oaks Co-op were happy to live here. "This is a zoo," said one wealthy woman after she and her husband settled in to a one-bedroom apartment. Soon after this, the couple left. Another resident, a single parent, called her place " A postage stamp." Like other mothers with children, she felt crowded. A few years later,she and her new partner bought a house and they were gone. Marilyn and Don Pollard, my original upstairs neighbours now live in the Kootenays. Fred and Judy Roman, two very active co-op members left to buy a house in east end Vancouver.
The problem with Eight Oaks Co-op was that many of the apartments were very small. The old style apartments around us on Cambie street were bigger than our suites. We had a huge lawn that was our front yard. Yet our apartments were for the most part not big enough for growing families.
In the next 34 years dozens of people moved in to our co-op and dozens of people left. Disputes and feuds erupted and then died down." Democracy is sometimes a messy business," one history lecturer told me. And in our co-op though there was a lot of democracy, many people tired of it. Part of our governing board resigned when we had to re-build huge parts of the co-op in 2004. After 1995 I moved into the background and just did my assigned tasks. In fact I made this move at about the same time that I left political parties and the antipoverty movement.
Moving into Eight Oaks Co-op was a great thing for me. It came with an added bonus and that was my first next door neighbour. Howard Ambrose was a one-legged native of Moose Jaw Saskatchewan.In his journeys across Canada, Howard had fathered two sons and divorced one wife. He'd also developed a wonderful gift for drawing and painting landscapes. An unfinished painting of a house sat on a table in his living room. Howard turned me onto drawing and painting which I'm still doing to-day.
Wednesday 31 August 2016
Tuesday 30 August 2016
Exits and Entrances - A Journey Through Many Landscapes by Dave Jaffe; Chapter Eight - Part One.
Chapter Eight - Part One
Politics didn't dominate all of my life in the 1980's and 1990's. On a late summer day in 1982, I opened up the door of an apartment in a housing co-operative on Cambie street. The housing co-op lay about eight blocks south of Vancouver City Hall. Up the street few blocks south lay the beautiful Queen Elizabeth Park and down the street going northwards, was the Cambie Street bridge which led straight into downtown Vancouver.
But as I opened the door to this spanking new apartment, my spirits leaped up. Here at last, I told myself, was a nice place to come home to. Carpets ran along the floors of this small one-bedroom apartment. A washroom with a washer and dryer stood just next door. And in this co-op, or around it, lay just about everything I needed.
For the next two weeks I couldn't wait to leave the two tiny rooms where I'd stayed in Kitsilano for the past seven years."When you move into a housing co-op you've won the lottery," said May Brown, the centre-right city councillor to a Vancouver city council. Brown had rightly described my state of mind on my first sight of where I would live.
Yet she didn't mention the constant meetings and tensions required to run a housing co-op. In the previous 16 months I'd gone to over 20 meetings and also twice to city council to make this co-op happen. Now the moment of payback had come. I was now a full-fledged resident of Eight Oaks Housing Co-operative, a four storey, 42 suite building on Cambie Street. On the co-op's north side and on its first floor sat Acorn Day Care where some of the co-op's children could go to.
1982 was one of the last years of Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau's time in power. The aging prime minister had been goaded by the left leaning New Democratic Party to finance social housing. Eight Oaks and many other co-ops came out of this new government spending. In his time in power Trudeau encouraged the building of 600,000 units of social housing. Never before or since has a Canadian government financed and helped build so many units of social housing.
Our co-op was developed by Richard Morgan and Jacques Khouri. Khouri headed up Inner City Housing and before becoming a developer, he had tried to save low cost housing in Kitsilano. I love living in Eight Oaks Housing and still live there, the last of the original residents to do so. Yet not all people were happy living there., a fact I'll discuss in the next section of this memoir.
Politics didn't dominate all of my life in the 1980's and 1990's. On a late summer day in 1982, I opened up the door of an apartment in a housing co-operative on Cambie street. The housing co-op lay about eight blocks south of Vancouver City Hall. Up the street few blocks south lay the beautiful Queen Elizabeth Park and down the street going northwards, was the Cambie Street bridge which led straight into downtown Vancouver.
But as I opened the door to this spanking new apartment, my spirits leaped up. Here at last, I told myself, was a nice place to come home to. Carpets ran along the floors of this small one-bedroom apartment. A washroom with a washer and dryer stood just next door. And in this co-op, or around it, lay just about everything I needed.
For the next two weeks I couldn't wait to leave the two tiny rooms where I'd stayed in Kitsilano for the past seven years."When you move into a housing co-op you've won the lottery," said May Brown, the centre-right city councillor to a Vancouver city council. Brown had rightly described my state of mind on my first sight of where I would live.
Yet she didn't mention the constant meetings and tensions required to run a housing co-op. In the previous 16 months I'd gone to over 20 meetings and also twice to city council to make this co-op happen. Now the moment of payback had come. I was now a full-fledged resident of Eight Oaks Housing Co-operative, a four storey, 42 suite building on Cambie Street. On the co-op's north side and on its first floor sat Acorn Day Care where some of the co-op's children could go to.
1982 was one of the last years of Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau's time in power. The aging prime minister had been goaded by the left leaning New Democratic Party to finance social housing. Eight Oaks and many other co-ops came out of this new government spending. In his time in power Trudeau encouraged the building of 600,000 units of social housing. Never before or since has a Canadian government financed and helped build so many units of social housing.
Our co-op was developed by Richard Morgan and Jacques Khouri. Khouri headed up Inner City Housing and before becoming a developer, he had tried to save low cost housing in Kitsilano. I love living in Eight Oaks Housing and still live there, the last of the original residents to do so. Yet not all people were happy living there., a fact I'll discuss in the next section of this memoir.
Monday 29 August 2016
Exis and Entrances: A Journey Through Many Landscapes, by Dave Jaffe: Chapter Seven - Part Five
Chapter Seven - Part Five
Just before I left political parties and the anti-poverty movement I heard one New Democratic party member describe me to an N.D.P. Member of the Legislature. "That man," this member said about me, "is one of the slipperiest slimiest member of this party I've ever known." This man may have been right. Still, he forgot to mention that I voted for him in a long ago nomination contest. But he remembered that I had failed to show up in another nomination battle where he was campaigning for a candidate who was defeated.
Yet it wasn't just my flawed behaviour that led me to leave political parties. It was also the political climate that swirled around North America and Canada in particular in the 1990's. Events shattered my dreams of a democratic socialism. The rise of the reform Party and massive federal deficits led nearly every political party to swing in a conservative arc.
In the 1990's the Mulroney Conservative government signed on to two North American free trade agreements, first with the U.S. and then with the U.S. and Mexico. These free trade deals tied the hands of any government that wanted to bring in any new social programs. Then the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 discredited any kind of socialism, even the democratic kinds like what the N.D.P. used to offer.
One beautiful spring day in 1997 I travelled down the Fraser Valley to the small town of Hope. Here, the mighty Fraser River swings west towards the Salish Sea and Vancouver, a two hour journey away. The sun shone down from a clear blue sky as I gazed at the river and the huge mountains that it streams past.
"I'm done with political parties," I told myself. "I'm still a progressive but I'm not going to be involved with politics and social movements any more." On the banks of the heaving Fraser Raver I waved an imaginary goodbye to COPE, the N.D.P. and the anti-poverty group called End Legislated Poverty or ELP. I was now 55 and it was time to leave behind the passions of the past.
Just before I left political parties and the anti-poverty movement I heard one New Democratic party member describe me to an N.D.P. Member of the Legislature. "That man," this member said about me, "is one of the slipperiest slimiest member of this party I've ever known." This man may have been right. Still, he forgot to mention that I voted for him in a long ago nomination contest. But he remembered that I had failed to show up in another nomination battle where he was campaigning for a candidate who was defeated.
Yet it wasn't just my flawed behaviour that led me to leave political parties. It was also the political climate that swirled around North America and Canada in particular in the 1990's. Events shattered my dreams of a democratic socialism. The rise of the reform Party and massive federal deficits led nearly every political party to swing in a conservative arc.
In the 1990's the Mulroney Conservative government signed on to two North American free trade agreements, first with the U.S. and then with the U.S. and Mexico. These free trade deals tied the hands of any government that wanted to bring in any new social programs. Then the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 discredited any kind of socialism, even the democratic kinds like what the N.D.P. used to offer.
One beautiful spring day in 1997 I travelled down the Fraser Valley to the small town of Hope. Here, the mighty Fraser River swings west towards the Salish Sea and Vancouver, a two hour journey away. The sun shone down from a clear blue sky as I gazed at the river and the huge mountains that it streams past.
"I'm done with political parties," I told myself. "I'm still a progressive but I'm not going to be involved with politics and social movements any more." On the banks of the heaving Fraser Raver I waved an imaginary goodbye to COPE, the N.D.P. and the anti-poverty group called End Legislated Poverty or ELP. I was now 55 and it was time to leave behind the passions of the past.
Saturday 27 August 2016
Exits and Entrance - A Journey Through many Landscapes by Dave Jaffe: Chapter Seven - Part Four
Chapter Seven - Part Four.
Another interesting and committed member of the New Democratic Party was Margaret Mitchell who served as the New Democratic Member of Parliament for Vancouver-East from 1979 to 1993. Mitchell grew up in central Canada and became a nurse and then a social worker.
This short blonde woman joined the Canadian army and worked in South Korean hospitals during the Korean War. She later moved to Vancouver and was one of the hardest workers I ever saw in the political world."Margaret makes sure that her constituents's problems get solved, " one of her assistants said.
During her time in Parliament Mitchell was, I think, the first Member of Parliament to focus on and denounce wife battering. As she condemned this practice, Members of Parliament in other political parties tried to shout her down. Yet she persisted in her speech unfazed by the abusive words hurled at her. She was one gutty lady.
These M.L.A.'s and M.P."s I have mentioned plus other New Democratic representatives , in government or in opposition, battled tough well-entrenched political machines like the Bennett father-and son Social Credit Party, the Trudeauite Liberals and the Mulroney Tories. They didn't win too many elections but they kept the progressive flame alive in British Columbia.
From 1972 to 1976 I took part in over 20 elections. I licked stamps, stuffed envelopes, canvassed many voters and met many people. But I didn't fit too comfortably into the world of party politics. I panicked at key moments, talked far too much and asked too many questions. Nor was I a team player the way I should have been.
"Here comes Dave Jaffe," one friend of Dennis Cocke said when he saw me at the 1990 N.D.P. convention in downtown Vancouver. "He's going to talk my head off about politics and ask me some very searching questions." When I discovered the different factions in the N.D.P. I would go up to some people and ask them, "Do you belong to the (Bob) Wiiliams wing of the party, the (Dave) Barrett brigade or the (Dennis) Cocke machine?'
These kind of ridiculous questions convinced many people I knew in the N.D.P. that I was a problem to stay away from. At last in 1996 I agreed with them and left the N.D.P. and COPE. At the same time I walked out of the anti-poverty movement where I also had caused problems. I had hung around movements for change too long and had become ineffective and a very small but disruptive force. Politics I realized was a very serious business and I was too undisciplined to fit in to the political machine.
Another interesting and committed member of the New Democratic Party was Margaret Mitchell who served as the New Democratic Member of Parliament for Vancouver-East from 1979 to 1993. Mitchell grew up in central Canada and became a nurse and then a social worker.
This short blonde woman joined the Canadian army and worked in South Korean hospitals during the Korean War. She later moved to Vancouver and was one of the hardest workers I ever saw in the political world."Margaret makes sure that her constituents's problems get solved, " one of her assistants said.
During her time in Parliament Mitchell was, I think, the first Member of Parliament to focus on and denounce wife battering. As she condemned this practice, Members of Parliament in other political parties tried to shout her down. Yet she persisted in her speech unfazed by the abusive words hurled at her. She was one gutty lady.
These M.L.A.'s and M.P."s I have mentioned plus other New Democratic representatives , in government or in opposition, battled tough well-entrenched political machines like the Bennett father-and son Social Credit Party, the Trudeauite Liberals and the Mulroney Tories. They didn't win too many elections but they kept the progressive flame alive in British Columbia.
From 1972 to 1976 I took part in over 20 elections. I licked stamps, stuffed envelopes, canvassed many voters and met many people. But I didn't fit too comfortably into the world of party politics. I panicked at key moments, talked far too much and asked too many questions. Nor was I a team player the way I should have been.
"Here comes Dave Jaffe," one friend of Dennis Cocke said when he saw me at the 1990 N.D.P. convention in downtown Vancouver. "He's going to talk my head off about politics and ask me some very searching questions." When I discovered the different factions in the N.D.P. I would go up to some people and ask them, "Do you belong to the (Bob) Wiiliams wing of the party, the (Dave) Barrett brigade or the (Dennis) Cocke machine?'
These kind of ridiculous questions convinced many people I knew in the N.D.P. that I was a problem to stay away from. At last in 1996 I agreed with them and left the N.D.P. and COPE. At the same time I walked out of the anti-poverty movement where I also had caused problems. I had hung around movements for change too long and had become ineffective and a very small but disruptive force. Politics I realized was a very serious business and I was too undisciplined to fit in to the political machine.
Exits and Entrances: A Journey Through Many Landscapes by Dave Jaffe; Chapter Seven - Part Four.
Chapter Seven - Part Four.
Margaret Mitchell was another interesting and principled New Democrat. Mitchell served as member of Parliament for Vancouver-east from 1979 to 1993. Mitchell grew up in central canada. She became a nurse and then a social worker.
Margaret Mitchell was another interesting and principled New Democrat. Mitchell served as member of Parliament for Vancouver-east from 1979 to 1993. Mitchell grew up in central canada. She became a nurse and then a social worker.
Friday 26 August 2016
Exits and Entrances - A Journey Through Many Landscapes: by Dave Jaffe; Chapter Seven - Part Three
Chapter Seven - Part Three
Out of the big names of the N.D.P. in the 1970's and 1980's, I found Bob Williams to be the most interesting. Like Dave Barrett he came from a progressive background in east end Vancouver. A town planner and developer, Williams gave off a tough side that could frighten some people. In one of his last years in the B.C. legislature, Williams just about shredded the Social Credit minister of forests Dave Parker. A former minister of forests himself in Dave Barrett's government,, Williams threw one question after another at Parker during one legislative session. I don't think that Parker ever recovered from Williams's third degree inquiry.
Williams not only could frighten some people in the Social Credit government. He could also throw fear into some New Democrats. In the last half of the 1970's, Williams stepped aside from his legislative seat to make way for Dave Barrett to return to the legislature. Rumours abounded that Willaims was planning to unseat a sitting N.D.P. Member of the Legislature at a coming nomination meeting.
During this time,Williams casually dropped into another east end riding just to pass the time of day. The executive assistant of this riding got scared. "Williams may be planning to take on one of our two sitting M.L.A.'s," she told me. "We've got to make sure that this doesn't happen." At the riding's next executive meeting, the two sitting M.L.A's ran another slate of candidates and threw out the old executive members. "I just wish Bob Williams had never showed up in this riding," one purged member of the executive said. "The sitting M.L.A.'s thought that we were supporters of Williams and just got rid of us." I got to know the N.D.P. M.L.A.'s who moved in the party at a lower level than Williams. The humanitarian Norm Levi served as Barrett's Minister of human Resources in Barrett's government. He took a terrible pounding in the media when he raised welfare rates. The short grey haired Levi had senn scenes of terrible violence when he was a soldier in the Israeli and British armies. Yet he kept a gentleness that surprised me.
Emery Barnes played a tough game of football for the B.C. Lions and helped his team win one Grey Cup. Yet this towering black man had a kind streak in him and a concern for the underdog. The cheerful Darlene Marzari lived in a large unpretentious house not far from where I lived in Kitsilano. When serving on city council she met Bruce Eriksen and Libby Davies. She helped them in their campaign to open the Carnegie Centre.
Yet when asked years later about her positive role in this campaign she told the man who asked the question, "I can't remember that."
Out of the big names of the N.D.P. in the 1970's and 1980's, I found Bob Williams to be the most interesting. Like Dave Barrett he came from a progressive background in east end Vancouver. A town planner and developer, Williams gave off a tough side that could frighten some people. In one of his last years in the B.C. legislature, Williams just about shredded the Social Credit minister of forests Dave Parker. A former minister of forests himself in Dave Barrett's government,, Williams threw one question after another at Parker during one legislative session. I don't think that Parker ever recovered from Williams's third degree inquiry.
Williams not only could frighten some people in the Social Credit government. He could also throw fear into some New Democrats. In the last half of the 1970's, Williams stepped aside from his legislative seat to make way for Dave Barrett to return to the legislature. Rumours abounded that Willaims was planning to unseat a sitting N.D.P. Member of the Legislature at a coming nomination meeting.
During this time,Williams casually dropped into another east end riding just to pass the time of day. The executive assistant of this riding got scared. "Williams may be planning to take on one of our two sitting M.L.A.'s," she told me. "We've got to make sure that this doesn't happen." At the riding's next executive meeting, the two sitting M.L.A's ran another slate of candidates and threw out the old executive members. "I just wish Bob Williams had never showed up in this riding," one purged member of the executive said. "The sitting M.L.A.'s thought that we were supporters of Williams and just got rid of us." I got to know the N.D.P. M.L.A.'s who moved in the party at a lower level than Williams. The humanitarian Norm Levi served as Barrett's Minister of human Resources in Barrett's government. He took a terrible pounding in the media when he raised welfare rates. The short grey haired Levi had senn scenes of terrible violence when he was a soldier in the Israeli and British armies. Yet he kept a gentleness that surprised me.
Emery Barnes played a tough game of football for the B.C. Lions and helped his team win one Grey Cup. Yet this towering black man had a kind streak in him and a concern for the underdog. The cheerful Darlene Marzari lived in a large unpretentious house not far from where I lived in Kitsilano. When serving on city council she met Bruce Eriksen and Libby Davies. She helped them in their campaign to open the Carnegie Centre.
Yet when asked years later about her positive role in this campaign she told the man who asked the question, "I can't remember that."
Thursday 25 August 2016
Exits and Entrances: A Journey Through Many Landscapes by Dave Jaffe: Chapter Seven - Second Part
Chapter Seven - Part Two.
Once I had joined COPE I realized its internal set-up. COPE brought together communists and left-leaning social democrats. The communists like Bruce Yorke, Fred Wilson and communist sympathizers like Harry Rankin ran COPE because they had founded COPE back in the late 1960's. But social democrats like Libby Davies, Bruce Eriksen, Jean Swanson and the health economist Dave Schreck gave COPE a wider appeal. Unfortunately neither Jean and Dave ever got elected to city council though both of them ran for council quite a few times.
I was now launched on a 14 year involvement in the political world. While belonging to COPE, I also volunteered for the New Democratic Party. This double role caused me some tensions.
"We can't get close to COPE," Gerry Scott, one of the N.D.P.'s chief organizers told me in 1980. "They've got communists in there. We've got to keep them at arm's length." I stayed active in COPE and in the N.D.P. too. When people asked me what the N.D.P. was like I usually replied, "It's an organization like any other. There's a top, a middle and a bottom.I'm at the bottom."
At the top stood the provincial secretary and the party leader. During most of the 1970"s and into the 1980's, Dave Barrett, the charismatic former social worker from east end Vancouver led the party. A great organizer Yvonne Cocke, was the provincial secretary for some time.
In the middle of the party you found the elected Members of the Legislative Assembly and the federal Members of Parliament or M.P.'s. Near the top of the party also were trade union leaders like the head of the B.C. Federation of Labour, the heads of provincial public sector unions and the then-head of the International Woodworkers of America. Then at the bottom sit the rank-and-file N.D.P. members like myself along with the 40,000 other members of the provincial party. I was just one of tens of thousands of anonymous members who basically showed up to canvass, and lick and stuff envelopes. Nothing I or other canvassers did, really affected election results. I used to tell people, "My dad was a salesman for a cable company. I'm a salesman for social democracy."
I divided the prominent N.D.P. members into two groups:Those I knew and those I didn't. I never knew Dave Barrett, the hard driving M.L.A. from New Westminster Dennis Cocke, or Bob Williams the tough intellectual from Vancouver-East . Barrett led the N.D.P. to victory in 1972 and served as premier from 1972 to 1975. The New Westminster -based Cocke was B.C."s Minister of Health under Barrett and did a very fine job. His wife Yvonne was for a time the provincial secretary, as stated before. Then there was Bob Williams. These four people basically set the directions for the N.D.P. in the 1970's and early 1980's.
Once I had joined COPE I realized its internal set-up. COPE brought together communists and left-leaning social democrats. The communists like Bruce Yorke, Fred Wilson and communist sympathizers like Harry Rankin ran COPE because they had founded COPE back in the late 1960's. But social democrats like Libby Davies, Bruce Eriksen, Jean Swanson and the health economist Dave Schreck gave COPE a wider appeal. Unfortunately neither Jean and Dave ever got elected to city council though both of them ran for council quite a few times.
I was now launched on a 14 year involvement in the political world. While belonging to COPE, I also volunteered for the New Democratic Party. This double role caused me some tensions.
"We can't get close to COPE," Gerry Scott, one of the N.D.P.'s chief organizers told me in 1980. "They've got communists in there. We've got to keep them at arm's length." I stayed active in COPE and in the N.D.P. too. When people asked me what the N.D.P. was like I usually replied, "It's an organization like any other. There's a top, a middle and a bottom.I'm at the bottom."
At the top stood the provincial secretary and the party leader. During most of the 1970"s and into the 1980's, Dave Barrett, the charismatic former social worker from east end Vancouver led the party. A great organizer Yvonne Cocke, was the provincial secretary for some time.
In the middle of the party you found the elected Members of the Legislative Assembly and the federal Members of Parliament or M.P.'s. Near the top of the party also were trade union leaders like the head of the B.C. Federation of Labour, the heads of provincial public sector unions and the then-head of the International Woodworkers of America. Then at the bottom sit the rank-and-file N.D.P. members like myself along with the 40,000 other members of the provincial party. I was just one of tens of thousands of anonymous members who basically showed up to canvass, and lick and stuff envelopes. Nothing I or other canvassers did, really affected election results. I used to tell people, "My dad was a salesman for a cable company. I'm a salesman for social democracy."
I divided the prominent N.D.P. members into two groups:Those I knew and those I didn't. I never knew Dave Barrett, the hard driving M.L.A. from New Westminster Dennis Cocke, or Bob Williams the tough intellectual from Vancouver-East . Barrett led the N.D.P. to victory in 1972 and served as premier from 1972 to 1975. The New Westminster -based Cocke was B.C."s Minister of Health under Barrett and did a very fine job. His wife Yvonne was for a time the provincial secretary, as stated before. Then there was Bob Williams. These four people basically set the directions for the N.D.P. in the 1970's and early 1980's.
Wednesday 24 August 2016
Exits and Entrances: A Journey Through Many Landscapes: by Dave Jaffe. Chapter Seven Part One.
Chapter Seven - Part One
A young woman's voice with an English accent came over the phone. "This is Libby Davies from the Downtown Eastside Residents Association," she said. "Do you want to come and work with us?" It was August 1979. I wanted to do something useful. I was tired of living on welfare, having book proposals rejected and selling things on the phone. Also Eric's demands were wearing me out.
I contacted the Downtown Eastside Residents Association or DERA as it was called. I ended up working in DERA's office often praising DERA's tall thin no-nonsense leader Bruce Eriksen. I worked alongside Elizabeth 'Libby' Davies, who 20 years later became the N.D.P. Member of Parliament in Vancouver-East.
I became friends with Jean Swanson, a tall committed activist who even to-day (2016) speaks out for the homeless and the poor. A former iron-worker, the Winnipeg-born Bruce Eriksen joined me up in the progressive civic party, the Committee of Progressive Electors or COPE. Here I met long-time city councillor Harry Rankin, whose acute legal mind impressed me. His friend, Bruce Yorke, was a committed communist and economist. He was another pillar of COPE. So too was Fred Wilson, a short bearded organizer for the B.C. Communist Party. At that time, Wilson loathed the N.D.P.. and he and I sometimes clashed over policies.
The downtown eastside however, always brought me back down to reality. In those days, back in the late 1970's, the streets of the downtown eastside were chockful of poor people, working people looking for a drink in the many taverns, alcoholics down on their luck and strangers passing through the neighbourhood. Many of these people lived in run down hotels that had a tavern on the hotels' grounds floors. DERA worked hard to improve the lives of the area's residents. At the time I showed up at DERA, Bruce Eriksen and Libby Davies were continuing to press the Vancouver city government to open the Carnegie Centre as a community centre for the downtown eastside.
Eriksen had started this campaign way back in 1972. Soon he would succeed and the centre finally opened to the public in 1980. "We went back and forth so many times to city hall," Davies once recalled. "We just met so many politicians giving us the run-around.
In the end Eriksen and Davies decided to run for office too under the COPE banner. They were elected to city council. But it took time. Eriksen became a city councillor in 1980. Davies won a seat on council in 1982. Joining DERA meant joinng COPE and this for me was a learning experience.
A young woman's voice with an English accent came over the phone. "This is Libby Davies from the Downtown Eastside Residents Association," she said. "Do you want to come and work with us?" It was August 1979. I wanted to do something useful. I was tired of living on welfare, having book proposals rejected and selling things on the phone. Also Eric's demands were wearing me out.
I contacted the Downtown Eastside Residents Association or DERA as it was called. I ended up working in DERA's office often praising DERA's tall thin no-nonsense leader Bruce Eriksen. I worked alongside Elizabeth 'Libby' Davies, who 20 years later became the N.D.P. Member of Parliament in Vancouver-East.
I became friends with Jean Swanson, a tall committed activist who even to-day (2016) speaks out for the homeless and the poor. A former iron-worker, the Winnipeg-born Bruce Eriksen joined me up in the progressive civic party, the Committee of Progressive Electors or COPE. Here I met long-time city councillor Harry Rankin, whose acute legal mind impressed me. His friend, Bruce Yorke, was a committed communist and economist. He was another pillar of COPE. So too was Fred Wilson, a short bearded organizer for the B.C. Communist Party. At that time, Wilson loathed the N.D.P.. and he and I sometimes clashed over policies.
The downtown eastside however, always brought me back down to reality. In those days, back in the late 1970's, the streets of the downtown eastside were chockful of poor people, working people looking for a drink in the many taverns, alcoholics down on their luck and strangers passing through the neighbourhood. Many of these people lived in run down hotels that had a tavern on the hotels' grounds floors. DERA worked hard to improve the lives of the area's residents. At the time I showed up at DERA, Bruce Eriksen and Libby Davies were continuing to press the Vancouver city government to open the Carnegie Centre as a community centre for the downtown eastside.
Eriksen had started this campaign way back in 1972. Soon he would succeed and the centre finally opened to the public in 1980. "We went back and forth so many times to city hall," Davies once recalled. "We just met so many politicians giving us the run-around.
In the end Eriksen and Davies decided to run for office too under the COPE banner. They were elected to city council. But it took time. Eriksen became a city councillor in 1980. Davies won a seat on council in 1982. Joining DERA meant joinng COPE and this for me was a learning experience.
Tuesday 23 August 2016
Exits and Entrances: A Journey Through Many Landscapes. By Dave Jaffe. Chapter Six, Part Four.
Chapter Six: Part Four
Eric was a man I met in the early 1970's. He gave some great advice that helped me survive.
He not only taught me how to write like a journalist and access welfare. He also taught me how to save money on clothes and books. "Go and shop at Salvation Army and other second-hand stores," he told me. "Lots of clothing there is very cheap and very good."
I follow his advice and not my dad's on this and other issues. I saved hundreds of dollars going to thrift stores. Now in my mid-30's, I shuttle from one low paid job telemarketing, then to welfare and then to short term writing gigs. I survive for the next 12 years thanks to Eric, the son of a professor now teaching in Davis, California.
Eric also did one last good thing for me. He turns me on to vegetarianism. This was something I'd thought about for a long time but until I met Eric, I'd never done much about. "Eating meat caused most of the wars of the 20th century," Aldous Huxley, one of my 1960's idols had written in effect in one of his essays. I no longer read Huxley's works and he may have been wrong on this issue.
Yet meat cost lots of money and some of the books by vegans that I read says that meat doesn't fill you with vitamins or minerals. Soon I gave up eating eggs, meat, chicken, cheese and butter. I wasn't living the affluent life, that was for sure. Still, I managed to scrape by on low wages and welfare cheques.
By now all the people I knew from Montreal, save for my father, had left my life. I met Dick Prinsep, a shrewd observer of politics and a former meteorologist. We became friends. Dick's socialist politics had outraged his bosses in government. They ended his meteorological career. yet like me, this native of Ottawa stayed in the N.D.P.
Rodger Garbutt and I met in the halls of Max Cameron High School in Powell River. Powell River is a mill town that hugs the shoreline of the Burrard Inlet , two ferry rides and a long drive distant from Vancouver. This short, gifted native of north-east England, joins me up in the N.D.P. He takes beautiful photographs, paints some great pictures, and like me enjoys the outdoors. We spend days together, exploring B.C. and rapping about politics.
"Rodger is a great teacher," one of his former students Chuck Young told me. He certainly taught me a lot. I leave teaching but often travelled to Victoria to see Rodger when he moved to Victoria and taught for many years at Claremont High School. These people and some others help me many times. Yet Eric helped me when I desperately needed help. For a few years we remain fast friends.
Eric was a man I met in the early 1970's. He gave some great advice that helped me survive.
He not only taught me how to write like a journalist and access welfare. He also taught me how to save money on clothes and books. "Go and shop at Salvation Army and other second-hand stores," he told me. "Lots of clothing there is very cheap and very good."
I follow his advice and not my dad's on this and other issues. I saved hundreds of dollars going to thrift stores. Now in my mid-30's, I shuttle from one low paid job telemarketing, then to welfare and then to short term writing gigs. I survive for the next 12 years thanks to Eric, the son of a professor now teaching in Davis, California.
Eric also did one last good thing for me. He turns me on to vegetarianism. This was something I'd thought about for a long time but until I met Eric, I'd never done much about. "Eating meat caused most of the wars of the 20th century," Aldous Huxley, one of my 1960's idols had written in effect in one of his essays. I no longer read Huxley's works and he may have been wrong on this issue.
Yet meat cost lots of money and some of the books by vegans that I read says that meat doesn't fill you with vitamins or minerals. Soon I gave up eating eggs, meat, chicken, cheese and butter. I wasn't living the affluent life, that was for sure. Still, I managed to scrape by on low wages and welfare cheques.
By now all the people I knew from Montreal, save for my father, had left my life. I met Dick Prinsep, a shrewd observer of politics and a former meteorologist. We became friends. Dick's socialist politics had outraged his bosses in government. They ended his meteorological career. yet like me, this native of Ottawa stayed in the N.D.P.
Rodger Garbutt and I met in the halls of Max Cameron High School in Powell River. Powell River is a mill town that hugs the shoreline of the Burrard Inlet , two ferry rides and a long drive distant from Vancouver. This short, gifted native of north-east England, joins me up in the N.D.P. He takes beautiful photographs, paints some great pictures, and like me enjoys the outdoors. We spend days together, exploring B.C. and rapping about politics.
"Rodger is a great teacher," one of his former students Chuck Young told me. He certainly taught me a lot. I leave teaching but often travelled to Victoria to see Rodger when he moved to Victoria and taught for many years at Claremont High School. These people and some others help me many times. Yet Eric helped me when I desperately needed help. For a few years we remain fast friends.
Monday 22 August 2016
Exits and Entrances: A Journey Through Many Landscapes: by Dave Jaffe; Chapter Six- Part Three.
Chapter Six continued: Part Three.
During times between doing primal therapy, I started to read about fetishism. I realized that my mother or the nurses I had when very young, hadn't held me a lot. The insights that came from primal therapy and my readings, at time overwhelmed me. I sat for hours in my two tiny rooms in Kitsilano amazed at what I was learning about myself.
Yet Eric didn't only steer me into primal therapy. He turned me onto journalism and how to write easy-to-read stories. "Dave, you have to learn journalism," he told me after I"d written a piece for a local paper. "What you're writing, nobody will read. It's too academic."
On Eric's advice, I borrowed a book from the library by Rudolf Fleisch, who wrote the post-Sputnik best seller called "Why Ivan Can Read, And Johnny Can't'. Fleisch, who was born in Austria, set out in easy-to-read prose the way to writing well.
Use quotations, he said. Cut down big words into much smaller ones. Look for anecdotes that express the theme of the story you're writing. Use active verbs, not passive ones. From December 1975 to the spring of 1976, I studied Fleisch's book for days on end. And once I finished Fleischs work I borrowed books on journalism from the library.
As the rain poured down outside, I slowly shrugged off the know-it-all ideas that I'd picked up at McGill University. "I know nothing," I told my friends. "I've got to start learning all over again."
Eric also told me how to get welfare. My savings from teaching, writing and government grants, have shrivelled down to nearly nothing. I sure wasn't going to borrow money from friends or my family like my dad had in England. "Never take the dole, or welfare," my father said to me years ago. I shrugged off such advice. I had to survive.
So on one morning in 1977 I went to the nearest welfare office and ended up with a $160 cheque every month. The financial aid worker at the office classified me as 'employable' even though I could only walk six or seven blocks a day. And I needed crutches to even do that distance.
Still, liviing on $160 a month sure looked better than sleeping on the street.
At that time, Eric was a hippie who filled me in on his own past. He had led big demonstrations in the 1960's and 1970's against the Vietnam War, unrestricted urban development, police brutality and punitive drug policies. Eric starred as a witness in the judicial inquiry into the 1971 Gastown Riot, where police had beaten up dozens of demonstrators protesting anti-marijuana laws. As a hard core politico, I had at times scorned the hippies. Now thanks to Eric I realized that many hippies had shown great bravery and daring. Eric taught me other lessons too.
As I told people later, "Knowing Eric was a growth experience." For a time he was my guru.
During times between doing primal therapy, I started to read about fetishism. I realized that my mother or the nurses I had when very young, hadn't held me a lot. The insights that came from primal therapy and my readings, at time overwhelmed me. I sat for hours in my two tiny rooms in Kitsilano amazed at what I was learning about myself.
Yet Eric didn't only steer me into primal therapy. He turned me onto journalism and how to write easy-to-read stories. "Dave, you have to learn journalism," he told me after I"d written a piece for a local paper. "What you're writing, nobody will read. It's too academic."
On Eric's advice, I borrowed a book from the library by Rudolf Fleisch, who wrote the post-Sputnik best seller called "Why Ivan Can Read, And Johnny Can't'. Fleisch, who was born in Austria, set out in easy-to-read prose the way to writing well.
Use quotations, he said. Cut down big words into much smaller ones. Look for anecdotes that express the theme of the story you're writing. Use active verbs, not passive ones. From December 1975 to the spring of 1976, I studied Fleisch's book for days on end. And once I finished Fleischs work I borrowed books on journalism from the library.
As the rain poured down outside, I slowly shrugged off the know-it-all ideas that I'd picked up at McGill University. "I know nothing," I told my friends. "I've got to start learning all over again."
Eric also told me how to get welfare. My savings from teaching, writing and government grants, have shrivelled down to nearly nothing. I sure wasn't going to borrow money from friends or my family like my dad had in England. "Never take the dole, or welfare," my father said to me years ago. I shrugged off such advice. I had to survive.
So on one morning in 1977 I went to the nearest welfare office and ended up with a $160 cheque every month. The financial aid worker at the office classified me as 'employable' even though I could only walk six or seven blocks a day. And I needed crutches to even do that distance.
Still, liviing on $160 a month sure looked better than sleeping on the street.
At that time, Eric was a hippie who filled me in on his own past. He had led big demonstrations in the 1960's and 1970's against the Vietnam War, unrestricted urban development, police brutality and punitive drug policies. Eric starred as a witness in the judicial inquiry into the 1971 Gastown Riot, where police had beaten up dozens of demonstrators protesting anti-marijuana laws. As a hard core politico, I had at times scorned the hippies. Now thanks to Eric I realized that many hippies had shown great bravery and daring. Eric taught me other lessons too.
As I told people later, "Knowing Eric was a growth experience." For a time he was my guru.
Saturday 20 August 2016
Exits and Entrances - A Journey Through Many Landscapes: by Dave Jaffe . Chapter Six - Part Two
Chapter Six. Part Two
When I started to do primal therapy with Eric, I ended up growling, beating my fists against the therapy room's padded walls, and then crying for minutes on end. And yes from time to time I did scream. All the pains of my life and the grieving for dead members of my family came out of my shaking body.
By now I didn't trust some psychiatrists. One psychiatrist I went to, told me he could cure my addiction to valium. He gave me a pill that nearly gave me a nervous breakdown after taking it, for a few weeks. Back then I trusted Eric and once a week I set aside an hour for primal sessions.
"I feel clear," Eric and I tell each other again and again. And this was true. My massive fits of anger shrink. The primals sweep away my waves of sadness. And I stop abusing women. Yet I should point out, that when I stopped abusing women, some women started abusing me. "Mister," one artist said to me after I took up drawing and painting, "All you do is copy. You don't have an original bone in your body." Another woman who worked at the Vancouver Art Gallery said to my face, "You are one of the most pompous and derivative artists I've ever met."
A few years after doing primal therapy I worked with a severely disabled woman who abused me day after day. Finally one day after she accused me of making mistakes, I told her, "You're a mistake." Then I left the job I was working at, and found another. In the middle of an argument with another woman, this female told me, "You are crazy and your life is crazy." And finally a neighbour of mine told me that I was one of the weirdest men she had ever known. Much of what these women said about me and to me was probably true. Yet I could have insulted them too but after doing primal therapy I rarely did this.
Now up to this stage of my memoir I haven't mentioned any women I went out with. The reason for this is simple: Up until the age off 33 I had only hung out with one woman for any stretch of time. In my teens and 20's I did go out with a few women. But none of this dating - as it was called in my youth - went anywhere.
I'm a fetishist who's turned on by frilly blouses and white scarves wrapped around women's necks. I ended up going to female prostitutes in my twenties and after, making love to these women who wore the frilly clothes and scarves that I brought to them.
Over time, some women did turn me on, especially if they were dark or brown-haired, well-dressed and reasonably intelligent. But with one or two exceptions, a long enduring love affair was out of the question. My erections would only come when making love to a woman wearing my fetishes
When I started to do primal therapy with Eric, I ended up growling, beating my fists against the therapy room's padded walls, and then crying for minutes on end. And yes from time to time I did scream. All the pains of my life and the grieving for dead members of my family came out of my shaking body.
By now I didn't trust some psychiatrists. One psychiatrist I went to, told me he could cure my addiction to valium. He gave me a pill that nearly gave me a nervous breakdown after taking it, for a few weeks. Back then I trusted Eric and once a week I set aside an hour for primal sessions.
"I feel clear," Eric and I tell each other again and again. And this was true. My massive fits of anger shrink. The primals sweep away my waves of sadness. And I stop abusing women. Yet I should point out, that when I stopped abusing women, some women started abusing me. "Mister," one artist said to me after I took up drawing and painting, "All you do is copy. You don't have an original bone in your body." Another woman who worked at the Vancouver Art Gallery said to my face, "You are one of the most pompous and derivative artists I've ever met."
A few years after doing primal therapy I worked with a severely disabled woman who abused me day after day. Finally one day after she accused me of making mistakes, I told her, "You're a mistake." Then I left the job I was working at, and found another. In the middle of an argument with another woman, this female told me, "You are crazy and your life is crazy." And finally a neighbour of mine told me that I was one of the weirdest men she had ever known. Much of what these women said about me and to me was probably true. Yet I could have insulted them too but after doing primal therapy I rarely did this.
Now up to this stage of my memoir I haven't mentioned any women I went out with. The reason for this is simple: Up until the age off 33 I had only hung out with one woman for any stretch of time. In my teens and 20's I did go out with a few women. But none of this dating - as it was called in my youth - went anywhere.
I'm a fetishist who's turned on by frilly blouses and white scarves wrapped around women's necks. I ended up going to female prostitutes in my twenties and after, making love to these women who wore the frilly clothes and scarves that I brought to them.
Over time, some women did turn me on, especially if they were dark or brown-haired, well-dressed and reasonably intelligent. But with one or two exceptions, a long enduring love affair was out of the question. My erections would only come when making love to a woman wearing my fetishes
Friday 19 August 2016
Exis and Entrances - A Journey Through Many Landscapes: By Dave Jaffe; Chapter Six
Chapter Six: Part One
This chapter is about my journey towards liberation.
Eric was a tall thin draft resister from the United States. Like tens of thousands of other Americans back in the 1960's and early 1970's, he came to Canada because he didn't want to fight in the Vietnam War. I didn't blame him.
I met him through Bob Sarti another tall American who was another draft resister, and was then working as a reporter at 'The Vancouver Sun' newspaper.
In turn I met Bob through his wife Marilyn, a dark-haired intense woman who grew up in the northeast of the U.S. Bob came from New York City, while Eric spent his youth in California. Like me, Marilyn was a member of the New Democratic Party.
By the early 1970's I had joined the New Democratic Party. Now I would go around telling people, "I'm a social democrat who's a Jew. I still have doubts about Israel but I don't want to see it vanish. I also support Quebec's right to separate from Canada." These were not N.D.P. policies.
Naturally I got into many arguments with many kinds of people especially with Maoists, anarchists and right wingers. One man who saw me in Bob Sarti's back yard cried out loud, "Help me! Here comes Dave Jaffe." In short I was a younger left wing version of my father. My socialist beliefs were the counterpart to his faith in the Jewish religion.
Eric and Bob Sarti were anarchists. They admired the writings of the American anarchist Murray Bookchin. Eric still thought he could do some good in the N.D.P. Anyway Eric joined the N.D.P. in the provincial riding of Vancouver-Burrard which was the riding I was in too. Eric started showing up where I lived and sometimes where I worked at the Canada Manpower office in downtown Vancouver. Here I lasted about eight months and caused many problems.
"You were crazy back then," Bob Laughlin, one of my co-workers told me. He was right. Bob was a big bearded native of Ottawa. He left Canada Manpower to do primal therapy. At the time many people made fun of Arthur Janov and his book 'The Primal Scream'. Yet I read the book and thought that Janov's primal therapy could help me. Bob thought so too. Eric also preached the virtues of the therapy and told me it could help cure my problems.
So on one cloudy November morning in late 1975 Eric led me into a padded room off East Hastings Street and said to me quietly, "Fell Dave. Just feel your pain, your anger and your sadness." This was the beginning of my journey towards self-understanding.
This chapter is about my journey towards liberation.
Eric was a tall thin draft resister from the United States. Like tens of thousands of other Americans back in the 1960's and early 1970's, he came to Canada because he didn't want to fight in the Vietnam War. I didn't blame him.
I met him through Bob Sarti another tall American who was another draft resister, and was then working as a reporter at 'The Vancouver Sun' newspaper.
In turn I met Bob through his wife Marilyn, a dark-haired intense woman who grew up in the northeast of the U.S. Bob came from New York City, while Eric spent his youth in California. Like me, Marilyn was a member of the New Democratic Party.
By the early 1970's I had joined the New Democratic Party. Now I would go around telling people, "I'm a social democrat who's a Jew. I still have doubts about Israel but I don't want to see it vanish. I also support Quebec's right to separate from Canada." These were not N.D.P. policies.
Naturally I got into many arguments with many kinds of people especially with Maoists, anarchists and right wingers. One man who saw me in Bob Sarti's back yard cried out loud, "Help me! Here comes Dave Jaffe." In short I was a younger left wing version of my father. My socialist beliefs were the counterpart to his faith in the Jewish religion.
Eric and Bob Sarti were anarchists. They admired the writings of the American anarchist Murray Bookchin. Eric still thought he could do some good in the N.D.P. Anyway Eric joined the N.D.P. in the provincial riding of Vancouver-Burrard which was the riding I was in too. Eric started showing up where I lived and sometimes where I worked at the Canada Manpower office in downtown Vancouver. Here I lasted about eight months and caused many problems.
"You were crazy back then," Bob Laughlin, one of my co-workers told me. He was right. Bob was a big bearded native of Ottawa. He left Canada Manpower to do primal therapy. At the time many people made fun of Arthur Janov and his book 'The Primal Scream'. Yet I read the book and thought that Janov's primal therapy could help me. Bob thought so too. Eric also preached the virtues of the therapy and told me it could help cure my problems.
So on one cloudy November morning in late 1975 Eric led me into a padded room off East Hastings Street and said to me quietly, "Fell Dave. Just feel your pain, your anger and your sadness." This was the beginning of my journey towards self-understanding.
Thursday 18 August 2016
Exits and Entrances - Chapter Five - Continued by Dave Jaffe
Chapter Five continued
As my knees decayed, John's life went downhill too. His landlord, a friend of John's killed himself. John then broke off all contact with me. I saw it was necessary for him and in hindsight it was the best thing that happened to me. I also realized that John may have been gay and his super-masculine front was built up by him to protect him from any hints of being gay.
Of course not all the weight lifting people in the Y.M.C.A. weight room were like John. Gunter was a husky brick layer who was intelligent and a kind and decent man. Another Dave, towered over me and remembered me from our days at McGill University. He was an ESL teacher, and at one time tried to get me a job teaching ESL.
Art, a bearded energetic man did find me a clerical job at B.C. Institute of Technology. Al was a husky bearded man from east end Vancouver. he worked at a local community centre with some tough young men. Yet Al was a kind person.
Still, there were other people there who I steered clear of. One huge man from eastern Europe grabbed a modern dancer and one day pinned him up against the wall. "Don't you ever change the weights on this barbell when I'm using it," he growled at the dancer. Another man who had tatoos on his arms, gave me looks that terrified me. A third man I knew had a father who killed himself. This man scared me too sometimes.
Yet my wonky knees and John's new mood pushed me out of the 'Y' weight room and into another totally different place. And as young people would say to-day in 2016, "It was all good."
As my knees decayed, John's life went downhill too. His landlord, a friend of John's killed himself. John then broke off all contact with me. I saw it was necessary for him and in hindsight it was the best thing that happened to me. I also realized that John may have been gay and his super-masculine front was built up by him to protect him from any hints of being gay.
Of course not all the weight lifting people in the Y.M.C.A. weight room were like John. Gunter was a husky brick layer who was intelligent and a kind and decent man. Another Dave, towered over me and remembered me from our days at McGill University. He was an ESL teacher, and at one time tried to get me a job teaching ESL.
Art, a bearded energetic man did find me a clerical job at B.C. Institute of Technology. Al was a husky bearded man from east end Vancouver. he worked at a local community centre with some tough young men. Yet Al was a kind person.
Still, there were other people there who I steered clear of. One huge man from eastern Europe grabbed a modern dancer and one day pinned him up against the wall. "Don't you ever change the weights on this barbell when I'm using it," he growled at the dancer. Another man who had tatoos on his arms, gave me looks that terrified me. A third man I knew had a father who killed himself. This man scared me too sometimes.
Yet my wonky knees and John's new mood pushed me out of the 'Y' weight room and into another totally different place. And as young people would say to-day in 2016, "It was all good."
Wednesday 17 August 2016
Exits and Entrances: A Journey Through Many Landscapes by Dave Jaffe. Chapter Five - Part One
Chapter Five - Part One.
I've often felt too small, especially when I was a teenager. At school or in the street, many men and some women towered over me. To-day I stand fully grown at five feet six inches or 1.65 metres high. I wanted to be bigger, stronger and tougher. In my late teens I took up weight training. As a result, my weight ballooned from 135 pounds to close to 175. I didn't grow up. I grew out.
Yet my weight training alas, damaged my legs. I pumped out repetitions with weights for my arms, legs, shoulders and chest. Yet my knees took the bruunt of damage from lifting weights.
At the local Y.M.C.A. weight room on Burrard Street I sweated while trying to pump up my thighs. I would hold a weight on my shoulders while bending my knees. I did this while the heels of my shoes rested on a plank of wood.
"You're going to kill your knees doing this," one of the many weight lifters at the Y.M.C.A. gym told me. "I'd stop doing that if I was you."
I ignored this advice. All through the 1960's to the mid-1970's, I kept squatting with weights while my heels rested on a wooden block. To make matters worse, in 1974 I took up jogging. John was a tall muscular brown haired 40- something man I met in the 'Y' weight training gym on Burrard Street. He would lift weights and then work out on the gymnastic bars in a gym upstairs from the weight room. The weight room sat in the 'Y' building's basement.
I saw John do jogging too. So then I took up jogging. Meanwhile I would often run into John when he would stalk back downstairs into a tiny room beside the weight room. Here. a huge punching bag hung from this small room's ceiling. John would then punch this bag with a manic intensity, sometimes for over half an hour at a time. His sweaty smell soon filled up the room which had no windows.
I looked on at John's punching workouts, half-fascinated, half-repelled. "That John is not a bad guy," another weight trainer told me. "But sometimes I've seen him act kind of strange." I ignored this comment and became friends with John who was then in his mid 40's. A former logger and construction worker, he lived in a tiny basement room not far from where I lived in Kitsilano.
"You and me are just fig leafers," John said about his and mine weight training. "We're just trying to look good. We're not tough." And as he said the word "tough" his face would sometimes shake to emphasize the word. I kept on jogging though I couldn't keep up with John in his jogging workouts. I was truly hurting my knees by jogging and doing squats in my peculiar way. I was heading for a fall. It came soon enough.
I've often felt too small, especially when I was a teenager. At school or in the street, many men and some women towered over me. To-day I stand fully grown at five feet six inches or 1.65 metres high. I wanted to be bigger, stronger and tougher. In my late teens I took up weight training. As a result, my weight ballooned from 135 pounds to close to 175. I didn't grow up. I grew out.
Yet my weight training alas, damaged my legs. I pumped out repetitions with weights for my arms, legs, shoulders and chest. Yet my knees took the bruunt of damage from lifting weights.
At the local Y.M.C.A. weight room on Burrard Street I sweated while trying to pump up my thighs. I would hold a weight on my shoulders while bending my knees. I did this while the heels of my shoes rested on a plank of wood.
"You're going to kill your knees doing this," one of the many weight lifters at the Y.M.C.A. gym told me. "I'd stop doing that if I was you."
I ignored this advice. All through the 1960's to the mid-1970's, I kept squatting with weights while my heels rested on a wooden block. To make matters worse, in 1974 I took up jogging. John was a tall muscular brown haired 40- something man I met in the 'Y' weight training gym on Burrard Street. He would lift weights and then work out on the gymnastic bars in a gym upstairs from the weight room. The weight room sat in the 'Y' building's basement.
I saw John do jogging too. So then I took up jogging. Meanwhile I would often run into John when he would stalk back downstairs into a tiny room beside the weight room. Here. a huge punching bag hung from this small room's ceiling. John would then punch this bag with a manic intensity, sometimes for over half an hour at a time. His sweaty smell soon filled up the room which had no windows.
I looked on at John's punching workouts, half-fascinated, half-repelled. "That John is not a bad guy," another weight trainer told me. "But sometimes I've seen him act kind of strange." I ignored this comment and became friends with John who was then in his mid 40's. A former logger and construction worker, he lived in a tiny basement room not far from where I lived in Kitsilano.
"You and me are just fig leafers," John said about his and mine weight training. "We're just trying to look good. We're not tough." And as he said the word "tough" his face would sometimes shake to emphasize the word. I kept on jogging though I couldn't keep up with John in his jogging workouts. I was truly hurting my knees by jogging and doing squats in my peculiar way. I was heading for a fall. It came soon enough.
Tuesday 16 August 2016
Exits and Entrances: A Journey Through Many Landscapes. Chapter Four, Part Three.
Chapter Four, Part Three.
My father was a true eccentric as well as being an Orthodox Jew. He didn't wear sideburns like the truly Orthodox. Still, he believed in just about every word in the Old Testament. I stayed with my father for about eight years off and on, after my mother and sister passed away. During this time my father threw himself into the affairs of the Orthodox synagogue, the Schara Tzedeck. Here my father caused all sorts of problems while doing some good things too.
He tried to get rid of non-Jewish people who were members of the Jewish Community Centre at 41st Avenue and Oak street. If he had succeeded, the community centre would have gone bankrupt. He demanded that all Jewish restaurants serve only kosher food. "You're father is impossible to work with," one woman told me. "He's crazy about kosher food."
I should have left my father's high rise long before I eventually did. Finally I moved into a tiny one bedroom place on the west side of Kitsilano. But I was a mess. "That man is still fighting his father," one woman, who I worked with at one time, said about me. She was right.
In fact I became the opposite of my dad. He was an Orthodox Jew. I became a liberal Christian. He was a married man. I never married. He ran after the rich and the well-to-do. I became at one time a hard core socialist and worked with the truly poor. He could never save any money. "Your father is a cash addict," another woman I knew told me. I became a real cheapskate who could save a money even at times when I lived on welfare.
There were other opposites in our lives. My father worked from the age of 13 to the day he retired at 78. I worked a total of about 11 years. Last, my father was a good athlete who played a good game of soccer and won many medals on the track in the 100 and 200 yard races. He was a star at what was called 'the county level' in the U.K., which was like our provincial level in Canada. I, on the other hand was hopeless in sports. I couldn't catch a baseball or throw a football.
Yet I could swim which I was still doing in my early 70's. My father never learned that skill. And there must have been other ways that I differed sharply from my father. I can't think of them now, but they surely existed. Yet up until the age of 35 or so, in my character I was very like my father. Like him, I was brash and abusive, and caused problems, whatever organization I joined.
Once I ended up in this tiny suite in Kitsilano I continued my disruptive path. Now at times massive rages overcame me and then sadness settled in my brain. I wanted to cry but couldn't. I kept on taking valium and abusing women. Then in late 1974, I contracted chomdromalacia, or a roughening of the kneecaps. My knees swelled up and I could only walk now with the help of crutches.
What would I do, I wondered. How would I survive? Then suddenly a rescuer came into view.
Yet before he showed up, I had detoured into weight training that made me need him even more.
My father was a true eccentric as well as being an Orthodox Jew. He didn't wear sideburns like the truly Orthodox. Still, he believed in just about every word in the Old Testament. I stayed with my father for about eight years off and on, after my mother and sister passed away. During this time my father threw himself into the affairs of the Orthodox synagogue, the Schara Tzedeck. Here my father caused all sorts of problems while doing some good things too.
He tried to get rid of non-Jewish people who were members of the Jewish Community Centre at 41st Avenue and Oak street. If he had succeeded, the community centre would have gone bankrupt. He demanded that all Jewish restaurants serve only kosher food. "You're father is impossible to work with," one woman told me. "He's crazy about kosher food."
I should have left my father's high rise long before I eventually did. Finally I moved into a tiny one bedroom place on the west side of Kitsilano. But I was a mess. "That man is still fighting his father," one woman, who I worked with at one time, said about me. She was right.
In fact I became the opposite of my dad. He was an Orthodox Jew. I became a liberal Christian. He was a married man. I never married. He ran after the rich and the well-to-do. I became at one time a hard core socialist and worked with the truly poor. He could never save any money. "Your father is a cash addict," another woman I knew told me. I became a real cheapskate who could save a money even at times when I lived on welfare.
There were other opposites in our lives. My father worked from the age of 13 to the day he retired at 78. I worked a total of about 11 years. Last, my father was a good athlete who played a good game of soccer and won many medals on the track in the 100 and 200 yard races. He was a star at what was called 'the county level' in the U.K., which was like our provincial level in Canada. I, on the other hand was hopeless in sports. I couldn't catch a baseball or throw a football.
Yet I could swim which I was still doing in my early 70's. My father never learned that skill. And there must have been other ways that I differed sharply from my father. I can't think of them now, but they surely existed. Yet up until the age of 35 or so, in my character I was very like my father. Like him, I was brash and abusive, and caused problems, whatever organization I joined.
Once I ended up in this tiny suite in Kitsilano I continued my disruptive path. Now at times massive rages overcame me and then sadness settled in my brain. I wanted to cry but couldn't. I kept on taking valium and abusing women. Then in late 1974, I contracted chomdromalacia, or a roughening of the kneecaps. My knees swelled up and I could only walk now with the help of crutches.
What would I do, I wondered. How would I survive? Then suddenly a rescuer came into view.
Yet before he showed up, I had detoured into weight training that made me need him even more.
Monday 15 August 2016
Exits and Entrances A Journey Through Many Landscaped by Dave Jaffe; Chapter Four - Part Two
Chapter Four - Part Two
In the summer of 1967, my sister Valerie was already dead. My mother was dying. In between those two traumatic events one of my favourite musicians, John Coltrane died at the age of 40. This wonderfully talented African American played the saxophone in ways that entranced me. Now he too passed away. I didn't grieve all these deaths enough. I should have. Instaed I enrolled at the University of British Columbia to be a teacher, a job I knew I wouldn't like.
Already in Montreal I'd dropped out of Macdonald Teacher's College two years in a row. Still, I trudged on trying to be a teacher since there seemed to be no other choice. One final death remained. My cousin, one of my father's brother Ted, died at the age of 21. It happened while my father was visiting England in December. I had never felt alone as in that month.
I started to shake and I headed off to a doctor for a cure. He gave me valium and for a while I became a valium addict, a devotee of this tiny yellow pill.
"What a drag it is getting old," sang Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones in the Stones' song 'Mother's Little Helper'. "If you're not really ill/ There's this little, yellow pill". To compound my problems in those days of sadness, troubled people swirled around me or came visiting. Stan from Montreal rented a room near the Haro Street apartment where I was living with my father. He enrolled in the Faculty of Education like I did. Yet then he dropped out of his courses and slept in every day.
Alan a very nervous young man, showed up in Vancouver. He too came from Montreal. Alan got arrested in student sit-in at Simon Fraser University up on Burnaby Mountain. "I want to go back to the metropolis, and find a job," Alan said." I don't want to be stuck out here in the hinterland." Alan's mood didn't improve as his trial strung out for months on end.
Then there was Mike, a talented musician who had nervous problems. "That man is a genius on the guitar, but a child at life," a woman who knew Mike said. Mike's mood swings added to my torment. His partner Lori whom I called "Chappie" saved him from self-destruction.
Finally, Ted Newman, a former classmate of mine in Northmount High showed up to see me. He brought his wife Robyn and his baby daughter Galen along. Ted had had his problems in the past. But now he seemed very steady, and compared to me and my other friends, he was the sanest of us all.
And then there was my dad.
In the summer of 1967, my sister Valerie was already dead. My mother was dying. In between those two traumatic events one of my favourite musicians, John Coltrane died at the age of 40. This wonderfully talented African American played the saxophone in ways that entranced me. Now he too passed away. I didn't grieve all these deaths enough. I should have. Instaed I enrolled at the University of British Columbia to be a teacher, a job I knew I wouldn't like.
Already in Montreal I'd dropped out of Macdonald Teacher's College two years in a row. Still, I trudged on trying to be a teacher since there seemed to be no other choice. One final death remained. My cousin, one of my father's brother Ted, died at the age of 21. It happened while my father was visiting England in December. I had never felt alone as in that month.
I started to shake and I headed off to a doctor for a cure. He gave me valium and for a while I became a valium addict, a devotee of this tiny yellow pill.
"What a drag it is getting old," sang Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones in the Stones' song 'Mother's Little Helper'. "If you're not really ill/ There's this little, yellow pill". To compound my problems in those days of sadness, troubled people swirled around me or came visiting. Stan from Montreal rented a room near the Haro Street apartment where I was living with my father. He enrolled in the Faculty of Education like I did. Yet then he dropped out of his courses and slept in every day.
Alan a very nervous young man, showed up in Vancouver. He too came from Montreal. Alan got arrested in student sit-in at Simon Fraser University up on Burnaby Mountain. "I want to go back to the metropolis, and find a job," Alan said." I don't want to be stuck out here in the hinterland." Alan's mood didn't improve as his trial strung out for months on end.
Then there was Mike, a talented musician who had nervous problems. "That man is a genius on the guitar, but a child at life," a woman who knew Mike said. Mike's mood swings added to my torment. His partner Lori whom I called "Chappie" saved him from self-destruction.
Finally, Ted Newman, a former classmate of mine in Northmount High showed up to see me. He brought his wife Robyn and his baby daughter Galen along. Ted had had his problems in the past. But now he seemed very steady, and compared to me and my other friends, he was the sanest of us all.
And then there was my dad.
Saturday 13 August 2016
Exits and Entrances: A Journey Through Many Landscapes by Dave Jaffe: Chapter Four
Chapter Four: Part One.
The media dubbed the summer of 1967, "the Summer of Love." I called it' "The Summer of Death." While hippies grew their hair long, smoked dope and poured into places like Haight Ashberry in San Francisco, and Kitsilano in Vancouver, I wrestled with grief.
I last saw my sister Valerie in the spring of 1967. She lay dead in a room in a Vancouver hospital. She was only 21 but she was killed by a massive cerebral hemorrhage. I placed my fingers on her cold dead lips and muttered to myself, "Poor Valerie." In her so short life, my younger didn't find much joy. She was too young to remember the good times in Willesden. She hated living in my shadow as she made her way through the halls of Iona Avenue School and then Northmount High.
"I'm always known as your sister," she told me once. "Always people say, 'Oh, you're Jaffe's sister'. I hate it. And then there's all those snobs at school." In high school, with the exception of Grade 10, I always scored reasonably high marks. Valerie consistently got C's and C+'s, but no higher.
Yet she had a very fine voice and should have gone to a musical academy. But my parents had no money to make that happen.
Once out of high school in 1962 which was two years after I graduated, Valerie trecked to work in offices to file, type and answer phones. Her blonde brownish hair always looked nice. Yet sadness often glazed her blue eyes. The men she went out with, often abused her. I did too and we often fought. After a disastrous stay in London, England, Valerie came back to Montreal. Here, she met a short ambitious Englishman named Dave Trowbridge. "Get on the birth control pill," this native of Hoxton, England insisted. Valerie did for she was scared of getting pregnant.
Taking those estrogen-packed pills I believe killed Valerie with a stroke. Dave left shortly after her death, and went back to London England.
Still grieving my dead sister, I ended up in the Vancouver General Hospital in August 1967. I watched one afternoon as my unconscious mother lay in a white sheeted bed. She had now shrunk down to 35 kilograms. Bruises and red marks ran across her skeletal body. For the past two years my mother had struggled with breast cancer. Now on a sunny afternoon in late August, she died.
In the past two years from 1965 to 1967, my mother saw her mother die, and one of her daughters. She had struggled for the past 15 years to hold our family together through pain and poverty. My mother had never gone through the poverty that she did with my father, for she came from an upper middle class family.
And then came more deaths that I'll deal with shortly. This for me was a tough time.
The media dubbed the summer of 1967, "the Summer of Love." I called it' "The Summer of Death." While hippies grew their hair long, smoked dope and poured into places like Haight Ashberry in San Francisco, and Kitsilano in Vancouver, I wrestled with grief.
I last saw my sister Valerie in the spring of 1967. She lay dead in a room in a Vancouver hospital. She was only 21 but she was killed by a massive cerebral hemorrhage. I placed my fingers on her cold dead lips and muttered to myself, "Poor Valerie." In her so short life, my younger didn't find much joy. She was too young to remember the good times in Willesden. She hated living in my shadow as she made her way through the halls of Iona Avenue School and then Northmount High.
"I'm always known as your sister," she told me once. "Always people say, 'Oh, you're Jaffe's sister'. I hate it. And then there's all those snobs at school." In high school, with the exception of Grade 10, I always scored reasonably high marks. Valerie consistently got C's and C+'s, but no higher.
Yet she had a very fine voice and should have gone to a musical academy. But my parents had no money to make that happen.
Once out of high school in 1962 which was two years after I graduated, Valerie trecked to work in offices to file, type and answer phones. Her blonde brownish hair always looked nice. Yet sadness often glazed her blue eyes. The men she went out with, often abused her. I did too and we often fought. After a disastrous stay in London, England, Valerie came back to Montreal. Here, she met a short ambitious Englishman named Dave Trowbridge. "Get on the birth control pill," this native of Hoxton, England insisted. Valerie did for she was scared of getting pregnant.
Taking those estrogen-packed pills I believe killed Valerie with a stroke. Dave left shortly after her death, and went back to London England.
Still grieving my dead sister, I ended up in the Vancouver General Hospital in August 1967. I watched one afternoon as my unconscious mother lay in a white sheeted bed. She had now shrunk down to 35 kilograms. Bruises and red marks ran across her skeletal body. For the past two years my mother had struggled with breast cancer. Now on a sunny afternoon in late August, she died.
In the past two years from 1965 to 1967, my mother saw her mother die, and one of her daughters. She had struggled for the past 15 years to hold our family together through pain and poverty. My mother had never gone through the poverty that she did with my father, for she came from an upper middle class family.
And then came more deaths that I'll deal with shortly. This for me was a tough time.
Friday 12 August 2016
Exits and Entrances: A Journey Through Many Landscapes by Dave Jaffe. Chapter Three - Part four
Exits and Entrances - Chapter Three, Part Four.
In late 1966, my mother and father head off to Vancouver. Valerie, my younger sister who's just come back from a disastrous stay in London, England joins me on a train ride out to this west coast city. So in 1966 I cross Canada three times by land.
Once in Vancouver I head off to San Francisco by bus. I go back there the next winter for seven days or so. I then take a long journey by bus to the U.S. and Mexico in the winter of 1970 to 1971. Once back in Vancouver, I stay with my father but get restless again. I soon head off to Europe to meet my dad's family after 18 years away from them. I don't get on with most of them save for Jon Breslaw, a Reaganesque son of my father's cousin Dot. Jon and I have already met in Berkeley where he's taking his Ph.D.
Two years after this in 1973 I bus across Canada once more to Montreal. "You sure must have been restless," a therapist tells me a few years later. I definitely was.
But the 1973 jaunt across Canada turns into a disaster. I get thrown out of one place I stay in, and have to leave another person's place after an argument with him. Then I crash at another person's place which makes this young man with a wife and a child feel very crowded. Montreal to my surprise, doesn't turn me on anymore. It now looks old and not beautiful like Vancouver.
I was now 31 years old. Most of my age group had grown up, toiled away in careers, got married, bought houses' had children and settled down. Here was I, an ageing hippie, still moving from place to place with little money and a dropout from a teaching career that went nowhere. "There's teachers and learners," the main character in John Updike's novel 'The Centaur' says in effect. "I was meant to be a learner." I still didn't have a clue of what I was meant to be.
Tragedies too piled up along the way. I had to make choices in my life. Soon life made those choices for me.
In late 1966, my mother and father head off to Vancouver. Valerie, my younger sister who's just come back from a disastrous stay in London, England joins me on a train ride out to this west coast city. So in 1966 I cross Canada three times by land.
Once in Vancouver I head off to San Francisco by bus. I go back there the next winter for seven days or so. I then take a long journey by bus to the U.S. and Mexico in the winter of 1970 to 1971. Once back in Vancouver, I stay with my father but get restless again. I soon head off to Europe to meet my dad's family after 18 years away from them. I don't get on with most of them save for Jon Breslaw, a Reaganesque son of my father's cousin Dot. Jon and I have already met in Berkeley where he's taking his Ph.D.
Two years after this in 1973 I bus across Canada once more to Montreal. "You sure must have been restless," a therapist tells me a few years later. I definitely was.
But the 1973 jaunt across Canada turns into a disaster. I get thrown out of one place I stay in, and have to leave another person's place after an argument with him. Then I crash at another person's place which makes this young man with a wife and a child feel very crowded. Montreal to my surprise, doesn't turn me on anymore. It now looks old and not beautiful like Vancouver.
I was now 31 years old. Most of my age group had grown up, toiled away in careers, got married, bought houses' had children and settled down. Here was I, an ageing hippie, still moving from place to place with little money and a dropout from a teaching career that went nowhere. "There's teachers and learners," the main character in John Updike's novel 'The Centaur' says in effect. "I was meant to be a learner." I still didn't have a clue of what I was meant to be.
Tragedies too piled up along the way. I had to make choices in my life. Soon life made those choices for me.
Thursday 11 August 2016
Exits and Entrances - A Journey Through Many Landscapes - by Dave Jaffe. Chapter Three - Part Two.
Exits and Entrances - Chapter Three - PartTwo
I'm glad I took my first trip across the U.S. and parts of Canada. Yet after my return to Montreal I feel unhappy. In a few years I would leave Montreal. But I decided to head out once more.
In the basement of the Eaton's department store not far from McGill University, I meet a woman from Los Angeles. I fall in love with her though she tells me right away, "I'm engaged to be married." Ignoring these warning signals, I hitchhike and ride buses to Los Angeles the next summer. The woman I like so much tells me to get lost. Yet I live at my sister's apartment and spend long wonderful hours on the beaches at Santa Monica. I realized years later that this was the first time in 15 years that I'd been to a beach.
Once again, back in Montreal I vow to leave this city. I'd seen the west coast of North America and the climate and natural beauty there had turned me off Montreal forever. Yet I don't want to live in the U.S. of A. Its right-wing politics frighten me.
Yet everything seems seems to be tilting west. Aldous Huxley lives and dies in Los Angeles. He dies on the same day that President JFK is shot dead. Henry Miller, another one of my favourite writers, stays in Big Sur in California. Ken Kesey, a rising young novelist, farms in Oregon. And Montreal's winters and summers still suck. Plus I'm now increasingly aware of the rise of separatist feelings in the province of Quebec. But where can I go to?
Then an answer comes in the person of Dick Clemens now calling himself 'p.x. belinski'. He introduces me to the writings of C. Wright Mills, a left-leaning American sociologist. He gives me back issues of the Marxist monthly 'Monthly Review'. This long-haired 20 something hippie type has been to Cuba, joined 'ban-the bomb' movements and has had at least one nervous breakdown. Still, I find him to be one of the most interesting people I've met. Clemens moves to Vancouver in 1965 and I plan to follow him.
I'm not saying "I'm apolitical" anymore. I've become a Marxist. Soon I head off to Vancouver. For the first time I hitchhike and bus across this vast land of Canada, astounded at its empty spaces and clean neat western cities like Regina, Calgary and Vancouver.
Then in September 1966 I come back to Montreal. "I'm leaving here," my dad tells me when I come to my parents' tiny one bedroom apartment in McGill's student's ghetto. "We're going to Vancouver." My father has found a job with a cablevision company that has its head office in Vancouver. And wonder of wonders he's no longer poor. He and my mother aren't rich either . Yet their and mine 15 year trek through poverty and destitution is over. Life is bearable again.
Me and my family are on the move again but this time with more money in our pockets. So goodbye Montreal. Hello Vancouver. This was a good move.
I'm glad I took my first trip across the U.S. and parts of Canada. Yet after my return to Montreal I feel unhappy. In a few years I would leave Montreal. But I decided to head out once more.
In the basement of the Eaton's department store not far from McGill University, I meet a woman from Los Angeles. I fall in love with her though she tells me right away, "I'm engaged to be married." Ignoring these warning signals, I hitchhike and ride buses to Los Angeles the next summer. The woman I like so much tells me to get lost. Yet I live at my sister's apartment and spend long wonderful hours on the beaches at Santa Monica. I realized years later that this was the first time in 15 years that I'd been to a beach.
Once again, back in Montreal I vow to leave this city. I'd seen the west coast of North America and the climate and natural beauty there had turned me off Montreal forever. Yet I don't want to live in the U.S. of A. Its right-wing politics frighten me.
Yet everything seems seems to be tilting west. Aldous Huxley lives and dies in Los Angeles. He dies on the same day that President JFK is shot dead. Henry Miller, another one of my favourite writers, stays in Big Sur in California. Ken Kesey, a rising young novelist, farms in Oregon. And Montreal's winters and summers still suck. Plus I'm now increasingly aware of the rise of separatist feelings in the province of Quebec. But where can I go to?
Then an answer comes in the person of Dick Clemens now calling himself 'p.x. belinski'. He introduces me to the writings of C. Wright Mills, a left-leaning American sociologist. He gives me back issues of the Marxist monthly 'Monthly Review'. This long-haired 20 something hippie type has been to Cuba, joined 'ban-the bomb' movements and has had at least one nervous breakdown. Still, I find him to be one of the most interesting people I've met. Clemens moves to Vancouver in 1965 and I plan to follow him.
I'm not saying "I'm apolitical" anymore. I've become a Marxist. Soon I head off to Vancouver. For the first time I hitchhike and bus across this vast land of Canada, astounded at its empty spaces and clean neat western cities like Regina, Calgary and Vancouver.
Then in September 1966 I come back to Montreal. "I'm leaving here," my dad tells me when I come to my parents' tiny one bedroom apartment in McGill's student's ghetto. "We're going to Vancouver." My father has found a job with a cablevision company that has its head office in Vancouver. And wonder of wonders he's no longer poor. He and my mother aren't rich either . Yet their and mine 15 year trek through poverty and destitution is over. Life is bearable again.
Me and my family are on the move again but this time with more money in our pockets. So goodbye Montreal. Hello Vancouver. This was a good move.
Tuesday 9 August 2016
Exits and Entrances: A Journey Through many Landscapes by Dave Jaffe Chapter Three, First Part
Chapter Three
No one would ever call the old Arts building at McGill University in the 1960"s, 'beautiful'. It wasn't. This old two story structure was drafty, and filled with crowded classrooms and sometimes shining floors. Yet I hung out in the building's basement where you could find the men's student room. Here, young men smoked, gossiped, drank endless cups of coffee and played cards between classes.
Here, me and another former Northmount High School classmate of mine called Mel meet an older student. He tells us how he and a friend of his, hitchhiked to Mexico through the United States, the previous summer.
We listen enthralled for over an hour to his tales. "We've got to do this," says Mel at the end of the man's talk. "Let's do it together next summer." Mel is a short, red haired, freckle-faced person. He scores high on exams but he's also a redneck who sounds, or tries to sound like Steve McQueen in the t.v. series 'Wanted Dead Or Alive'. Years later I realize that Mel's views resemble those of U.S. President Ronald Reagan.
But this doesn't bother me back in 1962. "I'm apolitical," I tell people. I read books by Philip Roth, Aldous Huxley, Henry Miller and the original hitch hiker jack Kerouac. These aren't political writers.
So in the summer of 1962, Mel and I travel across Canada and the United States. Before going, I play for days the records of Joan Baez, who at that time was my favourite singer. Over and over again in our living room I play her songs, listening to her high lilting voice sing 'Plaisir D'Amour' and "Barbara Allen'.
The U.S. of A. and south western Ontario stand in stark contrast to Baez's gentle messages of peace, love and loss. Vast stretches of freeways barrel through southern Ontario, a land full of massive industrial plants and gleaming skyscrapers. We cross into the American Midwest whose factories and farms exude even more power and industrial might. "A country like this," I tell some one about the U.S., "can never go wrong." But this wasn't true. A bare six years later, America was bogged down in an unwinnable war, and asassins in the meantime killed off President John F. Kennedy and many African American leaders like Martin Luther King Junior, Malcolm X and Medgar Evers.
Yet I enjoyed myself, although the waiting for people to pick us up tested my anxious character. We spend just a week with my newly-married sister Sylvia and her husband Shelley Auerbach in their Los Angeles apartment. In San Francisco I find a dream city where there's no heat and no humidity. After thumbing north through Oregon we take a bus back into Canada. We end up at Vancouver at the University of British Columbia.
Here we meet a professor who takes us in his car all the way east to Chicago. Along the way back, farms endless suburbs, massive forests, broiling deserts, waving wheat and cities stream full tilt past us. This first trip is etched in my memory and will be until the day I die - or at least until Alzheimer's or dementia attack my brain. I had seen a big chunk of the U.S. but came back dissatisfied. I needed another journey and would soon take it.
No one would ever call the old Arts building at McGill University in the 1960"s, 'beautiful'. It wasn't. This old two story structure was drafty, and filled with crowded classrooms and sometimes shining floors. Yet I hung out in the building's basement where you could find the men's student room. Here, young men smoked, gossiped, drank endless cups of coffee and played cards between classes.
Here, me and another former Northmount High School classmate of mine called Mel meet an older student. He tells us how he and a friend of his, hitchhiked to Mexico through the United States, the previous summer.
We listen enthralled for over an hour to his tales. "We've got to do this," says Mel at the end of the man's talk. "Let's do it together next summer." Mel is a short, red haired, freckle-faced person. He scores high on exams but he's also a redneck who sounds, or tries to sound like Steve McQueen in the t.v. series 'Wanted Dead Or Alive'. Years later I realize that Mel's views resemble those of U.S. President Ronald Reagan.
But this doesn't bother me back in 1962. "I'm apolitical," I tell people. I read books by Philip Roth, Aldous Huxley, Henry Miller and the original hitch hiker jack Kerouac. These aren't political writers.
So in the summer of 1962, Mel and I travel across Canada and the United States. Before going, I play for days the records of Joan Baez, who at that time was my favourite singer. Over and over again in our living room I play her songs, listening to her high lilting voice sing 'Plaisir D'Amour' and "Barbara Allen'.
The U.S. of A. and south western Ontario stand in stark contrast to Baez's gentle messages of peace, love and loss. Vast stretches of freeways barrel through southern Ontario, a land full of massive industrial plants and gleaming skyscrapers. We cross into the American Midwest whose factories and farms exude even more power and industrial might. "A country like this," I tell some one about the U.S., "can never go wrong." But this wasn't true. A bare six years later, America was bogged down in an unwinnable war, and asassins in the meantime killed off President John F. Kennedy and many African American leaders like Martin Luther King Junior, Malcolm X and Medgar Evers.
Yet I enjoyed myself, although the waiting for people to pick us up tested my anxious character. We spend just a week with my newly-married sister Sylvia and her husband Shelley Auerbach in their Los Angeles apartment. In San Francisco I find a dream city where there's no heat and no humidity. After thumbing north through Oregon we take a bus back into Canada. We end up at Vancouver at the University of British Columbia.
Here we meet a professor who takes us in his car all the way east to Chicago. Along the way back, farms endless suburbs, massive forests, broiling deserts, waving wheat and cities stream full tilt past us. This first trip is etched in my memory and will be until the day I die - or at least until Alzheimer's or dementia attack my brain. I had seen a big chunk of the U.S. but came back dissatisfied. I needed another journey and would soon take it.
Monday 8 August 2016
Exits and Entrances: A Journey Through Many Landscapes by Dave Jaffe. Chapter Two continued: Part Three
Chapter Two continued
At night time wherever my family stays, my mother and father squabble and sometimes scream at each other. The reason? The usual one namely shortage of money. I'm now in high school at Northmount High, a new school built for the surging young of pre-Baby Boomers and Baby Boomers.
At first, I love high school. It gives me a refuge from my family's apartment, with its bare living room, no t.v. and a tiny fold-up cot where I sleep. Later we get some living room furniture thanks to Sylvia who quits school for a time to get a job.
Then wisely she slips away from Montreal and goes to Los Angeles in 1960. My mother's pitifully low wages as a file clerk that keeps starvation away from the door. My father now sells aluminum sidings to people often as poor as he is.
"You are nomads," one of my father's partners in their belt factory tells me with a mocking smile. But that was way back in 1956. By 1962 I was in university at McGill, barely scraping by mark wise in philosophy and english studies. I had become a snobby abusive self-proclaimed intellectual.
Wealthy and not-so wealthy WASPs and Jews rub shoulders in the halls and classrooms of shis downtown university. But these two groups rarely date each other or even like each other. "Why do your Jewish women dress up so much?" a blonde Protestant lady asks me in one of my classes. "We don't."
To-day I would say that Jews assert themselves by dressing up. WASPS didn't have to do that, because back then in the early 1960's, they were still the top dogs in Montreal. Hanford was a tall curly-haired honours student. He was a WASP. "We were told to hate Jews," he told a friend of mine.
"Later I found out that Jews were interesting people. To-day I like Jews."
Hanford's father was a professor at McGill University. I often wondered whether he told his son to dislike us. But I never asked him or his son.
Of course, not all my poverty-stricken teen age years were terrible. In my early teens I loved to play pool although I was a bust on the baseball diamond and the football field. As an athlete I stunk and was usually the last person to be chosen in pick-up games. Still, with friends of mine like the husky Mike Lowsky, the outspoken Micky Katansky and the dark-haired Stephen White, I went to pool halls where we often played for hours. And I often won at the pool table.
Later on, I pal around with Peter Cohen, a son of a rich dress store owner. He joins me up in a club at the Y.M.-Y.W.H.A. on Cote Sainte Catherine. I love playing basketball. and dancing at 'Y' in its ballroom on Sunday afternoons. Later still I make friends with Stan Berger who introduces me to classical music. He has a big collection of classical music in his bedroom and he lives with his mother only two blocks away from my parents' place on Bourret Avenue.
I look up with awe at Jack, a dark-haired graduate of Northmount High whose intellect overwhelms me. Later I see this man as a cold abusive intellectual. Other McGill students like Ronald Blumer and Adam Szymanski who become film makers, turn me on to international flicks from Germany, France and Italy. Morrie Alioff, a tall clever film critic also opens the world of film to me.
Yet I want to leave Montreal. I loathe its ferocious freezing winters, and broiling humid summers. I sense the threatening rise of the new French-Canadian nationalism. I tire of my parents' endless arguments. And at McGill, I stumble on a way out of this dead end.
At night time wherever my family stays, my mother and father squabble and sometimes scream at each other. The reason? The usual one namely shortage of money. I'm now in high school at Northmount High, a new school built for the surging young of pre-Baby Boomers and Baby Boomers.
At first, I love high school. It gives me a refuge from my family's apartment, with its bare living room, no t.v. and a tiny fold-up cot where I sleep. Later we get some living room furniture thanks to Sylvia who quits school for a time to get a job.
Then wisely she slips away from Montreal and goes to Los Angeles in 1960. My mother's pitifully low wages as a file clerk that keeps starvation away from the door. My father now sells aluminum sidings to people often as poor as he is.
"You are nomads," one of my father's partners in their belt factory tells me with a mocking smile. But that was way back in 1956. By 1962 I was in university at McGill, barely scraping by mark wise in philosophy and english studies. I had become a snobby abusive self-proclaimed intellectual.
Wealthy and not-so wealthy WASPs and Jews rub shoulders in the halls and classrooms of shis downtown university. But these two groups rarely date each other or even like each other. "Why do your Jewish women dress up so much?" a blonde Protestant lady asks me in one of my classes. "We don't."
To-day I would say that Jews assert themselves by dressing up. WASPS didn't have to do that, because back then in the early 1960's, they were still the top dogs in Montreal. Hanford was a tall curly-haired honours student. He was a WASP. "We were told to hate Jews," he told a friend of mine.
"Later I found out that Jews were interesting people. To-day I like Jews."
Hanford's father was a professor at McGill University. I often wondered whether he told his son to dislike us. But I never asked him or his son.
Of course, not all my poverty-stricken teen age years were terrible. In my early teens I loved to play pool although I was a bust on the baseball diamond and the football field. As an athlete I stunk and was usually the last person to be chosen in pick-up games. Still, with friends of mine like the husky Mike Lowsky, the outspoken Micky Katansky and the dark-haired Stephen White, I went to pool halls where we often played for hours. And I often won at the pool table.
Later on, I pal around with Peter Cohen, a son of a rich dress store owner. He joins me up in a club at the Y.M.-Y.W.H.A. on Cote Sainte Catherine. I love playing basketball. and dancing at 'Y' in its ballroom on Sunday afternoons. Later still I make friends with Stan Berger who introduces me to classical music. He has a big collection of classical music in his bedroom and he lives with his mother only two blocks away from my parents' place on Bourret Avenue.
I look up with awe at Jack, a dark-haired graduate of Northmount High whose intellect overwhelms me. Later I see this man as a cold abusive intellectual. Other McGill students like Ronald Blumer and Adam Szymanski who become film makers, turn me on to international flicks from Germany, France and Italy. Morrie Alioff, a tall clever film critic also opens the world of film to me.
Yet I want to leave Montreal. I loathe its ferocious freezing winters, and broiling humid summers. I sense the threatening rise of the new French-Canadian nationalism. I tire of my parents' endless arguments. And at McGill, I stumble on a way out of this dead end.
Saturday 6 August 2016
Exits and Entrances: A Journey Through Many Landscapes by Dave Jaffe
Exits and Entrances; Chapter Two Continued
I liked Iona Avenue school. It was my introduction to Canada. I gaped at some of my well-dressed classmates, most of whom were Jewish like me. They towered over me and all the boys wore long pants unlike the short ones I wore at first. I also enjoyed going to class with girls. My classes in Barnet were all boy classes.
Montreal, I soon realized was a sharply divided city. Ethnic lines sliced across this metropolis. "The French" I was told lived on the city's north and east side. Yet ethnic lines also cut through English-speaking Montreal. Jews, Italians, WASPS, Irish and Afro-Canadians mostly lived in their own areas.
"How can you be an English Jew?' one of my classmates in Grade Five used to ask me. "All English are Christians." He meant all WASPs were Christians. I tried to explain to him that some people in England were Jews. I can't recall if I did convince him or others.
I was a newcomer to the school, a blonde short child who spoke with an English accent. I stuck out and was a target for bullies. Soon I ended up in terrible fist fights most of which I lost. Yet this was something that I'd expected. It didn't bother me because it didn't last too long. What did hurt me and the rest of my family was my father's decisions at work. Tired of taking orders of the boss of the dress factory where he worked, my father left his job there and set up his own belt business.
"Your father should never have been a businessman," one of his fellow workers told me years later. "A salesman yes. A businessmen? No way."
We now start on an endless odysssey. We move from Decarie Boulevard to a walk-up duplex around the corner on Colbrooke Avenue. We get evicted from there eight months later. Then we head off to a nearby apartment on Snowdon Avenue. In the following February in 1956 we get booted out of there for not paying the rent. We head off north a kilometre or so to an apartment on Cote Sainte Catherine street. A year later we were on the move again to a nearby apartment on Saint Kevin Street.
Eight months after that in 1958, we move to Kent Street a middle class street full of nice duplexes. We last a bare four months there. Once again the landlord gives us the heave-ho for non-payment of rent. This was the height of the 1950's, when millions of Canadians for the first time in their lives were enjoying affluence. We just struggled to survive.
Now we find another apartment in a new building on Bourret Avenue, four blocks or so from Kent street. At first, the landlord doesn't want us as tenants. He may have heard about us from other landlords. Yet later he relents and we stay here for four long years.
Many years later I came across the book called 'Naked Nomads' by the conservative writer George Gilder. "That must be about me and my family in the 1950's and early 1960's," I tell a friend of mine. It wasn't. But its title fitted our lives back then. Yet during all these traumatic moves I felt happy and my life in the late 1950's in Montreal still strikes me as one of the most joyful chapters in my time on earth.
Still, more troubles loomed ahead.
(To be continued).
I liked Iona Avenue school. It was my introduction to Canada. I gaped at some of my well-dressed classmates, most of whom were Jewish like me. They towered over me and all the boys wore long pants unlike the short ones I wore at first. I also enjoyed going to class with girls. My classes in Barnet were all boy classes.
Montreal, I soon realized was a sharply divided city. Ethnic lines sliced across this metropolis. "The French" I was told lived on the city's north and east side. Yet ethnic lines also cut through English-speaking Montreal. Jews, Italians, WASPS, Irish and Afro-Canadians mostly lived in their own areas.
"How can you be an English Jew?' one of my classmates in Grade Five used to ask me. "All English are Christians." He meant all WASPs were Christians. I tried to explain to him that some people in England were Jews. I can't recall if I did convince him or others.
I was a newcomer to the school, a blonde short child who spoke with an English accent. I stuck out and was a target for bullies. Soon I ended up in terrible fist fights most of which I lost. Yet this was something that I'd expected. It didn't bother me because it didn't last too long. What did hurt me and the rest of my family was my father's decisions at work. Tired of taking orders of the boss of the dress factory where he worked, my father left his job there and set up his own belt business.
"Your father should never have been a businessman," one of his fellow workers told me years later. "A salesman yes. A businessmen? No way."
We now start on an endless odysssey. We move from Decarie Boulevard to a walk-up duplex around the corner on Colbrooke Avenue. We get evicted from there eight months later. Then we head off to a nearby apartment on Snowdon Avenue. In the following February in 1956 we get booted out of there for not paying the rent. We head off north a kilometre or so to an apartment on Cote Sainte Catherine street. A year later we were on the move again to a nearby apartment on Saint Kevin Street.
Eight months after that in 1958, we move to Kent Street a middle class street full of nice duplexes. We last a bare four months there. Once again the landlord gives us the heave-ho for non-payment of rent. This was the height of the 1950's, when millions of Canadians for the first time in their lives were enjoying affluence. We just struggled to survive.
Now we find another apartment in a new building on Bourret Avenue, four blocks or so from Kent street. At first, the landlord doesn't want us as tenants. He may have heard about us from other landlords. Yet later he relents and we stay here for four long years.
Many years later I came across the book called 'Naked Nomads' by the conservative writer George Gilder. "That must be about me and my family in the 1950's and early 1960's," I tell a friend of mine. It wasn't. But its title fitted our lives back then. Yet during all these traumatic moves I felt happy and my life in the late 1950's in Montreal still strikes me as one of the most joyful chapters in my time on earth.
Still, more troubles loomed ahead.
(To be continued).
Friday 5 August 2016
Exits and Entrances - Chapter Two by Dave Jaffe
Chapter Two- Montreal: A City of 13 years.
I came with my family to Montreal in early August 1953. We pulled into the Windsor train station in downtown Montreal after a six day sail across the Atlantic Ocean on a 20,000 ton liner that berthed in Quebec City. The liner had the right name. It was called the S.S. Atlantic. A train then whisked us to Montreal.
The heat wrapped its humid suffocating arms around us the moment the five of us carried our luggage onto Montreal's Dorchester Street. Thirteen-and-a-half years later in late 1966, my sister Valerie and I sat on a train that pulled out of another Montreal train station as snow lashed the rails. We headed west to join our parents in Vancouver.
In those thirteen years or more I and my family lived through one hellish moment after another. Landlords threw us out of six apartments for non-payment of rent. Through winters and summers we went nowhere until my sister Sylvia, took off to California. We lived from hand to mouth barely existing at times, while scraping through one horrible year after another "You were poor when you left for Canada," a relative said years later. "And in Canada you just got poorer."
My mother said many times in that journey through hell, "We are as poor as the proverbial church mouse." She was right.
But at the beginning things went well. My father found us a room in a rooming house right across from McGill University on Sherbrooke Street. Then we quickly moved into an apartment building on Decarie Boulevard in Notre dame de Grace or 'NDG' as it was called back then.
Then my father found a job in a dress factory. My parents took in boarders and at first there were no problems. Every weekday I crossed the busy Decarie Boulevard - which is now a freeway - to go to Iona Avenue school, as did my younger sister Valerie. Sylvia went off to West Hill High, a fair distance west.
At first Montreal astounded me. I gazed wide- eyed at the beautiful neon covered stores on Sainte Catherine Street in the downtown area. I marvelled at the huge coloured cars that roared along city streets. And I couldn't believe the amount of goods that piled up on supermarket shelves. I'd just come from post-war England where meat, eggs, butter and a whole lot of other things were still strictly rationed.
But not everything ran perfectly, as I soon found out.
I came with my family to Montreal in early August 1953. We pulled into the Windsor train station in downtown Montreal after a six day sail across the Atlantic Ocean on a 20,000 ton liner that berthed in Quebec City. The liner had the right name. It was called the S.S. Atlantic. A train then whisked us to Montreal.
The heat wrapped its humid suffocating arms around us the moment the five of us carried our luggage onto Montreal's Dorchester Street. Thirteen-and-a-half years later in late 1966, my sister Valerie and I sat on a train that pulled out of another Montreal train station as snow lashed the rails. We headed west to join our parents in Vancouver.
In those thirteen years or more I and my family lived through one hellish moment after another. Landlords threw us out of six apartments for non-payment of rent. Through winters and summers we went nowhere until my sister Sylvia, took off to California. We lived from hand to mouth barely existing at times, while scraping through one horrible year after another "You were poor when you left for Canada," a relative said years later. "And in Canada you just got poorer."
My mother said many times in that journey through hell, "We are as poor as the proverbial church mouse." She was right.
But at the beginning things went well. My father found us a room in a rooming house right across from McGill University on Sherbrooke Street. Then we quickly moved into an apartment building on Decarie Boulevard in Notre dame de Grace or 'NDG' as it was called back then.
Then my father found a job in a dress factory. My parents took in boarders and at first there were no problems. Every weekday I crossed the busy Decarie Boulevard - which is now a freeway - to go to Iona Avenue school, as did my younger sister Valerie. Sylvia went off to West Hill High, a fair distance west.
At first Montreal astounded me. I gazed wide- eyed at the beautiful neon covered stores on Sainte Catherine Street in the downtown area. I marvelled at the huge coloured cars that roared along city streets. And I couldn't believe the amount of goods that piled up on supermarket shelves. I'd just come from post-war England where meat, eggs, butter and a whole lot of other things were still strictly rationed.
But not everything ran perfectly, as I soon found out.
Thursday 4 August 2016
Exits and Entrances: A Journey Through Many Landscapes by Dave Jaffe Chapter One continued
Chapter One continued of Exits and Entrances
In Barnet in the early 1950's there were plenty of sporting events to go and see. My favourite team was the local Barnet soccer team. I often go down the road to cheer them on. Their games often thrill me. I am crushed when I go down to the huge Wembley stadium in the early 1950's. Here from high up in the stands I watch some other team beat Barnet in the amateur soccer semi-final match. I came home simply feeling crushed and downhearted.
But my mother is so proud of me. "David went to Wembley," she says. :"He went on his own in a coach alone and came back alone."
I also loved to go to the Oval stadium in downtown London to watch my favourite cricket team Surrey play. And often in summer time I sneaked away and smoked cigarettes in a field behind the apartment building I lived in. This turns me on.
My sister Sylvia thinks I'm nuts. She wasn't the only one who felt this way. "Everybody in this town thinks you're insane," she told me one day. I can't recall what my younger sister Valerie thinks.I realize early on that she often looks sad. For my mother and father though life was tough. And worse was in store for them and all of us.
Montreal, Canada. Somehow that city popped up in my father's head. In 1953 he decided to move to Montreal. He should have chosen, Toronto, Calgary or Vancouver. But he picked Montreal. It was a disastrous choice.
Anyway in the spring of 1953 he came home and says, ""We're leaving to Montreal." My father's mail order business is making nothing. Time and again he borrows money from family and friends instead of going to the local dole office. So off we go to Montreal. My mother and sisters do something they'll be doing many times in the next twelve or so years. They pack up our clothes and leave our furniture, cutlery and stuff behind.
On a day in July in 1953 our family relations wave goodbye to us as we get on a train to take a trip to Southhampton where a ship's waiting for us and others. "Well, they all showed up to see us off," my dad said. "They were glad to see us leave," my mum replied. "They're happy to see the back of us."
Five of us sat in a crowded train carriage, dressed up for a journey into the unknown. I didn't want to leave. I wanted to stay in Barnet, see soccer games, play with my mates and smoke cigarettes far away from my parents' eyes. I broke down as the train climbed a hill. I cried and cried. A lovely chapter of my life, full of pain but also joy had ended forever. It took me another five years to be so happy again and that period of my life only lasted a year or two.
Only in the late 1980's 35 years later, would life take me to another stage that I enjoyed as much as I'd enjoyed my life in Barnet.
In Barnet in the early 1950's there were plenty of sporting events to go and see. My favourite team was the local Barnet soccer team. I often go down the road to cheer them on. Their games often thrill me. I am crushed when I go down to the huge Wembley stadium in the early 1950's. Here from high up in the stands I watch some other team beat Barnet in the amateur soccer semi-final match. I came home simply feeling crushed and downhearted.
But my mother is so proud of me. "David went to Wembley," she says. :"He went on his own in a coach alone and came back alone."
I also loved to go to the Oval stadium in downtown London to watch my favourite cricket team Surrey play. And often in summer time I sneaked away and smoked cigarettes in a field behind the apartment building I lived in. This turns me on.
My sister Sylvia thinks I'm nuts. She wasn't the only one who felt this way. "Everybody in this town thinks you're insane," she told me one day. I can't recall what my younger sister Valerie thinks.I realize early on that she often looks sad. For my mother and father though life was tough. And worse was in store for them and all of us.
Montreal, Canada. Somehow that city popped up in my father's head. In 1953 he decided to move to Montreal. He should have chosen, Toronto, Calgary or Vancouver. But he picked Montreal. It was a disastrous choice.
Anyway in the spring of 1953 he came home and says, ""We're leaving to Montreal." My father's mail order business is making nothing. Time and again he borrows money from family and friends instead of going to the local dole office. So off we go to Montreal. My mother and sisters do something they'll be doing many times in the next twelve or so years. They pack up our clothes and leave our furniture, cutlery and stuff behind.
On a day in July in 1953 our family relations wave goodbye to us as we get on a train to take a trip to Southhampton where a ship's waiting for us and others. "Well, they all showed up to see us off," my dad said. "They were glad to see us leave," my mum replied. "They're happy to see the back of us."
Five of us sat in a crowded train carriage, dressed up for a journey into the unknown. I didn't want to leave. I wanted to stay in Barnet, see soccer games, play with my mates and smoke cigarettes far away from my parents' eyes. I broke down as the train climbed a hill. I cried and cried. A lovely chapter of my life, full of pain but also joy had ended forever. It took me another five years to be so happy again and that period of my life only lasted a year or two.
Only in the late 1980's 35 years later, would life take me to another stage that I enjoyed as much as I'd enjoyed my life in Barnet.
Wednesday 3 August 2016
Chapter One Continued of Exits and Emtrances: A Journey Through Many Landscapes Continued by Dave Jaffe
Chapter One Contsinued
Tensions. I'm aware of tensions that hang in the air in this house on Alexander Avenue in Willesden. One morning while playing in sthe nursery, I see my mother say goodbye to may father as he goes to work.
"Mont" she says to my father as he goes to work. "How will we pay this bill?" my father looks troubled too. Both his businesses, a travel agency and a clothing factory rest on very shaky foundations. Soon in about 1950 both businesses go bankrupt and my father vanishes for months.
"We must sell this house and move to Barnet," my mother says. Her troubled blue eyes look even more anxious now. Yet she rises to the challenge. The house is sold and my mother moves us to an apartment in Barnet, a growing suburb just to the north of London. Joan the nanny vanishes. So does Mrs. Cox the cook. I stop going to the London Jewish Day School which my father founded, but I didn't like.
Now my father comes back to our family. Yet the five foot six inch frame of my dad, Montague Jaffe seems to have shrunk. And for the first time I start to doubt his advice and views. "Never take the dole," he says to me. "Never buy anything second hand and never read newspapers that someone else has bought."
25 years later in Vancouver I flout or break all my father's rules. I live on welfare or "the dole" as it was called in great Britain. I haunt Sally-Ann stores looking for clothing and book bargains, and dip into recycling bins for old newspapers. I love doing this. Yet my father would never do any of these things.
He could have got seven pounds a week from welfare. Instead he borrows money or takes it from his brother Ted or his sister Hannah Stern. His small mail order business produces no money week after week. He also borrows or takes cousins and friends. "A schnorrer", Jews would call my dad which in English and not Yiddish means "a beggar." That is what he became in Barnet.
But meanwhile I love Barnet. I go to soccer games, play soccer, fight with my classmates in brutal playground scraps at Christchurch School and shine in exams where I often lead the class which is an all-male set-up. The teachers we have often cane and beat us.
My mother, a brown-haired daughter of a deaf mother and a tyrannical jeweller father, rarely hugs or touches me. Yet she dips into her small trove of shrinking cash to pay my way to see Tottenham Hotspurs, my favourite professional soccer team. Sometimes I go with my father when he makes some money. Like many fathers he bonds with his son around sports. Long after I have forgotten my soccer spectator days my father remembers them. And I had other sports favourites too.
(To be continues).
Tensions. I'm aware of tensions that hang in the air in this house on Alexander Avenue in Willesden. One morning while playing in sthe nursery, I see my mother say goodbye to may father as he goes to work.
"Mont" she says to my father as he goes to work. "How will we pay this bill?" my father looks troubled too. Both his businesses, a travel agency and a clothing factory rest on very shaky foundations. Soon in about 1950 both businesses go bankrupt and my father vanishes for months.
"We must sell this house and move to Barnet," my mother says. Her troubled blue eyes look even more anxious now. Yet she rises to the challenge. The house is sold and my mother moves us to an apartment in Barnet, a growing suburb just to the north of London. Joan the nanny vanishes. So does Mrs. Cox the cook. I stop going to the London Jewish Day School which my father founded, but I didn't like.
Now my father comes back to our family. Yet the five foot six inch frame of my dad, Montague Jaffe seems to have shrunk. And for the first time I start to doubt his advice and views. "Never take the dole," he says to me. "Never buy anything second hand and never read newspapers that someone else has bought."
25 years later in Vancouver I flout or break all my father's rules. I live on welfare or "the dole" as it was called in great Britain. I haunt Sally-Ann stores looking for clothing and book bargains, and dip into recycling bins for old newspapers. I love doing this. Yet my father would never do any of these things.
He could have got seven pounds a week from welfare. Instead he borrows money or takes it from his brother Ted or his sister Hannah Stern. His small mail order business produces no money week after week. He also borrows or takes cousins and friends. "A schnorrer", Jews would call my dad which in English and not Yiddish means "a beggar." That is what he became in Barnet.
But meanwhile I love Barnet. I go to soccer games, play soccer, fight with my classmates in brutal playground scraps at Christchurch School and shine in exams where I often lead the class which is an all-male set-up. The teachers we have often cane and beat us.
My mother, a brown-haired daughter of a deaf mother and a tyrannical jeweller father, rarely hugs or touches me. Yet she dips into her small trove of shrinking cash to pay my way to see Tottenham Hotspurs, my favourite professional soccer team. Sometimes I go with my father when he makes some money. Like many fathers he bonds with his son around sports. Long after I have forgotten my soccer spectator days my father remembers them. And I had other sports favourites too.
(To be continues).
Tuesday 2 August 2016
Exits and Entrances: A Journey Through Many Landscapes by Dave Jaffe
Chapter One of Exits and Entrances by Dave Jaffe
In early May 1942 a 26 year old woman named Lillian Bolloten Jaffe went into labour at a hospital in Oxford England. After hours of pain and effort a male baby came out of her womb. This was me and my parents named me David Joseph Jaffe. So I came into this world like billions of babies before me, a helpless blob of humanity.
"Anatomy is destiny," Sigmund Freud once said. But I would change that to say, "Geography is destiny." At the time I was born great Britain was locked in a struggle for survival. Every day German Air Force planes scoured the British countryside bombing farms and factories. My father an intense working class native of East End London, owned a clothing factory that produced uniforms for the British army. World War Two was going full blast and every day thousands of people fought and died in Britain, Europe, Africa and Asia.
My parents stayed in London throughout the war, and sent me to a series of homes and nurses far away from bomb-battered London. But some thing went wrong at one or two of the places I ended up at. "Dad had to take you away from a nurse you were staying with," my mother an upper middle class woman told me years later. I broke one of my legs while staying with one woman and my left leg never entirely healed from this accident. Also I was mistreated or abused along the way. This impacted my life in later years which I'll deal with later.
In any case my first memory of my life happened on my third birthday May 3, 1945. This was not only my birthday. It was also Victory in Europe Day. Adolf Hitler's once mighty military machine lay in ruins and the Second World War at least in Europe was over. Nazi Germany had surrendered while the Japanese fought on in Asia.
Still British people and tens of millions of people who had lived under Nazi occupation for the past five years celebrated the Allied victory. My father took me downtown and the streets were packed with joyful people waving the Union Jack flag. "Are they celebrating my birthday?" I asked my father, who patiently explained why people were so happy. It was the first let down in my life. In any case I was happy and returned to our house in Willesden in North London. At that time my family was firmly middle class. We had a cook and my sister Sylvia and I had a nanny too to look after us.
From the outside everything looked good for my family. But trouble lurked around the corner. I soon became aware of this.
In early May 1942 a 26 year old woman named Lillian Bolloten Jaffe went into labour at a hospital in Oxford England. After hours of pain and effort a male baby came out of her womb. This was me and my parents named me David Joseph Jaffe. So I came into this world like billions of babies before me, a helpless blob of humanity.
"Anatomy is destiny," Sigmund Freud once said. But I would change that to say, "Geography is destiny." At the time I was born great Britain was locked in a struggle for survival. Every day German Air Force planes scoured the British countryside bombing farms and factories. My father an intense working class native of East End London, owned a clothing factory that produced uniforms for the British army. World War Two was going full blast and every day thousands of people fought and died in Britain, Europe, Africa and Asia.
My parents stayed in London throughout the war, and sent me to a series of homes and nurses far away from bomb-battered London. But some thing went wrong at one or two of the places I ended up at. "Dad had to take you away from a nurse you were staying with," my mother an upper middle class woman told me years later. I broke one of my legs while staying with one woman and my left leg never entirely healed from this accident. Also I was mistreated or abused along the way. This impacted my life in later years which I'll deal with later.
In any case my first memory of my life happened on my third birthday May 3, 1945. This was not only my birthday. It was also Victory in Europe Day. Adolf Hitler's once mighty military machine lay in ruins and the Second World War at least in Europe was over. Nazi Germany had surrendered while the Japanese fought on in Asia.
Still British people and tens of millions of people who had lived under Nazi occupation for the past five years celebrated the Allied victory. My father took me downtown and the streets were packed with joyful people waving the Union Jack flag. "Are they celebrating my birthday?" I asked my father, who patiently explained why people were so happy. It was the first let down in my life. In any case I was happy and returned to our house in Willesden in North London. At that time my family was firmly middle class. We had a cook and my sister Sylvia and I had a nanny too to look after us.
From the outside everything looked good for my family. But trouble lurked around the corner. I soon became aware of this.
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