Right, Left and Centre: The Politics of Some Canadians: Part Nine. The Crtiical Critic.

         Right, Left and Centre: Part Nine: The Critical Critic:


         A few people who knew him used to call him "The critical critic" for that's what he was. He spent a large part of his life criticizing critics, especially those on the left.
    "Noam Chomsky sees all power wielders as evil," the critical critic used to say. "That's just not true." When religious men and women used the Gospels or other parts of the Bible to call for justice, the critic objected. "Religion,": he said, "supports the status quo. You can't use it to change the world to make it more equal."
    A tall, uneasy looking man, the critic had been a good football player in his youth. "He had a great pair of hands," one of his childhood  friends recalled. The critic was adopted. as a child. In east end Montreal in the early 1950's, he would drive his tiny three wheeler along Hutchinson street in spring time at a furious speed. He was living in Mordecai Richler territory. For like Richler the critic was a Jew. In the mid-1950's, his parents moved to Outremont, a more middle class area which was further west than Hutchinson street.
    Here disaster struck his family. His cheerful stepfather died of a heart attack. "He was a smoker,' the critic said. His father keeled over in his dress factory and was gone. He was only 48 years old. His mother a short plump bookkeeper married again. Yet her new husband wasn't a nice man. He used to hit and abuse the critic.
     Yet then this man died.. "He was a smoker too," the critic recalled. "And he didn't do any exercise." So the critic's second stepfather died also from a heart attack. He wasn't even fifty years old. Now the critic turned in on himself. He idealized himself before the age of eight, in other words before his first stepfather died. He never fell in love with a woman and he didn't like schools either.
    By the age of about 16 the critic had become a Jewish tribalist. He went to university and graduated after a while. Yet he spent large parts of his free time reading about Jewish history and the Holocaust. He loathed Germans of course. He also became paranoid about anti-Semitism and saw it everywhere. Of course this isn't hard to do since it's quite easy to find some people anywhere who don't like Jews.
    In the world to-day anti-Semitism is quite strong in Moslem countries and weaker in many western lands. Still, there's people who dislike Jews all over the world. And the results of this dislike for Jews has led to terrible results. "The history of Jews," one rabbi pointed out, "is often a history of suffering." Wherever Jews have lived, they've been persecuted. The only exception here is India. Yet in most parts of the world, wherever Jews have shown up, people have unleashed hatred and violence against them.
   Many famous writers have hated Jews as have many politicians, including of course, Adolf Hitler who spawned the Holocaust, Argentina's Juan Peron, Quebec's famous theologian Lionel Groulx and England's famous king of the Middle Ages,Richard the Lionheart.