Right, Left and centre: The Poltiocs of Some Canadians by Dave Jaffe; Chapter 44, Part One.

   Change Your Name, Change Your Status by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 44, part one.


     Rosenbaum became Rosen which morphed into Ross. It was a typical progression in a surname. Many Jews and other ethnics changed their surnames and/or shortened them. Then they could blend seamlessly into the English-sounding Anglophone Canadian majority. No one  would bother you at least with a name like Ross. Or so Arthur Ross, born Arthur Rosen, figured.
      Arthur Ross as he liked to call himself, was a tall dark haired adolescent who went to McGill University in downtown Montreal in the 1960's. Back then many male students wore suits, ties and overcoats or raincoats. Women wore trendy dresses or skirts, coats and cashmere sweaters. Of course the clothes people wore back then, did depend on how rich your parents were.
      A few years later, great cultural and political rebellions swept across parts of the globe. Old dress codes vanished like many other habits. Yet when Arthur Ross first showed up at McGill, those events lay a few years away. So Arthur Ross usually wore a suit and tie.
     He came from the Jewish area of Snowden in Montreal. He was bright and aggressive and like many Jews back then had a fierce desire to succeed. He won a scholarship to McGill University, which no longer restricted Jews from becoming students there, which it had done for a quite a few years before. Art's father was a cutter in a dress factory of which he was part owner. Hyman Rosen, Art's father, had slaved long and hard to sent his only son to McGill. His eldest daughter Rachel became a primary school teacher, while his younger daughter Frances was a legal secretary.
     "Don't screw up Arthur," Hyman Rosen told his son on Arthur's first day at McGill. "We're depending on you." Arthur didn't intend to make mistakes. He knew the road to riches lay through getting a profession. At McGill, he aimed to study to be a lawyer and get a job with a big legal firm. Yet at this stage in the early 1960's, most big law firms were staffed by White Anglo-Saxon protestants, or 'WASPS' as they were called. The WASPs for the most part didn't like Jews and would never hire one.
    At McGill, few Jews that Arthur ever knew  dated  WASPs or vice versa. The smoking corridor that lay just outside the university's main library was called 'The Gaza Strip' . It surely took its name from the strip on Israel's western border. Here, Israeli troops often clashed with Arabs who tried to sneak across the border into Israel and kill Israelis.
      No gunfire ever shook the Gaza strip at McGill. Here, students, both Jewish and non-Jewish alike.
exchanged pleasantries while smoking tobacco. Yet in classrooms and outside them, few Jews and WASPs hung out together. And sometimes the feelings of Christians towards Jews did surface.
     "Why do your Jewish women dress up so much?" one young WASP lady asked Arthur when he first came to McGill. "We non-Jewish girls dress much more simply." Someone could have told this young woman that dressing up was a way for an ethnic minority to assert itself. Yet Arthur didn't have a reply for this question - at least not yet. He was only 18 years old and hadn't yet studied the sociology of ethnic groups. So he remained baffled by the question, at least for now. Yet that would soon change.