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).