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.
Tuesday, 9 August 2016
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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