Jerry Cohen

The Montreal Fifties, Anti-Semitism, and Herbert Jordan

   

I was born in 1941, and from that date until my departure for England, where I now reside, in 1961, I lived first on Park Avenue between Laurier and Fairmount, and then on St. Joseph Boulevard, at the corner of and on the right side of Hutchison: had I lived on the wrong side, across the road, I would have gone to grubby Baron Byng and not to semi-elegant Strathcona, and I would not have been in this book.

Anti-semitism was a strong force in Montreal in those years.  Jewish kids like me experienced anti-semitism in two forms, one coarse, and the other more clean-shaven and better groomed.  The coarse kind of anti-semitism came from some of the French Canadian working class people with whom we lived cheek by jowl.  I don't know how many of them harboured anti-semitism in their hearts, but it certainly sometimes came out of some of their mouths, such as those of certain rough French-Canadian kids who, at least once or twice, called me "maudit Juif" as I made my way to school along the sidewalk.  When I heard "maudit Juif" ("damned Jew"), I walked swiftly on, eyes averted from the name-caller, and probably most of those at whom such epithets were hurled did the same, but there did exist a more or less organized West-Side-Story-type Jewish gang, called "the Lords", which, so I believe, conducted gladiatorial contests against French-Canadian gangs and, although I do not know how much of what we heard about the Jewish gang's exploits was myth, and I never saw them in action, I was glad that such a gang was in business.  In any case, the "maudit Juif" name-calling didn't happen very often, not, anyway, in my immediate experience, but it doesn't have to happen a lot for it to be a preoccupation as you walk along the streets where it sometimes happens.

The well-bred variety of anti-semitism was projected at us by some of the school teachers in our high school, Strathcona Academy.  Strathcona was named after the Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal, a one-time High Commissioner of Canada to Great Britain and, at an earlier stage in his life, the man who built the Canadian Pacific Railway.  He did not build it single-handedly, but when the line being laid from the East met the line being laid from the West, he drove in the final spike, which was made of gold.

Now, because the area in which Strathcona stood was populated by Jews and French Canadians, with very few non-Jewish non-French Canadians, the great majority of the pupils in Strathcona Academy were Jewish.  Something of the order of 90% were Jewish, the residual 10% being formed out of Greeks, Syrians, a French Huguenot or two, and a very few Protestants whose native language was English.  The teachers, by contrast, every last man-Jack and woman-Jill of them, from the principal down to the raw recruits, were pure white Protestants of British Isles extraction.  Elsewhere in the city, there were Jewish teachers teaching Jewish kids, under the auspices of the Protestant School Board, but it was a principle or anyway a policy in Strathcona Academy that no Jews were to be hired: perhaps it was because Jews were so over-represented among the pupil intake that they thought it would needlessly tilt things even further away from Protestantness if they took in Jewish teachers as well.

The fact that 90% of us were Jewish and almost none of us were Protestant did not prevent the school from laying little bits of Protestant religious observance on us.  We said the Lord's Prayer every morning, I sometimes very quietly, chanted a Yiddish parody version, invented by Irving Zucker, a Baron Byng alumnus who is now a distinguished professor at Berkeley, specializing in reproductive physiology.

And every Christmastime we assembled to sing carols and to listen to some narishkeit intoned by a local clergyman.  The extraordinary thing, and this tells you much about the North American 1950's, is that, in my secure recollection, and that of my friends, not a single one of us ever voiced even a mild squeak of protest against this incongruous imposition.  We were only too glad not to be subjected to the weirder stuff that would surely have been thrust upon us if we'd been in a Catholic school.

Few teachers ever adverted to this curious ethnic divide between teachers and taught.  But one of them, Mr. Herbert Jordan, was uninhibited about it.  Jordan taught us two subjects: Guidance, and English literature.  In his capacity as teacher of Guidance, Mr. Jordan from time to time warned us that, since we were Jewish - he blankly ignored the 3 non-Jews in our 30-strong class when making such warnings - he warned us, with relish, that, since we were Jewish, we would gain admission to McGill University only if we scored rather better in our examinations than the minimum required for non-Jews: that was McGill’s policy.

Now, to go to McGill was a widespread hope and expectation in our class.  (I was once travelling on a bus on Sherbrooke Street, and, as it passed the Roddick Gates, where McGill University begins, a little Jewish boy asked his mother: "What's that?" "That's McGill, that's where you're gonna be a doctor", she replied, in a European accent.)  Anyway, we did want to go to McGill, and one could imagine someone telling us about the special threshold at McGill for Jews  matter-of-factly, or even in a tone of compassion and anger, but Jordan would rehearse this piece of information with a certain satisfaction, in a spirit of: don't get too big for your boots; you may be clever, but you are Jewish, after all.  And, once again, we did not protest against this display.

I should say as a footnote at this point that McGill's delicate discrimination policy (don't prohibit Jews, but make sure that only the smarter ones come) had, I think, come to an end before Herbert Jordan was still ignorantly admonishing us in the aforementioned terms.  A massively wealthy Montreal Jewish family, the Samuel Bronfman family, which owned, among other things,  Seagrams Distilleries, had by then, so I believe, poured a lot of money into McGill's coffers on the understanding that McGill would reciprocate by lifting its numerus clausus, and it duly did.

I say that we did not protest against Jordan, but we did have contempt for him.  But if you think that all we had for him was contempt then you do not understand what sort of contempt we had and you do not understand what it is to be on the receiving end of ethnic discrimination.  We did have contempt, but we also had respect, because men like Jordan were on top, they were the official people who ran things and who made things go like they were supposed to go.  They didn't get called maudit Juif as they walked home from school.  They didn't, even their parents didn't, speak with more or less strong European accents.  They were the bright, clean, white people, not underhand-clever and street-smart and sly, like we were, but full of a spotless surface virtue.

When I look back, I find it remarkable that my respect for Jordan was so robust, despite my contempt for him and despite the many opportunities he created for me to withdraw my respect.  Thus, for example, in his manifestation not as Guidance teacher but as teacher of English literature, Jordan many times told us that there were only seven kinds of plot in all works of fiction, and, he added, with Christian pride, that all seven plots were to be found in the Bible.  I found this claim both fascinating and incredible, and there was also inside me when I heard it a proto-philosophical stirring about what exactly the criteria of identity would be for plot types, what the criteria were for saying this story has the same plot as that different one, and so forth.

Now, whenever Jordan made this claim, he'd illustrate it by saying that there is, for example, the plot based on the return of the prodigal son.  But that was the only example that he ever gave.  So, because I found Jordan's claim baffling, I one day gathered my courage and I went to him after class and I asked him, because I really wanted to know the answer, I wasn't just trying to trip him up, I asked him what the other six plots were.  I suppose it was my subversive intention to then see if I could find a counter-example, a truly different eighth type of plot.  What was my surprise and disappointment when a somewhat embarrassed Jordan (I have to say that his embarrassment wasn't as great as it should have been) replied with little hesitation that he couldn't quite remember any of the other six plots.  He'd look up the point in a book he had at home and get back to me on this.

Now that should have undermined my respect for Jordan, but it didn't, even though he never came back with a single one of the six missing plots, and I, of course, never reminded him of his undischarged obligation.  This shows how a member of a despised minority can continue to have a kind of deference towards the man in charge even when the man has proved himself to be an empty windbag.  And because you have a kind of deference to him, and therefore to his views, you have a kind of deference to his view that Jews are not quite human, or that they have all too many of the less agreeable human characteristics, and that doesn't help you to respect yourself. 

Having devoted this space to the exposition of an unpleasant aspect of the Strathcona / Outremont experience, I should like to close by remarking that there was never, to my knowledge, any incident or expression of ethnic hostility between Jewish and non-Jewish pupils in the school. 

We were all friends.

Jerry Cohen