A Good Place to Come From

by Morley Torgov

  If the two Jewish teenagers saw each other quite steadily, rumours that were intended to be amusing would begin to fly throughout the Jewish community, rumours that emanated from Wiseman's Bakery (from whence came most of the important gossip in town). Tales would be told—very hush-hush of course—that the girl's father had found a package of contraceptives belonging to the boy in the driveway of the girl's house. Eventually, the news would reach the ears of the boy's father. When that occurred, the boy's family existed without rye bread and challah for a month or two, or imported their breads from Toronto, until the whole humiliating business blew over and it was once again possible to present oneself at Wiseman's without embarrassment.

  There were other reasons for not dating Jewish girls, reasons of a purely scientific nature.

  Jewish girls had a propensity for wearing eyeglasses with extra-thick lenses. They were inclined to certain annoying excesses, like overeating and becoming very fat, and using too much Noxzema so that when you danced with them cheek to cheek all you could smell was Noxzema, and you came away with cold cream on your face.

  Intellectually, they tended to be terribly aggressive, trying desperately to top every joke you told, and winning higher grades in school in such thoroughly unfeminine pursuits as History, Geography, Physics, Chemistry, English, French, Latin, Mathematics, and even Gym. There was a certain brassiness about Jewish girls. True, they could put on a coy act whenever you tried to feel a chest or rub a thigh in the darkness of the Algoma Theatre. But you knew somehow that when they gathered among themselves—these hardbitten Jewish wenches—they would describe your inept attempts in clinical detail, punctuating each sentence with shrieks of derisive laughter.

  Gentile girls, on the other hand, were totally desirable.

  Gentile girls smelled of Evening-in-Paris which they seemed to purchase by the gallon from Woolworth's or Broughton's Drug. Their hair, never worn in tight phonylooking curls like Jewish girls' but allowed to drop naturally to the shoulder, shone like polished walnut or wheat in a sunny field. In the winter they wore loose-fitting sweaters and pleated plaid skirts that gave them a warm, woolly appearance.

  Because every Jewish family possessed a good car "for the business," Jewish boys were renowned for being mobile on weekends. Despite wartime gasoline rationing, each Jewish merchant in town had his own secret knack for maintaining a full tank at all times. After all, wasn't a storekeeper just like a doctor? One never knew when one would have to make a sudden delivery. Gentile girls appreciated this fact of war, and demonstrated their appreciation generously. On Saturday night, when the keys to the family DeSoto were ceremoniously handed over to you ("Remember son, cars don't grow on trees, be careful!"), you would call on your Gentile date and you could sense the moment she climbed into the car that she much preferred this method of transportation to the "Y" dance than walking or going by bus. Unlike her Jewish counterparts who merely took such luxury for granted, a Gentile girl sat on the front seat of the DeSoto very close to you and complimented you on your skill at the wheel, while you pretended to reach for the gearshift lever on the floor and shifted her knee instead.

  A visit inside a Gentile girl's home was a journey full of fresh experience. No smell of chicken fat or mothballs here; no mezuzeh at the entrance door. Instead, other smells, other religious symbols. If she were Finnish, the place smelled of fresh strong coffee. If she were Ukrainian, you immediately detected a pungent mixture of cabbage and garlic. An English girl's house often bore the lingering odour of grilled bacon, and an Italian's girl's residence was so saturated from cellar to roof with cheese that the smell entered your nostrils even before the front door had been opened to let you in.

  Protestant living rooms usually displayed a copy of a church bulletin in the magazine rack. This presented no special problems. But Catholic living rooms almost invariably were dominated by a fair-sized crucifix on the wall, hung dead-centre above the chesterfield. This made cosy chesterfield conventions very difficult indeed. On some crucifixes Christ's eyes were turned heavenward, on others His eyes were cast downward. No matter. The point was: He was there, in the room with you. "Forgive them, Lord," He seemed to be saying, "for they know not what they do." It was quite impossible to sustain a "Two's Company" atmosphere with Jesus Christ suspended a few inches above your head.

  So there, briefly, are all the principal reasons why—despite the odd minor inconveniences—a Jewish boy was always better off dating a Gentile girl. All the principal reasons, that is, save for the most basic: Gentile girls happened to be in plentiful supply and came in a limitless variety of shapes, sizes and temperaments, while Jewish girls were always in short supply (a fact of life shrouded in numerology and genetics, I think) and those that were available were, as I indicated at the outset, all horrible anyway.

  It was thus perfectly natural that, in his travels from adolescence to manhood, every Jewish boy should engage in at least one heavy love affair with a schiksa—a Gentile girl. And it was equally natural that his parents should react by becoming bundles of electric wires—short-circuited, sparking, sputtering, fraying at their ends, threatening to burn down the house. Through these high-tension wires coursed all sorts of nervous currents.

  There were currents of fear: "Just you wait, my boy, the first time you have an argument she'll call you a dirty Jew." There were currents of resentment: "How could you do this to us? Haven't we given you everything?"

  Currents of anger: "Keep this up and so help me God we'll cut you off without a cent to your name."

  Above all, currents of shame: "What will people say?"

  If your romance with a Gentile girl took on a really serious appearance—something more than attendances at Boat Club dances and nights of mild petting in Bellevue Park—and if there were genuine indications that you were being magnetized toward some alien altar in an Anglican or Presbyterian or Roman Catholic sanctuary, your parents would adopt a different approach. No more simple hollering, for it was too late in the game and you were too old to be intimidated. Instead, they would reason with you, reason by example. They would point to notorious local intermarriages—of which there were a surprising number in Sault Ste. Marie—and underline for you all of the unspeakable tragedies that had flowed from those unholy unions.

  "Do you know that his father sat shiva for a whole month, not just for one week, when he discovered that they were married?" . . . "Do you know that to this day her mother hasn't spoken so much as one word to her?" ... "Have you seen what she gives him to eat Friday nights? Pork and beans, may God strike me dead if I'm lying, pork and beans!" ... "Look at their kids, not Jewish, not Christian, not anything." ... "He's ashamed to come into the synagogue with her, with his schiksa."

  It accomplished nothing. Love always prevailed over reason—even reason by example. Therefore you went right ahead with your romance, convinced in your own mind that you and your schiksa would together explore and chart whole new territories of understanding for the benefit of unborn generations, there in the front seat of the DeSoto.

  Like most Jewish boys and Gentile girls, you and your girl had first met in your early high school days. You came from "downtown" where the shopping district was located, and your home was a block or two from your father's store, or perhaps you lived in an apartment above the store. She was an east-ender. Her home was on the best side of the tracks, where the local lawyers and doctors lived, where the most ornate Christmas decorations appeared every December and disappeared every January, where the girls donned white figure-skates in winter and the boys rowed in sculling teams in the summer.

  The first encounter at a Y dance was a disaster. Your mother had taught you to do the foxtrot, holding you decently and modestly at arm's length while the radio played "Sunday, Monday and Always." And you had taught yourself to waltz; well, actually it wasn't really a waltz; you simply fox-trotted in three-quarter time. But nobody had taught you to jitterbug and when the nickelodeon in the Y gymnasium began to blare out "In the Mood", you let go her
hand and went limp—and, even before you could slink off to a corner and lean miserably against a set of parallel bars, one of the senior boys from the east end had cut in and was traversing the floor, from end to end, in a crouched, relaxed style that bespoke great expertise and self-confidence.

  The trauma instilled by your initial flop on the dance floor lasted for months. You passed the girl in the halls, you stared across at her in the school auditorium, once you even sat next to her in a booth at Capy's Grill, noting that of all the girls in the restaurant she was the only one who poured her ketchup into a neat little circle at one side of her plate of french fries and who ate the golden brown slices of potato one at a time rather than bunched into a red mess on the fork. She alone, among all the loose-fitting sweaters and pleated plaid skirts, finished her Coke without making a rasping sound as her straw drained the last of the liquid and began to suck air.

  In short, she had class. Still, you dared not ask her again for a dance.

  Meanwhile, she began noticing things about you.

  You were now a sergeant in Squadron 155 Air Cadets of Canada and were privileged to march alone on parades at the rear of your flight rather than in the ranks with the corporals and underlings.

  Since your parents had always discouraged most forms of athletics, and since you hadn't much natural aptitude for athletics anyway, you didn't go near the water, didn't go near the hockey arena, the football field, the basketball court, the baseball diamond or the ski hill. Instead, you concentrated on the highbrow. You went near the piano keyboard, you went near the school English and oratorical clubs, you went near student politics. You threw yourself into these occupations, bearing in mind what your parents had drummed into you so often: "You have to be twice as good as they are before they consider you half as good." "They" referred to east-end Gentile society, of course.

  By the time you had reached your second-last year of high school you had won several piano awards at the Kiwanis Music Festival and played in the school orchestra. You had placed second in the oratorical contest and had been elected to your third term on the Students' Council.

  In short, while you didn't exactly have class, you were a Somebody.

  You still hadn't mastered the jitterbug but it didn't matter anymore; as one reached one's senior years in high school it was the slow numbers that counted, especially the final number on the dance program—"Goodnight, Sweetheart"—when the girls danced with their eyes closed and the boys buried their faces in the girls' hair and the floor seemed to be coated with sweet sticky corn syrup that made you take small intimate steps.

  So, putting aside those ghastly memories of earlier times, you caught her outside the chemistry lab one Friday afternoon at four o'clock and invited her to celebrate the end of yet another drab week of school over a Coke at Capy's Grill, an invitation she accepted with unexpected enthusiasm.

  After that the invitations and the acceptances grew in number and importance. You continued to look at the other Gentile girls who shared your teenage world, but you didn't really see them. She, meanwhile, had begun turning down invitations from one of the basketball stars who was constantly after her, and brushed off the son of one of the higherup executives at the steel plant, a young man with great expectations—his father having been to Yale. Several of the boys who left high school to go into the services, and who returned home for short leaves looking smart in their crisplycreased uniforms, called her for dates. One of the boys even had his wings and was reputed to have topped his class at the flying school at Camp Borden. Still she said no, she was busy.

  At last you were both in the final year of high school and going steady. There were no official announcements. One simply concluded that the same boy and the same girl, seen together regularly in a booth at Capy's, or dancing by themselves in a dark corner of the gym at the Y Saturday night after Saturday night, or joined together on the front seat of a DeSoto on Sunday afternoons, were irrevocably committed to each other. Among your peers that is what one simply concluded.

  With your parents there was the same conclusion, to be sure. But it was not a simple conclusion, arrived at calmly and with resignation. Far from it. "Where are you going, out with that same schiksa tonight? Do you know, do you have even the slightest idea; just what the hell you're getting yourself into? Have you made up your mind to throw away everything just for this girl?"

  To all of these questions the answer was yes. Yes, you were going out again with her because there wasn't a Jewish girl anywhere in the Western Hemisphere who possessed even the tiniest fraction of this girl's softness and gentleness. Yes, you knew exactly what the hell you were getting into. You'd been in her home many times now and not only were her parents kind to you but there wasn't even a crucifix on their living room wall (it hung in the entrance hall near the coatrack), and they had never so much as breathed a word in your presence about the fact that they were Catholics and you were Jewish. Yes, if necessary you were prepared to throw away everything for this girl; a chance to get out of the small town, a chance to go to college, a chance to carve out a career for yourself in some big city hospital or courtroom. If necessary, you were prepared to spend the rest of your days with her, there in the front seat of the DeSoto, parked on the Canada Steamships dock at the foot of Pim Street, watching the lake freighters go by on the St. Mary's River, surviving on Cokes, french fries, and dreams.

  Then, late one Saturday night after the dance at the Y was over, you'd consumed the traditional hot roast-beef sandwiches with french fries and peas all drowned in thick brown gravy, had parted company with the other kids in your clique, and had parked on one of the few unoccupied promontories that could still be found at that hour in Bellevue Park.

  She sat very still, her eyes looking straight ahead through the windshield at the dark river.

  "I don't know how to tell you this," she said quietly, "but my mother and father had a long talk with me last night"

  It was all over just as it had begun years before at that first dance—painfully.

  At home you were once again persona grata. The war was coming to a close and, with victory in sight and the cash registers cheerfully ringing, your father spoke of buying you one of the first new cars that would soon come off the assembly lines and of outfitting you for university with your first made-to-measure overcoat. Your mother stopped nagging you about everything. You could deposit your dirty laundry right smack in the middle of the dining room table and she would kiss your socks, so happy was she to have her son back in the fold again where he belonged.

  In the autumn following the Big Breakup, the girl entered the rigorous and disciplined life of a nurse-in-training at the local Catholic hospital. You went off to college in Toronto where you were accepted into a fashionable Jewish fraternity. There, in the fraternity house, you learned the first social lesson for living in the big city: "Jewish girls are 'nice' girls; them you take out when you want to spend a respectable evening and you've got some money to spend. Schiksas are the ones you take out when you have 'other things' in mind." One day, early in your freshman year, you spoke to a girl who always seemed to sit near you during English classes. You told her your name and she said hers was Gretta Brockman.

  Gretta Brockman. Jewish! And a doll at that. Flawless complexion. A great way of walking. And twenty-twenty vision.

  "I've got tickets for the play at Hart House Saturday night," you said. "How'd you like to join me? Maybe we could have a bite first ..."

  You took her to dinner at the Savarin where she ordered filet mignon and strawberry shortcake, the latter out of season and very expensive. You told her where you were from and a bit of your past history. Then you asked her about herself.

  "Gretta Brockman," you said, lying, "that name's awfully familiar. Where would I have heard your family's name before?"

  She paused to think, anchoring her fork in the strawberry shortcake. "Gee, I don't know where you would have run across it. We're the only Brockmans in Toronto, as far as I know. I've never hear
d my folks speak about any relatives up north."

  She then explained that her real name was Gretchen Braukmann, that her father was born in Germany and her mother in Denmark. "We live in York Mills, quite close to a Lutheran church—which is handy because we're Lutherans."

  Down the drain went your filet mignon and your shortcake, down the drain went your theatre tickets. Down the drain. Wasted.

  You'd come a long way from Sault Ste. Marie.

  But you still had a long way to go.

  The making of the President, 1944

  In the summer of 1944 Thomas E. Dewey, New York's Republican governor, embarked upon the impossible task of replacing Franklin D. Roosevelt as president of the United States of America. It was an historic battle: Dewey, the sober young ex-district attorney attacking the gates of the White House demanding to be let in; Roosevelt, resolute despite his age, infirmity and war-weariness, insisting upon remaining in occupancy for an unprecedented fourth term. One man desperately seeking the highest office in the land, the other just as desperately refusing to give it up.

  In that same hot July of 1944 our Jewish community was engaged in the annual agony of hunting for a president. But in this case it may truly be said that the man did not seek the office, the office sought the man. Mind you, this was not a new state of affairs. Traditionally, a president was pressed into service in a manner very much resembling the recruitment of seamen into the British Navy in days of yore. In fact, the only difference lay in the technique of bludgeoning; where a potential sailor was persuaded with a wooden club, a potential president was persuaded with wild promises and even wilder threats. In either case, by the time the victim recovered consciousness, he was far out to sea and committed to a year of misery. Only in the rarest instances did a draftee for the presidency accept the call without putting up strong resistance. Such a man usually possessed a streak of vanity a yard wide. But by term's end vanity had changed to thorough disenchantment; consequently there was never a problem over an incumbent succeeding himself—the incumbent couldn't wait to abandon his gavel.