2/5/97

Growing Up Jewish on Jesus Island

When we moved in to Prince Charles Street, it looked like Anatevka with bungalows.

    Once upon a time there was a thriving Jewish community that didn't live happily ever after.
    It could be Warsaw I am writing about, or Budapest, or Baghdad, because such are the familiar Jewish ghost towns of lore.
    But this dying community is my own, my hometown.
    Jesus Island is Jewish no more.
    There are still a few of us left, but the Talmud Torah has closed, and the Young Israel's likeliest future is as a Greek Orthodox community center.
    They may be ready to sing "Sunrise, Sunset" on Jesus Island, but not before I invoke a memory or two.
    When we moved into Chomedey (the Jewish part of the island, which straddles the north shore of Montreal Island), it looked like Anatevka with bungalows. Our street had just been reclaimed from farmland, and we were roughing it in the midst of rural suburbia. Our street consisted of nine half-finished homes, and that's it. In fact, our street was not even that: it was a bog. And in May, in Canada, that would make it a very slushy bog. Heaven for a six-year-old boy with a thing for mud puddles.
    We moved in, and they finished building the house around us. Then another house went up, and we had a neighbor, and another house, another neighbor, and wouldn't you know, we were surrounded by Jewish families with six-year-old boys.
    Finally, all the little bungalows were in place, and all the nice families in them, and the only other thing we had to show off was a street sign. (It read "Prince Charles Street." Honest.)
    Ultimately, my Dad got us on the map. The neighbors used to get together a couple of times a week in the middle of the bog to burn our garbage in a huge communal bonfire. Then one day a garbage truck got lost and trundled past our house. My father raced out and jumped on the truck. The garbagemen, I am sure, had not been commandeered by too many Orthodox Jews. They stopped. Sorry, they explained, they could not collect garbage where there was no street. Sorry, my Dad explained, he wasn't getting off until they promised to include us in their rounds. It was like high noon at the OK Corral. We won. Recognition at last.
    Probably fearing another showdown with that crazy Jew with the yarmulka, the municipality swiftly sent in an army of roadwork vehicles to pave over our muck. I helped. I became the workers' Kool-Aid officer, winning their hearts with an excellent choice of flavors. In return, these French-Canadian laborers bestowed on me their eternal friendship. (Hell, I was six. I really thought they'd come back to visit every Shabbat.) Before long, I was helping another crew instal sidewalks. I would later pencil a fine grade two composition, "What I Did During Summer Vacation."
    You might wonder why we needed a street at all. But this was Quebec: we had to have a proper surface to play street hockey on. (The sidewalks were necessary to stop the ball from rolling too far.) Phil and Jonah and Stevie and Brian and Schwartz (who we hated but he had a goalie stick) and Little Markie and I would play until frostbite set in or supper was ready, whichever came first.
    Sometimes the game would end prematurely, when somebody broke Rule Number One: Never, ever shoot the ball onto the Smadjovic's front lawn. Old Mrs. Smadjovic would sit on her balcony, bundled up against the cold, and like a starving spider pounce on any wayward ball. She was the Boo Radley of Prince Charles Street. No child had ever entered her house and come out alive. Even her own son, Alex, had grown sideburns, greased his hair and run away to become a matinee idol in Hollywood. Well anyway, that was the rumor. He came back about once every three years for a visit, and on principle we never obliged by greeting him like a hometown hero.
    But it seems the grim old bat took a liking to me, which gave me the bejeebers. One day, when I was about 11, she hooked a jagged finger at me. Like a zombi, I succumbed. Silently (she never did speak to anyone on the street for as long as we lived there), she led me into her lair, and down the steps into her basement. A terrible place to die, I thought: it was dank, and dark, and starkly empty, except for -- a huge box in the corner. A box of balls. Tennis balls, rubber balls, footballs, baseballs. Her life savings. And she wanted me to have them. For a couple of days, the Orbaum kid was quite the hero of the neighborhood. 

WE DIDN'T have much in those days, even if we were homeowners. The house cost $12,500, a tremendous sum we were allowed to pay off over the rest of our lives.
    It was 1962, and to my embarrassment, we were driving around in a two-tone green '57 Chevy. Mr. Sax, two doors down, had himself a brand-new candy-apple convertible, for heaven's sake. We nurtured our clunker until 1966, when its brakes failed during rush hour approaching a red light at the main intersection, which was great because my Dad then bought a '64 Ford, blue.
    Our cars seemed to make spectacles of themselves: this one almost blew up the immense Cartierville Bridge, when our gas tank fell off over the St. Lawrence River.
    What we didn't have, we borrowed. We probably borrowed more in food from the neighbors than money from the bank. Everyone in the street knew when my mother was cooking supper: I'd be off to the Libmans for an onion, my sister Debbie to the Snitzers for a cup of rice -- oops, we already owe them rice; go to the Henninks instead -- and Vicky would be off to the Coopers to scrounge up something for dessert.
    Years later, Phil Libman and I were recalling the Good Old Days. I should write a book, he said. Aw, who'd buy it? I asked. "The Libmans would buy one," he said, "and the Coopers would buy one. The Snitzers would buy one. And your mother would borrow one."
    Prince Charles Street was aswarm with kids until all the dads drove home from work, then deserted through suppertime (except for Debbie, Vicky and me running about collecting supper). When we were finally forced into bed, the weary parents slipped out and crisscrossed the street to drink coffee together and moan about the kids.
    When we ruled the pavement, we made the laws. You could chalk a hopscotch pattern, but not between the streetlights, because that was for hockey, and hockey was more important. Anybody who shot, hit or threw a ball through a window, his parents had to pay. The Smadjovic lawn was out of bounds during hide-and-seek. You parked on the street at your own risk during baseball season. Both teams in a street-hockey game could call themselves the Montreal Canadiens, and anyone wearing a Toronto Maple Leafs sweater was not allowed to play.
    The most inviolable law was the Two Feet Guvmint Proppity Law. For some reason we believed that the first two-foot strip of everybody's lawn belonged to the government, and it was a sort of sanctuary. I'd be in a big fight with Big Markie and he could smack me around all he wanted, but if I stood on the edge of his lawn I could yell "Guvmint Proppity!" and be safe. And long after the fight was over, even after Big Markie had gone in, I'd still be outside his house, stubbornly alone, hollering "Guvmint Proppity! Guvmint Proppity!" until either the police or my parents came and got me.

WE SOLD our home in 1974 and moved to an enormous apartment building in Montreal. Seven years after that, I went to live on a kibbutz, and eventually, Jerusalem.
    In 1990, by now married, nearly a father, a homeowner myself, I flew to Montreal to revisit my old haunts. I borrowed a car, drove across the Cartierville Bridge into Chomedey, and all atingle, made my way to Prince Charles Street. It had aged. The trees had grown, the road patched here and there, the bungalows looked seedy and rundown, and some residents, clearly in violation of the law, had planted shrubs on Guvmint Proppity.
    Only the Snitzers still lived there. Mrs. Smadjovic was dead. Most of the rest were in Toronto. Phil is in Sha'arei Tikva. The street, and much of Jewish Chomedey, was now French, Greek, Italian.
    I stopped the car in front of 4176. I rang the doorbell. A thin middle-aged woman opened the door, wide enough that I could peek inside to where I used to hang my snowsuit.
    "Oui?" the woman said.
    Excusing my intrusion, I explained that this house was where I grew up. She smiled warmly, but didn't invite me in. We chatted on the balcony for a while, and then she suddenly remembered something.
    "Et vous Monsieur Orbach?"
    "Orbaum," I said, surprised.
    "Un moment." She went inside and came back out with two envelopes, addressed to me, at 4176 Prince Charles Street.
    I gaped at her in amazement.
    Sixteen years later, I was still getting mail.