Global, real time, always on—shocks incessantly delivered to every part of your body. It triggers a fight-or-flight response that does not abate. You find yourself in an endless spiral, a constant hypervigilant state where all you can do is think about what happened, what you should have done differently, how you couldn’t control the situation no matter what you might have done, around and around it goes.

In the meantime, you are in a very strange bubble of silence. Around you, everyone is normal, though keeping their distance. You can go out with the dog, take your kid to school, make dinner. You can go to the store and buy mouthwash, celery. Nobody says a word about it. Everything happens online, via social, via email, via text, never face to face. Total silence in the centre of the whirling vortex. Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is. Something all about you. Not about you at all.

Let’s get this out of the way: Jason Arday is not a victim, but he is a human sacrifice twice over. Sacrificed to woke. Then sacrificed to the 24-hour world of refracted entertainments, outrage politics, perversion, sanctimony; the slow-moving Odyssey-like journey from the margin to the centre suddenly sped up, no escape wherever you go, wherever you are, some kind of ancient torture turned post-postmodern, the drip-drop of digital reverb driving you mad. It’s maddening. It’s madness.

A world, our world, made a man. Invented him, really. The man went along with it. I don’t know why, we will never know exactly why. But he went along with it. That, of course, was his fatal error. It’s an understandable one. He was handed accolades, titles, well paying positions and instant credibility. By all accounts, Arday, only 41 at the time of his death, was unwell. In exactly what way, I don’t know. He claimed autism and certainly was a serial fabulist of the most bizarre type, telling lies so big that nobody could but accept them—until they didn’t. His “scholarship” was a hodgepodge of self refrential wokery and plagirized wordplay.

Yet it’s unclear he actually knew that to be the case. I want to believe, at least, that he wasn’t just playing along, but somehow truly thought that he was doing the work, and doing it well. I don’t know. Either way, there he was, moving through academia like a hot knife through butter; Temple Grandin-on-the-Backs, Chauncey Gardiner-on-the-accursed-Potomac.

To speak, in defence or in outrage, is meaningless. In the whirlwind moment, there is only pile-on. Only more. It doesn’t matter what your perspective, whether you come as saviour or to deliver the final blow. Better to keep silent. It hurt me to witness yet another mobbing. I was fearful for Arday as a human being. He was in it. The typhoon. A bigger fiercer meaner The-Weather-Station-Sharknado-Super-Event than had descended on me. There are relatively few of us who know exactly what it is like.

You walk or in this case marathon through the forest, foolishly wondering at the way the leaves are behaving strangely, falling in this wrong season; dancing up around in weird spirals. And suddenly the whole woods is collapsing on top of you. I remember that first morning, waking up to find that the entire ridiculous Canadian arts and culture milleu aligning against me based on the flimsiest of premises. Taking the kid to school. We walked hand in hand down the quiet street. It was any other day. A sunny day in spring. But my face was burning and my heart was beating weirdly. I felt like I could see my breath. I saw my neighbor. She was across the street on her patio. She worked for The Toronto Star. She tracked me as I walked by. She already knew what I was in for.

It’s a bit like a dream now, a fairy tale. Once upon a time, I was attacked relentlessly online, featured repeatedly on the front pages of Canada’s biggest newspaper, subject to incidenary rhetoric, accused of being some kind of racist monster. My “story” even featured on the front of the page of the New York Times, above the fold, like a school shooting or a major political development. In an instant, your reputation is no longer your own. In an instant you are a character, a thing, a football to be kicked up and down the field as the winds of time mercurially blow and the audience cheers and rages and cries for blood and your head.

Ever since, when I see it happen to others, whether they are in the right or not, I am taken back to those days. Dark days. Some very dark days.

Arday was not in the right. He did many things wrong. Nevertheless, he did not deserve what he got. I had people around me. I had many many reasons to live. And I had done nothing wrong. It didn’t matter. Like Jason Arday, I was reduced to a figurehead, a symbol. Left and right ideaologues developed entire theories around me, parsed my words in columns aimed at burnishing their own reputations and distancing themselves from the stench of my rot. Like Jason Arday, my “case” reached a fever pitch because it seemed to be about so much more than whatever it was that I had been accused of. In the end, only a handful, a tiny few, cared what would or could happen to me. To this day, I still occasionally run into people from that former life of mine who are shocked and tonguetied to see me. They supposed I’d jumped or at least had the good sense to exile myself to the country for failed white racists or whatever it was I had supposedly become.

I could have. I could have taken Arday’s way out. I defintely thought about it. I was lucky that I had the support I needed. Arday didn’t. Many don’t. When people use you, when people want you solely as a symbol of some grander thing, they don’t support you when you no longer represent what they want. They discard you. Tear down the Arday statue. Scrub clean the digital record.

His death is a tragedy. It’s a tragedy for his family, friends, children. But it’s also a tragedy of the commons. How quick we are to dehumanize and destroy. He deserved to be exposed. But what was done to him, and only him, was not justice. It was not done out of virtue or truth-telling or reporting. The spectacle can never be redemptive, and Arday should never have been alone to try and find his way through the upside-down. Never. Not for a minute.

His death is convenient. Now he can be swept under the carpet, dust in the wind. Just as quickly as the hurricane blows up from the tempetuous seas does it disperse into someone else’s cooling, relieving breeze. Well, phew, I’m glad that’s over.

Wrong. I continue to want some modicum of justice for the way I was thrown away like garbage by my so-called peers and pals in culture (oh woke 1.0, that was so crazy). Jason Arday too deserves justice for the things that were done to him. Don’t hold your breath waiting. Don’t think about it at night when you are lying all alone in the world with your head on a pillow that feels like the first stone they threw at you.

Part 2: If Not Now, When

Right And Wrong

Another list, circulates. This time it is an online list of businesses in Toronto that should be boycotted because they are “Zionist”.

What next? On the first night of Hanukkah in western, temperate Sydney, Australia, far away from the Middle East, there is a massacre. Jews who gathered on the beach to dance and pray and light candles. Shot down in the name of Islam. 15 dead, more than 40 injured. Who can celebrate the great victory of the Maccabees after that?

The face of Matilda, 10-year-old Jewish, Ukrainian-would-be-Australian girl, shot dead on the beach, haunts me. In the pictures, she smiles joyfully, buck toothed and delighted. Her parents brought her from war-torn Kiev for a life free from Russian drones. She too is on a list. A list of dead Jews.

Dogs of War

At the neighborhood dog park, I kibbitz with Iranian Sonny. He runs an idiosyncratic pomegranate-themed juice and frozen treat shop decorated with horse saddles and sticky-note tributes to the store’s greatness. The frozen slushie concoctions are an amazing combination of tart and sweet. I’m a regular. Sonny always tries to give me my order for free, but I never let him.

His shop is part of a larger family business started by his parents when they came to Canada after the Iranian revolution. Now Sonny is worried that the shop might close. He alludes to strange happenings, shadowy figures. I press him for details.

Sonny’s dog, a tiny brown poodle thing with a coat of light brown curls leaps nonstop at Sonny’s hand as he passionately gesticulates. Sonny tells me that his Iranian friend had shots fired at his Toronto gym. It was a warning to stop saying bad things about the Islamic regime. In the meantime, Sonny is getting bizarre calls at the shop warning him not to support the mullahs.

“I don’t support them,” he says incredulously. It’s true. Bobby has had a “Women, Life, Freedom” sign in the window of his shop since the death of Mahsa Amini, young Kurdish woman disappeared from this planet by the murderous Islamic theocracy.

So why are they telling Bobby not to support the theocracy? He shrugs. “All our product comes from my country,” Bobby tells me. Maybe they think he’s in with the Mullahs because he imports from Iran? Who knows. We live in Canada, where everything and nothing is as clear as mud. A land of immigrants, land of long running shadowy disputes imported into the diaspora for the express purpose of muddying the waters. Anyway, he might have to close. If things keep going the way they are going. He won’t be able to get the Persian pomegranate juice. That’s the stuff. The stuff that keeps the customers coming back.

We both silent, standing there together. It’s April but it feels like March. The wind blows cold. It’s been four years since the amoral “morality police” beat Mahsa to death, a young woman my older daughter’s age. That set off a wave of frustrated protests, one that led to the most terrible reprisals, thousands shot dead on the streets, thousands more disappeared, arrested then executed.

Two years later comes October 7, several thousand more civilians, mostly young women, murdered. In the name of religion, death and dictators, the innocent are raped, mutilated, and horrifically killed. And so, war. War for both of our ancestral homelands, countries neither of us had a chance to grow up in.

“Grrrrr,” announces Bobby’s tiny dog. Out of nowhere he leaps over a passing German Shepard.

Bobby brightens. “He never stops jumping that one!”

Alive

My brother calls. He is being discharged from the hospital. They have not found the exact cause of the brain bleed, which is a good thing. His brain no longer bleeds. He’s a bit foggy on the details of his life and times, which is maybe, for now, not necessarily a bad thing. His daughter has come home to visit. He promises her he is going to eat healthy, exercise, and de-stress. She sighs and makes him a sandwich.

Tweet Tweet

On X, I attempt to confront a far-left “activist”, part of the group who establishes a “registry” listing Canadian citizens who have been or are in the IDF, the Israeli Army, the only thing that protects more than half of the world’s Jews from instant annihilation by its hostile neighbors.

We don’t care about your stupid list, I tell him. Soon one of my brother’s kids will appear on the list. He’s in marketing in Tel Aviv. His company works with child-star-turned-daytime –talk-show host Drew Barrymore to promote a cell phone game to middle-aged stay-at-home moms with disposable incomes and time on their hands.

I find out that the guy with the registry is based in Montreal. I also find out that he’s now working on a list of Jewish summer camps, schools and synagogues. Besides being a completely deranged hater of the Jewish people, he is sitting in my personal Jerusalem, Montreal, at once defiling my childhood memories and attacking my future.

Why not just do a list of Jews? I ask him. Then it would be easier to round us up for “re-education?” The more I “X”, the angrier I feel. I want to hurt this man. I am not a violent person. It’s increasingly obvious to me, however, that I could be. In the right circumstances. If, say, my family was being threatened. My family is being threatened.

I have to go walk the dog, make dinner, help the kid with her homework. Reluctantly, I sign off. When I return the next day, I see that I have been banned. X has banned me. No reason or explanation is provided. The Montrealer who makes lists of Jews, however, has not been banned. He’s adding new subscribers from all over the world every single day.

Anniversary, A True Story

In the early morning hours, I thrash through a bad dream. I’m helping some young kids. I don’t know these kids. But I’m helping them forget that they are in some kind of dire situation. I’m playing with them, distracting them. But then one wants to go home. I tell him no, but he absolutely insists. Fed up, I take this kid by the hand. We wander through a large complex before coming to an apartment. The apartment, I just know, belongs to a friend of mine from high school. In real life, Charlie, who I’m still in touch with, is a Rabbi who grew up in a family that, though of Jewish roots, did not participate in any Jewish rituals or holidays.

In the dream I enter Charlie’s apartment only to meet my long-deceased grandfather, Zadie Avrham. My Zadie who fled to Russia from Poland just ahead of the NAZIs, then fled the USSR to Canada to give my mother and eventually me a truly free life. We hug and I feel his whiskers brush against my soft cheek like they did when I was a boy. I’m so happy to see him. Charlie then takes me for a tour of the apartment. It turns out to be an enormous room filled with shelves holding records. Not files. I’m talking about vinyl records, LPs.

The room begins to tremble and shake. We are under attack. Records spill off the shelves. Everyone is shouting, screaming. I jump out of the way just in time to avoid a wave of LPs crashing down on me. The next thing I know, there are gunmen running toward us, firing their machine guns. The kid, hit, slumps sideways. I’m going to be killed, I know. In a desperate bid to avoid the bullets spraying toward me, I dive into a chaos of whirling records.

I wake up. I’m falling. In real life, I’m falling.

My wife, from a distance, from far away: “What’s going on? Hal?”

Her voice reaches through layers of dream state confusion. I’m lying on the ground in the narrow space between the wall and the bed, wedged against my book-stuffed night table.

“Hal?”

I push myself up. The back of my head pulses. I must have hit it on the way down. I probe for blood. I’m okay. I had a dream. Records. Records and bullets. Diving to get out of the way of the kaffiyeh clad terrorists.

“I fell out of bed,” I tell my wife, myself.

Disoriented, I look at my phone. It’s almost 6am. 5:58 am on October 7, 2025.

The Saddest Simcha in the World

Though every bat mitzvah is special, this one feels like an act of defiance. My brother, exercising and even considering a diet, comes up to read two prayers that were not read at mine, or his, or my older daughter’s bat mitzvahs. He reads, first, the prayer for the hostages taken by Hamas. Second, he read the prayer for the soldiers of Israel fighting to bring the hostages home.

Big deal, grunts the dybbuk who lives on my shoulder. Just another quinceañera-sweet-something with a little bible thrown in. But by the time she manages to totter up to the bema on her big-girl high-heels and read from the Torah—the rabbi inviting people like my neighbors the Leungs from Hong Kong to come up and take a look at the handwritten scroll before my daughter begins to read—it really does feel like a big deal. It feels like the biggest deal in the world.

After reading from the torah my daughter, hair coiffed, perfectly applied makeup glimmering, speaks about her parsha (her assigned portion of the Torah). She talks about the various commands God gave Moses as the tribes, the once enslaved escapees from Egypt, took their circuitous, prolonged journey through the desert toward the land of Israel.

As they trekked along on a journey part penitence, part preparation, they were educated in the ways they would have to behave if they wanted to set up the first Jewish state. The proscribed behaviour was a complicated mix of legalese and spiritual engagement. It reads somewhat, uh, stilted, to the youth of today who generally aren’t familiar with animal sacrifice or ancient grains that don’t come in a cereal box. “Today,” my daughter points out, gamely attempting the bat mitzvah tradition of trying to give the dusty, mostly tedious text new life in the far less strange land of Canada, “we still have expectations put upon us if we want to call ourselves Jewish.” Like the proto-Jews of Egypt, you can’t just say you are Jewish. You have obligations. There is a code, a way of being. The rabbi chants and I think about everything my daughter, her sister, and my nephews and nieces have already been through. Young people who will have to find their way through this strange new world.

Ran

I visit Israel. It’s two and half years after October 7, a time of quiet, however momentary. The Gaza war has ground to an unsteady ceasefire. Operation Rising Lion has just concluded, and Operation Roaring Lion is a storm cloud on the horizon. Thinking about this, I’m picturing a room of spotty twentysomething IDF conscripts tasked by their gravely serious Corporal with the assignment of coming up with catchy names and accompanying logos. Despite the seeming winding down of things, everywhere you go, everywhere you look, there are posters. All the posters show one name, one face: Ran Gvili, 24 years old, the final hostage. Ran was a police officer, closer to my older daughter’s age then mine. Suddenly confronted with a horde of frenzied terrorists running at him, he did his best to fight back. He was among the 251 dead and living Israelis dragged back to Gaza. His body, one of the first to arrive, is now the last to remain, the last to leave. Where are Ran’s remains? What’s become of him?

At the Nova site I stand, trying to imagine it, the infinite impossible search for one last body. The site is much changed. There is a paved area to accommodate vehicles. Mourners. There aren’t many on this sunny but cool mid-week winter day in the desert. A young man says a prayer in front of the monument to another young man. He looks like he is going to cry. It rained the last few days. Winter rains. There are pools of water. The youngster mourning the loss of his friend or brother or lover stands in mud. Patches of low-slung greenery, weeds and grasses and clinging shrubs. On October 7, it would have been dry and dusty, the hills in the distance dotted dun. Hot and dry in the waning days of the long Israeli summer that gets rolling by April and is in full force and full heat from May to practically November. Across from the Nova site itself, there are trees planted now, planted and staked, one for each person who lost their life. Desert into forest. 378 trees still in their infancy, not unlike most of the people who were massacred at this peaceful, still spot in the desert. The trees will grow to maturity. The dancers will not.

The Nova site itself consists primarily of makeshift tributes to the dead, now in their twenties forever. There are signs describing them, signs with pictures, with their favourite sayings, stories of who they were, of how they were, what hopes and aspirations they had. So much left undone. The young women are mostly the same age of my wife when she was on Kibbutz in the desert. They are the age of Kid #1, who has yet to visit Israel, though she could easily have been one of the dancers and revellers, high on life and possibility and the bloom of the desert sun illuminating the long, glorious night. It had been cold at the end, the desert sand cool on their feet, the dark air flirting with the coming winter’s shadow. But then the sun came up and everyone cheered and stretched their long tanned summery limbs toward the emerging warm light.

Free Pizza

The fall starts with Kid #2 starting at a Toronto public high school. Though at another public school they “accidentally” played the Canadian national anthem in Arabic on the first anniversary of the October 7^th massacre, nothing of that sort has happened at her school, at least not yet.

So far none of her teachers have used graphics of evil Hebrews to illustrate a math or history lesson. Is it just a matter of time? At the University of Toronto School of Dentistry, a professor shows an illustration of a figure bound in an Israeli flag tied with rope. The man’s head, painted in the colours of the Palestinian flag, hangs down in desperate sorrow. The image appears next to an explanation of the “strangulation theory” of dental pulp. The next slide shows a man with a hooked nose in a pool of money, meant, apparently, to illustrate the principle of “immunity.”

With our encouragement, Kid #2 joins The Jewish Club. She returns from the first meeting and reports, with approval, that all they did was eat pizza (kosher) and hang out.

Since there aren’t many members, Kid #2 starts bringing her friends with her. They aren’t Jewish, but who cares? They tag along to ‘support’ ie. eat pizza. One friend whose parents are apparently quite “liberal” tells Kid #2 she is unsure of her presence there, as she doesn’t want to signal any kind of agreement with what Israel is doing: “You know, the war and everything.”

The teacher overseeing Jewish Club tries to get a conversation going. Is everybody okay? He notes that since October 7, there has been a lot of antisemitism in Toronto. Faltering discussion ensues. Kid #2’s leftie friend leans over to whisper in her ear—“What’s October 7?”

Animals

W. and I lie in bed trading stories about our emerging world.

“There’s a new protestor roaming the Jewish neighborhoods,” I tell her. “He calls himself The Vegetarian. Or maybe it’s The Vegan. He goes to that protest up at Bathurst and Sheppard. He has a sign saying: ‘I Stand For Animal Rights.’”

“What does that mean? What does he want?”

“I think he’s trying to claim that Israelis are bad because they eat a lot of meat. I read somewhere that they are the number one consumer of meat in the Middle East.

“Per capita?” asks data-intrigued, long time vegetarian wife.

“I guess…” I say uncertainly.

“And does he wear a keffiyeh?”

“Of course,” I say.

She nods as if it all makes sense.

“Did you hear about the restaurant?” she then asks me.

I shake my head. “What restaurant?”

“There’s a Jewish restaurant. I think it’s in North York. Somebody shot at it in the middle of the night. Because the owners are Jewish and they support Israel.”

“What’s it called?”

“Old Avenue Restaurant.”

“Never heard of it. What kind of food?”

W. plugs the question into her phone. “It says: Southern Caucasus cuisine.”

“What kind of food is that?”

W. shrugs, looking defeated. “I mean, still,” she says. “They shouldn’t shoot at it…”

So Hard To Know

As part of the lead up to her Bat Mitzvah, Kid #2 assists with the work of a local Toronto charity initiative called Ve’ahavta, a Jewish Response to Homelessness. Among other things, Ve’ahavta sends a van around Toronto offering the homeless hot meals and drinks and essential sundries like clean socks, sleeping bags, toothbrushes and sanitary pads.

Kid #2 and I ride the van together, though I mostly hang back, watching as she hands out sandwiches and cookies. Her calm efficiency is impressive, considering she is amongst crowds of people suffering from unimaginable struggles with drugs, mental illness and all the ensuing byproducts of society’s unwillingness to truly grapple with what neoliberal urban sprawl means for those left behind.

Weeks before, the Ve’Havata van and charity—a humanistic organization that helps all —came under attack by so-called Palestinian activists. Throughout May at least one individual claiming to be striking a blow for freedom of the besieged in the Middle East followed around the van, trying to impede the work of the outreach workers and volunteers. In another blow against the global Jewish conspiracy, Ve’ahavata was sent hateful antisemitic messages. Meanwhile, blocks away from the extremely modest Ve’havata headquarters an all-girls religious Jewish school had bullets pumped into its door in the middle of the night. From the river to the sea! If not now, when?

My daughter is no angel and most of the time is primarily concerned with three things: what her friends are doing, where the packages she ordered online are (In progress? Shipped? Hidden on the porch???), and what I’m making for dinner. But the Ve’ahavta experience stays with her. This is what someone addicted to fentanyl and living on the streets of Toronto looks like. This is what a family of six refugees, dark-skinned, hair covered, no English, living in a single motel room in Scarbrough, looks like; veiled young women with babies on their hips, armed with no language by which to acquit themselves in the Canadian context, they talk to Kid #2 with their gestures, their sad eyes, with the steely grips they retain on their older children’s hands.

Belize

We take a trip to Belize. It’s us and Kid #2. My parents, in their eighties, are supposed to go too, but my dad has developed the latest in an infamous string of strange health problems. In this case, the radiation treatment he received to successfully kill his throat cancer, though he never smoked and wasn’t all that much of a drinker, has now produced a dying jaw. He’s in constant pain and having a hard time eating. My parents stay home awaiting news on possible treatment. They take turns fixating on the dire outcomes of my dad’s condition, and the dire situation of the hostages in Gaza.

So we arrive as two frazzled adults and a thirteen-year-old eager to tan. We set up on Ambergris Caye, the largest of this small Central American country’s islands and the terminus of the Yucatan peninsula. In the island’s only town there is a café called Marbucks. We don’t go there. The town is ramshackle and funny, with random dogs running in and out of the traffic that is primarily made up of golf carts. There are various tourist shops ranging from well-lit and air conditioned to dark, hot and dusty. Prompted by two little sisters I wander into a shop run by their mother and we randomly buy something simply to support this hapless store. “Mister,” one of the sisters says to me. The other little kid holds up a magnet portraying the seashore. Both collapse in giggles.

The next day we go snorkeling with a man who says his name is Eddie Lover. For some reason I start referring to him as Tony Love. He taxis us out to a reef area called The Mexican Rocks and we float around. We are strangers here, in this underwater home of grey snapper, hog fish, gar, flounder, an impressively relaxed sea turtle and a rather put upon bright green moray eel. It’s all very beautiful. I surface and rip my mask off -- “Tony! Tony Love! Is that a shark?” Our guide looks around, confused. My body as an alien thing, a floating skin bag of air longing more than anything for a beer. On the way home, Kid #2 throws up.

Back at our blissful rental, I pace the second-floor deck then, trying to get myself to relax, settle on a comfortable chair with my laptop and a Belikin stout (the delicious local beer). I get online just in time to watch the coverage of Hamas returning the bodies of the two baby brothers they murdered on October 7. These are the red-headed Bibas brothers, three and nine-months old. Hamas also killed their mother.

That evening, to distract ourselves, we put on a feelgood movie about the rescue of a Thai soccer team trapped in a flooded cave system. It’s an incredible story. Thousands of people from Thailand, Australia, the UK and the US come together to rescue all 12 youngsters and their coach.

I can’t help but think back to those two little red-haired Jewish kids that Hamas kidnapped and murdered. There was no international coalition aimed at their rescue. In many places, including my country, it was the opposite: there were protests praising the kidnappers and lamenting attempts to rescue the hostages.

Days of Awe and Woe

It’s Yom Kippur, the day of repentance and fasting. Here in the diaspora, there is a sense of rising dread. The holidays, post October 7. Something bad is going to happen, we all know. The only question is when and where.

Then the question is answered. While we North American Jews sleep a man by the name of Jihad al-Shamie, a 35-year-old born in Syria, decides to commemorate the occasion by driving a car into a group of people outside the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation, a synagogue in the quiet suburb of Higher Crumpsall just outside the city of Manchester. After driving into the crowd and badly injuring someone, al-Shamie moves into stabbing mode, killing one person and injuring several others before he is finally shot and killed by police. Sad news for a sad day. By the time we wake up, they are already celebrating the attack on the streets of London.

How much longer will this go on? Forever, I guess? Blaming the Jews is back in fashion. It’s their own fault for oppressing the peaceful Gazans and running the world’s financial system according to our secret protocols. For us, it’s Groundhog Day. Every day is Munich, 1936. Every day they are chasing my uncle through the Siberian winter in hopes of landing a blow on the only Jewish boy in town.

Between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, Israel, the US and unlikely ally Qatar announce a new peace plan for Gaza. Every Jew I know from (almost) every political persuasion spends Yom Kippur in prayer. Prayer that Hamas takes the offer. The end of the war. A rebuilt Gaza governed by an international body. Give us back our hostages, emaciated and beaten, murdered and tortured, dead or alive. That’s all we want.

On Yom Kippur, Kid #2 stays home from high school. The family fasts. Kid #2 asks me for help getting an assignment done. We spend an hour together researching the causes and effects of wildfires. The scale is incomprehensible. A single careless flick of a cigarette butt. Thousands of kilometres burnt to the ground.

The Exploding Brain

I get a call around eight at night. It’s my mother. She tells me my brother is at Sunnybrook Health in the emergency room. He’s had a brain bleed. By the time I get to the hospital the next day my brother has been moved out of emergency to a neurology ICU on the 3^rd floor of a complex that stretches several city blocks wide. He is awake, sort of, and conscious, sort of. He has a catheter and keeps saying he needs to pee. He does not know where he is or why he is there. He’s not hungry—a rarity for the big man. He is thirsty but is not supposed to drink due to some upcoming test to figure out what the hell is going on with him. I stand at the edge of the hospital bed. “I need to pee,” my brother mumbles for the third time since I got there. The nurses are at another bed yelling “Mr. Hakim open your eyes. Wake up Mr. Hakim! Open your eyes Mr. Hakim!” That their sole medical intervention seems to be poking poor Mr. Hakim in the ribs is not at all comforting. As my brother drifts in and out of awareness, I shift from foot to foot, fumble with the contents of my pockets—car keys, phone—and wait. For him to wake up. For him to come to his senses.

Nothing of the sort happens. A few hours later, hungry and tired and worried, I creep along with the ever-present traffic. South down the long-congested Yonge Street corridor on my way back home from the hospital. I feel besieged and angry. Rageful. I knew this was coming. It was too much for my brother, with his kids in Israel, with his obsession with Jewish history; in every speech, every masked protestor waving the Hamas flag, he sees it: the past and its many precedents. I should have tried harder to snap him out of it. You can’t spend your days brooding and worrying about and obsessing. I swear that if he recovers, I will redouble my efforts. I will speak out against the madness, the groups trying to defund Jewish camps, decertify Jewish schools, demonize Canadian Jews like my niece and nephews who moved to Israel and completed their mandatory service in the military. But by the time I near Lawrence Avenue, my fervour has already passed. Do I, past middle-age and on the praecipe looking down at the new Hebraic promised land of senior discounts, early bird suppers and MAID, really have to wrestle with all this, plus whatever is going on with my brother? A secular artist with a penchant for scotch and naps, I’m hardly the man for the job, I tell myself.

I pass a sign in front of a synagogue: “If not now, when?” The ancient scholar Hillel’s famous saying. Hillel who came to Jerusalem from some distant part of the wide-ranging Babylonian empire, a grown man, forty-plus, he longed to study. But he was a pauper, too broke to pay the fees. He climbed fences, learned to eavesdrop before finally being recognized as a master of Jewish thought, his sayings still pondered today. “Pee…” my brother muttered. “Go back to sleep,” I told him. “You’re tired.”

I’m tired too. I feel like events are outpacing my capacity to make meaning with words. There are still 53 hostages in Gaza. I’m reminded of them almost every day. My brother lying in the ICU. “Code Blue,” someone announced calmly over a loudspeaker while I stood vigil over my brother. I double-checked his breathing. He was okay. Just sleeping.

Almost home. If not you, then who? It’s not long till dusk, but the sun has come out, warming the winter day with bright sunshine. I squint at the road ahead. Ten more minutes. My back hurts, from driving or standing, I’m in my fifties now, the age when your back hurts just from going about your life, the age when your parents start seriously dying and your brother has a bleed in his big round fat head. Anyway, it’s not his fault. It’s history, asking for more than we can give. Once, Hashem sent an angel to wrestle Jacob, younger brother of far more vital firstborn son Esau, from whom he had stolen his father Isaac’s blessing. The angel and Jacob battle all night. I think of my brother and I, the wrestling match against the intangible we’ve been engaged in all our lives. Are we winning? Losing? Who’s to say?

Dawn crests and Jacob refuses to relent. He doesn’t win, he isn’t winning. He just keeps holding on, no matter what. He wrestles with God until God’s emissary gives in to Joseph’s demand for a blessing. A blessing from God. Then it is done. The angel sent by Hashem releases Jospeh from his grip. He blesses him and renames him. He renames him Israel.

Coming Next Week: Part 3: All the Simchas in the World featuring Hal in the Twitter wars, Iranian Bobby’s fabulous jumping doggie and so much more!

It’s a beautiful spring day, the first spring of the rest of my life. Slowly I cycle through my alma mater the University of Toronto. It’s a ride I like to take every so often in the nicer weather. I cruise past the ivy-covered façade of the Hart House student centre where W. used to run mini-marathons with a group twice her age, most them already half crippled by their years of circling the small track. Then I head over to Front Campus, leisurely peddling while letting myself drift back to those fast-moving days when I was young and eager to learn and possibly certifiable and certainly uncertain and about to meet the girl I would eventually make a life with. A forty-minute bike ride, round-trip, that brings up, you know, just a few memories.

Front Campus is a large circle of grass overlooked by the ornate 19^th century-built University College. With its imposing central clock tower, stained glass windows and wood-paneled classrooms, this is the building where I attended many of my classes. It’s where I first read Chaucer and Plato, McLuhan and Donne. It’s where I edited my first newspaper articles and went to my first ever fancy-dress ball, The Fire Ball, named after the great fire of 1890, that burnt down the first iteration of the imposing building.

On this day, however, Front Campus is barely recognizable, barely accessible. The large grass circle that leads to UC is surrounded by temporary fencing. Inside the fence there are scraggly tents and an equally scraggly group of maybe thirty or so people. Faces obscured by kaffiyehs, the penned-in occupants wander aimlessly around, some of them holding signs, others sipping from plastic water bottles while sunning themselves next to various banners. “From the River to the Sea,” I read. “Glory to Marytrs.” “This is the Intifada.”

I stare blankly at the spectacle, too numb to even feel rage. “Zionism = Racism” is chalked on the road in big colourful letters. I pedal over the words, feeling the stare of the cadre of security guards who flank the wide stone steps of University College. Arms crossed, earpieces in, they conjure a sudden image— the decorative wood-carved gryphon that sits restively by the building’s grand east stairs. A protestor, his face covered by a black mask, raises a sign: “If not now, when?”

Alleys

At Daughter #2’s downtown Jewish day school it is announced that the kids will henceforth be surreptitiously dismissed into a side alley instead of the usual exuberant dismissal out the main front entrance of the Jewish Community Centre (JCC) and onto prominent Bloor Street.

After October 7, there are concerns: protestors, crazy people, even terrorists. I ask my daughter, “How was it, dismissing through the alley?” She shrugs wordlessly.

Passports

My brother calls. He wants to know if I’m considering my exit plan. He tells me that he’s going to call an immigration lawyer to see about getting his wife a US passport, since he already has one.

“I thought you were moving to Israel?” I ask him. He has three kids in their twenties living in Tel Aviv.

“I am,” he tells me. When he retires. Eventually. As soon as possible. When he can afford it. But in the meantime, what if he can’t get there? he wants to know. What if we Jews need to get out of Canada in a hurry? It’s a lot easier to get over the border than to a country on the other side of the planet.

“Forget it,” I tell him. “I’m staying.”

Will we really be forced out of the country we were born in? Could it really come to that? It has before.

Falling Again

A Friday night, I hit the Monarch with my pal RB to see Tsushimamire, a Japanese punk-pop trio made up of three women rockers. The band has been together since 1999, and Bob assures me they are a very tight act.1 That’s my kind of Shabbat!

The opening local band is on when we arrive so Bob grabs us a couple of pints and we tune in. They’re not bad, kinda metal with punk and goth influences. Between songs the lead singer announces that everyone should be working to “Free Palestine”. The crowd claps politely reciting it like a land acknowledgement, something people say without even knowing why or what exactly they are saying.

After a few more songs the opening act leaves the stage. I quickly drink two pints to calm myself. Fortunately, the Japanese trio is awesome. If they pay lip-service to the activist cause du jour, I have no idea. Aside from a few words here and there the whole set is in blissfully ecstatic Japanese.

Walking home around 2am, I stumble and have to steady myself. I regain my bearings and realize I’m on Dundas, three blocks from home, standing in front of the LCBO, the Ontario government run liquor store. It’s a place I’ve visited far too many times. Yet here I stand, barely recognizing this neighborhood stalwart. I am frozen here for a moment. I feel a bit like I’m going to have a panic attack. I don’t really get them anymore. Lately, though, I’ve been having dizzy spells followed by spots of lights flashing in my eyes. It doesn’t last long and usually goes away with deep breathing, a lie down, mental reminders that I’m fine, happily medicated going on twenty years. You’re fine, I tell myself. Lay off the whiskey. Go home.

The Simcha is Coming

Kid #2 has been preparing for her Bat Mitzvah in the spring. She must chant a section the Torah, written in biblical Hebrew with no vowels. She must give a speech about the experience. There will be a luncheon. There will be a party. No one feels much like partying. There are many dead. Young women who look so much like my younger daughter. I tell myself: There were Bar Mitzvahs held in the worst of times. Kid #2 seems unbothered. She revises the guest list as her school girl alliances fluctuate. “Be kind,” her mother tells her. The shul calls to tell us that there will be an extra charge, for armed security.

Neighbors

W. and I run into the other Jewish couple that lives on our street in downtown west Toronto. We all stop to talk. Daniel and Sarah both have bushy, curly hair and the pale skin of the Ashkenazim.

Daniel wears a large Magen David outside a floppy t-shirt concealing his dad belly. The couple, parents of a 14-year-old just finishing his first year at the local public high school, are shaken. They’ve just been harassed on nearby Queen Street outside of a bakery called Mabel’s. At Mabel’s you can buy a challa for $8.99 and twelve frozen heat-and-eat cinnamon buns with a side of cream cheese icing for $54.99.

As they were coming out of the store, rearranging their purchases, a woman with a young child in a stroller stopped and screamed at them.

“Zionists!” she screeched! “Zionists!”

The Brother, Again

I’m getting more and more worried about the brother. He’s depressed and anxious. He’s stopped exercising, claiming he doesn’t have time. His youngest son is finishing military service in the IDF. It’s relatively quiet on the Lebanese border, where the kids take turns manning the lookout station. I tell him not to worry so much. My brother is not assuaged.

Each time he calls, he is more upset than the last time. He warns me that these are the early days of the gathering storm. He references Hitler, Munich, the beer hall putsch. He’s been telling me this stuff for years and years.

Remember that internet trend about menfolk who thought about the greatness of the Roman Empire three times a day? (WWCD – What Would Caeser Do?) Substitute Jewish history for Rome and you have my brother. Speaking of the Romans, it was my brother who schooled me at length on how the Romans started Jew hatred. After they conquered Judea—the first incarnation of the state of Israel—they excommunicated the rebellious Jews to various parts of the empire.2 At the same time, the Romans went out of their way to label the Jews they were forcibly spreading out around the Roman Empire as apostates and troublemakers. The goal was to end Judaism, thus preventing Jews from returning to re-consolidate their control over Judea. That goal failed, as did the Roman Empire, but the idea that Jews were a pernicious, dubious presence persisted; the Christians quickly took it up and, eventually, the Muslims. So it is that the Romans effectively planted the seeds of antisemitism that would come to yield many long-limbed, deep-rooted offspring bountiful with poisoned fruit.

This was Jewish history according to my brother. I always brushed off his doom mongering. All that stuff was a long time ago. Even the Holocaust was starting to feel like a long time ago. We were Canadian Jews. What could possibly happen to us? But now, I was starting to circle back to all the times my brother warned that the tree hadn’t died. It just lay in dormancy, a waiting for fresh blood to fertilize it’s long, long roots.

After I hang up, I dissolutely open a beer and consider the problem. How to lift my mottled, soused soul out of that swamp of Netflix, Twitter, craft beer and all-you-can-eat bacon wrapped scallops and provide succor to my brother? What do I know? Feeling helpless, I decide to remain vigilant, aka do nothing. I tell myself that once the hostages are returned and the war ends, the broader war against the Jews, the one that has been going on for several thousand years, will also, somehow, abate. In the meantime, my brother’s way of looking at the world makes inroads into my psyche: the Roman Empire, several times a day.

Coming Next Week: Part 2: Am I My Brother’s Keeper? Plus: Bat Mitzvah Tzedakah! Bonus material: the Vegan NAZI!

I grew up in suburban DC-Maryland in the Eighties and have deep fascination and affection for anything related to the area’s indie punk scene. Back then, it was all Morning-in-America, the cold war, family sitcoms and Miami Vice. The big book was Bonfire of the Vanities and hit bands like the wretched Dire Straits gesticulated toward the isn’t-it-ironic with made for MTV songs like “I Want my MTV.” The mainstream actively repelled me—an aspiring writer, the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, and a fish out of water Canadian suddenly living his life in the centre of Ronald Reagan’s USA.

But I digress…In high school I started to write poems and stories as well as my own angry songs to be bellowed in the basement at all hours of the night. I was having my own sort of punk rock awakening. Alas by then I was too late to fully tap into the DC punk scene that I didn’t really discover until it was already disappearing on the horizon like a Soviet satellite exploding over a still Siberian night.

Nevertheless I did manage a few notable trips downtown where I found a different DC hiding in the long shadows cast by the government buildings and their counterpoint, the areas of Northwest Washington I was forbidden from stepping foot in. I saw punk rock played in an alley between buildings, bring your own beer, plop yourself down on a milk crate if you need a break from the moshpit. I managed to see Jim Carroll read/play his poetry at dcspace, got into the 9:30 Club to see some of my then heroes play live (Billy Bragg, Bob Mould) and skipped out of school to get my Life is Hell book signed by a pre-Simpsons Matt Groening.

But when I couldn’t get myself to DC—which was most of the time—the default was the only “cool” place nearby. About 15 minutes drive from my house, at the farther end of the vaunted Rockville, Maryland shopping strip, sat a record store by the name of Yesterday and Today. To be honest, I’d semi-forgotten about the place until I started reminiscing to RB and LD about my Maryland days, lamenting my too little too late attempts to tap into the punk rock scene.

Yesterday and Today, could it really have existed? A punk rock record store on Rockville Pike? I remember it was smack in the middle of a strip-mall. The strip-mall’s main attraction was an Entenmann’s factory outlet. Entenmann’s is/was a famous brand of baked goods best known for its soft chocolate chip cookies and its chocolate dipped donuts. The factory outlet sold two-for-one and, weirdly, insisted on wrapping up your double purchase by inserting the whole thing into a machine that bound them tightly in white string, a kind of anachronistic old timey branding that gave you the feeling of emerging with the products of a bygone era.

Yesterday and Today was the opposite: you entered stuck in the past but found yourself emergent; behold the bustling future! Thousands of 45s, LPs, posters and more spoke to possibility, discovery, the urgency of now. Time in the record store washed away the laugh tracks, the corporate bottom lines and the sensitivities of Tipper Gore. I browsed for moody accoutrements to hang up in my bedroom, ogling a mind-bending array of posters featuring the music I most loved back then—moody UK stuff like The Smiths, New Order, Echo & the Bunneymen plus their American counterparts like The Feelies, R.E.M., Guadalcanal Diary, Wall of Voodoo. I drooled over posters, but I also listened. In Yesterday and Today the soundtrack was often local punk rock of the kind that I had never heard before. Bad Brains, Minutemen, Minor Threat plus the occasional appearance of local legends like The Slickee Boys and the like.

After the Messthetics played, I got in line to buy the vinyl and compliment the band on a great set. The three of us were buzzing. Like all punk rock, The Messthetics experience is better live. On stage, you can really feel the way the tight lines of bass guitar and driving drums compress the flights of grunge-jazz guitar and saxophone feints at melody into something compact and urgent. Give the song “Gestations” a listen on the new Deface album to hear a great example of this. Song starts off like it could be a track from In on the Kill Taker, then moves into a totally new, but still more or less punk-esque, direction.

But I digress….I approached The Messthetics and bought my album. I told the mild mannered, bespectacled drummer Brendan Canty that I spent my formative years in Rockville. He immediately brought up Yesterday and Today, noting he used to work there. I was floored. The drummer from Fugazi used to work at the place where I spent hours flipping through amazing LPs you could otherwise only get in Europe? Turns out that half the punk scene of DC worked in Y&T when they weren’t touring tiny venues up and down the eastern seaboard. Writes one musician who worked at the store on and off in the Eighties:

Skip didn’t expect much of us, but he loved being around people who made music. We loved being influenced by all the amazing records we listened to in the shop and took home to play for our friends and bandmates. At Y&T, it was common to be waited on by the person whose picture was on the record you are buying. That could be intimidating, but it cemented in my mind the idea that this is a community we are all part of.

Community. That word pops out because though I didn’t know it at the time, an artistic community was very much something I wanted to be part of. The kind of community that Skip Grof fostered at his ramshackle record store, employing punk rockers half his age and even helping them to release their own records.

It was to Skip that Ian MacKaye turned to when he wanted to independently release a record by his first band, Teen Idles. He advised MacKaye on how to go about it and, as MacKaye writes, “In December 1980, the Teen Idles’ “Minor Disturbance” E.P. (an eight-song 7”) was released. This was Dischord Records #1.”

MacKaye would go on to run the Dischord record label for decades, releasing thousands of albums. After he moved out of his parents’ place, the label’s headquarters was a bungalow in Arlington, Virginia. In this modest house just across the Potomac River, a stone skip away from the centre of global power, punks lived, passed through and held basement practices. They also ran Dischord, mailing vinyl out to the surprising large number of people who, like me, dreamed of burning it all down, one insipid Casey Kasem top 40 hit after another.

I didn’t know any of this at the time. I didn’t know that Y&T was connected in any way to the DC punk scene I very badly wanted to be a part of. Hanging out in the store was the closest I’d ever be. But from a yearning distance I must have absorbed the key message. (Or maybe it was just some kind of weird osmosis from repeated listening to Repeater.)

All I can say is that first chance I got, I started my own magazine of underground writing and publishing. I ran it for twenty or so years. I was unwittingly following the MacKaye/Yesterday and Today playbook. That bigger lesson I somehow managed to learn: resisting the mainstream meant doing it yourself; it meant building other, better things. It meant that if you yearned for it and it didn’t exist you could will it into the world with your sweat and labour and commitment. So that’s what I took away, I suppose. I put my energy into a real alternative to the things I didn’t like, the things I didn’t see around me that I very much wanted to.

In those early days, I would send the glorified zine to all the small indie record labels that still thrived across the US and Canada. One day, I got a letter back from Dischord. There was complimentary note, artwork for a half page ad to run in the next issue of Broken Pencil, and a cheque for a few hundred dollars. I was shocked and moved. I’d done it. I’d made it to the big leagues.

So, a book, on the foundational meaning of the Jew, at a time when ever present but previously latent antisemitism is becoming the rallying cry of Europe’s most dynamic leader, the newly minted Fuherer. But Freud’s last book is no defence of the Jewish people. In fact, it’s the opposite. Freud notes at the outset that many won’t like what he has to say: “To deny a people the man whom it praises as the greatest of its sons is not a deed to be undertaken light-heartedly especially by one belonging to that people.”

Nevertheless, Freud plunges ahead. AS An important JEW he feels he has the moral right to offer his preferred revisionist critique, his more correct (per)version of Jewish truth. He writes: “No consideration, however, will move me to set aside truth in favour of supposed national interests.” Europe is, once again, a cesspool of Jew hate, Hitler’s brownshirts are massed on the Austrian border, but Freud’s going to say what he has to say, regardless of the “national interests”, by which he means, presumably, the rest of his Jewish brethren.

So what does he have to say? The book is a fever dream reinterpretation of the biblical Exodus. Freud claims to be inspired by late 19^th century discoveries in archeology that have altered the historical record. The great Doctor leaps from these archeological discoveries in Egypt—which he claims reveal the tomb of a Pharaoh said to have exclusively worshipped the sun god Ra—to the assertion that Moses was not a Jewish slave at all. He was, in fact, part of a splinter group still dedicated to worshiping Ra over and above all other deities. “Moses is an Egyptian probably of noble origin whom the myth undertakes to transform into a Jew. And that would be our conclusion!”

In his day, Egyptian Moses, according to Doctor Freud, is a popular figure, but not with authorities. When he and his followers are challenged by the current Pharoah, Moses flees, taking a good part of the pre-Jew Jewish slaves with him. In the desert, they meet up and sort of merge with another tribe that also has monotheistic tendencies focused on a volcano god called Jahve. Somewhere in there, I think, Freud has everyone show up at Jahve’s volcano (aka Mount Sinai) which goes off in thunderous, murderous rage. In Freud’s telling, Moses doesn’t die right before his rescued tribe enters the promised land, but rather the meshed tribe kills Moses to placate Jahve. Freud laments the killing of Moses and goes out of his way to trash Jahve—future god of the Jewish people aka Yahweh. He writes: “The god Jahve was probably in no way a remarkable being. A rude, narrow-minded local god, violent and blood-thirsty…”

Meanwhile, the blood-thirsty NAZI terror looms. For Jewish Vienna, everything will soon be reduced to one thing only: survival. Freud’s book is quickly forgotten as chaos mounts in Western Europe. In 1938 the NAZIs take over Austria without firing a single shot. They are met with brutish enthusiasm by the rank-and-file citizenry, particularly the million or so ethnic Germans Hitler claims require protection and reunification via the Thousand-Year Reich. Almost immediately the dictates of the NAZI eugenics project are applied. Jews are expected to wear stars on their clothes and brandish passports stamped with a “J”. Hitler sends over emerging uber-bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann to organize the methodical imposition of ever more restrictive rules; rules designed to reduce the 200,000 mostly well-off Austrian Jews, almost all of them in Freud’s Vienna, to impoverished castaways.

For several generations, after the last paterfamilias ruler of the Austrian empire ended all restrictions on Jewish citizens, Vienna had been a paradise. Jewish citizens opened businesses and pursued higher education. Freud studied medicine at The University of Vienna. On pleasant evenings after his classes, he strolled the Stephansplatz with his mates, stopping to buy cones of chestnut puree topped with whipped cream from street vendors.

Mere days after NAZI rule is imposed, everything changes. The assimilated middle classes of Jewish Vienna show up for suddenly required police registration. Eager to make a good impression on the NAZI overseers, many wear suits and dresses. They are registered and immediately ordered to work picking up trash and cleaning the sidewalks with toothbrushes and rags. Those who protest are arrested and shipped to Dachau from which they never returned except as bags of ashes. The Jewish Viennese are totally unprepared, even dumbfounded. Since 1933 students had been publicly burning Dr. Freud’s “Jewish” books across campuses in Germany. But before the NAZIs took over, Freud echoed the general sentiment of the Viennese Jews when he wrote to his nephew, Sam: “The only thing I can say, is that we are determined to stick it out here to the last. Perhaps it may not come out too bad.”

Things, in fact, are coming out very bad indeed. Desperate Viennese Jews place clumsily worded classified adverts in the Manchester Guardian. “I seek a kind person who will educate my intelligent boy, aged 11, Viennese of good family.” The ads sought kindness but also offered up genteel children as young as ten as maids, au pairs, cooks and domestic servants, anything to get them a visa to the UK. Under the new German regime, no Jew was allowed to leave without a visa to another country.

Freud remains steadfast, ignoring the entreaties of his horrified contemporaries to leave immediately. “Vienna has been in panicky spirits,” his daughter Anna Freud wrote to British psychoanalyst Ernest Jones in February 1938. “We are not going along with the panic.” Freud works on his Moses book. He begins to apply some of his most famous theories to excuse the strange behaviour of the proto-Jews united around the lava god Javeh. Why do these two merged tribes murder their savior, Moses? Freud asks rhetorically. This act of Oedipal self destruction is, according to him, perfectly natural, even universal. It’s myth incarnate, nothing special. Since time immemorial, the people have needed to kill their father figures, slaughter their godheads. From this necessary primal act of rage, followed by guilt, unrequited longing and, of course, repression, comes the entire edifice of human relationship to the eternal. He writes: “The murder of Moses by his Jewish people… becomes an indispensable part of our construction, an important link between the forgotten event of primeval times and its later emergence in the form of the monotheistic religions.”

All very interesting except to the Jews of Vienna. By now there are but some 60,000 Jews left, everyone else having either been shipped off to Dachau or stripped of their life savings and forced to flee. Those that remain desperately await papers to leave. The NAZI noose tightens. The Freud home and his Vienna publishing house are searched. The great man’s passport is taken. Still Freud prevaricates.

Then, in March of 1939, his beloved daughter Anna is picked up off the street and questioned for hours by the Gestapo. Anna returns home, unlike so many others, and Freud, shaken, announces it is now time to depart. Papers are supplied by the UK, but the SS demurs. International outrage accrues and finally the NAZIs relent after Freud signs documents stating that the Third Reich has treated him and his family very kindly. (“I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to everyone,” Freud was rumoured at the time to have written jauntily at the bottom of this formal document.) The family departs in June. They follow the same train and ferry route taken by thousands of formerly Austrian Jewish children—sent ahead by their parents who, though they don’t yet know it, they will never see again.

Safely ensconced outside London, Freud finishes his book, with final parting shots at the Jews and their nature. “Moses,” Freud laments, “created their character by giving to them a religion which heightened their self-confidence to such a degree that they believed themselves to be superior to all other peoples. They survived by keeping aloof from the others.” Freud is apologetic. He urges his readers to see that his peers are nothing special, not really. They may seem strange but they’re just Egyptians who feel bad about killing Daddy, no different than so many other tribals and primaevals whose myths the authors of the bible inverted and reinvented for their own misguided purposes. “Out of this guilt-laden compromise between acceptance and rejection,” Freud concludes, “there arose that peculiar character of the Jewish people which has ever since been a puzzle to other nations.”

Meanwhile, through that hot, restless summer since arriving in England, the Freuds anxiously await extended family left behind, particularly four of the Doctor’s sisters. Then, all at once, three blows are dealt to the Freuds. The first blow comes on September 1, 1939 at 4:45 am. The Germans invade Poland. England and France declare war on the Reich. Almost immediately, the waterways are infested with German U-boats. All civilian shipping and transport between continental Europe and the UK and the Americas cease. Exit visas become worthless. There is no way out. Only a few weeks later, the patriarch, the undeniably brilliant Sigmund Freud, succumbs to his prolonged battle with mouth cancer. He dies on September 23, 1939 at the age of 83. Then a final heavy blow: the family gets word that Adolfine Freud, Pauline Freud Winternitz, Marie Freud, and Rosa Freud have been swept up in the NAZI purges and sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. After that, communication ceases. There is no further news about the fate of the sisters.

Gradually through the fog of war, it becomes clear that Doctor Freud had overplayed his hand. He acted too late, waited too long, all the while believing his sisters and their families would be safe in Vienna, tied as they were to the great Doctor. He was wrong.

What else was Freud wrong about? Re-reading Moses and Monotheism, it’s possible to argue that he was wrong about the entire purpose of his own book. Freud himself seems to have been plagued at the end of his life by the very psychological phenomena of repression and unconscious self hate he identified as such a damaging part of human psychology. In this, I’m reminded of our current circumstances. Jew hate is the new norm, as if it never left. It’s the cause-du-jour for trendy urbanites and gullible co-eds alike. As in Freud’s time, we have a new generation of secular Jews busy helping and hating themselves by advancing revisionist history that harms, as Freud put it, “the national interest.” They follow the Viennese Doctor in making outlandish claims about the Jewish people, most notably, today, the assertion that Judaism and the land of Israel have no inherent connection. One should be, instead, the far more appeasing creature known as the “anti-Zionist” Jew. Like Freud, their true aspiration is to reinvent not Jewish history, but their own personal narrative. We are different! We are harmless! We gratefully give up our own tiny sliver of land!

Freud does not have to produce this book. He does not have to devote his valuable, diminishing energy to rewriting the bible in accordance with his preferred narrative, Jews as antecedents, perverse children on the right path worshipping the wrong God. Don’t hate the messenger, Freud is (unconsciously) saying. Instead, accept our peccadilloes, which, after all, as I have amply demonstrated, can still be used for the good of an enlightened, rational, Christian Western Europe.

The US, UK and Canada all currently have far-left parties absolutely obsessed with the nonexistent Gaza genocide. They are all, also, not coincidentally, led by men and women who claim Jewish heritage but work tirelessly to concoct a false narrative that denies the Jewish people a fundamental part of their heritage—their inalienable connection to the land of Israel. It’s all a bit cringe. Hitler was having none of it. Neither were the Austrians, the Dutch, the Poles, Ukrainians, Hungarians, Greeks, Yugoslavs and others who plunged into the NAZI project of racial extermination with the zeal of true believers. Towards the end of the war, the Freud family discovers the fate of the Austrian sisters they left behind. Adolfine Freud dies after only a few months in the Theresienstadt transit camp. Pauline Freud Winternitz, Marie Freud, and Rosa Freud live long enough to be sent by cattle car to the hastily established concentration camp Treblinka, just outside Warsaw. There they are murdered along with almost a million others.

Another month, another brave artist stands up against the Israeli genocide. In this case, actor Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers receives an award for “outstanding supporting performance” in a Canadian film. The award comes via the Toronto Film Critics Association. Tailfeathers does not attend the ceremony and instead sends a video. The video does the usual thank-you stuff then ends with this: “When we were shooting Sweet Angel Baby, October 7th happened and it changed everything. I just want to say that my heart continues to be with the people of Palestine who are experiencing this ongoing genocide and thank you to anyone in this industry who’s been brave enough to say anything.”

When her prerecorded message is played at the gala, those lines are edited out. Otherwise, we probably wouldn’t have noticed, given the lack of attention the TFCA garners and the fact that such pronoucements are a common thing these days. (See Bardem, Javier.) At any rate, according to then TFCA president Johanna Schneller, the edit is done exclusively because Tailfeathers went too long in her remarks. Tailfeathers responds by annoucing she is returning her award to rebuke the organization’s odious censorship.

News of the outrage reaches the media and Schneller immediately resigns. Predictably, the TFCA apologizes and restores the full unedited speech to their website, vowing to never ever edit another speech again. Just as predictably, a bunch of members of the association (almost half) take to social media to announce they are quitting what is obviously a reactionary, proto-fascist, groyper hellhole posing as a film critic’s assocation. (No one bothers to mention that Tailfeathers took home the $100,000 Best Canadian Film prize from the same horrid assocation in 2019.)

Now there’s a lot going on in the world. So much that it’s hard to believe that this kerfuffle made national news. It did though. It was reported on widely and was also the topic of a segement on the nationally broadcast CBC Radio arts show Commotion. The general tone was ‘I can’t believe the TFCA would censor this brave artist.’ The Commotion show made sure that the circle would stay closed by only bringing in the journalist Alex Nino Gheciu to talk about this for 15 minutes. He wrote the article that appeared on the CBC website, an article that quite notably couldn’t find a single person with a different take on the whole affair.

What sort of ‘other’ take could Gheciu and Commotion have explored? Well, they might have at least touched on the fact that there is no genocide in Palestine, ongoing or otherwise. It’s a disgusting lie to say what Tailfeathers said. Furthermore, they could have discussed her very particular framing of the issue. By leading with “October 7 changed everything….” and not mentioning what actually happened on that day, Tailfeathers is reshaping history. She tells a story much more to the far left’s liking: Hey everyone, on this day evil colonialist entity and worst country in the world Israel just totally randomally started genociding. Hmmm…what else happened on October 7, we wonder?

I don’t support censorship. Furthermore, artist-activists sporting watermelon pins on their jean jackets are very unlikely to take kindly to having the Free Gaza part of their acceptance speech lopped off for whatever reason. The TFCA should have gone back to Tailfeathers and asked her to record a shorter speech. Simple as that. If she wants to perform outrage and spew a massive lie within her alloted time, that’s up to her.

Except. Well. It is a lie. Should an actor be allowed to spout a hateful fabrication that at this point is clearly serving to demonize not just an entire country but also an entire ethnicity? Since I’m anti-censorship, I have to say ‘yes’. But I also have to say that these kinds of lies, and the complete failure of anyone in the cultural sphere to address them, have serious consquences, both for Canadian culture and for Jewish Canadians.

The Tailfeathers saga encapsulates the much larger problem facing the arts in this country. The Canadian Press/CBC article goes out of its way to report on how Tailfeathers rejects antisemetism and will even tolerate some Jews, provided they agree with her. In Tailfeathers’ email to the TFCA she writes: “To those in the Jewish community who are speaking out against the genocide of Palestinians, I recognize the incredible risk you are taking in critiquing the actions of the state of Israel. You are brave and your actions do not go unnoticed.”

On behalf of no one else, I would still like to thank Ms. Tailfeathers for her shout-out to the “Jewish community.” Unfortunately, she recognizes only a miniscule percentage of us: “Those” Jews. The good Jews. The Jews that agree with her. The rest of us are presumably bad Jews who are not performing our Jewishness in accordance with Ms. Tailfeathers’ preference. That would be the vast majority — over 95% of Jewish people in Canada — who support Israel, the only Jewish country in the world and home to more than half of all Jewish people on the planet. As part of our support, we will occasionaly note, politely, that Israel is not performing a genocide; in fact it allows food and medicine into a territory populated entirely by people who actually did attempt a bloodthirsty genocide that featured mass murder, rape, hostage taking and child murder.

We, the ‘other’ Jews, don’t matter. Neither do facts. In fact, the Canadian cultural scene prefers to proceed as if the majority “bad Jews” don’t even exist. Canadian culture only has space for the Good Jews. They’re the one’s whose “actions” will not go “unnoticed.” Who notices the good Jews (and presumably the bad?). Well in the culture scene, it’s the people who are funded and awarded and paid to make and manage the arts in Canada. People like Ms. Tailfeathers. This is a small group; a much smaller group than you might think. It’s a relatively incestuous group in which the creators are often asked to help decide which of their peers, colleagues and friends get funding, grants and awards. So, presumably, this is where the noticing happens. And what is done with this information, this noticing, this listing of good and bad Jews? If we go by the way the arts has been functioning for the last fifteen or so years, we can presume that the information will be used to keep “bad” Jews outside looking in.

This has already been done quite effectivley to other enemies of the politically homongenous far left arts scene. There are no people making a living in the Canadian arts who openly question the efficacy and wisdom of DEI quotas for grants and opportunities; there are none who oppose the ridiculous and ever conflicting fatwas on so-called “cultural appropriation”. Good luck getting a grant or a job in the arts with “volunteered at local Conserative Party of Canada riding assocation” on your resume.

Ideological conformity in our arts scene is mandatory. If you don’t toe the line, you will be pressured — financially and socially. You will lose opportunities and gradually find yourself deplatformed. Self censorship abounds, but for the Jewish creator even staying silent is no longer permitted. If you want to get in and stay in with the arts scene, you must perform your good Jewishness including, first and foremost, performing your hatred for the demon state of Israel. Otherwise, you’ll be put on notice. You’ll be suspect. You’ll be culled.

Here’s what it looks like: When I expressed disgust at the waves of post-October 7 campus occupations, the result was that my magazine Broken Pencil was relentlessly attacked, boycotted, and libelled. “Broken Pencil publisher is Zio-Nazi” announced a prominent “good Jew” on Twitter. Subscribers cancelled, advertisers fled, and cowardly writers pulled their articles. The magazine — bastion of left leaning voices and independent creative action — folded.

With “bad” Jews excluded from the public sphere, especially the arts and culture sphere that speaks, primarily and to everyone’s detriment, mainly to the left leaning urbanites, there’s no one inside to debunk the lie. It’s an echo chamber of colonizer white fragility nonsense that very conveniently demonizes the one Jewish country on the planet, a land mass the size of New Jersey surrounded by countries that want to raze it for the glory of their celestial amibitions.

But you won’t hear anything about that on the CBC. Everything changed on October 7 when Israel started genociding, remember? With only the “good” Jews platformed, the echoes can keep getting louder and louder. 2 +2 = 5. Say it again. Say it with more fervor. Say it like you really mean it. It’s a continuum of escalating exclusion. The woke, not the Jews, control the arts and media in this country. As a result, we have now moved from celebrating a lie, to demonizing and excluding the Jews who aren’t willing to parrot the lie. Furthermore any attempt to set the record straight or otherwise tamp down on the lie will be met with shrieks of outrage — “Censorship!”

This is about the arts, but it’s also about everyday life. The lie is a violent, abhorrent thing. It normalizes violence against Jewish people. Its constant repetition is leading to everything from shots fired at synogogues in Toronto to Jews being attacked and murdered simply for the crime of going about their lives in the UK, the USA and Australia. So to Ms. Tailfeathers, to the former members of the Toronto Film Critics Assocation who quit in outrage, to the CBC and everyone else going along with this, I say: You are spreading one of the oldest lies, one of the most heinous libels. You are not only harnessing your sacred social justice to systematically exclude Jewish Canadians from your millieu, you are putting them in grave danger. We notice. We are noticing.

So, a simple enough office invasion for Gaza, one assumes. There have been many of these so-called “protests” over the last two years. I only registered this event when the brief mentions of it in the media highlighted a few names I recognized. I decided to spend a bit of time digging deeper. When I did, I found myself increasingly perplexed. Look closer and you’ll see mixed messages, bad timing, and an overall incoherence that makes me wonder if I, and most who report on or otherwise comment on these protests, are somehow missing the point.

Let’s begin with the basics of the action. Protestors show up to this office in West Toronto on a weekday morning and storm in. Bardeesy, who represents the Parkdale-High Park riding of the city, is not there. The lone staffer who is there quite understandably becomes scared. She runs to a back room and calls the police. The police come and tell the invaders -- or activists or demonstrators or agitators or whatever it is they were trying to be that day -- to leave. Eight refuse and are arrested.

Meet the Parkdale Eight: Faisal Ibrahim, 39; Chloe Tse, 24; Matthew J. Goodings, 59; Francois Villeneuve, 48; Atia A. Haq, 38; Susan Goldstein, 67; Alexander Vesuna, 30; and Michael DeForge, 38, all of Toronto. They were charged with counts of forcible entry, unlawful assembly, mischief, and obstructing a peace officer.

So far so simple. Do-gooders-for-Gaza stage a Sixties style sit-in and change the world. Well, not quite. For starters, there’s the strange choice of target, Liberal MP Bardeesy’s constituency office. With his ringlets of gray hair and professorial glasses, Bardeesy looks like what he is – a think-tanky, dyed-in-the-wool, leftie. Bardessy is

former faculty at Toronto Metropolitan University, identifies as an Arab-Canadian, favours a total arms embargo of Israel and has gone on record with the claim that “Israel has been committing unacceptable atrocities” in Gaza. (No call to free the hostages though, whom Hamas was still holding in its tunnels when he made that statement.) Bardeesy also happens to be a member of the very government that rewarded Hamas for starting a horrible war by “recognizing” the “country” of Palestine. So you’d think the Parkdale Eight would see him as, if not an ally, then at least someone they wouldn’t want to aggressively antagonize. Generally, activists choose protest targets they strongly disagree with. In this case, Bardeesy and the Parkdale Eight are in lockstep. They share ideology and fantastical rendering of events in the Middle East. So what gives?

On timing, well, it’s also quite odd. There’s the ceasefire, so a little late for sanctions and embargoes. The members of the second Greta “aid” flotilla, meanwhile, were flown to Turkey quickly after being taken into custody. They were practically back in their comfortable homes when the Parkdale Eight moved in. Demanding the government press for something that was literally already underway seems a bit of a waste of limited protest-goodwill.

To the outside observer, the office invasion seems totally incoherent – ill timed, unplanned, pointlessly divisive. And yet it happened. It went forward. The Eight dug in and got themselves arrested. Why? What aren’t we seeing in this picture?

Above is a photo posted on Instagram. It was taken in the midst of the October Office Occupation. As you can see, in the background is a large red flag centering a depiction of what we’ll assume is meant to be a pre-contact Indigenous warrior. It seems to have been hastily duct-taped onto a wall. Also in the picture, there’s a keffiyeh draped woman with a cell phone -- texting or taking a selfie. There’s also a woman wearing a t-shirt. Look carefully and you can make out the t-shirt’s slogan: “Jews Say Stop Arming Israel”. The woman in this t-shirt seems to be holding a microphone as if about to make some kind of speech.

It’s an interesting tableau. Let’s look closer at the large flag of the warrior. Why that flag instead of the Palestinian flag or some effigy of Netanyahu or Donald Trump? Is the banner meant to inspire the Parkdale Eight crowd to be more warrior-like? It’s unclear. But clearly having the flag up and visible is a crucial part of the group’s overall ideology.

Now to the woman in the t-shirt holding the mic. What’s with the microphone? There’s no one there. No audience has gathered, waiting to hear her speak truth to power. Is it a prop for effect? Were they expecting a larger crowd? Again, hard to say. The t-shirt, of course, is easier to interpret. Presumably each action must feature a token “as-a-Jew” to give cover against accusations that the far left’s obsession with Israel has more to do with latent Jew-hate as it does to do with helping Gazans. The as-a-Jew must let people know that she is the token Jew, present and accounted for. Thus, the shirt. But the shirt’s message is interesting on its own – “JEWS SAY!” A thundering pronouncement speaking, apparently, for all the people of Sarah and Abraham. Not “This Jew says” or “Some Jews say.” Mic woman protestor speaks for all, whether we fellow Jews like it or not.

Can the t-shirt and the as-a-Jew woman possibly give us a bit more insight into the warrior flag? I’m guessing there is no Indigenous activist present. That is why the flag is necessary. It functions for the group as a kind of visual land acknowledgement. Paired with the ubiquitous kaffiyeh and the t-shirt, what seem to be mixed messages merge into a single plotline: Self-hate. These “protesters” do not like who they are. They seek to reject their backgrounds. They want to abdicate their supposed “privilege.” This means, essentially, destroy the West and return power to its heroic forbearers, the worthiest of which in this context are the Indigenous of “Turtle Island” and their compatriots in Gaza.

What we construe as incoherence they see as a powerful truth-telling, a parallel reality in which the worst countries in the world include the colonizing white supremacist hellholes of Canada and Israel. We see an attack on their ally’s office, they see an illegitimate government that refuses to cede power. The government – a colonizing entity of evil – can in fact never be an ally. This is not the realpolitik we typically understand to be at the heart of democracy. Let’s negotiate. Let’s try to understand each other. Let’s cut a deal. For the Parkdale Eight, there can never be a deal. The point is not to raise awareness or push the cause forward. The mic, the t-shirt, the flag, the keffiyeh, the refusal to leave. It’s not incoherent, it’s exactly what they believe. The point is the choreographed sound and fury.

The flag, the keffiyeh, the t-shirt. The father the son and the holy ghost. Think of it as a kind of repackaged trinity. The “action” confuses because its fundamental underpinning is not political, but religious. The Eight believe in or at least pay homage to a mythical pre-contact Indigenous identity that existed in Gaza and Canada before the Jews/whites/capitalists came and ruined everything. Once there was a perfect world, but it was ruined by the “oppressor.”

Thus, the two other symbols in the tautological tableau. First the as-a-Jew who represents rejection of Western faith. This is a recanting of the entire edifice of morality as set out first in the Old Testament, underpinning of all the subsequent legal codes that allowed for the development of our current pluralistic and prosperous societies.

The there is the keffiyeh. A confusing symbol for ultra left agitators to employ, at least to us outside observers. Isn’t the keffiyeh the symbol of the demand to give over the entire Middle East to exclusively Muslim ethnostates? When we see it, we think of the NAZI-loving Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. We think Yasir Arafat, Yahya Al-Sinwar. We think of people who believe that it is their holy mission to kill gays, Jews, Christians, adulterers, and pretty much anyone who opposes the establishment of Islamic Caliphates. Hardly a progressive simple.

So why would a group of people, most of whom are white, all of whom are ardent supporters of LGBTQ, minority, and women’s rights, none of whom adhere to the Islamic faith, embrace a symbol that completely rejects everything they purport to believe in? (In essence, this is the gays-for-Gaza/chickens-for-KFC paradox.) The answer is that the Parkdale Eight group does not see the keffiyeh as symbol of Islamic fundamentalism and never-ending holy war. To them it is a symbol of an even holier war—the war against themselves, the war against putrid and corrupt whiteness. They wrap the keffiyeh around themselves to somehow absorb the purity, the indigeneity. This is the way forward, they proclaim. Globalize the intifada and depose the West. It is their ultimate symbol of self-repudiation and sacrifice.

I would like to be able to say that their imagined “indigenous” world of Gaza and their fantastical intifada for social justice exist in an alternate reality outside our own. In terms of the symbols and language they employ and the choices the make, they are certainly more like a fringe cult/religious movement than serious political actors. Furthermore, many, if not most, of the people who have fallen into this ideology do not understand what they are protesting for, what they are against, and what the symbols they religiously display are meant to represent.

Nevertheless, this “movement” continues to attract adherents and considerable sympathy. There is ample evidence that Parkdale Eight-like actions have influenced institutions and political decisions in Canada and all over the Western world. This has led to fear and confusion and a rending of the social fabric such that we have not seen in our lifetime. Our leaders seem unable or unwilling to confront what is a widespread, ahistorical, call for societal self-immolation in the name of “justice.” Partly, they are silent out of bewilderment: they simply do not how to characterize or talk about a “movement” that is as totalizing as it is nonsensical. Look again at the swirl of flags and big feelings: it is the Rorschach of protests—some see a trigger warning, others a smoking gun. Facts, precedent, evidence—none of this can be used to either understand, appease or combat a quasi religious “movement” that acts entirely outside of standards, legitimate political discourse and dissent.

PART II Coming Next Week –

After Bondi: Are We Just Too Late? The Making (and Unmaking) of the Parkdale Eight

Oh and I’ve been a bit lax on the whole Substack thing lately, but I’ve got a big piece coming for everyone later this week to make up for it….

EXCERPT from The Hub. Read the rest here!

Understandably, the reaction has been calls to erase King, excise him from the canon as if he never existed. Indeed, the writer Robert Jago makes that very demand, writing in the Toronto Star the day after news of King’s fraudulent identity broke: “Now his work needs to be moved to the fantasy section.” What he really means is dump it in the garbage. The space on the “bookshelves” should be reserved for, as he puts it, “authentic, grounded and real Indigenous people.”

I get what he’s saying and why. But the deeper revelation of King’s fraud is that the systemic obsession with so-called cultural appropriation as applied to the literary arts is also a fraud. Think about it this way: fellow author Joseph Boyden and King weren’t who they said they were, but they were fine, interesting writers who completely disproved the idea that you cannot passionately, convincingly, and beautifully depict a culture that is not your own.

I offer suggestions. Over cheap sushi, my parents report back to me.

“Hallie,” my mom says, “I looked at that one place you said and it is one-hundred-and-twenty dollars per person to go there.” I stifle a laugh. That might have sounded like a lot when they got married in 1966, but these days that’s on the low-end for a fancy dinner in Toronto. Anyway, after long years working hard at successful careers, they certainly have the money. In their eighties and coming off a hellish year that saw my Dad undergo and recover from jaw replacement surgery, if there is ever an occasion to splurge, wouldn’t this be it?

I turn to my father. Did he perchance look into anywhere to take his beloved? “Why bother!” he blurts loudly. “She won’t like it anyway! So why bother?”

Oh-kay.

“There is a new place near us,” my mother announces. “We will go there. It is Indonesian food.”

My father splutters on his green tea.

“I’m not eating there!” he yells. “Indonesian food? What in the hell is she talking about? Indonesian food?”

My parents’ first date is at the Montreal restaurant Ruby Foos. A success ever since it opened on Decarie Avenue to great fanfare in 1945, it is still a very popular, very classy spot in the early 1960s when my father meets my mother at a Jewish social club for youth. At the time, it is famous for serving what would today be considered a bastardized mix of Chinese and Western food. In the provincial, Catholic, Quebec of the 1950s era, however, this is considered both exotic and classy. The restaurant is a huge hit, attracting English-Protestant playboys, emerging French Catholic titans of banking and real estate, and the old-school Jewish clothing factory barons.

The restaurant is situated in the nouveau Jewish area, across the “street” (a vast swathe of underground/overground highway) from another Montreal icon, the famous Orange Julep. This is a fast-food restaurant encased inside a wooden “orange” so massive it’s visible from miles away. Here the French girls on roller skates serve hotdogs smothered in beefy spaghetti sauce (a flavour imported from nearby Plattsburgh, New York). Customers sit in their cars. They don’t even have to get out to order.

When I was a kid, I used to love going there as part of a visit my grandparents who lived just down the street. To me, that was the height of luxury. But for my mother, Ruby Foo’s would have been next level. Coming from a poor refugee family that arrived in Montreal from the far regions of the Soviet Union in the mid-fifties, any dining out would have been considered opulent, let alone a trip to one of the hottest night spots in town.

If they were lucky, my parents would have sat in one of the quiet, spacious, luxurious banquette booths upholstered with deep red vinyl. They likely wouldn’t have noticed, but those highly visible booths were the most coveted spots in the joint. Many a crooked politician or cop wined, dined, winked and eyeballed from those tables, always on the lookout for, as one noted commentator on the Fifties Montreal scene wrote, “potential purveyors of graft.”

The menu would have tempted my parents with such strange delicacies as pineapple chicken aka Bo Lo Guy Pan for $1.30 and sweet and sour spareribs for $1.35 (pork, but that was okay, so long as you didn’t bring the leftovers home or tell your parents). For those looking for something classier, why not a lobster thermidor for $2.50? Chop suey came with the relatively unknown fragrance of ginger, fried rice was darkened by soya sauce and speckled with luminous green peas and bright cubes of carrot. Egg rolls, of course, but also the newly fashionable Club Sandwich and Fries.

I always imagined Ruby Foo’s to be one of those weirdly unique Montreal phenomena, like Moishe’s, the iconic steak house. Moishe’s was the brainchild of a pre-war Romanian Jew who mixed old world flavours with North American tastes to create an enduringly unique sensation; a hybrid of smells and sensibilities and spices that lives on today in the recipes of restaurants ranging from upstart suburban Smoked Meat Pete’s to Shwartz’s to Joe Beef and even the recent corporate reboot of Moishe’s Steakhouse itself.

But the Ruby Foo story is more complicated. Ruby Foo is in fact an American phenomenon. She is an actual historical figure, one of the first ever successful Chinese American woman entrepreneurs. Born Ruby Foo Wong in 1908, she comes of age in a teeming, openly racist boomtown San Francisco built on the backs of the badly treated Chinese “coolies”, cheap labour imported to build the railways that would gradually come to crisscross the US.

Barely twenty, Ruby Foo moves to Boston and opens a one room restaurant. Harnessing her canny instincts as a first-generation Chinese American restauranteur, she soon expands, opening the much larger Ruby Foo’s Den in Boston in 1929. Its blend of deliberately cheesy Oriental mystique, genuine Asian cuisine, Western offerings, and an extensive list of champagne cocktails, is a hit. It’s the first “Chinese” restaurant in Boston’s Chinatown to attract a primarily white clientele, and from the better classes to boot. Ruby Foo Wong isn’t done. She goes ahead and lends the formula, her unique brand, to restauranteurs in some of the grandest cities of the new world: New York, Miami and, of course, Montreal.

The exact nature of Ruby’s business dealings in Montreal are obscured by time, fate and, as it turns out, illegality. When you are doing deals with gangsters, record keeping is often vague, even nonexistent. We do know is that Ruby Foo’s Decarie opens its doors in 1945. Its most visible owner in what seems to have been a lucrative partnership is one Max Shapiro, Jewish immigrant from the Polish shtetl with a head for numbers and, like a small but influential cohort of his fellow co-religionists, little concern with the laws of the day. In fact, much of the Montreal criminal scene in the pre-World War Two environment comes from the ranks of Jewish immigrants from Romania, Poland, Lithuania and other outposts of besieged, already-fading Yiddish speaking Jewry.

After making his way to Montreal sometime in the 1920s, Shapiro gets in with the bigger Jewish and Italian players, most notably the infamous Harry Davis, also a Eastern European Jewish immigrant. Davis, at the time, is Montreal’s head mobster. He alone decides who can and who cannot dabble in illegal gambling in the city. With Davis’ blessing, Shapiro is allowed to establish himself. First, he must see where opportunity lies. The wide-ranging gambling scene includes everything from supposedly banned slot machines in the Laurentian resorts, to basement dens offering the French longshoreman’s dice game barbotte. Gambling is everywhere. The Catholic church, which presides over most of the social fabric of the day, is publicly very much opposed. So are the politicians and police, who launch frequent raids but never seem to find anyone of import to arrest.

Shapiro opens a gambling parlour on Peel Street. Still today, the Peel strip is known as a place of revelry and hedonistic excess – sin times ten. Take a stroll down its brightly façade on a Saturday night and you’ll find clubs and pubs and beer halls drawing everyone from rowdy McGill students to party hopping tourists to suburban Montrealers come downtown for a taste of the city’s famous nightlife. But things are more conservative at the time, and pressure is mounting to clamp down on what one magazine dubbed “the most lawless city in North America.” Maybe that’s why Shapiro also decides to invest in the more legit Montreal Ruby Foo’s.

A year after Ruby Foo’s opens, Harry Davis gets shot in the stomach three times by low level thug Louis Bercovitch. This turns out to be the end of an era. Bercovitch’s blatant act of violence – retribution for Davis denying him permission to open his own gambling den – shocks Montreal. The city finally gets serious about cleaning up its gambling dens. Shapiro is thanking his lucky stars. He got out just in time.

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I don’t know if Ruby ever visited Ruby Foo’s Montreal or had any knowledge of the unsavory aspects of its first ownership group. Foo died not that long after the Montreal branch opened. Still in her forties, a heart attack took her in 1950. She left behind an expansive empire, two ex-husbands, one current husband, and three children. Shapiro also died abruptly of a heart attack in 1958. Was it something in the food? Shapiro’s twin sons took over the restaurant but sold it off in relatively short order. Like so many offspring of the Jewish gangsters from a wilder era, the Shapiros went straight and went brilliant. They both attended McGill and became, respectively, the Presidents of McGill and Princeton in their later years.

Though Max Shapiro often “held court” at his successful Ruby Foo’s, he was dead well before my parents’ first date. I doubt my future mother and father knew much of anything at all about the Jewish mob ties behind the popular Montreal franchise. I doubt they even knew it was a franchise. They were too busy mooning at each other, holding hands, talking about their plans. The future lay before them, a seemingly bright and unexplored expanse. My father, like the Shapiro sons, would soon go to McGill, part of a large wave of Montreal Jews who were freed to attend by the trailing away of Jewish quotas and blatant institutional antisemitism. My mother was graduating Baron Byng high school and starting her own remarkable career, first stop a secretarial position at a local law firm.

In 1966, my parents would marry. They would leave Montreal forever a year later, never to live there again. Like Ruby Foo, they were immigrants who sought new pastures where they could leave behind old prejudices and stake new claims. Like Max Shapiro, they endured, worked, strived, scraped — all the while seeking a better, less fraught life for their two sons.

“Preferred by the town’s most interesting people,” Ruby Foo’s newspaper ads said. The gossip columns didn’t notice these two “interesting” young people, teenagers shyly perusing a menu as thick as a short book while peering through clouds of cigarette smoke at the hoi polloi of Montreal’s glory days. Nevertheless, they were there. Two people, two incredible stories, two long journeys at an end. A new beginning at the fanciest joint in town.

Hi all, I’ve written a lengthy piece on the rise and fall of the zine. I’m going to share a few excerpts here, please go to the consistently excellent Quillette (substack or website) and enjoy the whole thing!

On the potential of zines:

At the time, numerous social critics were warning about the breakdown of civic connection in Western societies. (Perhaps the most famous was Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, whose widely cited 2000 book on the subject would be titled, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.) Popular culture, particularly TV and movies, came under fire for turning us into passive consumers who stared at screens instead of interacting with others.

I saw things differently. In We Want Some Too, I offered up zine subculture as a model for how deep connection to mass electronic culture was seeding new communities that were filling the void left by all those bygone bowling-league nights, Tupperware parties, and Elks Lodge meet-ups. While television and other forms of mass entertainment inspired a passive, top-down form of cultural participation, zines (and the digital equivalents that were just then beginning to flourish) inspired a more crowdsourced grass-roots approach, breaking down the rigid distinction between corporate producers and consumers.

On Zines in the Art Gallery:

In 2023, this whole too-precious trend coalesced into a travelling exhibition, Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines, which showed around the world, including at the Vancouver Art Gallery and The Brooklyn Museum, where the concept was conceived. Naturally, it came complete with its own publication—an exit-through-the-giftshop hardcover book produced by London-based publisher Phaidon. The project adorns pretentious high-art flotsam with a superficial gloss of antique punk nerdom borrowed from zinedom—the conceit being that zines were primitive precursors groping toward the “boundary pushing” (yet also culturally sensitive) works of genius we are supposed to admire today.

On Zines in Academia:

Boston’s NPR affiliate recently exalted zines as “a way for marginalized communities to communicate with one another. For example, the Riot Grrrl feminist punk movement of the 1990s used zines to spread materials covering mental health, racism, sexual and domestic violence and reproductive rights. Zines today are similar in their mission.” For anyone who treasured zines in the pre-digital era, all of this sounds like a dispatch from la-la land. What we really loved about zines was the chance they offered us to revel in uncensored anarchy.

Want more? Of course you do! Read the full piece.

Consequently, I’m not that enthusiastic about our return. I had grown used to the sound of wind and water. When night fell, I would go down to the dock and listen to the quiet, the only light cast by the stars in brilliant array.

The summer was dry and hot and the county banned outdoor fires. Daughter #1, who was working at the local nearby provincial park at the time, spent a month fielding questions about what did or did not constitute a fire. Alas, she told irate campers, she did not personally make the rules; thereby she did not have the power to change them.

The rules are the rules, that’s the way it is, like it or not. I have a garden up north, which teaches me acceptance. For most of the summer I battled a groundhog before I was forced to accept that the battle was lost. There were to be no green beans or kale. The little asshole ate the tops of the carrots and beets too. Only my winter squash was truly productive.

To show off my one success I’m planning a two-squash Fall Fattoush salad as part of our upcoming Rosh Hashana dinner. There will be a small winter squash that I grew from heirloom seeds with a pedigree stretching back one billion years. The seeds yield black skinned squash with sweet orange flesh, perfect to toss in oil and grill. I’ll also fry up the oblong yellow skinned, green striped delicata squash that seemed to thrive this year, their vines outmuscling even the cucumbers’ spread. These plants produced a weirdly large number of fruit tasting like a winter squash crossed with the summer kind.

It'll be around twenty for the Jewish new year’s dinner coming up in a few weeks. Kid #2 – who, conveniently, hates squash – will have finished about a month of public high school by then, so I’ll have to throw some extra prayers in. Is it okay to beseech the higher power to keep my daughter from forgetting her Jewish education? (I’m guessing that’s more a parental responsibility.) #2’s in an enriched math and science program and tells me she’s already bored. I’m not surprised, because 1) in my experience teenage girls bore easily and 2) she’s very smart, though she does her best to hide it behind lip gloss, straightened hair and expensive hoodies.

When she got up to the cottage after camp, we went on a canoe trip. We took along my cousin and his teenage son, and my friend and his twenty-year-old son. At the insistence of the boys, we paddled across the lake to climb a steep, wild looking hill that overlooked our campsite. Everyone scampered up through the boulders, sharp underbrush and angry conifers, even me.

At the top, the boys ran around picking up rocks (or at least trying to pick up rocks) then throwing (or rolling) them down the arid hill. Kid #2 looked on with her arms crossed from our perch above it all on an underground boulder formed in the ice age. She had a Wednesday Addams demi-smile on her face as she mocked the man-children and their efforts. “That’s going nowhere,” she noted as a small boulder slammed to a halt in a tangled trinity of tiny, scraggly firs growing out of a sandy ledge.

The same could be said of so many things these days. All summer I picked through the past and wondered where I was going. I read memoirs, trying to wrap my head around the genre that I am currently attempting for the first time. My favourite memoirs, I came to realize, were the ones where nothing much happened. Where the writer tries to go somewhere but never quite gets there.

In Emmanuel Iduma’s I’m Still With You, the young Nigerian writer chronicles a return to his traditional homeland to search for anything that remains of his uncle, who disappeared in the chaos and ruination of the brutal Nigerian civil war. At one point, Iduma visits a seemingly abandoned technical college. This was the spot where Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, the purportedly pretentious, Oxford-educated ruler of the fledgling Biafran state, had given a remarkable “declaration” on how, as Iduma writes, the “flailing country would be governed”. The country, alas, was never to be governed. Even as the speech was being delivered hundreds of thousands were dying of starvation, including many of its poorly trained soldiers. The ill-fated quest for an Igbo modern state was over before it even really began.

At the school, Iduma finds cracked concrete out of which grow long grass and weeds. There is no monument, nothing to suggest this was a spot where anything even remotely important ever happened. I’m picturing those small towns up North. Out of nowhere appears a factotum who leads Iduma to the seemingly nonfunctioning school’s principal. The principal sits barefoot in his office, dusting his shoes, “indistinguishable from all the surly teachers” Iduma knew in childhood. “Men,” he writes, “who appeared to begrudge the youth of their wards, for whom teaching was a temporary position whose finale was always being deferred.” [144]

Iduma has no photo of his lost uncle, a solider in the Biafran army who, like so many others, simply never came home. Some describe him as having been light skinned, others as having skin dark as ebony. All witnesses to his possible bravery in the war are gone and what is remembered is contradictory. There can be no finale in these circumstances. Even the missing uncle’s name is debated This book must end without an ending. And so it does: Iduma discovering more of what he does not know. His only remaining uncle reveals that in addition to the disappeared solider and Iduma’s mother, there had been another uncle, a fourth child who came after his mother. His name, apparently, was also Emmanuel. “Emmanuel?” repeats the obviously surprised Emmanuel Iduma. Emmanuel died young, of an epileptic seizure. “Let’s forget about it,” Uncle Ajah says curtly.

All that nowhere, stretching for miles around. And how far away everything looks from the top of even the most modest hill.

Kid #2 is at a new camp this summer, having aged out of her previous, much closer locale. This year the kids sleep in tents without supervising counsellors. They do a much wider range of activities. In addition to the usual colour wars, canoeing, shirah (song), rikud (dance), and marathon bead-making sessions, they talk about their feelings and their relationship to their Judaism. They do leadership activities. They hug a lot.

Upon arrival the first thing you notice is a security guard complete with bullet proof vest. There’s a fancy gate that blocks the camp road. This is a summer camp. A Jewish one.

The school bus we boarded in the local town lets us off in the camp sports field. Campers surge forward as if from a burst dam. Standing off to the side observing while W. plunges into the crowd to search for Kid #2, I notice that it’s hard to tell the campers – 14 and 15 – apart from the counsellors – 18 and 19. Later we’ll take a picture that shows Kid #2 several inches taller than her university aged “tent mother”. My once cherubic perma-toddler suddenly grown up.

The first item on the agenda is mifkad (flagpole), the morning ceremony at which announcements are made, the Canadian and Israeli flags are raised, and O, Canada is sung. After we sing the national anthem, the kids recite in Hebrew what sounds to me like a prayer. The wind from the lake blows through the surrounding bristle of conifers. Many kids and parents, having just reunited, are still excitedly talking to each other, unable to contain themselves. I can’t catch the prayer. “What was that song?” I ask Kid #2 when it’s over. She shrugs. “It’s just some prayer. We say it every morning.”

Later, I get a chance to circle back to the flagpole area. Here are posted the words of the sung prayer in Hebrew and translated English: “If I forget you Oh Jerusalem, let my right had wither….” It’s a song adapted, as far as I can tell, from the famous Psalm 137 of the Jewish bible. This psalm commemorates one of the most painful moments of ancient Jewish history. The year is 586 BCE and Judea, the Jewish kingdom, is invaded and destroyed by The Babylonians, who exile the Jewish people to the far reaches of empire. The first temple, built with the wood painstakingly carried by the Jews through the desert after their escape from Egyptian slavery, is destroyed.

This tragic event, one of so many others to come, is marked by a day of fasting and lamentation known as Tisha B’Av. Tisha B'Av (the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, falling in July or August) also marks the destruction of the second temple in 70 CE, this time at the hands of the Romans. Again, the Jews experience a forced dispersal – deliberately scattered throughout the far outposts of Roman territory. (A theme, one could say.) Tisha B’Av is also notable as the sole somber day at many Jewish summer camps. Girls hug each other tearfully and boys stare manfully into the forest. The camp’s most soulfully bearded guitarist strums the melody to “Yersushaliem Shell Zahav” (“Jerusalem of Gold”).

I’m found in the mifkad area. Kid #2 reprimands me: No unsupervised wandering. “Who did you talk to? Don’t talk to anyone!”

We eat our barbecue lunch on the rocks overlooking the water. The wind has settled, and the lake is still. Kid #2 and her mother chat excitedly about the camp’s various doings. All around us are similar scenes, kids and parents happy to be together. Camp is on a bay at the end of a mid-sized lake. I watch the water lap at the beachfront. The sun is high in a cloudless blue sky, but slowly inexorably sinking. Soon it will be time to go. I am surprised to discover that I don’t want to go. “I like it here,” I tell my family decisively. “Not so loud,” Kid #2 hisses.

Before the buses arrive to take us back to our cars, the campers and counsellors show us their famous ruach. They sing the camp song at the top of their voices complete with furious moshing. Kid #2 is right near the middle, waving her arms in the air and bellowing the words in Hebrew and English (Hebglish!). Parents frantically snap pictures. It’s a Grateful Dead-Taylor Swift mashup staged in the middle of nowhere for the benefit of almost no one.

And then it’s over. Kid #2, a faint sheen of sweat over her tanned face, shoos us onto the bus. “See ya,” she says, dolling out quick hugs, her smile showing a hint of relief. As the buses pull out, she puts an around her bestie and tentmate, who waves desperately at her parents then bursts into tears.

The hot sticky school bus lurches away. I open the window. Northern Ontario pine and the lingering scent of grilled hot dog rush over me. So, too, does one more line from Psalm 137: “How can we sing the songs of the Lord in a strange land?”

Somehow, this nothing-burger landed the students a hearing in front of community-elected school board trustees. There the two young people didn’t address the principal’s reason for rejecting their request. They instead demanded that the school board “review this policy and our situation with an anti-oppressive equity lens. There is a stark power imbalance between the students and our principal. We require an appeal process because there is a power imbalance.”

The students showed that they are well versed in the language of DEI, the official policy framework of the Toronto school board and many other institutions in Canada and the United States. Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) policies started cropping up in the early two-thousands. They are now well embedded in almost every aspect of society. Their intellectual underpinning is the concept of “whiteness”. ”Whiteness” holds that as the West was conceptualized and actualized by white men, all Western systems and institutions are historically and permanently racist (and sexist and heteronormative). “Whiteness” privileges white ways of thinking while diminishing non-white systems of knowledge. To battle “whiteness”, institutions and systems must have a constant, permanent focus on countering these biases.

As an example of how this works in everyday life, the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), the largest schoolboard in Canada, has an official DEI framework. It applies to “all TDSB policies, procedures, programs, operations, and practices.” The idea is that DEI and fighting “whiteness” must be top of mind everywhere always – in math class and gym, in history lessons and fundraising, in disciplinary procedures and governance.

Thus the Keffiyeh Appeal. Having grown up with DEI, the high school students now know that they are “oppressed”. They also know that letting them sell keffiyehs for Gaza in school will strike a blow against whiteness and advance “equity”. After all, how else to resolve a “power imbalance” between non-white students and a white principal? Finally, they know that their needs should take precedence -- “From the perspective of Black and brown students, the message is that other students’ comfort are more valued than our identities.”

There has been a lot of ink spilled in the last six months or so about the pullback from DEI agendas. I’m someone who has been personally affected by DEI and its regressive search for racism in everything and anything. So when I see what looks to be a re-examination of DEI in the Canadian context, I’m immediately interested.

In the magazine The Walrus, former Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) producer Pacinthe Mattar writes an article entitled – “DEI Was Always Flawed, but the Backlash Is Truly Alarming”. I should note that one of Mattar’s claims to fame is a prior article in which she announced she left the CBC because it wasn’t doing DEI enough. At any rate, Mattar’s article reels off supposed evidence of the DEI backlash, but, curiously for a Canadian magazine, all her examples are from the US. She then, somewhat confusingly veers to a different complaint altogether – that when a Black person attains a position of power, they sometimes don’t fully follow the DEI script. Mattar cites as an example “Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the Black US ambassador to the United Nations, who repeatedly vetoed motions for a ceasefire in Gaza.” Point being, I think, that if backlash against DEI ever did actually arise in Canada, we too might be confronted with such unthinkable acts of ideological nonconformity.

Speaking of silos and the CBC, flagship national radio show The Current ran a segment just las week warning that “DEI rollbacks” were “coming to Canada.” Naturally, this was framed as a looming disaster. The piece started off with a pastiche of quotes about DEI being abolished – all from the US. The host then cited a total of two supposed DEI rollbacks in Canada – neither very convincing – before moving to a twenty-minute discussion featuring two people “doing the work” as DEI consultants. (DEI skeptics are not permitted in the CBC’s echo chamber, nor is actual debate.)

In the ensuing discussion, it was interesting that neither guest could point to any substantive pushback against DEI in Canada. “Host: Are you seeing a pullback from DEI initiatives here in Canada?” Guest: “Yes…And no…There are a small number of organizations that have done the pullback…” Guest then repeats the same two examples the host opened the segment with. Guest then admits one of them isn’t even a pullback from DEI, just an irrelevant name change.

In the end, both guests were able to assure the worried host that DEI not only wasn’t going anywhere, but was more essential than ever. Besides a few PR misperceptions like the idea that DEI sometimes causes deserving candidates to be passed over in favour of lesser qualified candidates (never happens; fake news), overall, everything is going tickety-boo. The main problem is that there is so much more work to be done. Not enough progress has been made. Oh dear! The host is worried. What happens, he asks, if we don’t “get it right”? -- presumably meaning resisting the supposed DEI backlash and continuing merrily down the garden path. “Who we are” the second guest warns, is at stake -- presumably meaning that any weakening in our resolve will result in a Canadian embrace of Trump-esque racism and fascism.

Meanwhile, over at Keffiyeh Appeal, the school board trustees were extremely sympathetic to the students’ “devastation” upon discovering that that their proposed fundraiser had been rejected. One trustee proceeded to ask the students leading questions about their encounter with the principal. Regarding the keffieyah as a potentially divisive symbol: “Was there any research provided to you, or was that a personal opinion, to your knowledge?” (Notes a fellow substack-writer following this drama closely: “Most principals keep a folder of research on their desks documenting the link between the keffiyeh and terrorism just for when such situations arise.”) Trustee then told the students that the principal’s response to them was “very troubling”. She encouraged them to consider “accessing the Human Rights Process…”

Along the way, we find out that prior to being brought in front of the school board, the students – despite the supposed power imbalance and supposed lack of an appeals process – had in fact already had meetings with several other higher ranking TDSB officials including school superintendents and even the Executive Superintendent. None of those officials decided to give the students the go ahead to hold a keffiyehs for Gaza fundraiser on school property. Despite this, we have a trustee who was so concerned that the students were told ‘no’, she went so far as to claim a possible human rights violation.

It's easy to see how the trustee could have become confused. Only last week, it was revealed that teachers at another Ontario school board had some doubts about a mandatory DEI session they were required to attend. During the session they were informed of the urgent ongoing project of “dismantling whiteness.” One concept at the core of “whiteness”, they were told, is “family.” Family is, apparently, a “white” ideal, part of an overall system that “erodes personal boundaries” by “prioritizing the family’s needs.” Luckily the local CBC radio show was on hand to smooth it all over as a case of mistaken perception.

So to recap: students have four meetings plus a school board hearing because a principle said ‘no’ to their bad idea. A trustee suggests the ‘no’ was a violation of their basic humanity. Teachers continue to be subjected to nonsensical propaganda claiming concepts like “achievement”, “work ethic” and even “family” are examples of “whiteness”, not core elements of what has made our country one of the richest, fairest and freest in the world. Meanwhile, the CBC continues to promote this very same agenda, not even trying – bothering – to present a balance of viewpoints.

So much for the backlash. Instead, what we have is a digging in. Pre-emptive strikes in the media against any potential wavering. Ramping up the kind of rhetoric and ideological bullying that led one high school principal to take his own life a few years back after being called out at a DEI struggle session.

We continue to live in an upside-down world. We continue to teach students that ‘no’ is oppression. The lie has been told for so long now, rooting it out seems almost impossible. The latest fantasy is that the troglodytes are massing, preparing their final assault. Get ready, whiteness is coming! All this just shows how difficult rooting out DEI will truly be, if anyone ever actually attempts it.

Nevertheless, when his cell rings, Dad rouses himself. It’s Peter, roughly the same age, born in poverty in post-war Germany instead of in poverty in post-war USSR. They met at Engineering school in McGill and the Jew and the German have been best friends ever since. Peter has also been struggling health-wise: a rare blood cancer, plus a stroke. They’re both currently using walkers and somewhat out of their minds.

“Peter!” Dad croaks.

“Sam!” Peter slur-yells.

Even though Dad’s got Peter on speaker phone at full volume, he grapples the cell to his ear because he hasn’t put his hearing aids in.

“I’m in the hospital!” Dad announces almost jovially. Ha! Beat that! He’s speaking as loudly as he can, straining the elastics keeping his mouth from fully opening.

“Okay!” Peter says, sounding equally delighted.

“I’ve had the surgery,” Dad continues.

“I’m eating my croissant!” Peter ripostes with bizarre glee. A lifelong gourmand with a fondness for cherries, wine and anything covered with what he calls shlag (aka whipped cream), Peter is now on a very strict low-sugar diet. It is mercilessly enforced by his wife. However, everyday he gets to go down to the café attached to his apartment building. Accompanied by his personal support worker, he is permitted to eat exactly one croissant.

“I’m not doing very well,” Dad responds, no longer jovial.

Peter makes a noncommittal noise. Or it could be the sound of chewing.

“Some of us are trying to rest,” mutters Dad’s hapless roommate from the other side of the hospital room curtain.

In fact, Dad isn’t doing too badly, all things considered. We weren’t sure he was going to make it. But here is, awake, talking, more or less sensible.

“Nothing can kill these guys,” I tell my wife. “They’re indestructible.”

We are walking the dog. It’s springtime in the city, which in my neighborhood means blooming lindens and longer and longer lineups at the super-trendy pizza place. People wait for hours for a slice, blocking the narrow sidewalk and cramming the one-way street with illegally parked cars. While they wait, they take selfies. Accompanied by our ridiculous, oversized sheepadoodle, I like to time my forays through the ridiculous lineup to achieve maximum photoshoot disruption. Who knows, maybe I’ll get famous on TikTok?

“What’s TikTok?” I ask my fourteen-year-old daughter. She just shakes her head sadly. When E. – older daughter – returns from university the three of us head off to visit their grandfather. After ten days in hospital, Dad has been sent home complete with feeding tube, walker and enough morphine and methadone to stun an elephant. He has his own personal support worker now, and she’s full time, so take that best friend!

As soon as we walk in, Dad rips up his shirt to show his grand-girls the stitches on his side and the tube collecting mysterious rust coloured “drainage.”

“Dad!” I yell. “Put that away!”

“Why?” he mutters through his elastics.

“Because the girls don’t want to see that!”

Dad’s PSW gently pulls his shirt back down. My mom shakes her head in exasperation.

“They don’t want to see that,” Dad tells himself disbelievingly.

Dad is tired and we don’t stay that long. Later, in the evening, he revives enough to send out a few emails. To my wife, he sends a note thanking her for all the love and support and telling her how much she means to him. I receive a shorter message: “When are you coming to see me?”

&&&&

We visit again a few days later so E. can say goodbye. Tomorrow, I will ferry her up to the provincial park near our cottage, where she’ll work for the summer. She’s a nature kid, which I take credit for. To look at me, you’d think I would break out in hives at the mere mention of the great outdoors. But I’m heartier than I seem (so long as I have my medications). I have dragged the kids to various parks and swamps and back country canoe trips since they were four. I probably caught the bug from my own father, who, when we lived in Ottawa, used to take us car camping back in the Seventies.

It’s a gorgeous spring day. It’s time for Dad’s daily stroll, so we all head outside. Weak sunshine and a light breeze stirring the stalks of the not-yet bloomed alliums. Dad pulls his sweatshirt tighter around him. Hunched over his walker, he proceeds slowly and carefully. Our party moves down a paved front walk bisected the building’s groomed garden area. Suddenly he veers off. “Birds!” he exclaims. He stumbles onto the uneven lawn, heading downhill toward the nondescript bushes. His walker teeters. E. and PSW reach him before he tumbles. They redirect him to flatter ground. The robins fly off to the tree across the street.

“My birds,” Dad says somberly.

“Next time, Zadie,” E. says soothingly. She pats his shoulder. He stops his off-roading and looks at her. He’s had a shave, and his soft white wavy hair is combed. The swelling has gone down a bit. The feeding tube dangling from his nose gently pendulums. Dad navigates half his mouth into a smile.

&&&&

Up north, spring’s hold is lighter, like a gentle frost misting away in a rising sun. The maples clutch their leaves in tight furls. The boughs of the thick firs hang heavy still, not yet recovered, I imagine, from the burden of winter. Here, one can feel it as a smell, a taste -- the colour of the air – time passing -- a new season emerging -- lighter, I think to myself. I want it to be true.

E. and I joke about Zadie and his walker adventures. Bob Dylan on the car stereo: “I was young when I left home….” I picture thousands of seniors lurching forward with their walkers and feeding tubes, some kind of geriatric marathon. At the finish line they will celebrate with pistols. Old men wildly shooting -- at the sky, at each other -- their beleaguered personal support workers taking cover.

We fall silent as we pass the empty cottage of our octogenarian neighbors. They got into a car accident last fall and are now in a supported living complex near their daughter. They won’t be coming back this summer. Or, most likely, any summer. They have been like family to us.

&&&&

Later, with the long sunny cool day just starting to cede to evening, we throw on heavy sweaters and take the dog on a walk. We move down the dirt road lined by woods, the dog happily sniffing at everything and anything. E. sees them first – rosettes of green shoots topped with tightly curled spirals. “Look,” she says. “Fiddleheads.” Inadvertently, we’ve timed it perfectly. The hill heading down to the stream swelled by spring into a swampy creek, is dotted with them. We pick fresh greens. I brush the dirt off a coil and raise it to my mouth. The taste is bitter then nutty and green – clorophyl and aloe and asparagus. Older Daughter tries one too. “Amazing,” she pronounces. Eager to join in, the dog rolls in a patch of weeds and what I will later hypothesize to be goose shit.

Having set E. up in the staff-house and left her to get ready for her first shift and the park’s opening day, I take an afternoon to myself then head back to the city the next morning. Not long into the drive west, the phone rings. It’s my mother – they’ve seen the surgeon. He surprised them by removing the feeding tube. She sounds relieved, happier than she’s been in months. I call E. to tell her the good news. She’s happy too. I ask her how her first night at the park was. She tells me it was great. She and a few others stayed up late looking for spring peepers. Did you find any? I ask her. “Lot’s of them!”

Then I’m alone in the car, a weirdly quiet bubble, muted highway sounds, the shoosh of a passing truck. I’m almost always picking someone up, dropping someone off – a daughter, a dog, some other kid who needs a ride, yeah, sure, why not, the more the merrier. For this drive, I’m alone. In the early spring, the peeper – a beige frog about an inch wide – comes out of a long dormancy. Alone in the dark, the male, seeking a mate, puffs up his tiny throat and brings forth his surprisingly loud call. The peep. Sound of spring. Time to live. College kids with flashlights tracking the hopeful daddy’s triumphant cries.

All four took their own lives either during or after the time of the Holocaust. The first to do so was the famous biographer and novelist Zweig, found hanging from the rafters with his younger wife Lotte in 1942. Rosenfarb notes that Zweig, of the four of them, suffered the least at the hands of the NAZIs. The famous Eurocentric was known for his tremendously entertaining studies of historical figures including a book about Marie Antoinette and one called The Three Masters on Balzac, Dickens and Dostoyevsky. Before his death, he completed a memoir/historical appreciation of what he called The World of Yesterday, a book about Europe, his Europe, in the 1910s and 1920s. Writes Rosenfarb: “What a beautiful, luminous work this books is!...To Zweig, Europe is like a spiritual garden where the most impressive personalities of all nations parade in their slippers, tasting the fruit from each other’s trees…”

The fruit had turned bitter. Rosenfarb posits that the writing of this book in Rio De Janeiro while Europe and the Jews burned was too much for Zweig: “He fell into a kind of concentration camp of the spirit, from which he could not find a way out.” Both Zweig and the poet Celan wrote in German. Having to write in the language of those who murdered his parents tortured Celan. Ultimately he could not overcome the contradiction: The façade of a cultured, munificent Europe had been forever shattered; yet here he was, stuck writing poetry in the language of the NAZIs – “Can you bear, Mother, as in the past at home, the quiet, the German, the painful rhyme?”

Hitler, architect of destruction, hated Europe -- the Europe that Celan and Zweig loved, the international Europe, the striving, intellectual Europe of art and commerce Zweig depicts through his friendships with figures as diverse as Zionist organizer Theodor Herzl and modernist French sculptor August Rodin. In his epic autofiction Min Kamp, Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard reads Hitler’s infamous book of the same name (Mein Kampf, My Struggle) and moves into a 450-page essay/aside depicting the first half of Adolf’s life. Here we see the Fuhrer in Vienna, failing to gain admission to art school and then architecture school. After that he falls into life as a broke itinerant selling homemade postcards that he draws depicting sites of the city and scenes from the street. Hitler sleeps at a men’s shelter and longs, more than anything, to belong to the art world. But he lacks both talent and vision. Knowing that he can never achieve his goal is the crux of his early “struggle.”

After serving in World War I, however, Hitler finds a new passion: – unwinding the European project, deconstructing modernism, returning his battered homeland to the values of blood, steel and statis. Hitler’s failure becomes his allure. His naked rage manifests as an urgent desire to be needed, to save. People react to his fanaticism on an unconscious level. Writes Knausgaard:

Anyone who has seen footage of the rallies of Hitler’s Germany knows what feelings they evoke, the sheer might of the uniformed, I-less community, the strength of the collective, and oh, how one might long to be part of such a we. Some of the images of the age express an almost savage beauty.

The savage beauty of “a we”, of how we will be, naked awful awe. Once Hitler conquers Vienna and the war ends, his plan is to usurp the city. He will instead turn Linz, where he grew up, into the Austrian city. Amid his failing war, he commissions a scale model of the new city that features a massive museum of looted art and a giant tower under which his dear mother and father and eventually little Adolf himself will be interred. Late at night, flipping through the stack of books on my night table, I try to remember where I read that The Fuher eventually brings, along with Blondie and Eva Braun, this scale model Linz with him to the Berlin bunker where all will end their days.

I don’t find the source. No matter. The minutes tick past and I’m still wide awake. How to live after a nightmare? Knausgaard agrees with concentration camp survivor and reluctant Montrealer Rosenfarb that Celan is deliberately inscrutable. He writes his claustrophobic poetry as if he was trapped in a language or language in general. He seeks a new language from which to testify, but the dead languages of Europe linger, morphology as power. We still read Kant and Heidegger. We still listen to Hitler’s beloved Wagner. The mythology of purity, of unadulterated beginnings, still churns up in us the supposed glory days, before the Jews wept in Babylon, before Christ died smiling, before the waters muddied and dusky traders moved up and down the coast selling mongrel dogs and half-breed horses the likes of which the people had never seen.

Why? Chava Rosenfarb wonders. Why do these great writers kill themselves after the war? She notes how few acts of suicide there were when she and her family and tens of thousands more were desperately trying to survive the Lodz ghetto then the furnaces of Auschwitz. Rosenfarb charts the similarities of these four artists. Particularly striking to her is how they grew up as relatively wealthy sons in a time when the Jews of Europe were rapidly gentrifying, assimilating. All four thought they could walk away. Walk away from how their parents and grandparents had been. The old assumptions and traditions. Walk away from prayer and exile and poverty. Move to the light of modernism – of art, atheism, and freewheeling acceptance. The great free flowing churn of ideas. They had freedom! They had Europe!

But the anti-Semitism of fin-de-siècle Vienna was never far away. The undercurrent of hate that baptized young Hitler, that set him on his path of scorched earth rage against what he couldn’t be, finally found them -- in Brazil, in America, in the cold winter waters of the Siene. The Europe they believed in was gone. They had left behind their connection to the Jewish world they had once taken for granted and happily forsook. What was left to them now was a netherworld, a gray zone, whispers and faded photos, paranoia, breakdowns, reoccurring memories. They lived “overcome by the sense of being cursed and abandoned,” writes Rosenfarb, though she might just as well have been writing about herself.

Finally, I feel it. The weight of sleep. The book in my hands is suddenly heavy. I scan the passage I’m trying to parse -- one more page and then an end to this interregnum, this time before dawn.

“We were nothing,” Celan prays in his poem “Psalm.”

“We are,

We shall remain, flowering.

The nothing --, the no-one’s rose.”

After coaching Kid #2’s ultimate frisbee practice (massive tourney coming up) I meet Daddy himself for lunch. According to my mother he is eating so little these days a strong wind could blow him away, so I direct us to a haven of giant-sized Bento boxes. Daddy gnaws his way through shrimp tempura, salmon sushi, California rolls and more while I try to take the temperature of the situation. “So…Mom’s…uh…mad at me?” He shrugs and spears a deep-fried yam. “About what I wrote?” Daddy chews ponderously and surveys his Bento. I can’t tell if he’s thinking about complicated family dynamics or considering which of the neatly arranged little compartments he will plunder next.

Eventually he puts down his chopsticks and glances up at me. “Your mother,” he announces. I wait with bated breath. Yes? My mother? He shrugs and pushes over his miso soup. “Here. You want this? I don’t want this.”

You can’t get blood from the stone. (Only, apparently, soup.) As it turns out, Dad isn’t too fussed about my depictions of him. I think he’s enjoying his time in the spotlight. Having gotten that out of the way I tell him that I’ve been looking into the family’s arrival to Canada. This he’s more interested in.

My father and his parents arrive just after World War II following a stint in a German displaced persons camp run by the Americans. They are part of a final wave of Jewish refugees being allowed into Canada, this group even more shell shocked, impoverished and desperate than their 19^th century predecessors. My father is five at the time and doesn’t remember much of the story. But the documents I have tell their own tale. The threesome arrive at Halifax’s famous Pier 21 – Canada’s equivalent of Ellis Island. They come over on the trans-Atlantic transport the USS Sturgis which makes landfall in the middle of winter, January 13, 1948. (My father’s parents would have been well used to the cold, having spent some considerable years in frigid Siberia as guests of the Soviet Union.)

I tell Dad that I’d found a picture of the ship – it is large and menacing, even though it is a transport and never engaged in battles. The various naval history nerds give me a surprisingly detailed rundown of the ship’s long life and many journeys. Built in 1943, the Sturgis eventually entered World War II, plying the waters of the South Pacific, moving primarily between the West Coast of the US and Pearl Harbour. Coincidentally, ship and crew were in Japan as rare witnesses to the moment of the Rising Sun Empire’s surrender.

After the war, the ship began to transport some of the million of refugees who had been left homeless and stateless. I find a picture of the Sturgis in 1947. It is in Bremerhaven, Germany, the port from which my grandparents and father were to depart a year later. The refugees are mostly facing the boat. They are in black coats, the backs of their heads covered by black fedoras, the women in dark knit hats. There is a long tunnel that extends from the boat’s deck down to the shore. The tunnel looks at once flimsy and foreboding, its entrance caught by the camera as a black hole. I read: “These C-4 Maritime Commission ships were built to transport 3,485 GI's, but usually carried fewer than 700 refugees. Onboard the General S. D. Sturgis there were no facilities for quartering families together. The men bunked aft, the women forward, with cabins reserved for the aged and for mothers with small children who slept on bunk beds three levels high, approximately six bunk beds per cabin.”

This tracks with what my Dad remembers. I slurp his miso and he tells me his father and most of the men were put to work on the ship and slept elsewhere. He says he does not remember seeing his father on the boat. But he remembers sleeping in a bunkbed with his mother in a room jammed with bunkbeds and other women and children. Finally, he remembers, as he puts it, “wandering around the boat all day.” Five years old, he spends the two-week journey solo, going hither and tither on the large, imposing Sturgis. He’d already been through so much. Did he wonder where he was going, what was waiting for him when he got there? Or was he unbothered, already well used to lurching from uncertainty to uncertainty?

I tell Dad that in the process of searching for information about the Sturgis, I stumbled upon another family that had been on the boat with them. I had found them on the Halifax-based Canadian Immigration Museum website: A sepia tinged photograph of a family in a semi-rural setting. The father is in an undershirt revealing skinny arms. His hair is pushed back, accentuating a broad forehead sloping down to sunken eyes. The expression on his face is of forbearance, of having seen things a father should never have to see. The woman, in a dress we would think of as formal and old-fashioned nowadays, is sort of trying to smile. She immediately reminds me of my grandmother. There are two children, a small boy and a baby girl. “Reva Kanner Dexter,” the caption reads, “immigrated to Canada from Bremerhaven, Germany on board USS General S.D. Sturgis with her parents, Sarah Schwartzman Kanner and Mechel Kanner, and her brother, Hymie. They arrived at Pier 21 on January 13, 1948, eventually settling in Montreal.”

Well! What do we have here? A family of Jews on the same exact boat trip. For all I knew, they were on the bunk below my five-year-old father and my grandmother. Dad is very interested in this. I tell him that the girl in the picture, Reva Kanner Dexter, wrote an article in 2018. In it she describes her parents’ journey out of Russia and on to Canada. The same picture of the young, grave couple and two little children appears, but this time the photo is placed in Kazakhstan, where this Reva was apparently born in 1944. My father was also born in Kazakhstan, an unbelievable coincidence were it not for the fact that, as Reva’s article goes on to explain, most of the Jews who fled into the Soviet Union from Poland were at first sent to work camps in Siberia where they primarily mined for coal as forced labour.

After the USSR officially went to war against the Axis and became reluctant allies with the Polish, whose government-in-exile had popped up in London, these Siberian forced labourers were freed. They were told to go to Kazakhstan where the Polish army was assembling. But the Polish army didn’t want Jews, so Kazakhstan ended up for many being just another strange exile, a malarial swamp vector of starvation and further antisemitism.

At any rate, here was another family with a history exactly like that of my dad and his parents. Dad tells me that though his parents almost never talked about it, he does know that the journey from Siberia to Kazakhstan was exceedingly dangerous and that at one point he believes his parents were arrested for trying to steal food. He can’t remember the details. In Reva’s article she writes about her parents being part of a group that felled trees and built a raft to sail down a river, stopping to scavenge at farms for food. Occasionally they were forced to dodge bullets. Could my grandparents have been with this group? Maybe Reva Kanner knows more, if she is still around. From the article she wrote, I tell Dad, it seems as if she eventually ended up in Vancouver. “Vancouver!” Dad says excitedly. He tells me that originally his family was slated to go to Vancouver. On the boat over, his dad met another dad who had been assigned Montreal but was unhappy about it because he had family in Vancouver. Knowing nothing of either place, my grandfather Berko agreed to switch cities with the man. “Could this have been the exact family?” my father wonders. Doubtful, but if I ever find Reva, I will ask.

Despite my father’s failing health and my mother’s warnings, he has managed to polish off most of the Bento box. We are both very full now, relaxing in the booth with our green tea. Dad says he wants to tell me one more story about his parents that I’ve never heard before. I know what he’s going to tell me, but I encourage him anyway. After all, these stories are our family’s only connection to a past totally erased, a world rendered nonexistent by acts of unfathomable violence.

My dad tells me that his parents loved each other very much, that theirs was a true love from the start, not some kind of arranged marriage which was still the custom back in those days. His parents were both born in the town of Sokolow Podlaski, which lies some 100 miles East of Warsaw. There were already Jews in the area when the town was officially founded in the 1490s and the town was predominantly Jewish for the next 500 years, with around 6,000 Jewish people living there. My father explains to me that my grandparents met when they were still children. They went to school together. But Berko’s parents had died, and somehow he had ended up abandoned. He became an orphan with nowhere to live.

One day, Luba, my dad’s mother, took him home with her. She asked her father if Berko could move in with them. My grandmother’s father surveyed the tiny house in which he lived with this wife and eight children. Then he smiled and shrugged and said, apparently, “Why not? What’s one more?”

According to my father, that was the genesis of my grandparents undying love. When the NAZIs came in 1939, teenage Berko and Luba fled East, eventually sneaking into the USSR before being caught and sent to Siberia, thus beginning a long odyssey of survival and endurance that would last ten long years. Everyone else in Luba’s family stayed behind. They were all murdered, mostly in the gas chambers of the Treblinka concentration camp, an entire town’s population obliterated, though a mere .17% of the three-and-a-half million Polish Jews who had once made up the population of my grandparents’ lost world.

Now the story is almost done. I offer to drive Dad home, but he says he will take the subway. I watch him wander slowly along the sidewalk. It’s true, I think. Despite the heavy lunch, a strong wind could definitely blow him over.

A news piece catches my eye: 18 Canadian theatre groups from across the country. Some kind of statement. At last, I think, we are coming together, speaking with one voice, recognizing that despite our differences we can still make common cause with each other to resist this American bullying.

I click on the piece. My heart sinks. These 18 theatre groups have not released a statement about Canadian unity or proudly Canadian productions. Instead they are announcing that as of March 03, 2025 they have joined something dubbed Theatre Artists for Palestinian Voices (TAPV) in a cultural boycott of Israel.

Among the groups signing on are the once illustrious gay and lesbian theatre company Buddies in Bad Times (Queers for Gaza!), The Theatre Centre, which operates a mere three blocks from where I live, and The Bus Stop Theatre Co-op in Halifax, a city I visit often to see someone near and dear who is currently attending university there.

I’m not going to bother attacking the idiocy of demanding a cultural boycott of the Middle East’s only pluralistic, democratic society. (Call me when you’ve boycotted the playwrights of Iran, Ethiopia, China and Venezuela…) Instead let’s focus on the moment. This moment in time. Canada in crisis. Canada trying to stand up for itself against the most powerful country in the world. This would be a great time to hear from our theatres, publishers, galleries, film festivals and other significant cultural organizations. As a longtime contributor to the Canadian arts scene, that would make me proud in a way I haven’t been of our cultural scene in quite some time.

Instead, we get a, wait for it, cultural boycott of Israel. We get more of the usual left-woke playbook. We get virtue signaling — they had no plans to program anything even remotely connected to Israel— and the ongoing ostracization of Canadian Jews. Can they not so much as bluesky a single maple leaf? Is that too much to ask?

When I go to The Bus Stop Theatre’s website I see that it is supported financially by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Canadian Government (through the Department of Heritage), two separate Nova Scotia organizations and the city of Halifax. In fact, every single organization on this list of 18 is likely supported by federal, provincial and municipal taxes. Larger organizations such as Buddies or The Theatre Centre will receive more than half a million loonies of funding annually.

What we get for this money, other than leftist pandering, is the subject of another column. But I can tell you what we aren’t getting –- one single positive word about Canada. None of these organizations will condescend to post a Wayne’s World meme or a picture of their artistic director wearing a Canada Is Not For Sale ballcap. Heaven forfend that they come up with their own creative way to indicate that despite all of Canada’s flaws, which they document extensively in production after miserable production, it’s the only country we have and maybe, just maybe, it’s not a totally terrible place to live in.

On November 1, 2023, three weeks after Hamas brutally murdered 1200 people and dragged children and octogenarians back to their terror tunnels, a large independent press posted on X. Vancouver-based Arsenal Pulp Press demanded “a Free Palestine”, and explained that it was Israel’s “occupation and apartheid” that “led to this moment.”

Clearly this outspoken Canadian cultural producer has strong opinions about the news of the day. I can’t wait to see how they are supporting Canadians in danger of “being erased from the conversation” by that “powerful cultural” institution just to the South. Oh, weird. Nothing on Arsenal Pulp’s X feed. Silence on their website too.

Well maybe an organization more into current events? I drop in on This Magazine, a longtime leftist publication supported by several levels of government. Heavy on identity politics, their website features an impressive three articles on Palestinian resistance right there on the main page. Nothing on Canadian resistance, though. Weird again, right?

So one day after the announcement of crippling tariffs that could send our whole country spiraling into depression or worse, our cultural organizations have nothing to say to Canadians. Except, that is, the bunch of them that decided this was their moment to an proclaim an absurd, hypocritical ban pertaining to a conflict on the other side of the world.

This is not just tone deaf. It’s a missed opportunity. Canadians are looking for inspiration, for reminders of what brings us together. I’m no jingoistic penny-pincher. I believe in funding the arts, even if that funding leads to vicious critiques of our of society. All the better, in fact, since, yes, we live in a complicated, maddening country that has its share of problems.

But this is also the country that gave my refugee parents a home. A country that gives hundreds of millions of dollars to arts and culture every single year. A country of freedom and beauty. A potentially great country that, in this moment, we should be celebrating.

The plan was to travel with my parents, in their early Eighties, stay ten days, make sure they are comfortable and established, and then leave them to winter for the month. It was a good plan artfully and somewhat laboriously concocted by the females who make the plans, pay for the plans and ask only that we, the kids and the males (hard to tell which are which), shut up and enjoy ourselves. But both demands are nearly impossible for us. My father, a garrulous complainer, a man ever able to find unhappiness in paradise. Like father like son, goes the saying. It is too hot for me here. (Naturally being a creature from Ottawa via Poland, my summer tolerance is minimal.) There are tiny black mosquitoes that ravage my ankles. The food is good, but so expensive, reminding me of the classic Woody Allen gag – Woman: “The food is terrible here!” Man: “I know! And the portions are so small!” The only reason this trip was hatched was so that we could get the parents out of what has proven to be a ridiculously cold and snowy winter. In point of fact, I am driven mad travelling with my parents, my father in particular, his every complaint like a sliver of bamboo shoved under a toenail. My parents! Born into deprivation and hunger at the end of World War 2 – they never miss a meal. They must sit down and slowly consume every morsel of breakfast, lunch and dinner. “Daddy needs a sandwich,” my mother will pronounce at random intervals regardless of whether we are at an airport, driving to dinner, on a seaside boat tour, watching a movie at a volume that causes the sofa to literally shake due to Daddy’s near deafness…Pause movie. Pull over. Return to shore. Daddy needs a sandwich.

It's minus 14 in Toronto with what looks to be two bloody feet of snow on the ground and I’m standing on our deck unhappily pondering a perfect horizon. The source of my unhappiness is of course Daddy, but here’s the rub: Daddy isn’t in Belize acting out the pantomime of post colonial tourism along with all the rest of us. Where is Daddy? He is stuck in the frigid city slogging out the worst winter in a decade. I’m unhappy because I’m being deprived of my usual unhappiness. The parents aren’t here. I can’t spend my holiday complaining about how they are driving me crazy and ruining my holiday. This to me is patently unfair. Classic Daddy. Why can’t he think about me for a change? But he has passed this on to me — our never-ending id, our impulse to consumption as a kind of destruction, to eat is to eat is to eat is to get ready to die with a full belly and a clean pair of socks. He will not die the death of his grandparents and uncles and aunts and innumerable cousins, the death of starvation and disease and slaughter. He will die with a full belly. He will eat until the cows come home. And then he will have dessert and that will be his last laugh, though it will sound a bit like a cry.

Daddy can’t eat and Daddy isn’t here. Like I said, he’s at home with my long-suffering mother, slogging through the winter. In the month leading up to the trip there was a series of health crises including a ten day stay in the hospital. When the smoke cleared, we discovered that having been diagnosed with throat cancer and “cured” in his Seventies, he now has new complications from that treatment. In his penchant for bizarre illnesses – a one in a million hernia that pushes through the side of the ribs and can’t be corrected via the usual simple surgery – he has really outdone himself. Now he has a one in every 500,000-throat cancer complication that involves, wait for it, the slow death and decay of the jawbone. Ridiculous! The “cure” if you can call it that is to cut out the dead piece of jaw and replace it with living bone from the leg and hope it all works out. And so he’s at home, chewing on mush, complaining about the pain and the cold, and leaving me to luxuriate on a tropical island without him.

Typical Daddy. I console him by saying that if he gets the surgery and makes it we’ll go again next year. Then again, I say, if he doesn’t make it, he’ll be dead and won’t need a vacation from the winter. So either way he’ll be all good. We employ a lot of gallows humour in our family. My father was born in a Kazakhstani Soviet hellhole, his parents just recently released from a Siberian workcamp. The only reason he was born in the first place was so that his mother, my grandmother, could use pregnancy as an excuse to not work in the mines. So there you go. That’s what passes for humour with the Niedzvieckis. On vacation I bring along some light reading. It’s a book about called Lost Landscapes by a Polish writer named Agata Tuszynska. Inspired by the writing of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Agata wanders through first Poland then the US and Israel trying to fathom the utter, sudden destruction of Polish Jewry after the NAZIs invaded her country. The book is spare and lyrical, gently exploring both Jewish and Polish memories of this seismic event:

I attempted to enter that world. I disturbed people's memories and the earth itself in search of the traces…I was seeking something I had never known: imagined tastes and smells…But I was always intruding from outside. "You are a tourist in this world," someone said to me. "And you?" I asked. "I? I live here."

My father is one of those people who has lived, at least partially, in that lost world, an old Jew who grew up speaking Yiddish and eating his mother’s klops and kreplach. He is dying, of course, slowly but inevitably, and truly no one knows if he will ever make it to sunny Belize. The kids call him Zadie and take him to the Starbucks across the street from his apartment. There he stands in front of the register waving the chain’s app on his phone aggressively in the direction of his grandchildren while demanding they get whatever they want. Suddenly he rounds on the cashier taking the order, yelling: “What’s good here!?!”

In the island’s only town there is a café called Marbucks. We don’t go there. The town is ramshackle and funny, with random dogs running in and out of the traffic that is primarily made up of golf carts. There are various tourist shops ranging from well lit and air conditioned to dark, hot and dusty. Prompted by two little sisters I wander into a shop run by their mother and we randomly buy something simply to support this hapless store. “Mister,” one of the sisters says to me. The other little kid holds up a magnet portraying the seashore. Both collapse in giggles. The next day we go snorkeling with a man who says his name is Eddie Lover. For some reason, channeling my inner Daddy, I start referring to him as Tony Love. He taxis us out to a reef area called The Mexican Rocks and we float around the underwater home of Grey Snapper, Hog Fish, Gar, Flounder, an impressively relaxed sea turtle and a rather put upon bright green moray eel. It’s all very beautiful and I am hyper aware of my body as an alien thing in this environment, a floating skin bag of air longing more than anything for a beer. On the way home, kid #2 throws up.

That night we watch a movie which we stream via first world magic from my computer in Toronto to the app I install in the Samsung tv here in this dark compound guarded by the indomitable Vladimir who patrols our villa from six pm to six am armed with a flashlight and who knows what else. Inspired by our underwater adventures we watch a documentary about the rescue of a Thai soccer team trapped in a flooded cave system. It’s an incredible story in which thousands of people from Thailand, Australia, the UK and the US come together to rescue all 12 youngsters and their coach. I can’t help but think back to my father’s formative years in which he languished in a German displaced person’s camp with his shell-shocked young parents. In Poland their entire families were herded into camps or to the edge of town, systematically murdered. No international coalition of well-meaning middle classes came to help them. Nobody cared. Toward the end of our week of holiday, Hamas returns the bodies of two brothers, three and not-even-one-years old, that they kidnapped and murdered. There was no international coalition aimed at rescue. In many places, including in my country, it was the opposite – the murderers were praised, students took to the streets to pray for monsoons, fiercer flooding, bodies in caves.

It's hard to be embittered on a Belizean island, but if anyone can do it, I can! I owe it to my Dad, to the patriarch, to the Daddy. If I could, I’d bring him home a catch-of-the-day sandwich, beautifully grilled snapper on a soft bun. Instead, we send pictures. My mom writes back. “It looks beautiful there. Daddy isn’t feeling well. How’s the food?”

The last missive from my burgeoning Substack empire discussed an aversion I have to Holocaust movies and literature. But I’m pleased to announce that my my abject terror of Holocaust movies doesn’t extend to the latest crop of films encountering the subject. There’s Zone of Interest (an excellent film that could have gone farther), The Brutalist (haven’t seen it yet) and most prominently, due to its Oscar nominations and star power, A Real Pain, written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg. I can watch these films because they don’t terrorize me with recreations of the many gruesome horrors of concentration camp life. The movies focus, instead, on, the peripheral aftereffects. What will survivors be like, what will the surviving perpetrators be like, and what will their children and children’s children be like?

This makes sense given that these films are created by those who did not directly experience what happened, for an audience with no direct experience with what happened. I’m similarly approaching the topic through the book I’m currently writing. It’s a memoir/family history that grapples with the legacy of my family’s slaughter and survival by examining, in particular, how my first cousin ends up as a career criminal associated with the Montreal mob. Throughout the book I ask one question — How much of our generation of cousins’ struggles and travails had to do with what our grandparents and even our parents went through during World War 2?

I was excited to discover that there was an acclaimed movie purportedly addressing the very same subject. Like my work-in-progress, in the film we’ve got first cousins who have taken very different paths through lives that have been, nonetheless, disrupted by family trauma (or should I say drama?). The film will probably win some hardware in March. It’s well written, paced and acted. It tugs on the heartstrings and seems to be honest and important. But A Real Pain is a whitewashed historical dissembling, a soulless exercise in Hollywood whataboutery and erasure.

In A Real Pain, American first cousins in their thirties go on a guided tour to Poland in the wake of the death of their beloved grandmother, a survivor. The central dynamic takes about two minutes to reveal itself: David is a nervous-nelly with a job in advertising who is anxious about being away from his wife and young child. Benji is an unattached, free-spirited, overly emotional failure who lives with his parents and smokes too much pot. Cue the odd couple clichés. Benji yells at David for being repressed, and David freaks out at Benji for being selfish and a drama queen.

Both cousins, the film posits, are in some way damaged by the Holocaust. We don’t actually get to find out, though, what happened to their family and the Jews of Poland. All the audience needs to know is that something bad vibey happened a really long time ago. Unfortunate, since a recent survey of 8 countries including Poland and the US, found that 20% or more respondents in seven out of the eight countries surveyed believed 2 million or fewer Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. 24% of Polish respondents believed this to be true, despite the fact that of the six million Jews murdered, three million Jews — fully half — were from Poland.

The tour group forms and we meet a few emblematic genocide-tour types — settled older couples with a benign interest in family history; the divorcee reconsidering her life choices and direction; and the recent convert to Judaism trying to get closer to his chosen religion. This last figure is interesting and revealing: He’s a refugee from Rwanda whose own family was killed in the tribal genocide enacted on the Tutsis by the Hutus. In other words, it’s not really about the Jews, so there’s no reason to get yourself excited about Israel or Palestine or anything like that. It’s about all people, all suffering. Very noble except the meaning and legacy of the Holocaust isn’t transferable to other genocides, and vice versa. The NAZIs designed their elaborate, purpose built killing camps specifically and solely to end European Jewry. That was their goal and in its scope, sophistication, rationalization, and unadulterated madness, there has never been anything like it before or since. If you make the Holocaust about everybody everywhere, you miss the point.

Several other things in this film underscore the attempt to de-Jew The Shoah. The very noticeable soundtrack of the film relies heavily on Poland’s favorite son and most recognized musician Frederic Chopin. Oh how light those famous piano nocturnes fall on us, how the notes conjure up the gentle melancholy of woebegone days. Days when Jews were marched to the edge of the forest, stripped naked, forced to dig trenches then pushed into them and shot. Ah, the dignified elegant trill of the bullets. A flock of birds is startled from the thicket by a piano arpeggio. Go South, dear Polish birds, for this spring of bloodshed has ushered in a permanent winter, an endless night not even the master’s music can see through.

The tour stops for dinner at a “Jewish style” restaurant. The eatery’s pianist starts into Hava Nagila. The tour guide winces and apologizes. The music is too on the nose, too Jew forward, for 21st century genocide-as-generic occurrence. No Klezmer here ladies and gentlemen!

Like the background music, Poland is a kind of benevolent onlooker in this movie. The scenery shown is bland and nonjudgmental. There once a world, but this film isn’t interested in showing how little of that world of three millions Jews is left in contemporary Poland. In an unintended irony, cousin Benji, expertly played by the extremely non-Jewish Kieran Culkin (oh dear, isn’t that cultural appropriation?) upbraids their guide for the tour’s lack of connection to the actual living, breathing country of Poland. The tour guide apologizes for this and promises to do better in the future. It’s a moment that is supposed to show how Benji cuts through the guided tour bullshit and tells it like it is. Stop with the facts and figures and show us something real. It’s unfortunate that Director Eisenberg didn’t take his own advice. The film portrays a modern, relatively generic Poland, a neutral territory on which horrible things happened. In reality, though, the majority Polish Catholics were eager participants in the liquidation of the Jews of Poland. Unlike post-war German governments and society, to this day Poland actively covers up the fact that its citizens were NAZI collaborators — no one helped the Jews of Poland less than their Christian neighbors.

Toward the end of the movie the cousins find their grandmother’s old apartment. Being utterly secular, they are unable to conjure up an appropriate prayer from either their religion or the canon of Jewish culture. There is no moment of mourning, or exultation, or thanks or remembrance. There is no moment in this movie when any of the characters does anything openly Jewish — say a prayer, where a yarmulke, order the chicken instead of the pork. So the hapless man-children decide to place two rocks on the step leading up to the flat. (This was prefigured by a scene at a random Jewish cemetery where they aped the Jewish custom of placing rocks on the graves of one’s dead at the suggestion of their British tour guide James.)

The Poles living in the flat above emerge onto their balcony to take in this strange spectacle. The English speaking son explains to the gnarled dad that they are witnessing American Jews memorializing the moment with rocks. The old man shrugs and seems momentarily affected by the scene, a man without any skin in this game, though presumably living in a Jewish area in an apartment that less than a generation ago would have been owned and occupied by a Jewish family. How did he come to be in that apartment, we wonder? Who was in it before him? What happened in this place? Old man then placidly requests that the weird American Jews remove their rocks when they are done so no on trips on them. Yes that’s just the thing. Leave no unsightly trace. Since we are in the ahistorical world of hermetic genocide remembrance we do not need to wonder where all those kind Poles were when the farmers volunteered to help with the shooting while their wives stayed behind to loot the Jewish dwellings. No pushing ladies, plenty for all!

And so the movie concludes with Benji and David reconnected, bonded forever by this journey of inchoate Chopin-y yearning. Benji is still a screwup and David is still a worrier, but they are more at peace with themselves and each other from having gone through the madcap adventure of goofing around in Poland together. Time for one last gentle nocturne as Benji and David go off on their separate, yet connected, paths. A touching story of reconciliation. Also a total whitewash. This is The Holocaust according to Hollywood. No Jewish culture, prayer, or even music allowed. History is tough stuff. Forget about it! Look to the future! Erase your differences. Tinkle out a nice little tune.