Les Juives de Quebec
Kanigel, Robert
LES JUIVES DE QUEBEC ROBERT KANIGEL Montreal is French; the Jews of Montreal are not. Say what you will about the lush and intricate drama now being played out across the U.S. border in...
...A few young people from time to time drift back but most are, as Eric Maldorf says sadly, "gone for good...
...And yet, at least as much as any other minority group in the province, they're busily trying to accommodate to the Bill 101 revolution...
...Yitzchak Shochat, who otherwise has little use for what's going on in Quebec, concedes: "I think you've got to learn the language...
...Clear support" for the referendum, on the other hand, had 49.6 percent planning to leave...
...I'm all right, she felt the man was trying to say...
...Oh, that things should come to this, many readers of the English papers, Jewish and not, must have felt: Every day now, it seemed, Quebec was slipping further out of control...
...But still, like thousands of other young Montreal Jews, she is seriously weighing a move out of the province...
...Last year, appearing before 1500 Jews at the Chevra Kadisha B'nai Jacob Synagogue, Premier Rene Levesque was heckled by a group of Jewish youths who waved banners equating his party with the Nazis...
...The caption suggested that Ikey ought to go back to Palestine...
...In Quebec today, one government office does little else but check into the backgrounds of school children to see if they have the legal right to attend English schools...
...Indeed, Sandra Greenfeld reports that in her experience, "You've got to be twice as good as a francophone to get the job...
...And surely the same applies to Holocaust survivors themselves who, as Jack Kantro-witz, executive director of the Canadian Jewish Congress' Quebec region, points out, "tend to fear abrupt social and political change...
...like Jews generally, they voted overwhelmingly against the referendum last May that could have led to a loosening of ties with Ottawa...
...Yes, she goes on, the French do go for "strong male figures at the head of government...
...There were no Jews in their schools, or in their firms...
...Duplessis' Union Nationale Party had circulated a pamphlet that showed a coarse old Jew, nose long and misshapen as a carrot, retreating into the night with sacks of gold...
...Make a like assessment of Philadelphia or Los Angeles, say, and you needn't apologize...
...It was like after a big rain when the sun starts shining," is the way Rushke Abramovitch remembers the feeling in Jewish Montreal after its defeat...
...The Jews of Montreal, then, are perhaps more exquisitely tuned than others to detect any stray hints of anti-Semitism...
...Comparisons between the Nazis and what he termed the PQ's "bootstrap nationalist operation" were, he suggested, absurd...
...the numbers mentioned most often range anywhere from five to twenty-five...
...He is president of the Council of Quebec Minorities...
...I don't know English very well and now I have to study French...
...The province's Office de la Langue Fran-caise at last count employed 260 people and operated on a budget of $8 million...
...Meanwhile, even the English schools in Quebec have to have so many hours of French if they wish provincial funding, and this often leaves students at Jewish day schools with impossibly arduous schedules...
...ici, as "kite...
...I mean nothing...
...A Jerusalem Post writer, while agreeing that anti-Semitic outbreaks were ? not imminent, did insist they were "a distinct threat...
...Why not learn French, the 63-year-old widow is asked...
...And a writer for the National Jewish Monthly, which is published by the U.S...
...ish school principal with somewhat , greater precision: "The French were I treated like dirt...
...But Section 1 of Chapter 1, Title 1 says it all without comma, clause, or qualification: "French is the official language of Quebec...
...In The Street, Mordecai Richler tells how while the neighborhood Leftie was always fretting about "capitalist treachery overseas," it was really the French-Canadians at homg [who] gave us much more cause for alarm...
...Weinfeld and Eaton found that 75 percent of the Jews they surveyed spoke English with their spouses, ten times as many as spoke French...
...Everywhere, OUI signs vied with NONs, the blue-and-white fleur-de-lys of Quebec competed with the Canadian maple leaf...
...Maldorf notes the almost total absence of Jews in the Quebec civil service...
...Only the French text of statutes and regulations is official...
...Weinfeld and Eaton found that of the 657 Jews they questioned, about 12 per cent thought there was actually "a great deal" of prejudice against Jews in Quebec...
...But they are "preoccupied with their concern for language and culture...
...Back then, he was one of those who picked up the paper that morning and read of Bronfman's startling pronouncement, and one of those surprised by the subsequent PQ victory...
...while inclined to keep kosher and follow the letter of Jewish observance, they actually attended services only infrequently...
...And what with the well-publicized pulling out of several corporate headquarters, he never had to ask why: When something is unusual, or unexpected, one must find a way to explain it, observes the rabbi...
...So, then, do many French intellectuals worry about the waning of French culture and the bastardization of their language...
...Both of these native Montrealers expressed their general views richly and expressively, with "buts" and "maybes" and "on the other hands" littering their statements...
...The law then goes on to establish what it terms "fundamental language rights," which guarantee every person the right to use French in the workplace, in "deliberative assembly," in the marketplace and in the schools...
...No," said one...
...sudden social change, has left them in an almost constant state of surprise, shock and psychic discomfort as French Quebec has marched to the drum of its own historical destiny...
...They were 80 percent of the population, yet even as late as 1971 seven in 10 of them reported difficulty using their language in j stores and restaurants, four in 10 of ? them on the job...
...Jack Kantrowitz tells of his experience at the Uni-versite de Montreal, where he taught a course in the sociology of North American Jewry: "They knew nothing," he says...
...And maybe there is less...
...They're a sensitive minority, like the Jews," she says, "concerned that others like them and view them as worthy...
...Consider Montreal's Sephardim, virtually all of whom are francophones...
...He's on the board of directors of the Canadian Human Rights Foundation...
...It was a bad time for the Jews, as terrorism ripped nations apart...
...In part it stems from the French preoccupation with their own lives, and their own political agenda...
...Meanwhile, English Canadians and Parisians alike take rare delight in representing this Quebecois accent—as hopelessly mongre-lized, and the distinctive Quebecois accent as harshly nasal and cruelly unpleasant to the ear...
...And while Weinfeld and Eaton found the Sephardim generally better satisfied with developments in the province than other Jews, they found no difference in how likely they were to leave Montreal were Quebec to go its own way...
...In Quebec today, the province's cultural development minister, and architect of its controversial language law, has been referred to as "Dr...
...Those not leaving the province at least began moving out their valuables and transferring their investments...
...Was something terrible happening in Quebec...
...The Weinfeld and Eaton survey suggests that this pattern is repeated throughout Jewish Montreal...
...In other words, when it comes to this crucial test, it matters less that they speak French than that they are not French...
...Despite fears to the contrary, he points out, Jewish day schools are still getting the level of funding to which they've been accustomed...
...The pequistes—supporters of the PQ—claim they have no intention of denying anyone a place in j the province, Marldorf says...
...Somehow, with all the talk of separatism, of provincial premiers battling it out with Ottawa over issues that in the U.S...
...No doubt in part inspired by the U.S...
...And yet, the researchers discovered, their sample was really little more frutn than other North American Jews...
...He has campaigned for his anti-separatist views, door to door, through some of the city's staunch-est separatist enclaves, meeting many French-Canadians, and coming to call some of them his friends...
...A scant seven per cent said they worked for French-owned or French-run enterprises—this in a metropolitan area two-thirds French...
...Largely, but not entirely...
...It's a very European sort of thing...
...But they haven't, he feels, at least not very enthusiastically...
...As Harold Waller suggests in his 1978 paper, this is hardly lost on anglophones...
...The good solid word mere, mother, often comes out as "ma-ere...
...Catherine, had enrolled in its French classes "hundreds and hundreds of adults...
...And won...
...There is no more anti-Semitism in the hearts of French-Canadians in Quebec than there is in those of English Canadians in Ontario or Alberta...
...Or rather, there is anti-Semitism in Quebec, but no more can be seen in the words or deeds of separatist premier Rene Levesque's Parti Quebecois government than in any other provincial government in Canada...
...Some fourth graders attend school from 7:30 in the morning to 5 at night...
...He simply couldn't fathom how the leading figure in the city's Jewish community could have been so unmindful of Quebec's collective state of mind that the party he so roundly condemned actually stood a chance to win...
...Everything I can take, but that I will not take," he's reported to have angrily told the audience...
...Its cultural heroes run not to the familiar Dickens and Shakespeare, but to names foreign to many American ears, like Racine, Moliere, Corneille...
...And when you're preoccupied, you can behave callously or insensitively to others...
...squeezed these days...
...He sits on a sofa in his apartment, the picture of an Israeli fighter plane on the wall behind him...
...Then too, some separatist leaders have taken apparent delight in finding parallels between Jewish opposition to both Palestinian and Quebec nationalism...
...McGill's Ruth Wisse also sees this, well . . . mellowness in the French...
...Kantrowitz tells of a "Mon-trealers' Club" in Toronto, a disco run by Montreal expatriates, that draws hundreds nightly...
...You've got to take it or leave it...
...Maybe they just don't want us...
...Many were refugees from former French colonies that had undergone the trauma of resurgent Arab nationalism...
...They had no contact with Jews...
...They didn't want people to be able to say later that the referendum went the wrong way because they hadn't done enough...
...Jean-Claude Lasry, the Sephardic spokesman, feels the Parti Quebecois has "demonstrated fairness, more than fairness" toward Quebec's ethnic minorities...
...Since 1921, Montreal's Jewish population has climbed from 46,000 to 115,000...
...Waller cites such anti-Semitically flavored movements as Achat Chez Nous, Jeunne-Canada, and L'Action Nationale...
...But they don't want to live that way, don't want the hassles and the headaches...
...B'nai B'rith, went so far as to say that "Montreal Jews feel the dark shadow of the Holocaust hover above them and their reactions are influenced by the possibility of history repeating itself...
...A succession of laws culminated in 1977 with the adoption of the controversial Bill 101, "The Charter of the French Language...
...The PQ is basically a democratic party operating in a democratic environment...
...Virtually no one left town as the election approached, for which Rabbi Shoham gives two quite different reasons: First of all, they wanted to make sure to vote...
...They weren't in the twentieth century...
...But more, he was "surprised that others were surprised...
...So that ironically, just when things seem bleakest for them, they may yet have a chance to carve out a new place for themselves in the new Quebec aborning...
...Urbain street, out through Outre-mont and Snowdon and Cote des Neiges, and finally into the newer suburbs, the echo weakens...
...Many of them, says Jean-Claude Lasry, share French-Canadian aspirations for French language and culture, yet are deeply troubled by the prospect of a Quebec cut loose from Canada...
...At least they're the product of the legislative process...
...But second, they wanted to be ready to act instantly should the vote go against them...
...And Ruth Wisse observes that young Jews seem to be taking a kind of pride these days in the friendships they're cultivating with young French Canadians...
...By two to one, the Weinfeld-Eaton respondents felt the French were actually less prejudiced against Jews than against the English...
...And how are the Jews managing under the New Order...
...We fought [them] stereotype for stereotype...
...Church teachings on birth control kept French families large and economically marginal...
...The fact that there were open displays of anti-Semitism in the province during the 1930s contributes to the belief that it could surface again...
...In The Street, Mordecai Richler has much to say about the French, about whom the St...
...The isolation of the Jews in Quebec, as Weinfeld and Eaton put it, "results from a combination of imposed conditions and voluntary preferences...
...Eighty-seven per cent of their sample told them that all or most of their friends were Jewish...
...For a while it seemed most of the couples he was marrying were headed for Toronto...
...But it was "only the WASPs who were truly hated and feared...
...And Jews, it would seem, return the compliment...
...Jack Kantrowitz, referring to the north-south boulevard that splits the virtually all-French east side from the rest of the city, reports, "My mother has never been east of St...
...But it does exist...
...She speaks French, but she is not French...
...Aw, now I'll have to get on the plane to see my kids," they'd complain...
...It was passed, notes Eric Maldorf, "to right a social injustice—but also to make better opportunities within the economic sector" for French Canadians...
...Oh, there are still traces of anti-Semitism among their number...
...He is angry and frustrated...
...The province's system of law is rooted not in the good English earth of Runnymede, but on the Continent of Metternich and Machiavelli...
...As many other Jews already had...
...It is viewed by its prime architect, Minister for Cultural Development Camille Laurin, on the other hand, as corresponding to "a psychological moment that happens only once in a people's history...
...Yitzchak Shochat laments that the new laws have created a class of illegal students, his own children among them, who must lie in order to qualify for the English language Jewish schools...
...But : he worries that Camille Laurin, architect of the province's "fran-cisation" efforts, "doesn't seem particularly concerned about the problems non-French speaker^ are having...
...Greenfeld's facility was plainly better than her own...
...The PQ was swept into office, pushed through its legislation and few were moved to moan and holler about minority rights...
...Luc section of Montreal: "We haven't seen signs of anti-Semitism to my knowledge in the PQ...
...It is a problem Jews share with English-speakers generally, of course, but which nonetheless touches them in a special way...
...So, it's insensitivity to minority concerns—perhaps yes...
...But he may also feel that way out of his own social passivity, his own shyness, his own reluctance to reach out to others...
...But could the one imperceptibly slip into the other...
...A young man and his girl friend, neither by any means reticent, were discussing the situation as they drove back from a vacation weekend in eastern Quebec...
...And yet, one resists such a conclusion...
...The extent of their knowledge was that Jews were rich...
...And it has left them vulnerable to gradual ot Robert ? ani gel is a writer living in Baltimore...
...Because one major source of Jewish discomfort in Quebec has been their own isolation...
...And yet is the almost predictable consequence of a Quebec 1980 that manages to compellingly suggest what in fact there is no sign of whatever...
...Slim pickings, to be sure...
...Their birth rate plummeted, j from the highest in Canada to the lowest...
...In Quebec today, Bluma Myer-son's little restaurant, "Bootsie," was ordered to undertake a special "francisation" program for its six employees...
...The Jewish community of Montreal is, as it is often put, "a full generation closer to the boat...
...Let's influence the social development of Quebec...
...her son, she says, "stays up until two every night watching French movies on TV...
...But there are strong male figures and strong male figures, she stresses...
...He has consulted with a lawyer and others, but all tell him that "anything I do will be illegal...
...But the regulations that go with them are subject only to somebody's whim...
...Thousands of young Jews left the province...
...The Canadian Jewish News' fall education supplement listed French offerings of one sort or another by everyone from the Quebec Ministere de l'Immi-gration to the United Talmud Torahs of Montreal...
...For a change, there is no need to hedge: They will, by the thousands and tens of thousands, leave...
...In Quebec today, the province is headed by a man who, following the 1972 Munich massacre of Israeli Olympic athletes, came near to excusing the act on the grounds of "the Palestinian nation's" despair over its "just cause...
...Today, with a measure of calm once more settled on the city, most everyone who remains has brothers or sisters, uncles or cousins in Toronto...
...It's very hard...
...And yet, a beginning...
...Rather, they've exhibited what has sometimes seemed callous indifference...
...They did not say, the rabbi stresses, "Oh, they shouldn't have left...
...Not that ominous-seeming suggestions of it can't be found...
...It was a trauma one doesn't easily forget...
...Whether the Jews come to feel like second class citizens in Quebec, of course, largely depends on the French, and their own emerging vision of the province...
...There is no indication of that whatever," says Jack Kantrowitz to the suggestion, in the most unequivocal reply to a question I have ever heard as a journalist...
...But in Montreal, it is not alone Holocaust survivors who are burdened with Old World political cynicism...
...We recognize the need to speak French," he says of the Jews...
...In many of their minds, the language of Shakespeare is inextricably linked with a near-colonial system which relegated them to inferior jobs and second class citizenship...
...These draw angry fire from pretty much everyone...
...I can't even make a case for that...
...They've got that fear in them and they carry it with them...
...Luc, it is almost entirely gone...
...Sometimes you're in a store, and you can't eat anything," because the signs are all in French...
...Though only 30, he bears a distinguished, almost statesmanlike appearance...
...What will Montreal Jews do should Quebec split away from Canada...
...The only trouble was, "they had nothing to replace them with...
...was sharply curtailed after World War I, Canada's continued unabated...
...Whereas Jewish migration to the U.S...
...There's probably not a future for me here, with my background, education and the fact that I'm English-speaking...
...Jean-Claude Lasry, a Moroccan Jew who, as a psychology processor at Universite de Montreal his studied the Quebec Sephardic community, estimates their number at upwards of 20,000...
...For these are American cities, steeped in a three century tradition of religious liberty, protected by a treasured Bill of Rights, graced by New World innocence...
...No way could that happen in the United States," says Wisse...
...People were ready to make drastic decisions," says the rabbi...
...They come out, and they're so undefined, and you can interpret them in half a dozen different ways...
...Levesque's seeming excusal of the Munich assassins in 1972 has oft been cited, as has his party's refusal to disassociate itself enthusiastically enough from an anti-Semitic tract appearing in a small separatist journal named lei Quebec...
...Eric Maldorf is a lawyer with one of Montreal's most influential law firms...
...Except that it's just not there...
...The Allied Jewish Community Services, the area's chief community welfare institution, now gives French classes to its staff, and meeting minutes are taken bilin-gually...
...Through his Council for Quebec Minorities, Eric Maldorf is one of those trying to make room...
...Of those saying they'd already given at least "a little" active consideration to leaving, only five percent listed anti-Semitism as a major reason...
...The verb frapper, to hit or knock, frequently gives way to knocker...
...Could the closing of a border to the passage of money, which is from time to time rumored as possible, turn into a closing of the border to people—with internally repressive policies to match...
...All these statements are true, and yet we may safely dispense with the question on the mind of any Jew hearing them: There is no anti-Semitism in Quebec...
...LES JUIVES DE QUEBEC ROBERT KANIGEL Montreal is French...
...Until by the time you Teach the glistening new suburbs of Hampstead and Cote St...
...None, zero, zip...
...Following a brief sample of Greenfeld's quick, clear, idiomatic French, the interviewer asked her to get back into English...
...Manny Weiner at the Allied reports a large, and growing, outreach program—"parlor meetings," they're called— designed to get Jews talking, almost for the first time, with the French...
...And yet it may all not be enough...
...The religious behavior of our sample is," Weinfeld and Eaton summed up, "inconsistent...
...But they joined it in a hurry...
...And Jews became more politically involved than ever before...
...I visited Quebec during a period one Montrealer described as "more relaxed than any in the past ten years...
...Even Le Devoir, today Montreal's preeminent French newspaper, during the 1930s was said to be anti-Semitic...
...And while Americans often draw pleasure from how their language continues to be enriched by the drug culture, by rock music, by Indian and Spanish words, by the technology of space and science, the watchdogs of the French language in Quebec cannot afford to be so tolerant of foreign influences...
...On the whole, though, they found about the same "perceived anti-Semitism" in Montreal as a similar survey had in Toronto a few years before...
...Marcia Milstein, for example, feels distant and alienated from the Quebec bureaucracy responsible for what she sees as "those crazy laws...
...But all this was history...
...The city has a sizeable number of mostly French-speaking Sephardic Jews from North Africa...
...Ruth Wisse recalls seeing a Jewish man with his daughter lingering long at a store counter chatting with the salesgirl in French...
...According to the last census, Jews were near the top among non-francophone ethnic groups in Quebec in their bilingualism...
...Bill 101 boasts a preamble, numerous titles and chapters, and 232 sections sometimes bewildering in their complexity...
...There are no public schools, at least in the American sense, but only Catholic and Protestant ones—with Jews defined, "by grace," as Protestants...
...He's articulate, he's smart and he knows a lot of people...
...In adapting to a unilingu-ally French Quebec, many of them, he says, "feel like they're going through the immigrant experience all over again...
...The synagogues here boast the same cavernous halls and sanctuaries, stained glass and marble floors, as can be found anywhere in North America...
...Just 20 years before, as one fortyish Montrealer has put it, almost in the manner of a Zen koan, "The French were the majority in this province, but they were not the majority...
...Rabbi Shoham remembers many congregants informing him of their departures for Toronto, or Calgary, or for Houston or Atlanta in the States...
...Says a Jew...
...Weinfeld and Eaton came up with figures just as unequivocal, as they asked their respondents whether they would "definitely" or "probably" leave in the next five years under various scenarios for Quebec's political future...
...But what of those seductive parallels between the PQ and the Nazis...
...I've heard a lot of mothers complain about how there's just too much to learn," says Yitzchak's wife Fruma...
...Yet barely three months earlier, as it prepared to vote on the referendum whose approval would place Quebec one step closer to independence, the province had been in turmoil...
...And this is just what worries Jack Kantrowitz...
...Canada has no Bill of Rights as such...
...In a paper he prepared for the Institute for Jewish Policy Planning and Research in Washington, D.C., Harold M. Waller of the McGill University Political Science department noted that "Quebec's own history serves to heighten the fears of Jews that they may suffer in an increasingly nationalistic French-Canadian environment...
...I'm concerned that Kantrowitz won't go over as well as Charbonnier" when it comes to jobs and acceptance in Quebec life generally...
...Beth Zion Synagogue's Rabbi Shoham was in Israel at the time, but he heard later how his congregants had manned telephones day after day, had gone door to door trying to turn out a big NO vote...
...To Gita Rotenberg, who came to Montreal 17 years ago from New York, none of this is so surprising...
...He said that the Saidye Bronfman Center across the street from the Allied's modern, mid-rise office building on Cote St...
...But even he has doubts...
...This is, of course, hardly new...
...Then they were asked directly whether they'd choose to stay in a politically independent Quebec...
...Ruth Wisse has, with Irwin Cotler, written of Quebec's Jews that they share "the Englishman's tongue but more of the Frenchman's perspectives...
...Bill 101 is not just a language law...
...All of which is mostly silly...
...It's true, we're really very insular, very isolated," says Gita Rotenberg...
...Rushke Abramovitch," a concentration camp survivor who came to Canada after the war and still speaks English with a heavy accent, reports similar frustration...
...The Jews did do battle on the referendum...
...And that moment of individual disillusionment was multiplied a thousandfold by the Jewish community at large...
...Surely there is today, as there was in the past, some coolness on the part of the French...
...It is genuinely hard to live among them without having affection for them...
...Young French-i Canadians began studying engi-I neering and business...
...This, in any case, is just what's happened...
...Bill 101 (which is now Law 101) is seen by some anglophones as, to use the words of one recent English language newspaper report, "legislation designed to destroy their language or drive them from the province—or both...
...Even those who are bilingual "are concerned about an underlying sentiment that places a premium on being a Quebecois, not just on speaking French...
...Sandra Greenfeld is fluent in French, but she is still an anglophone...
...Says Rabbi Sidney Shoham from his airy, brightly-hued study at Beth Zion Synagogue in the Cote St...
...Befitting their Old World roots, Weinfeld and Eaton found, their respondents clung to Old World Orthodoxy, 65 percent of those who attended services doing so at Orthodox synagogues...
...Do Jewish leaders in the Diaspora worry about assimilation...
...I'm considering Toronto," she says...
...Hebrew, Yiddish, English and French, too...
...Back in the 1940s, Mordecai Richler later wrote, "the real trouble was there was no dialogue between us and the French Canadians...
...Truly, the Jews of Montreal are anglophones...
...The kids are sitting so long they get belligerent...
...It's possible to wander through a shopping center out of Cote St...
...A program sympathetically portraying the Jewish community recently appeared on French TV...
...One Jewish activist, who asked that his name not be used, tells of how when Jewish hospitals recently seemed threatened by some new insensitiv-ity from Quebec City, he brought the potential blunder to the notice of the press, and thereby was able to stave off the threat...
...Whereas Montreal is, in many respects, a European city, rooted in the Old World____ The people of Quebec speak mostly French...
...and more, "a disservice to the memory of the Holocaust," because they suggest that if the PQ really offers a valid comparison to the Nazis then maybe things weren't so bad under Hitler after all____ No, the Parti Quebecois is not the National Socialists, and the French-Canadians are not Germans...
...Jews are finding, says Jack Kantro-witz, "that all of a sudden they're not at home in their city anymore...
...The Jewish community here has traditionally been uninvolved in the political process," says Eric Maldorf...
...Ruth Wisse suggests that Quebec nationalism, while not against anyone, "just doesn't leave much room for other people...
...But in the weeks and months before, Jewish Montreal had stood poised for action...
...He is darkly tanned, wears a neat mustache, steel-rimmed glasses, is impeccably dressed and groomed...
...Its leaders, he said, were fanatics—"a bunch of bastards trying to kill us"—and if they won, he'd pick up his ball club, and his Seagram's too, and march them right out of the province...
...Oh, "the old anti-Semitism" had been "dead for years," and these young French-Canadians were "finished with the old stereotypes...
...In Montreal, it is the ironwork, the decorative grill-work that embellishes everything from the simplest yard fence to the most elaborate window balconies...
...There's no indication at all, not even the slightest...
...Now, on the eve of the 1976 provincial election, a party dedicated not alone to language rights or the enhancement of French culture, but actually to De Gaulle's Quebec Libre, a sovereign Quebec, contested for control of the legislature...
...If you don't believe it, you're free to leave.' " Which is what thousands of Montreal Jews have already done...
...School was catechism, but scarcely a breath of modern science...
...Flexing," she agrees...
...And Quebec is becoming more French, and less English, every day...
...More than half of them, suggests a 1978 survey of 657 Jewish heads of household conducted by Morton Weinfeld of McGill University and William W. Eaton of the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington, D.C., were born in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East...
...were resolved a hundred years ago, of the FLQ terrorism of a decade ago, an American is reminded of fragile and tenuous European states just ripe for dictatorship and repression...
...Weinfeld and Eaton put the proportion of their sample able, by their own reckoning, to speak French "very well" or "fairly well" at 52 per cent...
...There I'll at least have one obstacle removed...
...in Baltimore, the blocks and blocks of white marble stoops...
...At the first of them, her anglophone interviewer asked, "How's your French...
...The Canadian B'nai B'rith, for instance, characterized that National Jewish Monthly article as "insensitive, inaccurate and inflammatory...
...It was virtually her first substantial contact with French-speakers...
...One Israeli-born cantor, I only recently come to Montreal, 1 gives this formally inaccurate, yet j revealing capsule history: "A long, long time ago, the French were ; slaves to the English...
...Among them,' I heard it said, 'with those porridge faces, who can tell what they're thinking?' . . . Given sufficient liquor, who knew when they would make trouble...
...In any event, there's little doubt that more will leave should their discomfort in the New Quebec, their sense of being unwanted foreigners, increase...
...The only way to buy is if they show you a picture...
...it seems unsettlingly simple, naive, somehow just plain wrong...
...They're not a particularly violent people," Eric Maldorf says of the French...
...And no one pretends there isn't still a chance Quebec will ultimately go its own way...
...The Canadian Jewish Congress' Jack Kantrowitz calls such PQ-Nazi likenings "morally odious," because they taint the innocent...
...The Quebecois, he feels sure, have "no racist tendencies...
...Whatever their practice at home, she notes, few Montreal Jews would hold a non-kosher affair...
...You see...
...And a Jewish population with antennae more than usually attuned to finding it should it reappear...
...Sandra Greenfeld, a woman in her mid-twenties, works for a large corporation in Montreal...
...It proves, he feels, the absence of the bully in the French-Canadian psyche...
...The French-Canadian ideal is that of a permissive, not authoritarian leader, who "has to win, not command, the hearts of the people...
...The isolation of the Jews of Montreal is more than physical, and by no means entirely their own doing...
...The stereotypes are still there, and they still go both ways...
...But among Jewish community leaders, surely "there were experts, people in the know who should have known...
...nettoyer, to clean, is replaced by cleaner...
...Nobody seems to know for sure how many thousands...
...Luc Shopping Center could as easily be out Route 4 in Bergen County, N.J...
...It's a matter of appearances, she explains...
...It did go the "right" way—60 per cent to 40 per cent...
...Quebec Jews "are trying this thing on," she says, "and quite proud of the fact that they are...
...Corporations must be designated by their French names alone...
...And encouraged the abandonment of their native tongue as the price of upward mobility...
...Michael Yarosky has gone so far as to blame Jewish anxiety about Quebecois and anti-Semitism on the community's traditional "insularity and isolation...
...Lawrence Boulevard in her life...
...But it is also in part the Jews' own doing: A party-goer may feel ill at ease because his host is cool to him, or the setting is overly stiff and formal...
...Superficially, at least, it would seem to lie in this fact: The Jews, by and large, speak English, while the official language of Quebec is French...
...If Quebecois leaders have not always shown a commitment to restrained rhetoric, neither have all Jews...
...Because Jews, Israel perhaps close to mind, can better sympathize with the Quebecois wish to be maitres chez nous, masters of their own house...
...repressive or violent tendencies—no...
...All right, maybe he, Maldorf, hadn't understood the Quebecois sense of grievance, and to what lengths they were prepared to go to express it...
...The French spoken in Quebec, as one Jewish Montrealer fluent in it has found, really amounts to "a dialect within a dialect within a dialect...
...Indeed, Israeli cantor "Yitzchak Shochat" (those introduced in quotation marks have asked that their real names not be used) says he experienced more anti-Semitism on a recent two-week trip to English Toronto than he had in two years in French Montreal...
...No," said the other, whereupon both fell silent...
...Separation of church and state is neither guaranteed nor practiced...
...Faced with the loss of their old security in an English-dominated Montreal, the Jews have now been almost forced to throw off the shackles of their old don't-rock-the-boat timidity...
...A Jew was recently appointed to the Quebec Human Rights Commission...
...They weren't in a hustle...
...In The Street, an account of his 1940s Montreal boyhood, Mordecai Richler tells how the "pea-soups"—the French—were for turning the lights on and off on the sabbath and running elevators and cleaning out chimneys and furnaces...
...It is an architectural theme that finds its purest expression in the city's older districts, but even in the suburbs you can hear an echo of it...
...That's why we left," explains the 43-year-old Lasry, who was one of the first to come to Montreal in early 1957...
...As for francisation of supermarket signs and, it seems, everything else, "People are very uptight about this...
...I was overseas during the war and among the first group that went into the Dachau concentration camp, and I know what happened in Europe...
...And he goes on to argue that the separatists "pose no direct threat to the Jewish community...
...The black-painted wrought iron is everywhere, formed into ornate window grates, swirling S-shaped balconies, twisting rear stairways, mandala-faced balcony railings...
...Even Canada, as a political entity, conjures up faintly Old World memories...
...rather, atop Mt...
...She hesitates, and I fill in: "Flexing...
...They understand, intellectually, what's going on...
...And not alone, apparently, by the WASPs...
...The further out you go, the less easily can these new Jewish suburbs be distinguished from their counterparts in Baltimore or Cleveland or New York, and the more they become just so many more scattered fragments of the larger North American Jewish Community—a Jewish island split off from Montreal itself...
...There is an emphasis on forms here, in the European way...
...Rushke Abramovitch hasn't enrolled in a French class yet, but it seems everybody else has...
...The problem is fear of anti-Semitism, not the reality...
...border in Quebec, in the end it alt comes down to that...
...As you head further out, though, as you follow the great, sweeping arc of Jewish settlement through Montreal, from down around St...
...The French Canadians were our Schwartzes...
...Luc and, save for the signs in the stores, feel you were in Jewish Cleveland, so familiar would be the faces, dress, and language of the Jewish shoppers there...
...All told, they found "a situation of high communal segregation of the Jewish community from both the English and French communities...
...Were the government truly intent on drawing minorities into the French-speaking orbit it would, he reasons, reach out to help them with all the grubby little problems the new laws impose in the schools, on the job, in business and elsewhere...
...Did those people whom Charles Bronfman had called "fanatics" really mean danger ahead for the Jews of Montreal...
...Out here, the houses grow apart, the parking lots larger, the commercial landscape more desolate— and the iron grillwork more vestigial...
...They were, it was rumoured, ridden with T.B., rickets, and the syph...
...The "burden of bilingualism," for so long borne solely by the French, has thus now been shifted to English—and Jewish—shoulders...
...1 don't think we Jews should really fear...
...People started to live again...
...English gets no such consideration...
...Greenfeld is bright, attractive, well-spoken, loves French culture, her native Montreal and is at home in la langue francaise...
...Until recently an administrative assistant, she was last summer making the rounds of employment agencies in search of a better job...
...One French commentator wrote, says Maldorf, paraphrasing, that "Without investigating the merits of such accusations, we have to understand their cause for concern...
...So there it is: A place in many ways more Old World than the rest of North America, now in the grip of a new wave of nationalistic fervor, that has in the past been the scene of open displays of anti-Semitism...
...To convey the hairtrigger sensitivity of many North African Jews to any rebirth of ultranationalism, Lasry employs a French expression he roughly translates as, "Once burnt by hot water, even cold water you fear...
...That was in 1971, and since then their collective French skills have surely improved...
...Whatever their antagonism toward PQ policies, many Montreal Jews express a warmth for the Quebecois they can't muster for English WASPs with whom they share a common language, pointing to subtle things like gestures and a shared Mediterranean temperament...
...in the past, he says, Jewish leaders have been loath to take such actions...
...Jack Kantrowitz offers this reading of PQ intent: " 'We serve 80 per cent of the population,' the government is saying...
...civil rights movement, the "Schwartzes" of Quebec embarked j on a "Quiet Revolution" that was ! not always—witness the terrorist ? bombings of the late 1960s—so j quiet...
...But back in 1976, to hear him tell it, he was a veritable naif...
...Marcia Milstein remembers hearing a radio report about how the town of Plattsburgh, south of the border in upstate New York, simply had no safe deposit boxes left to rent...
...Exactly...
...Surely many Jews in Quebec feel, well...
...His last work in moment, "It Matters How The Dead Are Buried," appeared in April 1980...
...The term francisation, the Levesque government's term for its policy of enshrining French as the official language, bears unmistakable resemblance to Nazi "Aryaniza-tion...
...Exterior signs must, with a few exceptions, be in French, and French only...
...In Quebec today, government officials whom the English papers like to call "language police" go around investigating infractions of the law that makes French the one, and only, official language...
...One day in early November 1976, on the eve of elections that pitted the separatist Parti Quebecois against the mainline provincial parties, Montreal Jews picked up their morning papers and read the shattering news: Charles Bronfman, head of Seagram's distilleries, owner of the much-loved Expos baseball team, and probably the most influential voice, and biggest contributor, of and in the Montreal Jewish community, had gotten up before a gathering of 400 Jewish leaders to declare that election of the Parti Quebecois would mean "the destruction of the Jewish community...
...Actually, it's not so much the laws per se to which he objects...
...In Quebec today, c'est delicat or c'est elegant are apt to yield to c'est fancy...
...Even so, she added: "You realize you'll be competing with francophones...
...We'd send our best and brightest to the federal government," he says, while the French were running the provincial bureaucracy virtually on their own...
...Hate" and depicted by caricaturists in jackboots and Nazi regalia...
...It saddens him that in all the years of the PQ's rise to power, no Jewish leader got up to say, "Let's fight for our future here...
...And this, to Maldorf, bespeaks a rare sensitivity, one not often found in a people flexing their nationalistic muscle...
...Clashes between French and Jewish street gangs were routine, and Maurice Duplessis, the immensely popular Huey Long-like figure who ruled the province from 1944 to 1960, at one point openly charged Canadian Jews with plotting to flood the country with European Jewish immigrants...
...When people compare this government to Nazi phenomena, I think those comparisons are obscene and totally unreal...
...Bill 101, then, stands fundamentally at odds with Canada's official bilingualism, making Quebec, in most public and official respects, unilingually French...
...The bearded, 32-year-old Canadian Jewish Congress executive sits, his corduroy jacket discarded, in a large, dead-white office overlooking downtown Montreal...
...This sport, such as it is, does not go unnoticed by the Quebecois, who bitterly recall the days when French—any French—was scarcely to be heard in offices and downtown department stores...
...One man who has functioned as a kind of lobbyist for Jewish Quebec, Michael Yarosky, says that he finds "the association of the government or the people of Quebec with anti-Semitism glib, irresponsible and hideous...
...Their archaic school system, controlled by the Church, consigned the brightest of their number to the priesthood or to careers as pharmacists, notaries (a form of lawyer), or in the civil service...
...And in the past they would not have had to look far to find it...
...Is it any wonder, then, that a revival of Quebec nationalism should see a desire to institutionalize the French language and restrict the use of English...
...Some, of course, prefer to say that the French abetted their own bondage...
...Urbain Street Jews evidently had mixed feelings...
...Most of the largest ' firms, and most of their bosses, were ¦ English...
...Fruma Shochat says the only French people she knows are those who come to fix something in her house, or to clean, or perhaps an occasional neighbor...
...but when it's everyday and routine, one needn't...
...I can't legally send my son to the school I want," he says, "and this is unfair...
...Cote St...
...All the ingredients seem on hand, arrayed in a rich nutrient dish, to give a positive test for some virulent new strain of anti-Semitic virus...
...To Wisse, the French are "very warm-hearted...
...He's on the executive committee of the Canadian Jewish Congress...
...The day after the PQ got in [in 1976], there was a regular parade of Brinks trucks to Toronto," Rabbi Shoham recalls...
...In San Francisco, it is the Victorian gingerbread houses one recalls...
...And this, he feels, "breeds the suspicion that maybe it's not a question of laziness on their part...
...For Howard Rosenblatt, principal of a Jewish school subject to an endless stream of regulations on language, and governing who can and cannot attend the school, the laws are handed downto serve "political, not educational ends...
...But I'm concerned that this won't be sufficient...
...All this may, just possibly, be changing a little...
...Quebec's five million French-speakers are surrounded by 250 million English-speaking North Americans...
...Sandra Greenfeld still remembers the shock she felt when she got her first job and realized she was the only anglophone among the 15 people in Accounts Receivable...
...But so is there today a reluctance by many Jews to take an active role in the public life of their city and their province— even sometimes to simply speak out and make their concerns known...
...Of the Weinfeld-Eaton 657 heads-of-household, 135 ranked as Holocaust survivers, a group plainly carrying little of that New World innocence so much more common, for example, among American Jews...
...Their older women were for washing windows and waxing floors and the younger ones were for maids in the higher reaches of Oulremont, working in factories, and making time with, if and when you had the chance...
...In the face of an independence referendum "clearly rejected" by Quebec voters, just 8.6 percent said they would...
...To Rosenblatt, they add up to prove that the French "are interested in eradicating any vital English-speaking population and having a French-speaking population only...
...Royal in the very center of Montreal stands an immense cross, which is lit at night, and which the law decrees may not be topped by any structure in the city...
...It would be difficult to overstate the extent to which the issue of language intrudes into the life of Quebec...
...there is Hitler, and there is Moses...
...Allied executive director Manny Weiner, who reports studying French six hours a week, told me he'd attended a meeting that morning in which "no more than about 12 words of English" were spoken...
...That was all they had to say...
...But if a nationalism-fueled Old World anti-Semitism is not the problem for the Jews of Montreal, what is...
...We believe there's room for you...
...Not a Kaiser-type, she says, but rather a local cure, a country priest...
...And he makes this final point—that the French press itself has expressed "outrage" at accusations of racism directed at the Quebecois...
...Says Gita Rotenberg, a free lance writer who has lived in Montreal for almost two decades and who is far from sympathetic to the view that the English kept the French down: "They were not prepared to be mobile...
...Most importantly, they cheapen the memory of the Holocaust...
...The President ? of France, Charles de Gaulle, visited j the province and, before throngs of [ Quebecois in front of the Quebec City city hall, cried Vive Quebec Libre] Politicians sensitive to "the ' profound feeling of alienation and grievance" among the French, as one young Jewish professional characterizes it, got elected to office— and began the push for French control of the province...
...Moreover, as Ruth Wisse, professor of Yiddish literature at McGill and a close observer of the Quebec scene, points out, the provincial language laws some view as harsh and insensitive encountered little resistance to their adoption...
...The World's Fair in 1967 opened up Montreal to cosmopoli-I tan influences...
...A former executive director of a Jewish social service agency in Montreal, David Weiss, has pictured the Jews of his city as "drifting in dread," and PQ-brand separatism as a "national socialism" which by virtue of its control of the provincial legislature ranks as "particularly pernicious...
...Why, he wondered, hadn't they...
Vol. 6 • December 1980 • No. 1
