Heroes in My Head

by Judy Rebick

  Less than a year after we moved to Toronto, my grandmother died. I had never seen my mother cry before. I remember feeling sad, but for some reason I didn’t cry. I was convinced she had died because I wasn’t there to take care of her. I still think it was possible that she died of a broken heart, losing both my mother and me.

  I remember my mother put her arm around me when she told me. It was a rare show of affection. The most I could ever hope for was a peck on the cheek.

  “Aren’t you sad that Grandma died?” she asked me.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “You loved her so much. Aren’t you sad that she’s gone? I am sad and Daddy is sad. What about you?”

  “I’m sad, too,” I said, but I refused to cry. “Are you mad at me?”

  “Why would I be?”

  “It’s my fault.”

  “What are you talking about, Judy?”

  “I know she died ’cause of me. You don’t have to pretend.”

  “She didn’t die because of you. What are you talking about?”

  “I know what happened. She fell holding me when I was a baby and that’s why she’s crippled, and she died ’cause I wasn’t there to take care of her.”

  “Where in the world did you hear that story? It’s not true. She got sick and her sickness made her crippled. She had a tumour on her spine. It was when you were a baby but it wasn’t because of you. Anyway, she didn’t die from the tumour. She died of old age.”

  I never got to say goodbye to my grandmother or participate in the collective grief of the family. My parents thought that children should not attend funerals, so Lenny, Alvin, and I stayed in Toronto with a babysitter while my parents were in Brooklyn. Whatever grief I might have had for my grandmother was buried along with everything else.

  * * *

  After my grandma died, my dissociation went into overdrive. My memories of my childhood in Toronto are pretty sketchy. I remember school, camp, going to the Jewish Y on Sunday mornings when my father played handball and we went swimming, and I remember going out for dinner either to the Steak Pit on Avenue Road or to China House on Eglinton Avenue.

  I do remember that my father changed once we moved to Toronto. He went into the hardwood flooring business with his family and started making a lot of money. If you live in a building that was constructed in the 1960s or 1970s in Toronto, you’re probably walking on floors they installed. He became successful and was admired by people around him. Jack made and lost several fortunes in his lifetime but that never bothered him. He was a risk taker and enjoyed living the good life. He gave my mother beautiful jewellery, a lot of it smuggled across the border, and they travelled a lot, especially on cruises. He went on regular junkets to Las Vegas. Jack was a gambler, betting with bookies in Toronto on every sports game going. He didn’t worship money, though, and he didn’t teach us to feel insecure without it.

  Generally, my mother was the parent who taught us how to behave. My father took us out to baseball, dinner, and concerts. He taught us through his behaviour neither to respect authority nor to follow the rules. He broke the law with impunity, had no problem standing up to cops or any other authority. He had episodes of uncontrollable rage, which frightened us, but my mother was more the disciplinarian when that was necessary.

  My father wasn’t like other people’s parents. He was exciting, unpredictable, funny, handsome, charming, and had gangster friends. I still occasionally meet people who have stories about him. So despite the fights, the rage, and the humiliation he caused me, my brothers, and my friends, I loved him.

  During the first couple of years we lived in Toronto, we went to Brooklyn a lot. Before the New York State Thruway was finished it was a twelve-hour drive. We three kids sat in the back and spent our time singing Broadway musical tunes. I still remember most of the lyrics to those songs. My parents didn’t sing but they enjoyed music: jazz, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan. Some of my happy memories are of those road trips. After my grandfather died in 1960, we didn’t go to New York as often. In Toronto, it was the neighbours that became our community. Because my father didn’t get along with most of his family, they were not a part of our daily lives. We visited my father’s parents and occasionally my aunts and uncles, but my mother’s friends were the neighbourhood women she played mah-jong with and my father socialized with his business associates.

  I also remember Rusty, our dog. She was a beautiful Irish Setter but not very well behaved. Leonard and I trained Rusty to jump on Alvin; as a result Alvin was afraid of her. My father would hit Rusty with a newspaper when she misbehaved but that only made her wilder when he wasn’t home. One time my mother baked a couple of apple pies, my father’s favourite, and left them on the kitchen counter to cool. Before we knew it Rusty had eaten a pie and crushed the other one with her paw. Soon after, Rusty disappeared; my father gave her away. I don’t remember how long we had her or whether my mother agreed with the decision, all I know is that we blamed Daddy. Everything bad was always his fault.

  While things continued to be volatile at home, school was a different story. Grade six was my best year. Alvin remembers that year I came into my own, telling stories about school at the dinner table and generally taking up more space. I do remember gaining more confidence in myself that year. I especially remember Mr. Subden. He not only recognized my talents, but he also helped me overcome my fears. I was afraid of tumbling, standing on my head, or doing a somersault during gym class. He didn’t order me to do it or excuse me from doing it. He helped me overcome my fear by supporting me. His kindness was like a calming balm. I even invited him home for dinner. I also remember my grade seven teacher, the towering, authoritative Miss Martin who wasn’t married and seemed very happy.

  After this I remember almost nothing about school. The years between grade eight and eleven are missing from my memory. I suppose it’s not an accident that this would have been about the time when I was moving into puberty. But a few key incidents stick out in my mind.

  When I turned fourteen, I went on my first real date. Marty Silverstein, one of the most popular boys at camp, asked me out on New Year’s Eve. I was beyond thrilled. I don’t remember either of my parents objecting to the date beforehand; no doubt if they had I wouldn’t have gone out with him.

  When Marty arrived at my house to pick me up, my father came to the door.

  “Hello, young man?”

  “Hello, sir,” Marty replied nervously.

  “I hope you know that I expect you to take care of my daughter and get her home on time.”

  “Sure thing,” Marty answered.

  Anxious to get out as quickly as possible, I started to put my boots on.

  “What’s wrong with you, young man?” my father said in a raised voice.

  “What do you mean, sir?”

  “Didn’t your parents teach you any manners?” Jack was now booming.

  Marty was confused and frightened.

  “Help her put on her boots, for Christ’s sake,” my father bellowed, moving in to grab Marty’s shoulders and force him to the ground.

  “Stop it, Daddy. I can put on my own boots,” I insisted, but it just made him angrier.

  Marty quickly got down on his hands and knees to help me. He was humiliated and I was angry. Marty was the perfect date: Jewish, handsome, from a well-to-do family, a good student. If my father wouldn’t even accept Marty, what was the point? As long as I was living at home, I would never go on another date.

  When I look back, it seems very extreme that I would give up on dating after that incident, especially since I stood up to my father on other issues. Now I think that his reaction to my dating was more threatening to my subconscious mind and I probably dissociated from my sexual feelings entirely until I was much older. I did once make out with a boy at camp when I was sixteen, but we got caught and I was lectured by the camp director, whi
ch no doubt reinforced the unfelt fear.

  Another memory that has stayed with me was when I experienced my first anxiety attack at camp at age fifteen. I felt a tightness and fluttering in my chest and went for a walk in the woods to get away from the girls in my cabin. My counsellor noticed I was missing and came looking for me. I didn’t know why I was feeling so anxious and I don’t remember what she did to calm me down.

  A year later, I suffered a clinical depression. I had just had my sweet sixteen party, a wonderful, elaborate event. There were printed invitations, the dress was semi-formal, and everyone was assigned a date. My father even had a dance floor built in the backyard. It was a lovely celebration, and I was pretty, popular, and a good student — all the things that were supposed to make you happy. But for some reason it made me feel desperately alone.

  During this time, my father was away a lot. His conflict with his father and his brother Irving, who ran their hardwood flooring business, was getting worse. Jack decided a business to manufacture flooring would be a good addition to their operation and the others agreed. He started going to Montreal to explore the possibilities and decided to open a factory in Sherbrooke, Quebec.

  A phone call that year made me question why he was away so much. My mother was down the street playing mah-jong and we kids were alone at home. The phone rang and Lenny answered it.

  “I want to talk to your father,” a man said angrily.

  “Sorry, my father’s not here,” he responded politely.

  “I know he’s not there,” the man yelled. “He’s in a hotel fucking my wife. Tell him that I’m going down there to kill him.”

  We huddled together trying to decide what to do. Should we call the police? What will we say? If we call the police, Mom will find out. Daddy can take care of himself but maybe we should warn him. We don’t know where he is. What are we gonna do?

  We didn’t do anything. Jack called that night from Montreal. He was fine. We were relieved. We weren’t really surprised that Jack was cheating. He had already bragged to Lenny that he had slept with another woman the day after his wedding. So we figured he was still cheating on my mother. But this call made it more dangerous.

  That winter, I had an undiagnosed illness that kept me in bed for more than a month. There were no real symptoms, just extreme fatigue and a lack of interest in anything. My marks in school went down 30 percent. The doctor diagnosed a virus because he had no idea what was wrong. I realize now that it was my first clinical depression. Many years later, I met my pediatrician Dr. Gerry Cohen and his wife, Dr. May Cohen, both of whom were important medical leaders in the pro-choice movement. I asked Gerry if he remembered me as a teenager and this particular illness. He did and agreed it could very well have been a depression, since little was known about teenage depression back then.

  After the depression, I gained a lot of weight, about forty pounds by the time I was eighteen. I was so skinny as a child that my mother had to buy suspenders to keep my skirt up. I started gaining weight once I hit puberty. At fourteen I weighed 125 pounds, 136 at fifteen, 148 at sixteen. By the time I was eighteen I weighed 180 pounds.

  Eating was comforting and being bigger than other girls made me feel safe. Being overweight also meant that boys weren’t as interested in me, so I didn’t have to work very hard to avoid going out with them, knowing that my father would make my life miserable if I did. Maybe I was looking to create a reason for my unhappiness that I could understand.

  Five

  “It Was McGill that Ruined You”

  In 1962, my father decided we would move to Montreal. The planned move gave me something to look forward to. I had friends and was active in the student council in high school, but still I was miserable. I was sure university would be much more stimulating and I would have more independence.

  My father had an architect friend of his design our new home. It was a two-storey ranch-style house with a floating staircase in front of a huge picture window. From the outside it looked like a mansion. There were four bedrooms, a large living room, dining room, kitchen, and den.

  My strongest memory of that house was running up the stairs after a fight with my father and slamming the door to my bedroom, where I was spending more and more time alone. My strategy to avoid fighting with my father was to invite my friends over, in the vain hope that Jack might behave himself or at the very least have a new target to occupy him. The first time my friend Susan Swan came over, he attacked her for not accepting the offer of seconds of what was certainly roast beef, mashed potatoes, and peas and carrots after a hearty soup and a chicken liver forshpeis (appetizer) — our usual Sabbath dinner.

  “What’s the matter, don’t like our kike food?” he berated her.

  Susan, who had never met a Jew before going to McGill, was horrified and looked to me for rescue. All I could do was roll my eyes. She had seconds and thirds, but that just encouraged him. I had warned her about Jack — we always warned our friends about my father’s “sense of humour.” He was almost always mean and could be very cruel. Susan never came back.

  I can still hear my mother’s voice: “It’s just your father, Judy. Don’t you know him by now? Why do you get so upset?” “Grin and bear it” was her motto, though I believe his behaviour never really bothered her.

  * * *

  My activism began the day I walked into the McGill Daily office in downtown Montreal in the fall of 1964. The office occupied most of the basement of the old Student Union building. At the centre of the office was a semicircular desk where the editors sat each day. There were a couple of offices along the wall for the editor and managing editor; the rest of us sat in a large open room at whatever desk was empty. The room functioned as a social space as well as a workspace.

  The Daily was the centre of radicalism at McGill. The New Left, which was what we called the radical student movement in the United States and Britain, had been redefining left-wing politics for a couple of years, mostly on campus. The New Left rejected the old leftist ideas of social democracy and Communism. The focus was on democracy and fulfilling the promise of government for, by, and of the people. I didn’t know anything about political activism but I loved the energy, the excitement, and the people involved in the movement. They were like me: misfits. Instead of admitting ignorance, I just kept my mouth shut, listened, worked hard, and dressed all in black so I looked like a radical. Everyone thought I was a lot savvier than I was.

  My first byline was for an article covering a speech given by pioneer feminist Laura Sabia to the McGill Women’s Union in November 1964. Mrs. Sabia was appealing to the “girls,” as we would have been called then, to stay in school. “The natural instinct to have children will be just as strong when you are thirty as it is when you are twenty,” she explained.

  Women were first admitted to McGill in 1884 but were not allowed to join the Students’ Society until 1931. The Women’s Union at McGill was founded during the First World War to organize care packages for soldiers; thereafter it continued to give women students a voice. In the 1960s, things were beginning to change. In 1964 Joy Fenston was the editor of the Daily, and the following year Sharon Sholzberg was the first female president of the Students’ Society. It would be a few years before the new generation of feminists, no doubt some of them in that very room, began their revolution. Looking at old issues of the Daily, it is clear that I had what we probably called the women’s beat.

  At the Daily, I met girls who seemed like they didn’t quite fit in, like me: Susan Swan, a tall magnificent creature who with her upper-class WASP background was no less exotic to me than if she had been from outer space. She was the only girl at McGill to ever quit a rushing for a sorority, but she still looked like a sorority girl. She felt out of place at the Daily, which was full of mostly bohemian Jewish radicals, but she loved writing. I befriended her because she seemed so different and because I secretly wanted to be a writer, too. The beatnik look
that I affected fooled her into thinking I belonged there so she was grateful for my friendship. And a great friendship it became, lasting until today. Honey Dresher was, like me, a nice Jewish girl who didn’t accept the future laid out before her. We quickly became friends and had a wonderful time together. And then there was editor Joy Fenston. Tough and serious, Joy was like no other girl I’d ever met. We never became friends but she was an inspiration. I don’t think Joy took any particular interest in promoting female writers, but her presence was inspiration enough.

  I remember the excitement of my first demonstration that fall. It was the year that three civil rights workers who had travelled south to assist with voter registration for Blacks were murdered in Mississippi. We marched to protest the minimal sentences given to the perpetrators.

  The Daily gave me the opportunity to stay away from home, too. We worked long hours and when we were “on the desk,” those hours stretched until after midnight. It drove my father mad. I assume he didn’t like my growing independence, and Lenny was away at school so Jack didn’t have him to pick on. That left only Alvin, and Jack almost never picked on Alvin. The difference between me and Lenny was that I fought back.

  “It was McGill that ruined you,” he would say for years after.

  * * *

  1965 was the year that changed everything. Patrick MacFadden became the editor of the Daily. He was Irish, quite a bit older than the rest of us being in his late twenties, married with children, well schooled in the radical politics and culture of the time, and a consummate womanizer. Most of us were in our late teens, enamoured by the growing youth movement in the United States and a little awestruck by his greater knowledge and charisma. We hung on his every word.

  At the first meeting that term, Patrick said, “We’re going to change what the Daily is.”

  Patrick made good on that promise, transforming the Daily from an ordinary campus newspaper focused on student politics, sports, fraternities, and events to the centre of radical activism at McGill. What that meant in 1965 was challenging the administration and the right-wing elements on campus, particularly those on the student council. It also meant supporting the civil rights movement and national liberation struggles around the world, including the one in Quebec, and of course opposing the war in Vietnam. This was the period when the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) was calling for a socialist insurrection and the overthrow of the Quebec government. The independence movement in Quebec was modelled on many of the anti-colonial liberation struggles. McGill University, a central Anglo institution, was a major target of their attacks.