A Good Place to Come From

by Morley Torgov

  At this point the speaker halted. He was attempting to suppress a belch, and obviously succeeded, although where the wayward pocket of air found a vacancy inside that well packed interior, heaven only knew. Wherever it was, it was immediately joined by the remainder of a third glass of water, then a fourth. Momentarily relieved, the speaker looked out over the audience once again, earning a round of applause mixed with laughter. There being no gavel, the chairman slapped a book down hard upon the table.

  "Please, let us have some order and respect." He gestured politely to the speaker to continue. Instead, the speaker bent laboriously toward the chairman. A whispered conference between the two, and anxious glances toward the doors leading from the hall, told what was next on the agenda. Taking the old man solicitously by the arm, the chairman led him from the head table toward one of the doors. The moment the door closed behind the two, the audience—men, women, and children (those old enough to understand)— broke into uncontrolled laughter. The rabbi, whose generosity as a host was exceeded only by his love of a good joke, abandoned the dignity of his station and laughed until his cheeks were crimson behind his white beard.

  It may be said that the elderly scholar emerged from the same door wherein he went. In fact he was obliged to do so no fewer than four times during the course of his speech. Each time he excused himself with great feeling: "Please, please you must pardon me ... I'm so sorry, so very sorry ..." But on each successive return the applause grew until it was almost an ovation. Had he been capable of sustaining such a performance, he would no doubt have attracted standing-room-only audiences within a few nights for by now he had become the object of sympathy as well as amusement, the perfect comic hero.

  Considering that his lungs and arteries, not to mention his other vital body mechanisms, had functioned overtime throughout the evening, his final declaration rang out with astonishing vigour: "Praise be to God the Jews have turned the desert into a blooming garden!"

  Too exhausted to acknowledge the enthusiastic handclapping that greeted the end of his oration, and too weak even to accept another glass of water that was offered, the old man slumped into his chair.

  "I'm sure I speak for the whole Jewish community," the chairman said when the applause had ended, "when I say how truly inspired we are by our guest speaker's glorious and important message."

  More enthusiastic applause.

  "And I am confident," he went on, "that each of you will now want to look into your heart and respond to this great man's emotional challenge that we should contribute to the welfare of our less fortunate brethren in Palestine."

  The chairman paused and peered sternly over his spectacles in the direction of the cluster of men in the assembly. No handclapping now. Just absolute silence.

  "You didn't tell us there would be fundraising," one of the men called out.

  "Come, come now," the chairman called back, "you didn't come here just to eat herring and onions, did you?" Amid general mutterings of discontent, there commenced a tribal ceremony known as "on-the-spot collection." The ritual (which the congregants would undergo on many occasions afterward) proceeded thus:

  Stage One: A tense stillness in the air. Everyone waits for one or other of the two "rich ones" to open. Meanwhile the two "rich ones" eye each other cagily, neither daring to make the first move. This is the orthodox Western gunfight, but in reverse-the object is to see which gunfighter has the slowest draw. Having hung back as long as honour will permit, one of the two finally announces his commitment. The other quickly matches it.

  Stage Two: Murmured criticism on the part of the bystanders because the rich ones opened scandalously low or—even worse—uncomfortably high.

  Stage Three: The momentum builds slowly downward as, one by one, the men in the audience call out their pledges and begin writing out their cheques.

  Stage Four: An awkward minute or two as "the poor one" makes up his mind.

  Stage Five (Final Stage): A collective sigh of relief.

  The ordeal of giving was over. Without awaiting further formalities, the audience rose from their seats and fell into noisy chatter. One knot of disgruntled donors immediately huddled in a corner of the room remote from the head table, to plot the ruination of the chairman. The chief plotter—a strict authoritarian at home but an unfettered anarchist away from home-occupied the centre of this group, inflaming his small band of cohorts with angry talk. "If I told you once, I told you a million times, you cannot trust a Galitzianer. May they burn in a fire, every one of them!" In another corner were gathered "The Four Hundred," those few in the congregation who considered themselves more affiuent and sophisticated than the general run—the cream of the cream, the chosen of the chosen. At their centre, holding court, stood the wealthiest entrepreneur, delivering a travelogue; he hadn't been to Palestine, but he had been to Florida recently and in the eyes of his courtiers he enjoyed at least as much celebrity status as the guest speaker. Close by the refreshment table, the town glutton and gluttoness, an obese couple who lived from snack to snack, carefully stationed themselves within easy reach of a large platter of spicy baked carp, thus gaining a two-seconds advantage over their nearest rivals, a poor second-hand furniture dealer and his wife for whom two slices of carp were often a full-course meal. Liberated from parental control at last, the children erupted all over the room releasing two long hours of bottled-up energy.

  With the arrival of the first steaming samovar, the chairman, the plotters, The Four Hundred, the uncommitted, and the kids all joined in the crush at the refreshment table. In their resolve to get at the platters of food they were—as always—unanimous.

  In the front rank, pressed against the refreshment table, stood the guest speaker, filling his plate—a human silo storing food to sustain him over the hundreds of miles of rail way track that stretched from the Sault to the next Jewish outpost on his itinerary.

  After him, there came other guest speakers from time to time. Mostly they were younger men. Some were poor scholars, thin, attired in loose-fitting black suits, their pale faces bearded; verbal stuntmen who spoke almost entirely in Yiddish and quoted from memory Hebrew sayings out of the Old Testament and Talmud, none of which they took the trouble to translate but all of which sounded erudite and impressive. Their voices rose and fell dramatically, and they performed little ballet movements with their shoulders and arms as they pleaded in this wilderness for faith and charity. When they ate, they pecked at their food furtively, like crows.

  Others were portly businessmen from Toronto who stepped off the train in expensive overcoats with velvet-trimmed collars. They spoke in English and drew their quotations from Shakespeare ("If you prick us, do we not bleed?"), but most of the time-being men of affairs—they relied upon facts and figures, graphs and charts, to make their points. Invariably they were on diets and ate with extreme caution, politely rejecting second helpings, swallowing little white pills discreetly with their tea, joking self-centredly about their ulcers and the strains of operating large clothing factories and travelling on speaking circuits during the off-season.

  All of them—though their talents varied—threw their hearts into their tasks. But not one of them came close to matching the old man's effectiveness. It was one thing to speak from the heart. And quite another to speak from the heartburn.

  Being Prepared

  The Great Debate of '38 began on the eve of my debut as a full-fledged Boy Scout. Tomorrow-Sunday-our troop would march from its home base, Central United Church, along Albert Street to St. John's Anglican Cathedral for a joint service with other local troops. The route was a mere city-block in length, but for me the occasion—my first parade—held all the significance of Caesar's return to Rome from Gaul. I stood before a full-length mirror fussing with my brand-new uniform, adjusting and re-adjusting the Mountie-style hat, centring and recentring the red and grey neckerchief, pulling the navy-blue hose so taut they wouldn't dare wrinkle. In response to my own orders—shouted at the top of my voice—I practised snapping
to attention, standing at ease, and saluting.

  All this drilling my father tolerated in silence, hidden behind his newspaper. But I could sense his mounting impatience by the rattling of its pages. The whole idea had been unpopular with him from the moment I announced my induction. ("You're almost a man already. You got no business at your age with such childish things. You should be learning typing and shorthand so it'll be easier for you when you go to college.") The fact that our troop met weekly at Central United conjured up horrible visions in his mind. He saw me standing in the church pulpit before packed audiences bearing witness of my conversion to their faith and denouncing my own people. I tried to explain that we met in the basement of the building and promised I would never so much as venture upstairs where the pulpit was located. These preliminary explanations and promises he received with a grain of salt. My pre-parade rehearsal did nothing to improve his outlook.

  Still he said nothing—until I began rehearsing the Scout oath: "On my honor I promise that I will do my duty to God and the King. . ."

  That did it. The newspaper landed half-way across the room as if blown by a hundred-mile-an-hour gale. A splitsecond later came the thunder.

  "Just what in the hell do they think they're doing, making a soldier out of a kid. Look at you, you're not even twelve years old yet."

  "Make up your mind," I said. "Last month you told me I was almost a man already. Besides, they're not making a soldier out of me. Honest. Just a Boy Scout."

  "As far as I'm concerned a uniform is a uniform, and I don't like it."

  "But even bus drivers wear uniforms—"

  "Bus drivers don't go around saluting and promising to do their duty to God and the King."

  I assured my father that our activities were entirely peaceoriented.

  "We learn all sorts of valuable things. How to signal with flags, how to make a fire by rubbing two sticks together, how to make a stretcher to carry somebody with a broken leg."

  "That's exactly what they made me learn in the army.

  Next thing you know they'll stick a rifle in your hands and tell you to go shoot people."

  We argued back and forth for an hour, my father serving, I retrieving. He remained unconvinced. He was remembering his own youth. At the age of nineteen, having failed to rupture himself by deliberately lifting heavy stones (a sort of un-fitness program), he was passed as medically sound and conscripted into the Russian Army. Two years later, his cavalry unit hopelessly bogged down on the Austrian Front, he took stock of his military career, and decided that it had nowhere to go but down. Together with two other Jewish conscripts who had come to the same conclusion, he chose to go sideways. Late one night he and his cohorts demobilized themselves, shedding the Czar's uniform and rifle, and fleeing across the border to Roumania. It. was a tale I'd heard often. Historians may have overlooked or ignored it, but I was always a little proud that—almost single-handed-my father made peace with the Kaiser in August of 1917.

  Now, barely twenty-one years later, here was the peacemaker's son, not yet in his teens, about to study semaphore, first aid in the field and incendiary techniques.

  "Don't worry," I said, "they don't teach anything about war. In fact just the opposite. Tomorrow we’re going to church to hear a sermon all about Lord Baden-Powell and scouting."

  ''Which church?''

  "St. John's Anglican."

  "St. John's Anglican! That's where they kneel when they pray. I know; I've heard about it. What are you going to do when they kneel down, eh?"

  I hadn't thought about that. In the past, when problems of that nature arose, I was always able to fake it. It was easy during morning exercises at school; the others would never notice that my lips didn't move throughout the Lord's Prayer because all heads were bowed and eyes shut tight in the prescribed attitude of piety. In the murmur of thirty young voices asking forgiveness for their trespasses, the silence of one non-Christian trespasser was inconspicuous. When they sang "Jesus Loves Me" I quietly substituted "Moses" for "Jesus" and thanked God that I was never called upon to sing the hymn solo.

  But kneeling in church—that was a religious crisis I hadn't faced before. Father was no help. "Those short pants'll sure do you a lot of good. Either you'll freeze your knees off, or you'll skin 'em raw kneeling in the cathedral."

  The parade went well. True, there were no spectators (who wants to watch Boy Scouts parading on a cold November Sunday morning?), but at least my hat stayed on and my socks stayed up.

  Inside the cathedral now. Sun streaming in through stained glass windows. Dean and Bishop in black and white robes leading the choir in the majestic processional, organ resounding throughout the high gothic-arched sanctuary. A far cry from the second-storey Foresters Hall, reeking of fresh varnish and stale beer, that my congregation rented for religious services until the early forties when the first synagogue was built.

  As a courtesy, the' Anglicans yielded the front pews to the boys from Central United; thus I had the misfortune to be seated almost directly under the dignified noses of the impressive Dean and the even more impressive Bishop.

  And then it came. The moment of truth. The Bishop rose and spread his arms: "Let us pray."

  The whole cathedral shifted forward to its knees. I alone sat frozen stiff in my pew not through courage but through fear. I was certain sorneone would cry aloud "Stop the prayer!" and I would be led off under close arrest to some dungeon deep in the bowels of St. John's, an unwitting Jewish martyr in a High Anglican stronghold.

  It seemed the prayer would never end. "Grant in these troubled times Thy blessing upon all our rulers ..." And there commenced an inventory of all our rulers as of 1938, beginning of course with the Royal Family, and working downward through an inexhaustible list of federal, provincial and municipal statesmen, the judiciary, the armed services and—at the bottom of the list—the most feared public official of all, our Local Chief of Police. At last, "Amen" and the whole cathedral shifted back into its seats and the service continued.

  I had stayed put. And I had survived.

  The first question fired at me when I returned home was not unexpected.

  "Well, soldier, how did you handle yourself when it came to the kneeling business?"

  Summoning all the sarcasm that a twelve-year-old boy man can possess, I shot back with a sneer, "I deserted my troop and skipped across the border."

  Then, remembering the Scout motto—"Be Prepared"—I retreated without a moment's delay before the former Russian army man could mount an attack, and sought haven with a friend who lived two safe blocks away. For the remainder of that Sunday, my friend's house was Roumania.

  The Salesman

  "He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine ... A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory."

  (From Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, Viking Press, New York, 1949)

  He rode on more than a smile and shoeshine. Much more. From what I saw of it, his life was crammed full of silver linings. The lapels of his double-breasted suit were cut razor-sharp and the three points of his breastpocket handkerchief stood up crisp and white and meticulously spaced. He travelled in the Pullman club car of the Toronto-Sault train. He ate steak every night in the best Chinese restaurant in town. And—most important of all—he quartered himself on the top floor of the biggest hotel, a nine-storey structure whose lobby was populated with important-looking men sitting in leather armchairs reading out-of-town papers and smoking cigars.

  Enveloped as he was in an aura of success, why then, I wondered, were his periodic descents upon my father's clothing store greeted with such lack of grace and hospitality?

  "Oh, so it's you again. What are you selling this time, cancer?"

  "Aw c'mon, don't be like that. I've got the greatest winter line you ever laid eyes on. Golden merchandise, every piece!" "Genius, that's what you said about your fall line. Take a look at my stock of suits. Middle of September already and two-thirds of your golden merchand
ise is still catching lint here. I can't give it away. The Salvation Army turned it down; even people on relief won't wear it."

  "Look, autumn is autumn and winter is winter. You can't expect to sell fall coats in December, can you?"

  With this fast bit of verbal footwork the salesman man aged to transport my father's ·economic outlook from the present season to the next. Don't bother to examine the logic; there was none. This was simply the standard opening round of a mating game between two old sea otters: the salesman (male otter) playfully and persistently luring the reluctant clothier (female otter) into the hotel sample-room (the underwater bridal chamber) by a series of deft twists and turns in the waves. At last "the bride" succumbed.

  "Alright, I'll look at your line ... but I won't buy!"

  This last threat was, of course, meaningless, a resolution that was always stated for the record at the outset only to dissolve the moment my father was exposed to the latest fashions. He was careful, however, to maintain a cool poker face.

  "Hm ... this little number ... not great, but not bad. Might just sell—"

  "Might! You'll sell 'em by the carload. You'll beg me for repeats. What's-his-name in North Bay bought four dozen of this one number alone."

  "Liar, he bought two dozen."

  "God should strike me dead, he bought four dozen."·

  "Two."

  "Okay, so maybe it was three dozen."

  "You're still a liar, but gimme three dozen anyway." Having reached this plateau, the salesman, with masterful timing, would suddenly remember a new joke going the rounds in the needle trade on Toronto's Spadina Avenue. The joke (well told, usually in Yiddish so the obscenities would be beyond me) was the oil that lubricated the rest of the day's dealings. With less agony now the remainder of the saleman's winter line found its way onto the order pad. Father was hooked for another season.