Judith Kalman on writing under the influence

Judith Kalman on writing under the influence of

Irving Abella How the challenges that faced Jewish refugees took a different turn for one family who moved from Budapest to Montreal.

When I heard about the death of Irving Abella, I happened to be reading a book called The Montreal Shtetl: Making Home after the Holocaust, by sociologists Zelda Abramson and John Lynch.

While my own family’s immigration to Montreal had come five years after the purview of their study, which covers the period 1946 to 1954, the same unwelcoming attitudes from the established Canadian Jewish community in Montreal toward the postwar newcomers had been felt by us on the other side of the city in a suburb singularly lacking in Jews.

We felt a mistrust from society at large, simply because we were immigrants. While tensions between the second- and third-generation Canadian Jews and their newcomer counterparts characterized life in Montreal’s Mile End, I’m guessing they were part of a larger stance against foreigners that prevailed before pluralism came into our thinking as a nation.

Irving Abella’s passing on July 6 brought back memories of the landmark book he co-authored with Harold Troper: None is Too Many, which traced Canada’s immigration policy toward European Jews in the period 1933-1948. It felt like a shocking exposé when published in 1982. The policy had been to exclude Jews from Canada and it persisted long after the atrocities of Nazi extermination camps became widely known.

Canada’s official multicultural policy, which dates to 1971 and celebrates our ethnic and racial diversity, was a decade old and already established as a core piece of our national identity narrative when None is Too Many landed, a sharp reminder that multiculturalism had not been our ethos forever.

When my own family arrived in Montreal in January 1959, my father found a job in the schmata business on St. Lawrence Boulevard. English street names were still widely in use. My mother was hired as a teacher at a nursery school on Jeanne Mance— pronounced “Gene Manse” by those who lived in the area. The school was run by the Jewish Immigrant Aid Society. I attended for a year. My mother continued working there while she re-certified her Hungarian credentials in order to become a teacher in the public system. These limited points of contact were all we shared with the community described in The Montreal Shtetl. Even so, I don’t think there was a single page in the book that did not resonate with recognition.

The suburb I grew up in was outside the Jewish community, near the opposite end of the island. My family bought a house two years after we arrived in Montreal. Initially, we were the only Jews in the area. Once again, I was attending the same school in which my mother was teaching.

Some years later, the Jordans appeared. Mr. Jordan was Black and Mrs. Jordan Jewish.

Shelley Jordan was in my cohort in high school and her little sister in my mother’s kindergarten class. There were a number of Jordan siblings between them whose hair ranged from dark brown to rust—but the little one in my mother’s kindergarten stood out for her puff of bright red hair styled in an Afro. As if this hair and creamy mocha-coloured skin weren’t already exotic to our white, Anglo and French-Canadian

Judith Kalman with her older sister Elaine, mother Anna and father Gustav, in a photo taken before they emigrated from Hungary.

suburb, the Jordan children turned out to be Jewish to boot.

Through their very genes, the Jordans seemed to me to stand for a kind of multiculturalism we were just starting to aspire to; only a multicultural society would fully embrace them.

Why did my family live in the east end when my father continued to work in the very heart of the Montreal shtetl? The answer lay in the path of life taken but my mother’s sister and brother-in-law who had immigrated in 1953, and subsequently sponsored our move to Canada.

Their reaction to the trauma of the Holocaust trauma was to convert to Christianity and keep their Jewish background secret. Out of a sense of family feeling, intensified by the vast number of family members lost in the war, my parents wanted to live near them in the east end.

By one of those ironic twists of circumstance, my father found a job in the predominantly Jewish clothing industry on the most Jewish commercial street in Montreal through my uncle, who owned and operated three ladieswear shops. He positioned my father at the epicentre of the Montreal shtetl, while expecting us to keep his family’s secret. My uncle even sent a considerable amount of money to Israel, using my father as his conduit. People are full of contradictions. The human psyche is complex and conflicted, and all of us probably say one thing while doing another, at least on occasion.

Each interviewee in The Montreal Shtetl dwells on a particular contradiction. The existing Jewish community provided generous financial support to postwar Jewish immigrants, but were unwilling to accept them socially. During a time when social assimilation by immigrants to North America was greatly encouraged, the immigrants were perceived as risky by the already established Jewish community, as though they would all be sent back to square one socially.

As far back as I can remember, I have known that most of my parents’ large families died because of the Nazis. And I picked up early on that the Jews of Europe

“If we’d been worth rescuing, I puzzled as a child, why did we have to continue hiding our Jewish identity in Russialinked Hungary? Why did we have to hide it for the short time we lived in England after the Hungarian Revolution? And why did we have to be circumspect about being Jewish in Canada to protect my aunt and uncle’s secret? ”

Judith Kalman at the Ville d’Anjou house where she grew up after moving to Quebec.

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had been liberated from the east by the Russians (I was born in Communist Hungary) and from the west by the Allies.

If we’d been worth rescuing, I puzzled as a child, why did we have to continue hiding our Jewish identity in Russia-linked Hungary? Why did we have to hide it for the short time we lived in England after the Hungarian Revolution? And why did we have to be circumspect about being Jewish in Canada to protect my aunt and uncle’s secret?

Today, residents of this country are taking a more candid and often painful look at their own history. This re-evaluation is most prominent in our relation to Indigenous people, but it is happening in other ways, such as remembering the unidentified immigration agent who said, “None is too many.”

After the war, quotas restricted Jewish admission to McGill University, much as they had in Hungary where my father and his brother were among the handful of Jews admitted to the Academy of Agronomy in the city of Debrecen. Jews were also restricted from bars, restaurants, hotels, clubs, and, along with Blacks, in the surrounding Laurentian resort. These social and racial prejudices proved stubbornly tenacious.

When I’m asked, somewhat skeptically, how it could be true that my aunt and uncle chose to hide their Jewish roots, and that my cousins persist in their fear of disclosure to this day, I point out that there was no welcome mat for Holocaust survivors who arrived the 1940s and 1950s.

Jews left violent persecution behind to arrive into social silence and shunning. The war in Europe was something no one in the community wanted to discuss. It was unpleasant.

For my cousins, the legacy of silence continues to make it taboo. If my parents mentioned the war years during a dinner party with my school colleagues, they felt it was a social faux pas. That memory still chafes.

In 2015, I was in Germany to participate in the Nazi war crimes trial of Oskar Groening, who was charged with aiding and abetting the murder of over 300,000 Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz, among them members of my parents’ families. Of the 55 co-plaintiffs, 21 were Canadian. Journalists from all over the world packed the courtroom. Not a single one from Canada.

I was thrown back to my parents’ faux pas. Was dwelling on the Holocaust unfashionable again?

As a child I used to accompany my father sometimes on the long bus ride from our suburb to downtown, and he would recount stories from before the war. Because we embarked at an early stop, we’d always get a double seat. As the bus filled up, other riders had to stand. The largely French-Canadian passengers looked down on us at the sound of my father’s foreign syllables.

I sensed suspicion and distaste, a misapprehension I tried to shield him from by steering our talk from Hungarian to English.

When you’re not wanted, how long before you’re really let in? n

Called to Testify: The Big Story in My Small Life by Judith Kalman was published by Sutherland House in May 2022.