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On September 10, 2015, I celebrated my 59-th year in Canada. At my age, when the news of ill-health and bereavements in my own extended family, among my friends and acquaintances become increasingly frequent, I celebrated it far more enthusiastically than heretofore.
In Search of a New Homeland
The history of the Republic of Turkey during the period 1923-1954 is replete with painful and traumatic events for the Jewish community.1 Over the years the overwhelming majority of the members of the community became expatriates against their wishes. Of the estimated 89,000-strong Jewish community living in Turkey during World War II, merely an estimated 15,000 still live there.
Matters had been thus when the violent and destructive events of September 6-7, 1955 finally shattered the last vestiges of my late father’s hopes and faith in the future of the Jewish community.2 It was time to leave.
In search of a new homeland, naturally, my father first visited Israel to determine whether the family could move there. Unfortunately for him, shortly after his arrival, the war of 1956 began. For a person orphaned at an early age and forced to drop out of elementary school to help support his widowed mother and younger sibling, my father had an uncanny ability to read the future. Upon his return, he announced that in as much as he would have loved to move to Israel, such a move did not make much sense because the Arabs would never make peace, and there would be more wars for a long time to come. Given his age (45) he did not want to become a spectator, while the country fought for its survival time and time again.
In search of a new homeland, naturally, my father first visited Israel to determine whether the family could move there. Unfortunately for him, shortly after his arrival, the war of 1956 began. For a person orphaned at an early age and forced to drop out of elementary school to help support his widowed mother and younger sibling, my father had an uncanny ability to read the future. Upon his return, he announced that in as much as he would have loved to move to Israel, such a move did not make much sense because the Arabs would never make peace, and there would be more wars for a long time to come. Given his age (45) he did not want to become a spectator, while the country fought for its survival time and time again.
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1 For
example, see: Guttstadt, Corry, Turkey, the Jews and the Holocaust, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2013 (originally published in German in 2008).
2These events, which some have described as a pogrom, occurred at a time when the relations between Turkey and Greece were very tense on account of the events in Cyprus where the Greek Cypriots running the island did not seem to have enough of their nasty treatment of the Turkish minority. Briefly told, to teach the Greeks a lesson, the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister arranged to spread the unfounded rumor that the Greeks had exploded a bomb and damaged the house located in Salonika where Turk ey`s founder President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was born, in the full expectation that an angry populace would rush to the streets and ferociously vent their anger against Greeks. The populace acted as expected. However, the security forces deployed to keep the demonstrators in check either failed or deliberately decided not to do so, on their own or upon the instructions of higher authority. As a result and I can only speak for Istanbul and the Prince islands, the enraged demonstrators went on a monstrous rampage of destruction in the Greek neighborhoods and business establishments. However, things did not end there. Since the crowds considered all non-Muslims as``giavours`` ( infidels, unbelievers, Christians) and had a hard time distinguishing the Greeks from the Armenians or Jews, they went on to damage or destroy a large number Armenian and Jewish homes and businesses and caused the death of a Turkish night watchman at a warehouse owned by a Jew. They broke into a vast number of stores, stole the merchandise they could carry, thrashed that which they could not or was of no interest to them. All the while, the police stood by, and the army was not called in to quell the riots until it was too late. One of the saving graces of the night was the fact that the Anatolian “hamal(s)” (who carried very heavy and large bales of merchandise on their backs for a fee), Turks, Kurds and Laz who lived at night in the caravansaries (large commercial buildings which housed large numbers of stores) out of which they worked, locked their huge metal doors to prevent the rioters from entering the buildings. The bitter irony in all of this was the fact that, besides paying some compensation to the injured parties, the government was forced to spend whatever little foreign exchange it had left, to issue import licences to replace the stolen and destroyed goods and some building materials. This was one of the last kicks on the country’s ruined down economy could sustain. In 1960, the Turkish Armed Forces removed the government that had also gone corrupt; hanged the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance, while the death sentence of the President was commuted to life imprisonment by reason of his old age. For a much respected professional historian’s treatment of these events, see: Bali, Rift N., and Model Citizens of the State: The Jews of Turkey during the Multi-party Period, Madison, Wisconsin: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012 (translated from Turkish by Paul F. Bessemer). Readers who are fluent in Turkish can read further about the events of September 6-7 in Bali, Rifat N., 6-7 Eylül 1955 Olayları: Tanıklar-Hatıralar, Istanbul: Libra Kitapcılık ve Yayıncılık,2010. On a personal note, after sleeping through the tumultuous night, on the morning of the 7th, I went to the city from our summer abode on one of the Prince Islands to write a supplementary examination in chemistry. Hence, I personally witnessed the tragic sights of the incredible destruction which made the principal arteries of the city impassable by streetcar or bus and forced me to walk from the wharf where my ferry docked most of the way to my school.
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2These events, which some have described as a pogrom, occurred at a time when the relations between Turkey and Greece were very tense on account of the events in Cyprus where the Greek Cypriots running the island did not seem to have enough of their nasty treatment of the Turkish minority. Briefly told, to teach the Greeks a lesson, the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister arranged to spread the unfounded rumor that the Greeks had exploded a bomb and damaged the house located in Salonika where Turk ey`s founder President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was born, in the full expectation that an angry populace would rush to the streets and ferociously vent their anger against Greeks. The populace acted as expected. However, the security forces deployed to keep the demonstrators in check either failed or deliberately decided not to do so, on their own or upon the instructions of higher authority. As a result and I can only speak for Istanbul and the Prince islands, the enraged demonstrators went on a monstrous rampage of destruction in the Greek neighborhoods and business establishments. However, things did not end there. Since the crowds considered all non-Muslims as``giavours`` ( infidels, unbelievers, Christians) and had a hard time distinguishing the Greeks from the Armenians or Jews, they went on to damage or destroy a large number Armenian and Jewish homes and businesses and caused the death of a Turkish night watchman at a warehouse owned by a Jew. They broke into a vast number of stores, stole the merchandise they could carry, thrashed that which they could not or was of no interest to them. All the while, the police stood by, and the army was not called in to quell the riots until it was too late. One of the saving graces of the night was the fact that the Anatolian “hamal(s)” (who carried very heavy and large bales of merchandise on their backs for a fee), Turks, Kurds and Laz who lived at night in the caravansaries (large commercial buildings which housed large numbers of stores) out of which they worked, locked their huge metal doors to prevent the rioters from entering the buildings. The bitter irony in all of this was the fact that, besides paying some compensation to the injured parties, the government was forced to spend whatever little foreign exchange it had left, to issue import licences to replace the stolen and destroyed goods and some building materials. This was one of the last kicks on the country’s ruined down economy could sustain. In 1960, the Turkish Armed Forces removed the government that had also gone corrupt; hanged the Prime Minister and the Minister of Finance, while the death sentence of the President was commuted to life imprisonment by reason of his old age. For a much respected professional historian’s treatment of these events, see: Bali, Rift N., and Model Citizens of the State: The Jews of Turkey during the Multi-party Period, Madison, Wisconsin: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012 (translated from Turkish by Paul F. Bessemer). Readers who are fluent in Turkish can read further about the events of September 6-7 in Bali, Rifat N., 6-7 Eylül 1955 Olayları: Tanıklar-Hatıralar, Istanbul: Libra Kitapcılık ve Yayıncılık,2010. On a personal note, after sleeping through the tumultuous night, on the morning of the 7th, I went to the city from our summer abode on one of the Prince Islands to write a supplementary examination in chemistry. Hence, I personally witnessed the tragic sights of the incredible destruction which made the principal arteries of the city impassable by streetcar or bus and forced me to walk from the wharf where my ferry docked most of the way to my school.
He decided against moving
to a European country because he did not speak any of the European languages,
save Greek, French and of course, some Spanish in the form of Judeo-Spanish.
Greece
was out of the question due to the virulent anti-Semitism, not to mention the
chronically shaky social, economic and political situation.
He did not think much of the French who expelled its Jewish population not once but five times during the middle Ages, not to mention the genocidal behaviour of the Vichy government. He believed the French to be viscerally anti-Semitic, braggarts, vain, sneaky, hypocrites, less than loyal to their allies, and opportunists to boot3
He did not think much of the French who expelled its Jewish population not once but five times during the middle Ages, not to mention the genocidal behaviour of the Vichy government. He believed the French to be viscerally anti-Semitic, braggarts, vain, sneaky, hypocrites, less than loyal to their allies, and opportunists to boot3
As
to Spain, he did not care to return to the country where our forebears were
subjected to massacres, exploited, dispossessed and finally expelled both from
the country and its Mediterranean possessions. Those who chose to convert or
were forcibly converted and stayed behind were subjected to a cruel Inquisition;
the Church still retained its medieval mentality; anti-Semitism was alive and
well, and the government was Fascist.
My father was not far off the mark when he predicted that, sooner or later, Christian Europe would have had enough of its guilt for aiding and abetting the Holocaust, by commission or omission (and in some instances both), and would once again give vent to its genetic anti-Semitism and turn against both the Jews in their midst and Israel.
My father was not far off the mark when he predicted that, sooner or later, Christian Europe would have had enough of its guilt for aiding and abetting the Holocaust, by commission or omission (and in some instances both), and would once again give vent to its genetic anti-Semitism and turn against both the Jews in their midst and Israel.
Nor
did he have any wish to immigrate to Latin American countries; chronically
unstable, economically in disarray and somewhat lacking in democratic values.
At the end of this elimination process, we were left with one of two possible destinations: the United States and Canada.
At the end of this elimination process, we were left with one of two possible destinations: the United States and Canada.
At
that time, the U.S. had a small quota for prospective immigrants from the
Middle-East. Getting in was no easy matter. This suited my father fine because
he had neither the interest nor the patience to learn English. At the time,
being an avid movie goer and a great fan of American movies, I was heartily
disappointed by the decision not to pursue further this destination.
Oh! Canada?4
This left us with Canada about which we knew almost nothing save for the information provided by the map of the country in my Colliers Atlas and the narrative on “Kanada” in my high school geography textbook. The narrative was encouraging. As I recall, it depicted Canada as a sparsely populated peaceful, industrial well-to-do country. When I learned from other sources, and related to my parents, the fact that the majority of the population of the province of Quebec, where Montreal -the country’s then largest city was located - was French–speaking, they were immensely cheered. After a few days, it was decided that we were going to settle in Canada. When I reminded my father of his comments concerning the French and France, he dismissed the the matter out of hand by pointing out that the ones in Quebec were North-American, New World French.
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Obviously, the Atlantic must have had some cleansing power, I did not know about.
As to some of the facts about Canada that we did not find out before reaching the decision, in this instance, ignorance turned out to be bliss. One of these was Canadians’ anti-Semitism prior to and during
World War II5. The government, with anti-Semites in key positions dealing with immigration and refugee matters, ignored the plight of European Jews seeking refuge6 . In this respect, Canada acted like many other “so-called” civilized Western nations, including its neighbour to the south. Ironically, the rate of Jewish enlistment in the Canadian Army, relative to the size of the community in relation to the total population, was the highest among the ethnic communities of Canada.
By the time we arrived, Canada was on its way to mend its record. If Canada was not, and remains not free of anti-Semitism, our family, friends and acquaintances never encountered it. One thing was certain: no one ever called us “Korkak Yahudi” (cowardly Jew) or addressed us with some other vituperative words.
Alas,
Canada’s annual immigration quota for the Middle East was not much larger than
that of the United States. My father was told that it would take quite some
time before he would be able to secure immigrant visas; that is of course,
provided we met the eligibility criteria set out by the Immigration Department.
An iffy proposition at best.
Becoming
a “real” Turk in Canada
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Oh! Canada?4
This left us with Canada about which we knew almost nothing save for the information provided by the map of the country in my Colliers Atlas and the narrative on “Kanada” in my high school geography textbook. The narrative was encouraging. As I recall, it depicted Canada as a sparsely populated peaceful, industrial well-to-do country. When I learned from other sources, and related to my parents, the fact that the majority of the population of the province of Quebec, where Montreal -the country’s then largest city was located - was French–speaking, they were immensely cheered. After a few days, it was decided that we were going to settle in Canada. When I reminded my father of his comments concerning the French and France, he dismissed the the matter out of hand by pointing out that the ones in Quebec were North-American, New World French.
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3I
did not quite believe him then but I
began to agree with him after President Charles de Gaulle uttered his anti-Semitic description of the Jewish people; President
Jacques Chirac demoted the status of the French Jews from being des “Français” to that of just
another ethnic minority like the relatively recently arrived Muslim one. Last
year, the French Ambassador to the United States distinguished French Jews from
the French in a context that did not call for such a distinction and he
certainly was not the only Frenchman to do so in recent years. And from there
on in, things got worse until President Hollande took the cake. I once asked my
father why he sent me to St. Michel, a lycée run by the French Christian
Brothers, if he felt so strongly against the country and its people. His reply
was: “Well, they offered the best
education money can buy. Anyhow, there are more of us than of them, so they
would not dare pull any tricks! For my part, I liked the school; I was proud to
wear its uniform; I respected my teachers; I am grateful for the fine education
they afforded me, and, proud to be a graduate of it.
4The first two words of the Canadian National anthem are “O Canada…” The word “Canada” comes from a St. Lawrence Iroquoian word, “Kanata”, meaning “village” or “settlement” http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/jacques-cartier/.
4The first two words of the Canadian National anthem are “O Canada…” The word “Canada” comes from a St. Lawrence Iroquoian word, “Kanata”, meaning “village” or “settlement” http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/jacques-cartier/.
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Obviously, the Atlantic must have had some cleansing power, I did not know about.
As to some of the facts about Canada that we did not find out before reaching the decision, in this instance, ignorance turned out to be bliss. One of these was Canadians’ anti-Semitism prior to and during
World War II5. The government, with anti-Semites in key positions dealing with immigration and refugee matters, ignored the plight of European Jews seeking refuge6 . In this respect, Canada acted like many other “so-called” civilized Western nations, including its neighbour to the south. Ironically, the rate of Jewish enlistment in the Canadian Army, relative to the size of the community in relation to the total population, was the highest among the ethnic communities of Canada.
By the time we arrived, Canada was on its way to mend its record. If Canada was not, and remains not free of anti-Semitism, our family, friends and acquaintances never encountered it. One thing was certain: no one ever called us “Korkak Yahudi” (cowardly Jew) or addressed us with some other vituperative words.
So
that was that. Canada was going to be our new homeland. Or, was it?
Getting into Canada
My
father was not prepared to put his business on hold for an indeterminate period
of time, waiting to find out whether he would obtain those visas. And so, he
devised an alternate scheme: he would get visitor visas for himself and the
family; fly to Montreal get a job, and if all was well by or before the end of
six months, he would bring us over and then apply for landed immigrant status
prior to the expiration of the visas. He left for Montreal in March 1957. It
did not take him that long after his arrival in Montreal to share with us his
prediction of a bright future in Canada, although as we later found out, he was
not referring to his future but to that of his children7. It was a most welcome change from his earlier
dire predictions about Israel and Europe. The family was reunited in Montreal
on September 10, 19578.
My Very First Day
The import of my immigration struck me on the very first day of my
arrival. Instead of just staying in our new apartment and trying to get some to
sleep to get over the jet lag, I decided to take a city bus on an unguided
sightseeing expedition of the city to get a feel of it, as I was in the habit
of doing in Istanbul, periodically exploring the various old neighbourhoods
from the Ottoman times. I started the expedition by going
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5Montreal
had an anti-Semitic Mayor French-Canadian and so was a large segment of the
city population. Among other things, the young Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who later became one of the most enlightened
Prime Ministers of Canada, and
governed the country between 1968
and 1974 (save for a short hiatus), was seen motorcycling around town wearing a
German helmet.
6Abella, Irving and Troper, Harold; None is
Too Many, Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys Ltd, 1982.
7 The only job he could find was that of a sales clerk in a pawnshop serving French Canadians at the legal minimum wage
7 The only job he could find was that of a sales clerk in a pawnshop serving French Canadians at the legal minimum wage
8As we were leaving Turkey permanently, my
mother packed all the family clothes in a large number of suitcases which we
brought with us. I remember the kindly French Canadian customs agent examining
our luggage asking my mother:” Mais Madame, pourquoi avez-vous tant de baggage?
Votre visa n’est que pour trois mois?”(Why do you have so many pieces of
luggage? Your visa is only for three months). My mother, who anticipated being
asked this kind of a question, answered without missing a beat: “Eh bien, nous
ne pouvions pas savoir pas quel temps il va faire durant ces trois mois,
n’est-ce pas? “(Well, we could not know what kind of weather we were going to
have during these three months, is that not so?) The agent flushed a benign
smile and dropped the subject. He probably knew all about people with too much
luggage.
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directly downtown in the western part of the city. After a few hours
of looking around, watching people, the sights and scenes, smelling the scents
of the food cooked in the restaurants, I realized that I had lost my way. I was
unable to get a sense of direction from the people passing by or from store
clerks. As a measure of last resort, I decided to ask a police officer. I
approached one with some trepidation. At the age of 17, it is one thing to
watch friendly smiling police officers in Hollywood movies and quite something
else to deal with one in a strange city.
He
sized me up and dealt with my problem in short order. He said: “Don’t worry,
we’ll get you home”. He then paged a patrol car, related my problem to his
fellow officers and asked them to drive me home which, as it turned out , was
quite a long way away.
My parents, worried about my long absence, were at a loss for words when I arrived in a police car. The officer who accompanied me to the door of the apartment said to my bewildered parents, with a big grin: “Here is your boy, welcome to Canada.”9
However, the thing I remember best about this encounter is the fact that when they asked me where I came from and I replied: “Turkey”, they did not ask me for my religion or anything else. They just said:” Aha! You are a brave young Turk then, eh?” I remember these words vividly to this day because I could not help being struck by the irony that I had to expatriate myself, travel thousands of miles, and arrive in a strange city to be recognized as a “real” Turk. It felt good to be recognized for what I was: A Turk who happened to be of Jewish faith.
By the same token, I could not help but feel bitterness and anger that in my own native land, the polity, the elites, the media and the people as a whole consistently rejected the notion that non-Muslims could ever be or become “real” Turks. And perversely enough, they made sure that we did not, by adopting an exclusionary definition of a “real” Turk as one who speaks Turkish, belongs to the Turkish race and ethnicity and to the Sunni branch of Islam.
And the Jewish community of Turkey was excluded despite the facts that: Osman, the founder of the Ottoman dynasty and Empire during in the 14th century, actively solicited Jewish merchants to relocate themselves on his lands; successive Sultans between the 14th and the end of the 16th century increased the size of the community considerably by letting in Jewish refugees who fled or were expelled from parts of Europe, the Mediterranean basin and North Africa.10 and of fundamental importance in the Turkish scale of values, in fact the top one, unlike the Greeks and Armenians from time to time prior to the establishment of the Turkish Republic, the Jews at all times remained fiercely loyal both to the Empire and later to the Republic; defended their interests in addition to being dutiful and generous contributors to their respective treasuries, and to
_________________________________________________
9I could not help but to contrast this experience with my feelings about Turkish policemen fostered by my parents from an early age. Because of their self-protective instincts as part of a minority conditioned by some painful past experiences, they consistently urged me to walk in the streets and ride on public transport as inconspicuously as possible, under the radar so to speak, so as not to attract unwelcome attention and to avoid having anything to do with strangers and policemen. As a matter of fact, I never spoke to a police officer prior to my departure for Canada. This is not to suggest, by any means, that all Turkish police officers deserve to be avoided, or that all the Canadian ones are invariably as courteous, and cheerfully accommodating as were the three I dealt with.
10These Sultans were no bleeding hearts but shrewd dealers. Bayezid II, a strict Muslim, who invited the Sephardic Jews to settle in the Balkans, did not care to have them settle in Istanbul nor did he care about the Jews of Istanbul and showed his contempt for them with a number of unpleasant gestures, until his son Sultan Salim I who dethroned him, fixed the situation in Istanbul: this was no way to treat geese laying golden eggs. The Sultans realized that by letting Jewish refugees settle in the Empire, especially as a result of the arrival of the waves of Sephardic and Italian refugees between 1492 and 1540 , they acquired at a bargain basement price a huge pool of first class manpower with expertise, skills and abilities in a large number of professions and trades which the Empire badly needed in order to pursue its territorial conquests, and to enrich generously their Imperial treasury on an on-going basis, and as it turned out, for centuries to come.
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some of their successes and advancement.
Yet, instead of expressing their appreciation for all of this and recognizing the rightful identity of the community members as Turks, the Republic continues to expect the community to express its gratitude to the Turkish nation for letting their forebears settle in the Ottoman Empire. And any perceived failure of the community to do that or any imaginary transgression of the expectations of the government and the elites, inevitably triggers accusations of “ingratitude” to their “host” as guests, who, by 1957, had been living in the Turkish society for over six hundred years.
My parents, worried about my long absence, were at a loss for words when I arrived in a police car. The officer who accompanied me to the door of the apartment said to my bewildered parents, with a big grin: “Here is your boy, welcome to Canada.”9
However, the thing I remember best about this encounter is the fact that when they asked me where I came from and I replied: “Turkey”, they did not ask me for my religion or anything else. They just said:” Aha! You are a brave young Turk then, eh?” I remember these words vividly to this day because I could not help being struck by the irony that I had to expatriate myself, travel thousands of miles, and arrive in a strange city to be recognized as a “real” Turk. It felt good to be recognized for what I was: A Turk who happened to be of Jewish faith.
By the same token, I could not help but feel bitterness and anger that in my own native land, the polity, the elites, the media and the people as a whole consistently rejected the notion that non-Muslims could ever be or become “real” Turks. And perversely enough, they made sure that we did not, by adopting an exclusionary definition of a “real” Turk as one who speaks Turkish, belongs to the Turkish race and ethnicity and to the Sunni branch of Islam.
And the Jewish community of Turkey was excluded despite the facts that: Osman, the founder of the Ottoman dynasty and Empire during in the 14th century, actively solicited Jewish merchants to relocate themselves on his lands; successive Sultans between the 14th and the end of the 16th century increased the size of the community considerably by letting in Jewish refugees who fled or were expelled from parts of Europe, the Mediterranean basin and North Africa.10 and of fundamental importance in the Turkish scale of values, in fact the top one, unlike the Greeks and Armenians from time to time prior to the establishment of the Turkish Republic, the Jews at all times remained fiercely loyal both to the Empire and later to the Republic; defended their interests in addition to being dutiful and generous contributors to their respective treasuries, and to
_________________________________________________
9I could not help but to contrast this experience with my feelings about Turkish policemen fostered by my parents from an early age. Because of their self-protective instincts as part of a minority conditioned by some painful past experiences, they consistently urged me to walk in the streets and ride on public transport as inconspicuously as possible, under the radar so to speak, so as not to attract unwelcome attention and to avoid having anything to do with strangers and policemen. As a matter of fact, I never spoke to a police officer prior to my departure for Canada. This is not to suggest, by any means, that all Turkish police officers deserve to be avoided, or that all the Canadian ones are invariably as courteous, and cheerfully accommodating as were the three I dealt with.
10These Sultans were no bleeding hearts but shrewd dealers. Bayezid II, a strict Muslim, who invited the Sephardic Jews to settle in the Balkans, did not care to have them settle in Istanbul nor did he care about the Jews of Istanbul and showed his contempt for them with a number of unpleasant gestures, until his son Sultan Salim I who dethroned him, fixed the situation in Istanbul: this was no way to treat geese laying golden eggs. The Sultans realized that by letting Jewish refugees settle in the Empire, especially as a result of the arrival of the waves of Sephardic and Italian refugees between 1492 and 1540 , they acquired at a bargain basement price a huge pool of first class manpower with expertise, skills and abilities in a large number of professions and trades which the Empire badly needed in order to pursue its territorial conquests, and to enrich generously their Imperial treasury on an on-going basis, and as it turned out, for centuries to come.
some of their successes and advancement.
Yet, instead of expressing their appreciation for all of this and recognizing the rightful identity of the community members as Turks, the Republic continues to expect the community to express its gratitude to the Turkish nation for letting their forebears settle in the Ottoman Empire. And any perceived failure of the community to do that or any imaginary transgression of the expectations of the government and the elites, inevitably triggers accusations of “ingratitude” to their “host” as guests, who, by 1957, had been living in the Turkish society for over six hundred years.
The First Week
Finding a small Istanbul in Montreal
Our family was warmly welcomed by a small circle of Jewish families from Istanbul who had settled in Montreal not long before and after the events of 1955. The families got together regularly, amused themselves singing Turkish songs, swapping old Turkish jokes and, strangely enough, from time to time, uttering and laughing about some of the insulting Turkish expressions and sayings about Jews. More seriously, they talked about their daily experiences, their take on Canada, the French-Canadians and the French spoken in the province. They discussed the challenges of doing business, the children’s schooling, and inevitably the latest news from Turkey, which between 1957 and 1960 went from bad to grim. We also joyously smoked Turkish cigarettes; ate delightful Turkish cuisine prepared by the mothers; drank “rakı”11 , when we managed to get our hands on a bottle or two, and failing that “ouzo” (Greek version of rakı).We topped it all with Turkish sweets which we managed to locate, mostly in Lebanese food stores, Greek eateries and in the one and only small Turkish restaurant in town.
The First Month
An unexpected Encounter
Finding a small Istanbul in Montreal
Our family was warmly welcomed by a small circle of Jewish families from Istanbul who had settled in Montreal not long before and after the events of 1955. The families got together regularly, amused themselves singing Turkish songs, swapping old Turkish jokes and, strangely enough, from time to time, uttering and laughing about some of the insulting Turkish expressions and sayings about Jews. More seriously, they talked about their daily experiences, their take on Canada, the French-Canadians and the French spoken in the province. They discussed the challenges of doing business, the children’s schooling, and inevitably the latest news from Turkey, which between 1957 and 1960 went from bad to grim. We also joyously smoked Turkish cigarettes; ate delightful Turkish cuisine prepared by the mothers; drank “rakı”11 , when we managed to get our hands on a bottle or two, and failing that “ouzo” (Greek version of rakı).We topped it all with Turkish sweets which we managed to locate, mostly in Lebanese food stores, Greek eateries and in the one and only small Turkish restaurant in town.
The First Month
An unexpected Encounter
After
we finally settled into our new abode, I resumed my longstanding daily errand
to buy fresh bread for my mother. In Turkey, this was a cinch; there was only
one kind of bread, and a delicious one at that. The closest bakery turned out
to be a store of a Jewish owned chain. On my first visit, I was served by a
lady who must have seen me looking lost, staring at the large varieties of
bread and buns on the shelves. She approached me and proceeded, with a heavy
Eastern European accent, to educate me about each kind of bread and bun. During this pleasant presentation I suddenly
noticed the numbers tattooed on one of her arms; the kind of tattoos I had
previously seen in the photographs of Holocaust survivors. Then, on a quick
glance at the arms of the two other women serving other customers, I noticed
that they too had the very same kind of tattoos.
It is one thing to read about Nazi atrocities
in concentration camps and something else to meet and speak with the survivors
of these camps in person. I do not know how it happened, but for someone who
usually did not allow himself to cry in public, I suddenly broke down in tears
and sobbed audibly enough to startle the other customers. All three women
rushed to surround me with hugs and tearful smiles. They told me not to cry;
that they were thankful to have managed to survive it all and to make a new
life for themselves in Canada. Then, suddenly turning serious, they added that
it is very important that I study the Holocaust, never forget its lessons and
to make sure to pass this knowledge on to my children and grand-children. They
also made me promise solemnly that I would do so.
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11A strong clear alcoholic beverage which, but for the heroic and the hardy, is usually drank with water or on ice.
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11A strong clear alcoholic beverage which, but for the heroic and the hardy, is usually drank with water or on ice.
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I honoured my promise from that day on.12 Later, I was pleased to learn that among the North American cities, Montreal became home to the largest number of Holocaust survivors.
I honoured my promise from that day on.12 Later, I was pleased to learn that among the North American cities, Montreal became home to the largest number of Holocaust survivors.
Becoming Canadian:
A Citizen of Canada and Subject of Her Majesty the Queen, Elizabeth II
A Citizen of Canada and Subject of Her Majesty the Queen, Elizabeth II
Within a month of the family’s reunification,
we applied for landed status and retained the services of a lawyer to help us
navigate through the application process. We first attended a hearing before an
immigration officer. Based on the legal advice we had received, we were not
surprised when he summarily rejected our applications. However, he suspended
the rest of the proceedings that would have entailed fixing a date for our
deportation, pending the outcome of our appeal against his decision. Again, as
we expected, our appeal was dismissed. Happily enough, this did not exhaust our
legal remedies . He recommended that we petition the Federal Minister of
Immigration to grant us the status of landed immigrant on “humanitarian
grounds”. And as our lawyer predicted, our petition was granted.13 It was 1960.
I must confess that, during the immigration proceedings, the one thing that threw me for a loop were the realisations that the Queen of England is also that of Canada and the country’s Head of State; and that the oath of allegiance for citizenship was the oath of allegiance to the Queen.
Well, having done my schooling in Turkey, I could not help but think of our history classes where we learned of the dirty tricks the British played on the Ottoman Empire, one of which was taking over Cyprus under false pretences.14 Needless to say, over the years, the Ottoman Empire was not the only victim of their perfidy. In the result, they acquired their well- deserved reputation as the “Perfidious Albion”.
As a Jew, I had my own grievances against the Perfidious Albion for the treacherous way in which it reneged on the promise of the 1917 Balfour Declaration and from 1922 until the end of its Mandate in Palestine it manipulated it in its interests.15 If this was not enough, after the war, the British turned their military might
I must confess that, during the immigration proceedings, the one thing that threw me for a loop were the realisations that the Queen of England is also that of Canada and the country’s Head of State; and that the oath of allegiance for citizenship was the oath of allegiance to the Queen.
Well, having done my schooling in Turkey, I could not help but think of our history classes where we learned of the dirty tricks the British played on the Ottoman Empire, one of which was taking over Cyprus under false pretences.14 Needless to say, over the years, the Ottoman Empire was not the only victim of their perfidy. In the result, they acquired their well- deserved reputation as the “Perfidious Albion”.
As a Jew, I had my own grievances against the Perfidious Albion for the treacherous way in which it reneged on the promise of the 1917 Balfour Declaration and from 1922 until the end of its Mandate in Palestine it manipulated it in its interests.15 If this was not enough, after the war, the British turned their military might
______________________________________________________
12In retrospect, I find it strange that the subject of the Holocaust was never raised, let alone addressed and discussed, at any time during my studies at St. Michel , either by the Turkish teachers who taught Turkish history or by the Christian Brothers, as both France and Turkey were involved in World War II; the former as an active participant, regretfully in more ways than one, and the latter which, despite its officially neutrality , played a significant part in it, among other things, with respect to the Jewish community in Turkey and the Jewish refugees seeking to escape the Holocaust by sea via the straights of Bosporus and the Dardanelles and later by crossing the Aegean Sea to Turkey, with the help of Greek resistance fighters See: Guttstadt, Corry, op.cit, supra.
13As it happened, 1957 and 1958 were politically tumultuous years in Canadian Federal politics. In the general election held shortly after we arrived, the Progressive Conservative Party (P.C.P) managed to win a minority government to unseat the long-governing, old and tired Liberal government .The P.C.P. followed up on this feat in the 1958 elections by crushing the Liberals and forming the largest majority government in the history of the country. As part of their strenuous efforts to attract the votes of the immigrants who traditionally voted for the Liberals under whose successive governments they had been admitted to Canada, the P.C. government made it a point to play sweet both with the landed as well as the illegal immigrants. To this end, it granted landed immigrant status to those, like us, who having tried to short circuit the system and failed, applied for the Ministerial permit to acquire this status. I hate to think what would have happened to us if we had failed to get the permit and were deported back to Turkey?
Britain’s subsequent decision to assert sovereignty over Cyprus resulted in a bitter conflict among Turkey Greece, and Britain, and later, the Republic of Cyprus, as well as between the Greek majority and the Turkish minority on the island that turned quite violent, with the Greeks inflicting the pain. So it was that Canada was pressed into peacekeeping duties on the island to keep apart the Greek and the Turkish Cypriots. The conflict remains unresolved to this day between Turkey and Cyprus.
During World War II, the old Albion, abandoned the European Jews to their fate in order to protect its political and economic interests in the Middle East by preventing them from taking refuge in Palestine. Among other measures, the British government, ironically as did Nazi Germany, pressured Turkey to prohibit, contrary to international law, the free passage of the ships carrying Jewish refugees through the straits of Bosporus and the Dardanelles and ultimately succeeded in 1942.
14Britain’s subsequent decision to assert sovereignty over Cyprus resulted in a bitter conflict among Turkey Greece, and Britain, and later, the Republic of Cyprus, as well as between the Greek majority and the Turkish minority on the island that turned quite violent, with the Greeks inflicting the pain. So it was that Canada was pressed into peacekeeping duties on the island to keep apart the Greek and the Turkish Cypriots. The conflict remains unresolved to this day between Turkey and Cyprus.
15During World War II, the old Albion, abandoned the European Jews to their fate in order to protect its political and economic interests in the Middle East by preventing them from taking refuge in Palestine. Among other measures, the British government, ironically as did Nazi Germany, pressured Turkey to prohibit, contrary to international law, the free passage of the ships carrying Jewish refugees through the straits of Bosporus and the Dardanelles and ultimately succeeded in 1942.
Page 7
on the Jewish militants in Palestine who sought and fought to establish a true, free and safe sovereign national home until the end of the Mandate; provided military equipment to some of the invading Arab armies, and later engaged in skullduggery during the consideration of Israel’s application to become a member of the United Nations.
Language and economic colonisation
12In retrospect, I find it strange that the subject of the Holocaust was never raised, let alone addressed and discussed, at any time during my studies at St. Michel , either by the Turkish teachers who taught Turkish history or by the Christian Brothers, as both France and Turkey were involved in World War II; the former as an active participant, regretfully in more ways than one, and the latter which, despite its officially neutrality , played a significant part in it, among other things, with respect to the Jewish community in Turkey and the Jewish refugees seeking to escape the Holocaust by sea via the straights of Bosporus and the Dardanelles and later by crossing the Aegean Sea to Turkey, with the help of Greek resistance fighters See: Guttstadt, Corry, op.cit, supra.
13As it happened, 1957 and 1958 were politically tumultuous years in Canadian Federal politics. In the general election held shortly after we arrived, the Progressive Conservative Party (P.C.P) managed to win a minority government to unseat the long-governing, old and tired Liberal government .The P.C.P. followed up on this feat in the 1958 elections by crushing the Liberals and forming the largest majority government in the history of the country. As part of their strenuous efforts to attract the votes of the immigrants who traditionally voted for the Liberals under whose successive governments they had been admitted to Canada, the P.C. government made it a point to play sweet both with the landed as well as the illegal immigrants. To this end, it granted landed immigrant status to those, like us, who having tried to short circuit the system and failed, applied for the Ministerial permit to acquire this status. I hate to think what would have happened to us if we had failed to get the permit and were deported back to Turkey?
Britain’s subsequent decision to assert sovereignty over Cyprus resulted in a bitter conflict among Turkey Greece, and Britain, and later, the Republic of Cyprus, as well as between the Greek majority and the Turkish minority on the island that turned quite violent, with the Greeks inflicting the pain. So it was that Canada was pressed into peacekeeping duties on the island to keep apart the Greek and the Turkish Cypriots. The conflict remains unresolved to this day between Turkey and Cyprus.
During World War II, the old Albion, abandoned the European Jews to their fate in order to protect its political and economic interests in the Middle East by preventing them from taking refuge in Palestine. Among other measures, the British government, ironically as did Nazi Germany, pressured Turkey to prohibit, contrary to international law, the free passage of the ships carrying Jewish refugees through the straits of Bosporus and the Dardanelles and ultimately succeeded in 1942.
14Britain’s subsequent decision to assert sovereignty over Cyprus resulted in a bitter conflict among Turkey Greece, and Britain, and later, the Republic of Cyprus, as well as between the Greek majority and the Turkish minority on the island that turned quite violent, with the Greeks inflicting the pain. So it was that Canada was pressed into peacekeeping duties on the island to keep apart the Greek and the Turkish Cypriots. The conflict remains unresolved to this day between Turkey and Cyprus.
15During World War II, the old Albion, abandoned the European Jews to their fate in order to protect its political and economic interests in the Middle East by preventing them from taking refuge in Palestine. Among other measures, the British government, ironically as did Nazi Germany, pressured Turkey to prohibit, contrary to international law, the free passage of the ships carrying Jewish refugees through the straits of Bosporus and the Dardanelles and ultimately succeeded in 1942.
Page 7
on the Jewish militants in Palestine who sought and fought to establish a true, free and safe sovereign national home until the end of the Mandate; provided military equipment to some of the invading Arab armies, and later engaged in skullduggery during the consideration of Israel’s application to become a member of the United Nations.
Eventually, as it turned out, I laboured
proudly and happily in Her Majesty’s Service for 37 years, first as a
Stipendiary Magistrate, (subsequently re-named Judge of the Provincial Court)
and then as a Federal Crown counsel, first as a prosecutor and then as a
litigator to defend the Crown against the civil claims filed by various
Amer-Indian bands and groups across the country. Of possible interest to the readers, the
lawyers who advanced the Indian claims included fair number of Jewish lawyers.
Uncovering the real Canada of 1957:
A Nation of Multiple Solitudes
When the initial euphoria of settling in
Canada slowly subsided, and as we started to take a serious look around, we
realised that the Canada we uncovered on the ground was not quite the same as
the image we had made of it. True, we felt welcomed by kind and gracious
Montrealers who were invariably helpful and often volunteered to help with a
smile on the ready. Genuine freedom was (and still is) in the air we breathed.
And we felt energised and capable of achieving anything we set our heads and
hearts to. The facts on the ground also told us other things that we had not
anticipated.
One country with five solitudes
The Canada we encountered comprised five solitudes: the Amer-Indian peoples — wards of the Federal Government, whose lives and communities were regimented by the Federal government; the Inuit people of Northern Canada; the Métis ( the children of the union of newcomers and aboriginal women and their descendants, who until the middle of last century were legally referred to as “half-breeds”); French-Canada in Quebec, and the English speaking minority of Montreal together with English speaking Canada which comprised a mosaic of newcomers, almost literally from the four corners of the world and the descendants of such groups that arrived earlier and assimilated into English-Canada. A relatively small number of French-Canadian communities located outside the province that labored to preserve their maternal language and their cultural heritage as best as they could with a few rather non-functioning links to French-Canada, were already half-assimilated into the surrounding English-speaking society.
In Quebec, the refusal or neglect of the English-speaking minority of Montreal including the newcomers to learn the language of their brethren compounded the feeling of two solitudes.16
Province of Quebec
Having chosen to immigrate to Canada and become part of the North American (read modern) French-Canadian society, we were rather disappointed by what we found: an inward looking society governed by an ultra-conservative government running the province in close collaboration with a traditionalist Church.17
_______________________________________
16The phrase “two solitudes” was coined by Hugh MacLennan, a prominent writer living in Montreal, who used it as the title of the book in which he asserted that the French-Canadian society and English Canada co-existed as “two solitudes.” The book, published in 1945, played a role in launching the political debate about the place of Quebec in Canada and what the nature of the relationship between the two communities, including the juridical relationship between the Quebec and the rest of Canada, ought to be.
17In 1960, the Quebecers jettisoned the traditional power and authority structure and elected the first of many provincial governments that engaged in an internal and an external “Revolution Tranquille" (in English Canada referred to as the “Quiet Revolution”) which in due course, did not remain either “tranquille” or quiet. They asserted what they believed to be Quebec`s historical rights and demanded the transfer of more constitutional powers from the Federal government. In the meantime, the reaction of English Canada to the arguments and demands was to keep wringing its hands and asking repeatedly “What does Quebec want?” until it was forced to stop asking and start looking for answers when Quebeckers elected the Parti Québecquois (P.Q.) which aspired to make Quebec a sovereign country and things turned ugly in the FLQ resorted to violence.
Page 8
The French–Canadian identity
In the result, both personal and collective French-Canadian identities were defined by the intertwining of the French language and cultural heritage and Roman Catholicism: a society which, despite forming the dominant majority in Quebec, was obsessed by a chronic fear of losing its identity by being swallowed up by English speaking Canada, not to mention, continent. And to make matters worse, the fear was perversely fed by an ill-advised, provincial educational policy.
The educational policy
In keeping with the Turkish way of thinking, we wanted my eight year old sister to complete minimally her primary schooling, which went up to grade eight, in French so as to become proficient in the language of the dominant majority. In fact, in keeping with the family tradition, my parents thought of having her do all her schooling in French. The plan ran into a strict prohibition. Under the then existing educational regime, the Quebec primary and secondary school system was run by the Catholic Church through the Catholic School boards, and the “so-called” Protestant school boards respectively. Under this regime, the Catholic boards were prohibited to admit any student who was not Catholic, while the Protestant ones were permitted to enroll every student that came along, except the Catholic ones.
In the result, the Anglophone minority of the province and the overwhelming majority of newcomers to the province — and particularly the children of immigrants and refugees (other than those who originated from a French speaking country such as Haiti)) who were most anxious to integrate into English Canada, attended the schools of the Protestant school boards, whose curriculum (save for a French language class in successive grades, such as they were) was taught exclusively in English.
Our reaction to this bizarre state of affairs was one of utter disbelief: why on earth would the French-Canadians obsessed with the preservation and maintenance of their identity, have a schooling system that progressively reduced the relative size of their majority in Quebec and of their minority in the rest of Canada?
Turkish as we were, my parents asked the Principal of the Catholic school who refused to admit my sister into grade three: this being a French-speaking province, don`t you want to make sure that all the students, regardless of their religion, acquire a good working knowledge of French by attending, minimally, a French language elementary school and even beyond? The official, a middle-aged gentleman, appeared to be pleasantly surprised by their question, coming, as it did, from newcomers. He rolled his eyes upward and with discernible regret in his voice and demeanour he replied: “Yes, I agree with your point of view but the law is the law”.18
The French language
The ”street French” of Montreal also came as bit of a shock.19 Initially, we just had almost no clue what we were being told. It was a new dialect in which some English nouns were converted into French verbs and a number of English words were pronounced with French phonetics .It contained a sizeable inventory of expressions that we had never encountered before, such as “caalin de bin de tabarouette” (phon.) which turned out to be a socially tolerated substitute form of profanation whose origin I never managed to figure out; “poigne ta drette” (phon.- tourne à droit/turn right); “a un autre tantôt” (on va se reprendre un autre jour/we will catch up another time); pas pantoutte (phon. pas du tout/not at all) and quaint words such as “jongler” (penser/to think), “jaser “(bavarder/to chat), "magané” (endommagé,détérioré/damaged/deteriorated), and I can go on. It was a French dialect mixed with some” franglais”.20
This analogy further endeared the French-Canadians to us and we began to enjoy hearing the local lingo. In turn, in our family conversations, we started the sentences in one language only to switch mid-course to another, and sometimes to yet another, the conversation ending up becoming a jumble of Turkish, Ladino, French and eventually, English; that is, when my parents did not spoke Greek between themselves when they did not want my sister and I to know what was being said. For a while, it looked like we were going to invent a whole new language.
Most regrettably, the snobbish or ignorant English-speaking Quebecers offended their Francophone brethren by refusing to consider their idiom to be “real” French. Obviously, these folks had not visited various regions of France where they would have heard people speak different dialects, use words that sounded strange with a fair dose of “Anglais” in the regions close to and in major cities. To add insult to injury, when Quebec and
_______________
18It took the Liberal reform government, elected in 1960, about five years to radically reform the educational system, among other things, by creating a Ministry of Education; abolishing the confessional school system and replacing it by one based on language. Some years later, successive governments imposed a number of additional linguistic restrictions and prescriptions in order to strengthen and enhance the use of French in the province’s schools, business enterprises and public places.
19As I understand it, historically, the French who settled between 1608 and 1759 in what came to be known as “Nouvelle France” spoke the dialects of the regions from which they originated. The conquest of Nouvelle-France by the British in 1759 froze both the language and the cultural bonds between the settlers and their mother country. Thereafter, the French language evolved in response to local conditions and circumstances such as the settlers’ and the Church’s treatment by the new British regime; the nature of contacts with the newcomers , the aboriginal peoples with whom they engaged in the fur trade, and with the large fur traders who worked for English companies . Eventually, as Quebec industrialised and French-Canadians became blue collar workers in English speaking enterprises, they began to acquire an in earnest an English vocabulary some of which metamorphosed into French.
20It did not take us long to make the connections between Turkish and Arabic and Persian languages during the Empire, and Turkish and French beginning in the late Empire, during which period the former borrowed copious amounts of Arabic, Persian and French vocabulary and Turkified the French one to note the parallels between the way the French language evolved in Quebec and the Spanish spoken by the Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 evolved into Judeo-Spanish, commonly referred to as Ladino. After 1492, estranged from Spain, its languages, dialects and culture, Ladino evolved, first, as a mixture of the Spanish dialects of the various regions of Spain from which the refugees originated and some Hebrew; then, as a mixture of the former with words and expressions borrowed from the languages spoken by the fresh arrivals in the community, by the neighbouring communities and in the countries with which the Empire maintained commercial and cultural relations; France becoming the leading one by the middle of 19th century. As a result, the Ladino vocabulary was progressively augmented and the language modified through the inputs of vocabulary and phrasing from Portuguese, Italian, Greek, French, Turkish, and through Turkish, from Arabic and Persian. In 2015, the Government of Spain ,endowed with politically correct thinking, sought to flatter the prospective Sephardic applicants for Spanish citizenship by describing Ladino as “the original [Castilian] Spanish enriched with loans from host languages”( my italics and translation) see: The Preamble of the Boletín Official del Estado,Num.151,Jueves 25 de junio de 2015,Sec.I.Pag.52557 I. Disposiciones Generales , Jefartura del Estado, Ley 12/20/2015, de 24 de junio en matería de concessión de la nacionalidad española a los sefardies originarios de España.” To my thinking, with all due respect to those who think otherwise, Ladino had become “un Espagnol magané”, as we would say in Quebec. Nevertheless, I am sad to report that I am probably a member of, the penultimate generation, if not the last one, to be proficient in the spoken and written Istanbul dialect of Ladino which is spelled and to some extent pronounced in accordance with the Turkish alphabet.
Page 9
One country with five solitudes
The Canada we encountered comprised five solitudes: the Amer-Indian peoples — wards of the Federal Government, whose lives and communities were regimented by the Federal government; the Inuit people of Northern Canada; the Métis ( the children of the union of newcomers and aboriginal women and their descendants, who until the middle of last century were legally referred to as “half-breeds”); French-Canada in Quebec, and the English speaking minority of Montreal together with English speaking Canada which comprised a mosaic of newcomers, almost literally from the four corners of the world and the descendants of such groups that arrived earlier and assimilated into English-Canada. A relatively small number of French-Canadian communities located outside the province that labored to preserve their maternal language and their cultural heritage as best as they could with a few rather non-functioning links to French-Canada, were already half-assimilated into the surrounding English-speaking society.
In Quebec, the refusal or neglect of the English-speaking minority of Montreal including the newcomers to learn the language of their brethren compounded the feeling of two solitudes.16
Province of Quebec
Having chosen to immigrate to Canada and become part of the North American (read modern) French-Canadian society, we were rather disappointed by what we found: an inward looking society governed by an ultra-conservative government running the province in close collaboration with a traditionalist Church.17
_______________________________________
16The phrase “two solitudes” was coined by Hugh MacLennan, a prominent writer living in Montreal, who used it as the title of the book in which he asserted that the French-Canadian society and English Canada co-existed as “two solitudes.” The book, published in 1945, played a role in launching the political debate about the place of Quebec in Canada and what the nature of the relationship between the two communities, including the juridical relationship between the Quebec and the rest of Canada, ought to be.
17In 1960, the Quebecers jettisoned the traditional power and authority structure and elected the first of many provincial governments that engaged in an internal and an external “Revolution Tranquille" (in English Canada referred to as the “Quiet Revolution”) which in due course, did not remain either “tranquille” or quiet. They asserted what they believed to be Quebec`s historical rights and demanded the transfer of more constitutional powers from the Federal government. In the meantime, the reaction of English Canada to the arguments and demands was to keep wringing its hands and asking repeatedly “What does Quebec want?” until it was forced to stop asking and start looking for answers when Quebeckers elected the Parti Québecquois (P.Q.) which aspired to make Quebec a sovereign country and things turned ugly in the FLQ resorted to violence.
Page 8
The French–Canadian identity
In the result, both personal and collective French-Canadian identities were defined by the intertwining of the French language and cultural heritage and Roman Catholicism: a society which, despite forming the dominant majority in Quebec, was obsessed by a chronic fear of losing its identity by being swallowed up by English speaking Canada, not to mention, continent. And to make matters worse, the fear was perversely fed by an ill-advised, provincial educational policy.
The educational policy
In keeping with the Turkish way of thinking, we wanted my eight year old sister to complete minimally her primary schooling, which went up to grade eight, in French so as to become proficient in the language of the dominant majority. In fact, in keeping with the family tradition, my parents thought of having her do all her schooling in French. The plan ran into a strict prohibition. Under the then existing educational regime, the Quebec primary and secondary school system was run by the Catholic Church through the Catholic School boards, and the “so-called” Protestant school boards respectively. Under this regime, the Catholic boards were prohibited to admit any student who was not Catholic, while the Protestant ones were permitted to enroll every student that came along, except the Catholic ones.
In the result, the Anglophone minority of the province and the overwhelming majority of newcomers to the province — and particularly the children of immigrants and refugees (other than those who originated from a French speaking country such as Haiti)) who were most anxious to integrate into English Canada, attended the schools of the Protestant school boards, whose curriculum (save for a French language class in successive grades, such as they were) was taught exclusively in English.
Our reaction to this bizarre state of affairs was one of utter disbelief: why on earth would the French-Canadians obsessed with the preservation and maintenance of their identity, have a schooling system that progressively reduced the relative size of their majority in Quebec and of their minority in the rest of Canada?
Turkish as we were, my parents asked the Principal of the Catholic school who refused to admit my sister into grade three: this being a French-speaking province, don`t you want to make sure that all the students, regardless of their religion, acquire a good working knowledge of French by attending, minimally, a French language elementary school and even beyond? The official, a middle-aged gentleman, appeared to be pleasantly surprised by their question, coming, as it did, from newcomers. He rolled his eyes upward and with discernible regret in his voice and demeanour he replied: “Yes, I agree with your point of view but the law is the law”.18
The French language
The ”street French” of Montreal also came as bit of a shock.19 Initially, we just had almost no clue what we were being told. It was a new dialect in which some English nouns were converted into French verbs and a number of English words were pronounced with French phonetics .It contained a sizeable inventory of expressions that we had never encountered before, such as “caalin de bin de tabarouette” (phon.) which turned out to be a socially tolerated substitute form of profanation whose origin I never managed to figure out; “poigne ta drette” (phon.- tourne à droit/turn right); “a un autre tantôt” (on va se reprendre un autre jour/we will catch up another time); pas pantoutte (phon. pas du tout/not at all) and quaint words such as “jongler” (penser/to think), “jaser “(bavarder/to chat), "magané” (endommagé,détérioré/damaged/deteriorated), and I can go on. It was a French dialect mixed with some” franglais”.20
This analogy further endeared the French-Canadians to us and we began to enjoy hearing the local lingo. In turn, in our family conversations, we started the sentences in one language only to switch mid-course to another, and sometimes to yet another, the conversation ending up becoming a jumble of Turkish, Ladino, French and eventually, English; that is, when my parents did not spoke Greek between themselves when they did not want my sister and I to know what was being said. For a while, it looked like we were going to invent a whole new language.
Most regrettably, the snobbish or ignorant English-speaking Quebecers offended their Francophone brethren by refusing to consider their idiom to be “real” French. Obviously, these folks had not visited various regions of France where they would have heard people speak different dialects, use words that sounded strange with a fair dose of “Anglais” in the regions close to and in major cities. To add insult to injury, when Quebec and
_______________
18It took the Liberal reform government, elected in 1960, about five years to radically reform the educational system, among other things, by creating a Ministry of Education; abolishing the confessional school system and replacing it by one based on language. Some years later, successive governments imposed a number of additional linguistic restrictions and prescriptions in order to strengthen and enhance the use of French in the province’s schools, business enterprises and public places.
19As I understand it, historically, the French who settled between 1608 and 1759 in what came to be known as “Nouvelle France” spoke the dialects of the regions from which they originated. The conquest of Nouvelle-France by the British in 1759 froze both the language and the cultural bonds between the settlers and their mother country. Thereafter, the French language evolved in response to local conditions and circumstances such as the settlers’ and the Church’s treatment by the new British regime; the nature of contacts with the newcomers , the aboriginal peoples with whom they engaged in the fur trade, and with the large fur traders who worked for English companies . Eventually, as Quebec industrialised and French-Canadians became blue collar workers in English speaking enterprises, they began to acquire an in earnest an English vocabulary some of which metamorphosed into French.
20It did not take us long to make the connections between Turkish and Arabic and Persian languages during the Empire, and Turkish and French beginning in the late Empire, during which period the former borrowed copious amounts of Arabic, Persian and French vocabulary and Turkified the French one to note the parallels between the way the French language evolved in Quebec and the Spanish spoken by the Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 evolved into Judeo-Spanish, commonly referred to as Ladino. After 1492, estranged from Spain, its languages, dialects and culture, Ladino evolved, first, as a mixture of the Spanish dialects of the various regions of Spain from which the refugees originated and some Hebrew; then, as a mixture of the former with words and expressions borrowed from the languages spoken by the fresh arrivals in the community, by the neighbouring communities and in the countries with which the Empire maintained commercial and cultural relations; France becoming the leading one by the middle of 19th century. As a result, the Ladino vocabulary was progressively augmented and the language modified through the inputs of vocabulary and phrasing from Portuguese, Italian, Greek, French, Turkish, and through Turkish, from Arabic and Persian. In 2015, the Government of Spain ,endowed with politically correct thinking, sought to flatter the prospective Sephardic applicants for Spanish citizenship by describing Ladino as “the original [Castilian] Spanish enriched with loans from host languages”( my italics and translation) see: The Preamble of the Boletín Official del Estado,Num.151,Jueves 25 de junio de 2015,Sec.I.Pag.52557 I. Disposiciones Generales , Jefartura del Estado, Ley 12/20/2015, de 24 de junio en matería de concessión de la nacionalidad española a los sefardies originarios de España.” To my thinking, with all due respect to those who think otherwise, Ladino had become “un Espagnol magané”, as we would say in Quebec. Nevertheless, I am sad to report that I am probably a member of, the penultimate generation, if not the last one, to be proficient in the spoken and written Istanbul dialect of Ladino which is spelled and to some extent pronounced in accordance with the Turkish alphabet.
Page 9
France
began to re-establish cultural links, at first, some French folks made fun of
the way their cousins from Quebec spoke.
Insofar as the Jewish community was concerned, we were quite startled to hear some Jewish friends tell us that they preferred their kids to learn Yiddish rather than “that” French. As it turned out, their kids resisted the idea of learning the former and did not learn much of the latter until knowledge of French became useful for some and a necessity for others at work.
In the meantime, the language issue
reinforced the two solitudes in Quebec.Insofar as the Jewish community was concerned, we were quite startled to hear some Jewish friends tell us that they preferred their kids to learn Yiddish rather than “that” French. As it turned out, their kids resisted the idea of learning the former and did not learn much of the latter until knowledge of French became useful for some and a necessity for others at work.
Language and economic colonisation
It
did not take my father long after his arrival to realise that it would be
impossible for him to find a position and receive a salary commensurate with
his vast business experience because he did not speak English. In the process,
he discovered the cruel truth that in the business world of Quebec, the
language that mattered was not French, the one spoken by the majority, but
English spoken by its minority. Indeed, English was the language of business
since all of the major industries, financial institutions (save for the
smallest two) and most of the major commercial enterprises were owned by American
or English-Canadian companies which at the time, controlled the Quebec economy.
My father found himself in the same boat as the unilingual French-Canadians, a sizeable segment of which had trouble securing employment with the major employers except at entry level jobs and in the event they managed to get hired, to secure advancement to managerial ranks. His reaction to this sorry state of affairs was once again triggered by his Turkishness. Ironically enough, he related to his French-Canadian interlocutors a sanitised version of the ”Vatandaş Türkçe konuş!” (Compatriots, Speak Turkish!) campaigns, that caused so much anguish and grief to the Jewish community.21 He asked what was holding them back
My father found himself in the same boat as the unilingual French-Canadians, a sizeable segment of which had trouble securing employment with the major employers except at entry level jobs and in the event they managed to get hired, to secure advancement to managerial ranks. His reaction to this sorry state of affairs was once again triggered by his Turkishness. Ironically enough, he related to his French-Canadian interlocutors a sanitised version of the ”Vatandaş Türkçe konuş!” (Compatriots, Speak Turkish!) campaigns, that caused so much anguish and grief to the Jewish community.21 He asked what was holding them back
__________________________________
21 1.The strict and narrow manner in which the Turkish society defines its identity is a corollary of the society’s deeply felt need for and its heavy emphasis on the homogeneity of the population. And it is this need which drove the founders of the modern Turkish Republic to engage in a powerful, emotionally charged campaign to “Turkify” every aspect of the society they inherited from the Ottomans. They Turkified the economy, the economic institutions, the military, all levels of public service, going so far down in the hierarchy as to replace non-Muslim tramway drivers by Muslim ones. Ironically enough, prior to the beginning of World War II and, in certain instances, with the connivance of Hitler anxious to keep the Turks in a friendly mood, the Turkish government hired a fair number of Jewish professors who upon being sacked from their university appointments left, were anxious to leave or fled Germany and Austria. The professors were specialists in areas such medicine public health in which the country’s expertise and resources were seriously deficient. Reisman, Arnold, Turkey’s Modernization-Refugees from Nazism and Ataturk’s Vision, Washington D.C.: New Academia Publishing LLC, 2006.
Page 10
from starting a similar campaign in Quebec, with the slogan “Employeurs Anglophones! Travaillons en Français!” (Anglophones Employers! Let’s work in French!) , hopefully without taking the campaign to the extremes we experienced in my native land.
The notion that I was a “Juif Catholique”, amusing as it was when I first heard it, nevertheless touched a sensitive nerve and brought me back to the identity problem we experienced in Turkey.
________________________________
2. In 1934, the Turkish Parliament enacted a law requiring the citizens to take surnames. The legislation explicitly prohibited the use of foreign or foreign sounding surnames. Although the statute was not directed to the non-Muslim minorities who already had surnames, a fair number of people in the Jewish community, including my father, took the prohibition as a strong hint that the government also wanted these minorities to change their surnames to Turkish ones. So around 1935, my father decided to Turkify his Spanish surname Aseo by translating it into Akman which more or less carries the same meaning as Aseo. cf. Tagger, Mathilde and Akman, Doğan, The Origins of the Name Aseo, Sephardic Horizons, v.2, issue 3, and summer 2012. The manner in which my father changed his surname is consistent with the common practice of Jewish immigrants and refugees who change their surnames by translating them into the corresponding words in the language of the country in which they settle. (When I first visited Spain in 1990, I discovered that by then, while the word aseo retained its original meaning, was also commonly used to refer to a washroom.) As if this was not enough, my parents also gave me a Turkish name, instead of Nisim, the name of my paternal grand-father, after whom I should have been named in keeping with the local naming customs. There was no point taking a Turkish surname if one kept a give- a- way Jewish name. And strange as it may sound, they chose my name like choosing a lottery ticket: they wrote half a dozen possible names on bits of paper, placed the bits in a hat, shook the hat to mix the bits and then picked one.
3. In the meantime, the government and the media and, at some point later, university students launched the language campaign which affected the Jewish community most adversely. Although the nationalists could not accept the fact, they somehow understood that, after all, the Greeks and the Armenians were merely speaking their respective mother tongue. On the other hand, as far as the Jewish community was concerned, they considered Ladino to be a language “foreign” to the community; the language of the very country that oppressed and expelled them. In the premises, they could not understand why they insisted in continuing to speak it. They considered this to be a sign of their, what else, ingratitude to their Turkish “hosts” who allegedly or rather mythically are said to have “welcomed” their forebears with “open arms” after they expulsion from Spain. Nor were the nationalist government, the media and the rest, willing to be patient and to give the community which had been using Ladino as its lingua franca in the multi-cultural Ottoman Empire for over 400 years to adjust to the new reality and start learning to use Turkish in public places and to adopt it as mother tongue. The campaign, which traumatised the Jewish community and stretched over decades, was tough, at times ugly and sometime violent. As a child, I witnessed my mother being subjected to verbal abuse when she was heard conversing in Ladino with a Jewish friend. Then, during the 1970s the campaign came to a sudden halt in Istanbul when a group of rowdy campaigners, unable to distinguish tourists speaking their own languages from locals speaking the forbidden ones, harassed a group of them. News of the event spread like wildfire and the campaigners were sternly condemned by the news media which, until then, had acted as their cheerleaders. The fiasco caused the early departure of the tourists in town and led to a substantial number of cancellations of reservations by those planning to visit the city. The result was a substantial drop in the revenue generated by tourism, which the country was anxious to promote. N.B. This narrative is largely borrowed from Bali, Rifat N, and Model Citizens of the State: The Jews of Turkey during the Multi-party Period, op .cit. supplemented by my own personal recollections of the events. For more detailed background materials that address the community’s history starting from World War I to the present, see: Bali, Rifat, N., The Silent Minority in Turkey: Turkish Jews, Istanbul: Libra Kitapcılık ve Yayıncılık,2013;see also: Anderson, Perry, Turkey, The New Old World, New York: Verso, 2009 (paperback edition, 2011).
22By then, my mother had long become utterly frustrated by her inability to do her shopping in French in the major department stores she liked to frequent. She used to say”I thought money had no colour, language or religion!” Barely a week after the enactment of the first piece of legislation dealing with the use of French by commercial enterprises, I could not help but enjoy watching my mother, enter her favourite department store, approach the sales girl at the counter where she intended to buy an item, address her in French and upon hearing the standard “I am sorry, I do not speak French” replied in French: “Then please find a salesperson who speaks French”. The poor sales girl after scurrying around looking for one, finally showed up with a French speaking person who served her.
Page 11
It then dawned on me, I suppose better late than never, that French-Canadians in Quebec defined their identity pretty much along the same lines as the Turks did; namely, a French-Canadian is a person of French descent whose culture and mother tongue are French and whose religion is Roman Catholic.
21 1.The strict and narrow manner in which the Turkish society defines its identity is a corollary of the society’s deeply felt need for and its heavy emphasis on the homogeneity of the population. And it is this need which drove the founders of the modern Turkish Republic to engage in a powerful, emotionally charged campaign to “Turkify” every aspect of the society they inherited from the Ottomans. They Turkified the economy, the economic institutions, the military, all levels of public service, going so far down in the hierarchy as to replace non-Muslim tramway drivers by Muslim ones. Ironically enough, prior to the beginning of World War II and, in certain instances, with the connivance of Hitler anxious to keep the Turks in a friendly mood, the Turkish government hired a fair number of Jewish professors who upon being sacked from their university appointments left, were anxious to leave or fled Germany and Austria. The professors were specialists in areas such medicine public health in which the country’s expertise and resources were seriously deficient. Reisman, Arnold, Turkey’s Modernization-Refugees from Nazism and Ataturk’s Vision, Washington D.C.: New Academia Publishing LLC, 2006.
Page 10
from starting a similar campaign in Quebec, with the slogan “Employeurs Anglophones! Travaillons en Français!” (Anglophones Employers! Let’s work in French!) , hopefully without taking the campaign to the extremes we experienced in my native land.
Well, the French-Canadians were too impatient
to rely on slogans .They did one better by electing successive provincial
governments that enacted a series of laws to address the language problems
ranging from unilingual English business and street signs to the language of
work. Funny as it may sound, one of the unintended group of beneficiaries of
the legislation turned out to be my mother, her friends and other immigrants
like them, who did not speak English at all or well enough, and consequently
found shopping quite difficult in all the major department stores (save for
one, in the eastern Francophone side of the city), where the sales staff, with
the odd exception, was unilingual.22
Facing the Tricky
Issue of Identity:
Who is a “real”
French-Canadian?
Un “Juif Catholique”
Before
resuming my university studies, I took a job as a reporter for an English
language daily newspaper in a small city in Quebec with a mix of Anglophones and Francophones in
order to acquire greater fluency and speed in written English. Curiously
enough, I was hired because of my fluency in French as they were looking, among
other qualifications, for someone to cover the news from City Hall where the
business of the City Council was conducted almost exclusively in French. One
day in the course of an informal conversation a French-Canadian councilor said
something like “as a Catholic you must know that…” After he completed his
sentence, I told him that I am Jewish. After prefacing his reply by
complimenting me on my French, he said: “Ah! Comme ça, vous êtes un Juif
Catholique!” (Ah! well then, you are a Jewish- Catholic!)
Who is a “real” French-Canadian:
Turkey redux?The notion that I was a “Juif Catholique”, amusing as it was when I first heard it, nevertheless touched a sensitive nerve and brought me back to the identity problem we experienced in Turkey.
________________________________
2. In 1934, the Turkish Parliament enacted a law requiring the citizens to take surnames. The legislation explicitly prohibited the use of foreign or foreign sounding surnames. Although the statute was not directed to the non-Muslim minorities who already had surnames, a fair number of people in the Jewish community, including my father, took the prohibition as a strong hint that the government also wanted these minorities to change their surnames to Turkish ones. So around 1935, my father decided to Turkify his Spanish surname Aseo by translating it into Akman which more or less carries the same meaning as Aseo. cf. Tagger, Mathilde and Akman, Doğan, The Origins of the Name Aseo, Sephardic Horizons, v.2, issue 3, and summer 2012. The manner in which my father changed his surname is consistent with the common practice of Jewish immigrants and refugees who change their surnames by translating them into the corresponding words in the language of the country in which they settle. (When I first visited Spain in 1990, I discovered that by then, while the word aseo retained its original meaning, was also commonly used to refer to a washroom.) As if this was not enough, my parents also gave me a Turkish name, instead of Nisim, the name of my paternal grand-father, after whom I should have been named in keeping with the local naming customs. There was no point taking a Turkish surname if one kept a give- a- way Jewish name. And strange as it may sound, they chose my name like choosing a lottery ticket: they wrote half a dozen possible names on bits of paper, placed the bits in a hat, shook the hat to mix the bits and then picked one.
3. In the meantime, the government and the media and, at some point later, university students launched the language campaign which affected the Jewish community most adversely. Although the nationalists could not accept the fact, they somehow understood that, after all, the Greeks and the Armenians were merely speaking their respective mother tongue. On the other hand, as far as the Jewish community was concerned, they considered Ladino to be a language “foreign” to the community; the language of the very country that oppressed and expelled them. In the premises, they could not understand why they insisted in continuing to speak it. They considered this to be a sign of their, what else, ingratitude to their Turkish “hosts” who allegedly or rather mythically are said to have “welcomed” their forebears with “open arms” after they expulsion from Spain. Nor were the nationalist government, the media and the rest, willing to be patient and to give the community which had been using Ladino as its lingua franca in the multi-cultural Ottoman Empire for over 400 years to adjust to the new reality and start learning to use Turkish in public places and to adopt it as mother tongue. The campaign, which traumatised the Jewish community and stretched over decades, was tough, at times ugly and sometime violent. As a child, I witnessed my mother being subjected to verbal abuse when she was heard conversing in Ladino with a Jewish friend. Then, during the 1970s the campaign came to a sudden halt in Istanbul when a group of rowdy campaigners, unable to distinguish tourists speaking their own languages from locals speaking the forbidden ones, harassed a group of them. News of the event spread like wildfire and the campaigners were sternly condemned by the news media which, until then, had acted as their cheerleaders. The fiasco caused the early departure of the tourists in town and led to a substantial number of cancellations of reservations by those planning to visit the city. The result was a substantial drop in the revenue generated by tourism, which the country was anxious to promote. N.B. This narrative is largely borrowed from Bali, Rifat N, and Model Citizens of the State: The Jews of Turkey during the Multi-party Period, op .cit. supplemented by my own personal recollections of the events. For more detailed background materials that address the community’s history starting from World War I to the present, see: Bali, Rifat, N., The Silent Minority in Turkey: Turkish Jews, Istanbul: Libra Kitapcılık ve Yayıncılık,2013;see also: Anderson, Perry, Turkey, The New Old World, New York: Verso, 2009 (paperback edition, 2011).
22By then, my mother had long become utterly frustrated by her inability to do her shopping in French in the major department stores she liked to frequent. She used to say”I thought money had no colour, language or religion!” Barely a week after the enactment of the first piece of legislation dealing with the use of French by commercial enterprises, I could not help but enjoy watching my mother, enter her favourite department store, approach the sales girl at the counter where she intended to buy an item, address her in French and upon hearing the standard “I am sorry, I do not speak French” replied in French: “Then please find a salesperson who speaks French”. The poor sales girl after scurrying around looking for one, finally showed up with a French speaking person who served her.
Page 11
It then dawned on me, I suppose better late than never, that French-Canadians in Quebec defined their identity pretty much along the same lines as the Turks did; namely, a French-Canadian is a person of French descent whose culture and mother tongue are French and whose religion is Roman Catholic.
The one exception to this definition was the
case of children, born to marriages between Irish-Catholic men and
French-Canadian women, provided the children were fully assimilated into
French-Canada from birth, although the children bore English surnames.23
Thus, as is with the case with the
exclusionary Turkish definition of identity, this definition, certainly
established a very high threshold for newcomers who were neither Catholic nor
of French descent but were of French culture by education and French –Canadians
by self-identification, to be considered and accepted as French-Canadians.
Somewhat more troubling than the definition
of identity, were the French-Canadians who, with self-evident ethnocentric
pride cum racism, used the phrase “Canadien Français ‘pure laine’” (pure wool),
to refer to a French-Canadian whose ancestry did not include persons who belonged
to other ethnic group, who were not Catholic and whose linguistic and cultural
heritage were not French.
Here
we go again, I thought. But here again we did not go as I had feared. I
realised that this definition of their identity was the self-defensive
mechanism of an insecure people, fearful of being unable to survive as a
distinct society, rather than an aggressive, exclusionary one intended to make
those of different identities feel like persona non grata in the province or to
reduce their status to that of some sort of “dhimmis”.
As it turned out, ultimately, the de facto
multiculturalism in Quebec, the French-Canadian Quebecers’ own political,
social and cultural values and openness to the outside world, made the critical
difference between the situations in Quebec compared to that in Turkey.
Choosing a university
Be that as it was, as a graduate of St. Michel, I thought it quite
normal and felt quite happy to pursue my undergraduate studies at the
Université de Montréal which at that time still functioned under a Charter
granted by the Church, with a member of the Church occupying the Rector’s seat.
It also happened to be an institution with a first rate faculty of social
sciences which, to my mind, was by far superior to those in the city’s English
universities.24 I was made welcome and I
instinctively felt quite comfortable in my new French-Canadian surroundings. I
was befriended by students who very much appreciated the fact that as an
immigrant I had chosen to study at their university rather than at an English
speaking one, as was the case for the newcomers and the minorities including
the Jewish community. As it turned out, at the time, I was the only “Juif
Catholique” in my faculty, and probably in the university. Some of my
classmates, taken aback by my ardent defence of Turkey against unjust or ignorant arguments about and against the country, affectionately nicknamed me “tête de Turc” as a strong minded stubborn person.
_________________________________
23Although, the Irish-Catholics were Anglophones, the French-Canadian parents did not want their daughters to marry outside their religion and therefore deemed the prospective Irish-Catholic grooms to be proper candidates eligible to ask for their daughters’ hand. Re: I deliberately frame these observations in the past tense, as I am not acquainted well enough with the present situation.
24I financed my undergraduate studies by driving a taxi two or three nights a week during the academic year save during examinations and full-time during the summer. It was quite an experience and a most helpful one for my studies as I began to hone my observational skills, learn how to apply sociological concepts, and to formulate and test hypotheses based on the behavioural patterns of my customers. It is truly amazing how much one can learn about human behaviour, social and cultural patterns by the way the passengers behave in the cab, what they say and how they say it, the type and nature of the questions they ask, and even the way they tip and the amount of the tip. My cab became my private socio-cultural laboratory. In the process, I learned a good deal about the various ethnic and linguistic communities of the city including the Jewish one.
Page 12
Sephardic Jews in an Ashkenazi Community:
Who is a “real” Jew?
_________________________________
23Although, the Irish-Catholics were Anglophones, the French-Canadian parents did not want their daughters to marry outside their religion and therefore deemed the prospective Irish-Catholic grooms to be proper candidates eligible to ask for their daughters’ hand. Re: I deliberately frame these observations in the past tense, as I am not acquainted well enough with the present situation.
24I financed my undergraduate studies by driving a taxi two or three nights a week during the academic year save during examinations and full-time during the summer. It was quite an experience and a most helpful one for my studies as I began to hone my observational skills, learn how to apply sociological concepts, and to formulate and test hypotheses based on the behavioural patterns of my customers. It is truly amazing how much one can learn about human behaviour, social and cultural patterns by the way the passengers behave in the cab, what they say and how they say it, the type and nature of the questions they ask, and even the way they tip and the amount of the tip. My cab became my private socio-cultural laboratory. In the process, I learned a good deal about the various ethnic and linguistic communities of the city including the Jewish one.
Page 12
Sephardic Jews in an Ashkenazi Community:
Who is a “real” Jew?
In Montreal,
until the arrival of Moroccan Jews, Sephardic Jews were rare species. Their
community, such as it was, consisted almost entirely of families that came from
Turkey and a sprinkling of other families that originated from the Arab
countries of the former Ottoman Empire having either left or fled these
countries when the War of 1948 started
or were expelled upon the establishment of the State of Israel.
To my family and circle of friends, the
Ashkenazi community in Canada was a new and strange world as ours was to them.
The only two things that bound us to them were our religion and our shared
collective memory of the major historical tragedies and hardships that befell
the Jewish people through the ages. Save for some western countries where both
communities existed, in Europe, our respective historical and geographical
trajectories bifurcated during the Middle Ages until the Nazi-Germans came to
power in 1933. In the result, these two sub-groups of the Jewish people
differed in their respective collective word-views as a result of the way each
were historically treated by and related to their respective surrounding
dominant societies. So did our trajectories bifurcate in terms of the dominant
religious schools of thought, traditions, customs and practices.
In Montreal, I had the distinct impression
that the Ashkenazi did not think much of the Sephardic Jews they dealt with. In
fact, some seemed to think that we were not quite Jewish, or seriously Jewish,
because to their thinking, we did not practice Judaism as they though it must
be practiced. For them, we were too “laid-back” about our Judaism to be true
Jews.25 We did not even speak Yiddish.
Well, history sure has a way of repaying the
haughty or as my aboriginal compatriots would put it “what goes around, comes
around”.26
As it was, my family and our friends did not manifest a particularly strong desire to join an Ashkenazi congregation, in good measure because they had a hard time conversing in English; of course did not speak Yiddish, and somehow they did not to think through a variety of matters the same way.
As it was, my family and our friends did not manifest a particularly strong desire to join an Ashkenazi congregation, in good measure because they had a hard time conversing in English; of course did not speak Yiddish, and somehow they did not to think through a variety of matters the same way.
Be that as it was, sadly enough, in my
parents’ case, their vague interest in becoming members of one of the
local congregations, abruptly evaporated
on the eve of Passover in the year following our arrival.
At that time, the local practice
required the worshippers to pay a fee
in advance in order to reserve a seat in the synagogue for the High Holiday
services and to show the receipt at the door to gain admission. Well, in
Istanbul, my father never bothered to comply with any such formalities and
always left it to the last minute
_________________________
25In my particular case, my elderly Jewish lady passengers riding in my taxi did not seem to think that I was a “proper” Jewish boy because I did not sound and behave as they expected me to behave: Not only I did not speak Yiddish, and go to shul (synagogue) regularly, I attended, of all things, a French-Canadian university instead of an English-speaking one. The facts that I spoke a funny language called Ladino which they never heard before and came from Turkey instead of Eastern Europe confirmed their opinion and sealed my fate.
26Some years later, when I began to study the history of the Jewish community in the Ottoman Empire, I learned that between the 14th to the 17th centuries and beyond, the Sephardic Jewish community was by far the dominant Jewish community. It seems that my Ottoman forebears treated the Ashkenazi refugees who arrived before and after them with touches of haughty superiority with respect to the ways the Ashkenazi refugees organized their community, lived and practiced their Judaism. Of necessity, the latter had to face reality and to adopt their ways to that of the majority and ultimately assimilate into it. In fact, long before I was born, the Ashkenazi origin of the members of the community was known by the fact that their surnames were either Ashkenazi or another Ashkenazi term. As we say in Canada, “what goes around comes around. Our turn came around in Canada. I chose to adopt the “Canadian” ways of doing and assimilate into the Canadian society as I found it.
Page 13
to pay at the door. Either in his ignorance of the local practice or, more likely ignoring the practice, he presented himself at the door of the synagogue without a ticket. Upon being asked for it, he replied that he did not have one and offered to pay whatever was required right there and then. His offer was dismissed and then he was escorted to the sidewalk by the two Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers in full regalia. Before being escorted, my father managed to peek through the entrance to the synagogue and noticed that the makeshift one erected in the basement for the Sephardics had a lot of empty seats.
When he returned home, my father was livid, fit to be tied. He just could not believe that a Jew could be prevented from praying in a synagogue, on a High Holiday to boot, in such a cavalier fashion. He declared that he would never join a congregation that put compliance with petty procedures ahead of its duty to let a Jew pray in its synagogue, simply because he had failed to pay for his seat in advance. And that was it. He never stepped into another synagogue until a proper Sephardic one was established. The facts that both the congregation and the rabbi spoke French pleased my parents to no end.
Naturally, in due course, the incident was consigned to oblivion and my parents, while remaining close to their original circle of friends, made new friends with their Ashkenazi neighbours.
A Sephardic cantor for an Ashkenazi congregation
I was unexpectedly reminded of the incident some 25 years later in the City of Saskatoon, situated in the middle of the Canadian prairies, where I was working as a Crown Counsel for criminal prosecutions. The town with a population of about 200,000 people had a small Ashkenazi Jewish community with a modest synagogue and an equally modest community centre. I would describe the small congregation as “survivor congregation” in that although its membership belonged to various branches of Judaism, they had to pray together in order to have a full service. As I recall it, at the close of a Friday night service, the Rabbi announced to the congregation that the Executive Committee had managed to hire a new cantor from Winnipeg. The good news were received with palpable excitement. However, the excitement quickly muted into an equally palpable perplexed silence, when the Rabbi reported that the new cantor was a Moroccan Jew of Sephardic tradition. He cut though the silence that greeted the introduction by assuring the congregation that the cantor was OK and that he will be alright for the services and for the community.27
_____________________________________________
27By the time the new Cantor arrived in town, I got transferred back to Headquarters in Ottawa and I did not follow the story beyond that point. It was during my time in Saskatoon when the Russian Jews were finally permitted to leave the U.S.S.R and the congregation decided to sponsor a Russian Jewish family. As it turned out, the family hailed from Azerbaijan, did not speak English that well, and the congregation did not manage to find a common language with which to communicate with them in a satisfactory manner. In a moment of frustration, someone had the idea of getting me, a resident polyglot of sorts, to see if I could get through to our newcomers. Surprise! Surprise! There we were in the middle of nowhere, so to speak, thousands of miles away from our respective native lands; having a nice conversation, the family head speaking in Azerbaijani Turkish while I carried on with my own Turkish.
_________________________
25In my particular case, my elderly Jewish lady passengers riding in my taxi did not seem to think that I was a “proper” Jewish boy because I did not sound and behave as they expected me to behave: Not only I did not speak Yiddish, and go to shul (synagogue) regularly, I attended, of all things, a French-Canadian university instead of an English-speaking one. The facts that I spoke a funny language called Ladino which they never heard before and came from Turkey instead of Eastern Europe confirmed their opinion and sealed my fate.
26Some years later, when I began to study the history of the Jewish community in the Ottoman Empire, I learned that between the 14th to the 17th centuries and beyond, the Sephardic Jewish community was by far the dominant Jewish community. It seems that my Ottoman forebears treated the Ashkenazi refugees who arrived before and after them with touches of haughty superiority with respect to the ways the Ashkenazi refugees organized their community, lived and practiced their Judaism. Of necessity, the latter had to face reality and to adopt their ways to that of the majority and ultimately assimilate into it. In fact, long before I was born, the Ashkenazi origin of the members of the community was known by the fact that their surnames were either Ashkenazi or another Ashkenazi term. As we say in Canada, “what goes around comes around. Our turn came around in Canada. I chose to adopt the “Canadian” ways of doing and assimilate into the Canadian society as I found it.
Page 13
to pay at the door. Either in his ignorance of the local practice or, more likely ignoring the practice, he presented himself at the door of the synagogue without a ticket. Upon being asked for it, he replied that he did not have one and offered to pay whatever was required right there and then. His offer was dismissed and then he was escorted to the sidewalk by the two Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers in full regalia. Before being escorted, my father managed to peek through the entrance to the synagogue and noticed that the makeshift one erected in the basement for the Sephardics had a lot of empty seats.
When he returned home, my father was livid, fit to be tied. He just could not believe that a Jew could be prevented from praying in a synagogue, on a High Holiday to boot, in such a cavalier fashion. He declared that he would never join a congregation that put compliance with petty procedures ahead of its duty to let a Jew pray in its synagogue, simply because he had failed to pay for his seat in advance. And that was it. He never stepped into another synagogue until a proper Sephardic one was established. The facts that both the congregation and the rabbi spoke French pleased my parents to no end.
Naturally, in due course, the incident was consigned to oblivion and my parents, while remaining close to their original circle of friends, made new friends with their Ashkenazi neighbours.
A Sephardic cantor for an Ashkenazi congregation
I was unexpectedly reminded of the incident some 25 years later in the City of Saskatoon, situated in the middle of the Canadian prairies, where I was working as a Crown Counsel for criminal prosecutions. The town with a population of about 200,000 people had a small Ashkenazi Jewish community with a modest synagogue and an equally modest community centre. I would describe the small congregation as “survivor congregation” in that although its membership belonged to various branches of Judaism, they had to pray together in order to have a full service. As I recall it, at the close of a Friday night service, the Rabbi announced to the congregation that the Executive Committee had managed to hire a new cantor from Winnipeg. The good news were received with palpable excitement. However, the excitement quickly muted into an equally palpable perplexed silence, when the Rabbi reported that the new cantor was a Moroccan Jew of Sephardic tradition. He cut though the silence that greeted the introduction by assuring the congregation that the cantor was OK and that he will be alright for the services and for the community.27
The distinctions between the Ashkenazi and
the Sephardic Jews became immaterial as the older generations of the former
began to pass away and the aggregate number and size of the Sephardic
communities remained negligible. Today, with the younger generations, if a
distinction between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews is mentioned — and I have not
heard one for years — it usually comes up as a matter of personal curiosity, historical interest,
and the occasional pleasant anecdotal
reminiscences.
Trying to Make a Living
Unlike that which was then mythically reputed
to be the case in the cities of the United States, the streets of Montreal were
not strewn with gold, to be picked at pleasure, loaded on to wheel barrows and
deposited in the vaults of the bank where one had an account. There was none to
be had and making a living during the first Trying to Make a Living
_____________________________________________
27By the time the new Cantor arrived in town, I got transferred back to Headquarters in Ottawa and I did not follow the story beyond that point. It was during my time in Saskatoon when the Russian Jews were finally permitted to leave the U.S.S.R and the congregation decided to sponsor a Russian Jewish family. As it turned out, the family hailed from Azerbaijan, did not speak English that well, and the congregation did not manage to find a common language with which to communicate with them in a satisfactory manner. In a moment of frustration, someone had the idea of getting me, a resident polyglot of sorts, to see if I could get through to our newcomers. Surprise! Surprise! There we were in the middle of nowhere, so to speak, thousands of miles away from our respective native lands; having a nice conversation, the family head speaking in Azerbaijani Turkish while I carried on with my own Turkish.
Page 14
few years proved quite challenging. It took my father some time to wise up to some local sharp small business practices he encountered and to find his business bearings. He teamed in partnership with a member of our close circle of friends from Turkey and together bought a business that turned out to be a semi-failure when the vendor breached the promise which induced them to complete the transaction. After selling that business, they succeeded in building a reasonably profitable new business.
Getting a job without “Canadian experience”
few years proved quite challenging. It took my father some time to wise up to some local sharp small business practices he encountered and to find his business bearings. He teamed in partnership with a member of our close circle of friends from Turkey and together bought a business that turned out to be a semi-failure when the vendor breached the promise which induced them to complete the transaction. After selling that business, they succeeded in building a reasonably profitable new business.
Getting a job without “Canadian experience”
Shortly after our arrival, unable to make up my mind about the field of
study I wanted to pursue, I postponed my university studies until I could make
an informed decision. In the meantime, I needed a job to contribute to the home
budget and to look after myself. And as a bit of bad luck would have it, it so
happened that just at that time the Canadian economy was hit by a recession and
finding a job turned out to be easier said than done.
The most wretched part of job hunting was my honest answer to the one critical question asked by the prospective employers: Do you have Canadian work experience? The answer was fatal to my chances of getting a job. After a while, I decided that, as we say in Canada, “enough is enough”. I devised a simple counter-strategy which consisted of answering their question by another question.28 So it was that at my next job interview, upon being asked the same old question, I gave the scripted performance which I had rehearsed in front of the mirror. I replied: How am I supposed to acquire Canadian experience if you don’t hire me? The fellow doing the hiring, who was Jewish and knew that I was one, stared at me for a while with a mixture of astonishment and a definite hint of disapproval of my insolent reply. As best as I can recall, he said: “Ok young man, you got the job, show us what you can do. The hours are seven a.m. to six p.m. with Saturday off at 1.The pay is $25.00 a week, no overtime and no fooling around. You better start tomorrow morning bright and early”. Long on hours and short on pay: welcome to a North American “sweat shop”!
The most wretched part of job hunting was my honest answer to the one critical question asked by the prospective employers: Do you have Canadian work experience? The answer was fatal to my chances of getting a job. After a while, I decided that, as we say in Canada, “enough is enough”. I devised a simple counter-strategy which consisted of answering their question by another question.28 So it was that at my next job interview, upon being asked the same old question, I gave the scripted performance which I had rehearsed in front of the mirror. I replied: How am I supposed to acquire Canadian experience if you don’t hire me? The fellow doing the hiring, who was Jewish and knew that I was one, stared at me for a while with a mixture of astonishment and a definite hint of disapproval of my insolent reply. As best as I can recall, he said: “Ok young man, you got the job, show us what you can do. The hours are seven a.m. to six p.m. with Saturday off at 1.The pay is $25.00 a week, no overtime and no fooling around. You better start tomorrow morning bright and early”. Long on hours and short on pay: welcome to a North American “sweat shop”!
The Old Country Beckons
Matrimonial inquiries
Matrimonial inquiries
As I was finishing my undergraduate degree, I discovered that the
employers in Quebec were not the only ones looking for people with Canadian
experience. I heard through my parents that some Jewish parents in Istanbul
were interested in finding for their daughters,
nice young men “from a good family” who studied abroad, acquired some
foreign “savoir faire”, preferably in business, and were receptive to the idea
of going back home to settle down and look for a good wife who shared his
values. (And if she came with a substantial dowry, all the better) The only sort of attractive feature of this
scenario was the prospect of becoming a partner in the prospective
father-in-law’s business. I do not know how and more importantly why, but
somehow, the word got around back in Istanbul that I might fit into this
scenario. I suppose I did fit, because I was from a good family and yes, I did
have a university degree.
So, when my father received a discrete inquiry along those lines, he broached the subject with me. It was to no avail. I found this kind of traditional arrangement rather oppressive to the bride, un-romantic, and “un-Canadian”. In any event, I had no intention of going back to live in Turkey after experiencing life in Canada. As it turned out, later on, I realised that when it came to marriage, I had “une vocation tardive” (a late vocation) as my teachers in St. Michel used to say about persons who joined the priesthood past the customary age.
Loss of the Turkish passport
A year after our arrival, when I went to the Turkish Embassy to renew my passport, I was informed that I had to go back to do my military service, and that if I did not agree to return forthwith they would keep my passport. Fully involved as I was then in discovering and settling in Canada; becoming “Canadianised” so to speak,
So, when my father received a discrete inquiry along those lines, he broached the subject with me. It was to no avail. I found this kind of traditional arrangement rather oppressive to the bride, un-romantic, and “un-Canadian”. In any event, I had no intention of going back to live in Turkey after experiencing life in Canada. As it turned out, later on, I realised that when it came to marriage, I had “une vocation tardive” (a late vocation) as my teachers in St. Michel used to say about persons who joined the priesthood past the customary age.
Loss of the Turkish passport
A year after our arrival, when I went to the Turkish Embassy to renew my passport, I was informed that I had to go back to do my military service, and that if I did not agree to return forthwith they would keep my passport. Fully involved as I was then in discovering and settling in Canada; becoming “Canadianised” so to speak,
________________________________
28My strategy was inspired by the Jewish joke I heard not long after my arrival in Canada. It goes like this: Why do you Jews always answer a question with another question? Answer: Why not?
Page 15
I decided not to return as military service was not going to be of any practical use to me in Canada, unless I decided to enlist in the Canadian Armed Forces, which for a time, I was interested doing. I declined to go back but with my Turkish mindset, I felt a little bad about dodging my military service until I was told that some Turkish university students evaded military service by resorting to a variety of tricks.
About 45 years later, I finally decided to visit the old country and got myself expelled from Turkish citizenship. After a first visit of nostalgia with my wife and three close relatives, in 2007, I was invited to Istanbul to participate in the class celebration of the 50th anniversary of our graduation from St. Michel. It was a splendid, most joyous celebration.29
28My strategy was inspired by the Jewish joke I heard not long after my arrival in Canada. It goes like this: Why do you Jews always answer a question with another question? Answer: Why not?
Page 15
I decided not to return as military service was not going to be of any practical use to me in Canada, unless I decided to enlist in the Canadian Armed Forces, which for a time, I was interested doing. I declined to go back but with my Turkish mindset, I felt a little bad about dodging my military service until I was told that some Turkish university students evaded military service by resorting to a variety of tricks.
About 45 years later, I finally decided to visit the old country and got myself expelled from Turkish citizenship. After a first visit of nostalgia with my wife and three close relatives, in 2007, I was invited to Istanbul to participate in the class celebration of the 50th anniversary of our graduation from St. Michel. It was a splendid, most joyous celebration.29
“Bloody Barbarians”? The history of the Ottoman Empire re-visited
In
school, I was a history buff, in part because unlike the subjects of math,
algebra, trigonometry which I had hard time fathoming, I excelled in it and in
part because I was fascinated with the re-construction of the past, and I
remain so to this day.
History became of secondary interest to me
during the first part of my postgraduate studies .But not for long. I was
brutally thrown back into it, in Philadelphia in 1966, when a fellow student
who knew I was Turkish and, for some reason or another, did not care much for
Turkey, threw on my desk a page from the New York Times and asked me to read
the “bloody thing” and walked away muttering the words “bloody barbarians”
sufficiently loudly so everyone on the room heard him.
I told the fellow “to get off it” and
returned to the page. I was aghast and lost for words when I realised that
the “bloody thing” was a full page ad commemorating what nowadays
is commonly referred to as the “Armenian
genocide”, perpetrated in the
Ottoman Empire during World War I in 1915. Certainly, my Turkish history school
textbooks made no mention of it.
I decided to investigate the matter after I
completed my studies. When I started reading about the subject, it did not take
me long to figure out that the history we were taught at school was the
“official” one that is an incomplete and sanitised version of the history of
the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, written in accordance with the nationalist-secularist
ideology and agenda of the government.
I found an illustration of this state of
affairs in Philip Mansel’s most readable book about the history of
Constantinople.30 Instead of writing about
the Empire’s conquests, wars, their dates and outcomes and ensuing treaties in
a mechanical fashion, as did our textbooks, his work focuses on “La Porte” in
the context of the social and cultural life of the city and paints the
portraits of the Sultans as persons rather than as warriors. Mansel demonstrates
in a compelling fashion that during the period of decline of the Empire “La
Porte” had many redeeming features, that all the Sultans during this period
were not abject failures and that some of them accomplished a number of
admirable things.31 These positive
features of the Empire were inconsistent with the Republic’s official line that
the decline of the Empire was caused, among other things, by inept or
________________________________
29By then, the majority of the members of the class lived in Canada, Belgium, England, France, Greece, Holland, Israel, Mexico, Sweden (and/or Denmark) or the United States. Ever since then, the long lost reunited brothers since grade six that we were , we remain in touch to this day, almost on a daily basis, exchanging holiday greetings, interesting news, editorials, opinion pieces, jokes , photograph collections and videos; what I call, “quality” spam.
30 Mansel, Philip, Constantinople: City of World’s Desire, 1453-1924, London: John Murray (publishers) Ltd. 1995 (Pelican Books edition, 1997). “La Porte” refers to the Palace, the seat of the Imperial government.
31One of these was that of the Sultan who during a visit to the military medical school noticed the absence of Jewish students. Upon inquiring as to the reasons for this, he was told that Jewish students could not attend the school as they were unable to perform their duties on Friday evenings and Saturday because it interfered with their religious observance of the Sabbath. Upon hearing this, the Sultan, the Caliph of the Muslim world, ordered that Jewish students be granted exemption from military duty so that they may attend to their religious duties. For an exact rendition of the story and other illustrations see: Mansel, Philip, op.cit supra.
Page 16
worthless Sultans, the undue influence of the Ulema32 and the general backwardness of the Empire. In furtherance of its agenda to redefine Turkish identity (as distinct from the Ottoman one) by secularising, modernising and westernising both the government and the Turkish society, the Republic held up the miserable state of affairs of the Empire as that which would re-emerge in the event the country failed to achieve these goals.
________________________________
29By then, the majority of the members of the class lived in Canada, Belgium, England, France, Greece, Holland, Israel, Mexico, Sweden (and/or Denmark) or the United States. Ever since then, the long lost reunited brothers since grade six that we were , we remain in touch to this day, almost on a daily basis, exchanging holiday greetings, interesting news, editorials, opinion pieces, jokes , photograph collections and videos; what I call, “quality” spam.
30 Mansel, Philip, Constantinople: City of World’s Desire, 1453-1924, London: John Murray (publishers) Ltd. 1995 (Pelican Books edition, 1997). “La Porte” refers to the Palace, the seat of the Imperial government.
31One of these was that of the Sultan who during a visit to the military medical school noticed the absence of Jewish students. Upon inquiring as to the reasons for this, he was told that Jewish students could not attend the school as they were unable to perform their duties on Friday evenings and Saturday because it interfered with their religious observance of the Sabbath. Upon hearing this, the Sultan, the Caliph of the Muslim world, ordered that Jewish students be granted exemption from military duty so that they may attend to their religious duties. For an exact rendition of the story and other illustrations see: Mansel, Philip, op.cit supra.
Page 16
worthless Sultans, the undue influence of the Ulema32 and the general backwardness of the Empire. In furtherance of its agenda to redefine Turkish identity (as distinct from the Ottoman one) by secularising, modernising and westernising both the government and the Turkish society, the Republic held up the miserable state of affairs of the Empire as that which would re-emerge in the event the country failed to achieve these goals.
The sanitised version of the history, which I
was taught, also left out a great many other most regrettable events in the
treatment of both non-Muslim as well as some Muslim minorities, after the
establishment of the Republic in 1923.
The irony in all of this is that one had to
leave the country in order to become properly acquainted with its unabridged
history.
The
Becoming of Canada: The Modern History of Canada in a Nutshell
If our years in in Canada have been most
satisfying and enjoyable, they certainly have not been immune to our “petits
quarts-d’heure” (trying or difficult times).As a matter of fact, we went
through three of them.
Canada`s history is the history of the complex
challenges faced by a young country with three founding nations: the Aboriginal
peoples, the French and the British, and a society of immigrants and refugees.
In the premises, the ultimate challenge of
the successive governments of Canada has been to build a country with a
distinct identity, common values and national goals; a united and prosperous
realm where peace, order and good government within the framework of democracy
prevails, and to achieve these objectives in a country which annually receives,
often in excess of, 200,000 immigrants that have to be integrated into the
Canadian society without damaging its multicultural fabric.
In
this process, under the watchful eye of the British government, the fathers of
the Confederation opened and led the path by establishing Canada in 1867, while
the subsequent federal governments
continued to extend this path, smoothing it along the way (some doing a much
better job than others) and taking the fundamental steps to promote the formulation and expression of
the national aspirations, goals and ideals of the country as a whole.
This nation building project turned out to be
a colossal one which remains somewhat incomplete due to Quebec’s periodic
ambivalence about remaining a partner in this project. We arrived in Montreal
not long before Quebec was about to launch its own political project. And it
was in this context that we experienced our “petits quarts-d’heure”.
Quebec
nationalism
Quebec’s “Revolution Tranquille" of the
1960s that set the province on the road to political, cultural, social and
economic reforms also burst open the long repressed nationalism of
French-Canadians. Soon enough as the religiousness of the French-Canadians
mutated into a loud and proud nationalism which in turn generated a number of
secessionist movements. By way of illustration, in Montreal, the rate of church
attendance for Sunday mass, prior to
1960, one of the highest, if not in fact, the highest in the Western world,
plummeted, if not to the lowest rate, to one among the very low ones.
The dream of a sovereign Quebec
And
so it was that our first “petit quart -d’heure“ was brought to us with the
compliments of one of these
_______________________________
32The guardians of legal and religious tradition of Islam who advised the Sultan on religious matters and sometimes exercised a significant influence in the running of the government.
Page 17
secessionist movements, Le Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ- Quebec Liberation Front.) formed in 1963. Impatient to achieve independence by democratic means, it soon resorted to terrorism by; exploding bombs in mail boxes at various locations, mainly in Anglophone residential and business neighbourhoods, including at the Montreal Stock Exchange which the movement considered to be the pre-eminent symbol of the English domination of Quebec and resulted in a large number of casualties; kidnapping and murdering an up and coming Minister in the Quebec government; kidnapping and subsequently releasing unharmed the British Consul-General in Montreal in exchange for being allowed to leave the country. This turn of events shocked both the Quebecers and the rest of the country, incredulous that such things could ever and did occur in their own backyard.
____________________________________
33The only case of peaceful secession, I can think of is that of Singapore from Malaysia.
Page 18
Yet, throughout all the debates and drama, the country as a whole remained focused but serene; a land of peace, order and good government both in Quebec and in the rest of Canada. For me, the way Quebec, the national government and Canadians as a whole approached and addressed the serious threat to national unity of Canada has been an incredible experience that further strengthened, if such was possible, my faith in the future of the country and of the Canadian society, hopefully with Quebec ,and if unavoidable, without it.
_______________________________
32The guardians of legal and religious tradition of Islam who advised the Sultan on religious matters and sometimes exercised a significant influence in the running of the government.
Page 17
secessionist movements, Le Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ- Quebec Liberation Front.) formed in 1963. Impatient to achieve independence by democratic means, it soon resorted to terrorism by; exploding bombs in mail boxes at various locations, mainly in Anglophone residential and business neighbourhoods, including at the Montreal Stock Exchange which the movement considered to be the pre-eminent symbol of the English domination of Quebec and resulted in a large number of casualties; kidnapping and murdering an up and coming Minister in the Quebec government; kidnapping and subsequently releasing unharmed the British Consul-General in Montreal in exchange for being allowed to leave the country. This turn of events shocked both the Quebecers and the rest of the country, incredulous that such things could ever and did occur in their own backyard.
If this was not enough, the French President
General Charles de Gaulle decided to visit Canada during its centennial
celebrations (1867-1967). Ignoring the general diplomatic custom of foreign
leaders to land in the capital city of the country, to be formally received by
the government, he chose to land in Quebec City, the capital of the province of
Quebec. He then proceeded to travel by car to Montreal on a road known from
olden times as Le Chemin du Roy (King’s road) with periodic stops along the way
to be received by the local population. When he arrived in Montreal, the Mayor
invited him to give a speech from the balcony of City Hall where he was cheered
by the crowds. He carried on with his speech, but unable or unwilling to
restrain his instincts for mischief making, he concluded it by shouting: “Vive Montréal!”, and after a pause, blurting
out: “Vive le Québec Libre!” driving the
crowd into frenzy. Such was his idea of expressing France’s gratitude to Canada
for sacrificing the lives of her native sons first, during the ill-fated
landing at Dunkirk, and after the successful landings on the beaches of
Normandy in 1944, fighting their way in the air and on land to help liberate
France while the good general watched the action from his comfortable quarters
in England. He was sent packing home in short order by the then Prime Minister
Lester B. Pearson who informed him that “Canadians do not need to be
liberated.” Upon hearing the news, my father turned to me and said: What did I
tell you?
What followed
the terrorism turned out to be a political scenario utterly unimaginable
in practically any other country where secession is an issue: The Quebec
secessionist movements and their members commonly referred to as the “souverainistes”, “séparatistes” or “indépendentistes”, pursued their goal by
peaceful and democratic means and the federal government responded in
kind.33
Quebec
entered into a democratic debate internally, with the federal government and to
a lesser extent with English Canada about the idea of an independent Quebec and
then more specifically on the relative merits of a proposal commonly referred
to as “souveraineté-association” (two associated sovereign countries) promoted
by the Parti Québécois (PQ) which in due course was elected to form the
government. This proposal entailed dissolving Canada as it exists and replacing
it with two sovereign countries; Quebec and Canada associated through a number
of fiscal, monetary and trade treaties.
In Quebec, the P.Q.
government brought about our two other “petits quarts- d’heure” by holding,
over time not one but two referenda, hoping to obtain the popular mandate to
begin negotiations with the Federal Government. While the government lost both,
the second was lost with less than two percentage points. It was a close call
.At the time a lot of people, myself included, felt that if another referendum
was held, the third time around, those percentage points might well go in
favour of the P.Q.____________________________________
33The only case of peaceful secession, I can think of is that of Singapore from Malaysia.
Page 18
Yet, throughout all the debates and drama, the country as a whole remained focused but serene; a land of peace, order and good government both in Quebec and in the rest of Canada. For me, the way Quebec, the national government and Canadians as a whole approached and addressed the serious threat to national unity of Canada has been an incredible experience that further strengthened, if such was possible, my faith in the future of the country and of the Canadian society, hopefully with Quebec ,and if unavoidable, without it.
Nevertheless, Insofar as the minorities of
Quebec were concerned, a fair number of their members who
immigrated to Canada to escape violence and political instability in their own
countries, thought it prudent to move to another province. So did, some members
of the Jewish community, endowed as they are with long, collective memories of
paying — with their money and blood — for the sins of the various factions of
the dominant societies engaged in
political warfare, social strife, violence and, at times, civil wars, also took
the referenda as cues to move to another province.
My parents chose to stay put but not before
being assured that their money in the
bank was secure as the banks are under the jurisdiction of the federal government
and as such would not be affected by an adverse referendum result or a
unilateral declaration of independence.34
All is well that ends well, at least for now.
In Quebec, the PQ is out of government and in a state of transition. Quebecers’
appetite for referenda is fully satiated, and the idea of secession has been
overtaken by an altogether different agenda responsive to the Quebec
electorate’s current needs, preoccupations and aspirations.
My Native Land and I Today
A paradox of immigrating to a new homeland, never to return permanently,
in circumstances such as ours is that it invariably leaves a void in one’s
thoughts and feelings. The native land just does not disappear from the mind
and the heart.
Speaking for me, the effluxion of time has
dramatically lowered the level of my consciousness about the hardships my
forebears, parents and more generally members our community endured over time
in our native land. Now, I rarely think or talk about these things except when
the news from Turkey are alarming. By the same token, this void also
extinguished the need to go on remembering these things and keep projecting
them into an uncertain dangerous future. In the process and in the safety of my
homeland, the mental and emotional space vacated thereby began to fill with the
memories of the things that endeared my native land to me: classical Turkish
music; the mystical worlds of Sufi and Mevlevi music; the enchanting movements
of the Swirling Dervishes; the tales of Nasrettin Hoca; the ferry trips on the
Marmara; the ports of call on the Bosphorus, the pleasures of Turkish baths;
the wonderful taste of Turkish cuisine, to mention only a few of these things.
In the end, the fact of the matter is that
while Turks can and do cause their brethren of Jewish faith to leave their
native land, they cannot take away their Turkishness in their thinking, culture
and tastes.
For a long time, when people asked me where I
came from my jesting reply was: How far back in history do you want me to go?
When they ask me to stop kidding them, my short reply was not “I am from
Turkey” as the corresponding term “Türkileyli” has a regrettable connotation. I
simply said: I am Turkish; an “Ottoman Turk” to be sure.
_______________________________________
34If ultimately, I left the province to live in a number of other provinces and eventually settled in the adjoining province of Ontario, it was not without regret .The moves were strictly necessitated by my idiosyncratic, occupational interests and professional pursuits. My affections for French-Canadians remain as they had been during my days at the Université de Montréal; and so do my happy memories of preparing for final exams, with some of my classmates at a Benedictine monastery, listening together to Gregorian chants sung by the monks which enchanted me then and still do now.
Page 19
But in the last fifteen years or so, when people ask me the same question, I look straight into their eyes and reply “What do you mean? I am Canadian.” The best part of it is that, my interlocutors do not question or challenge my reply.
______________________________________________
*(with slight stylistic modifications)from Bali, Rifat (ed.) “This is My New Homeland”-Life Stories of Turkish Jewish Immigrants, Istanbul: Libra Kitapçilık ve Yayıncılık ,2016, pp 35-76. rifatbali@librakitap.com.tr
_______________________________________
34If ultimately, I left the province to live in a number of other provinces and eventually settled in the adjoining province of Ontario, it was not without regret .The moves were strictly necessitated by my idiosyncratic, occupational interests and professional pursuits. My affections for French-Canadians remain as they had been during my days at the Université de Montréal; and so do my happy memories of preparing for final exams, with some of my classmates at a Benedictine monastery, listening together to Gregorian chants sung by the monks which enchanted me then and still do now.
Page 19
But in the last fifteen years or so, when people ask me the same question, I look straight into their eyes and reply “What do you mean? I am Canadian.” The best part of it is that, my interlocutors do not question or challenge my reply.
My
Homeland and its Jewish Community Now
Over
the last nearly six decades, Canada has changed a great deal and always for the
better.
The Jewish community in Canada nowadays
speaks less Yiddish while the Quebec segment of it speaks quite a lot of
French. It is a well–educated, civic-minded, prosperous and philanthropic
community, whose members are free to pursue any profession and participate
fully in every field of endeavor they wish to pursue and participate in, and as
a matter of fact, do so successfully, on merit.
All of which brings me to the question as to
the prima-facie evidence required to prove one’s identity as a “real” Canadian:
a Canadian citizenship certificate. After that, the onus to prove otherwise is
a heavy one, rests solely on the shoulders of the party contesting this
identity and the only admissible evidence is empirically proven or provable
facts strictly germane to the question.
Post-Script
Hardly a week passes by
without my sister and I thinking of and thanking our late father(1911-1985), of
blessed memory for all the sacrifices he made and the hardships he endured
after he decided to leave behind his successful business and material comfort
to make, against all odds, a new start, at the age of 46. Nor do we forget and
fail to thank our late mother (1917-2002), also of blessed memory, who gave our
father her steadfast and unconditional support throughout his ordeals, and in
the process made her own personal sacrifices. They did so in order to keep the
family together and provide us and their future descendants, with the
opportunity to live in a free and just society where we can and do identify
ourselves as Jews and affirm our Jewishness, without any fear, apprehension or
hesitation whatsoever, and as equal and respected citizens of this great
country.______________________________________________
*(with slight stylistic modifications)from Bali, Rifat (ed.) “This is My New Homeland”-Life Stories of Turkish Jewish Immigrants, Istanbul: Libra Kitapçilık ve Yayıncılık ,2016, pp 35-76. rifatbali@librakitap.com.tr
This is an odyssey that ended well. I read it avidly, with a lot of understanding. Strange enough, not only do we have a common past but also similar traits in our lives and the same taste in our palate now that life is nearing its end, as people who count their years say.
ReplyDeleteI don´t! I mean counting my years, one more than Dogan. So cheers, Dogan, my brother in origin, in faith and fate.