Excerpted: Keefer Street

I’m in coach leaving the train station in Regina when I see dozens of bedraggled men and women suddenly appear on a slight slope as if undergrowth rising from the soft yellow brush. I twist in my seat to watch as they race down the hill to the train, then leap into boxcars. One by one they board the train this way. One man misses. Hands reach for him. The train rolls across his foot. The man’s face lets out a torturous cry that I can’t hear but can see, and I turn away from the window. I barely sleep during the four days from the West Coast to Toronto, much of my time spent staring out at endless prairie stubbled by towns where grain elevators seem to rise as tall as the budding skyscrapers back home in Vancouver. 

~ 

The train trip east began with a shout through my bedroom wall. The rainy winter had been broken by the less rainy spring, and I was on my bed watching the rain race down the window when my mother shouted from the bathroom next to my room. “Jakie, when school’s out, I think you should leave Vancouver, go to Bessie for the summer.” She continued her thought standing at my bedroom door. “You could have a lot of fun with the boys. I think it would be good for you to get away from this for awhile. Loyf un freyen zikh. Run and be happy.” 

My father had stopped talking the day before, after telling my mother that the family was moving back to Fort Harold, the small town in the Cariboo region of B.C. where he’d spent his first decade in Canada. My father’s clothing store was dying on Vancouver’s Hastings Street; he hated the city, he wanted to go north. “Isaac, there’s nothing for me or the children in that place,” my mother said. “You’ll go where I say,” he demanded, and their voices were angry, and then there were no voices at all. Whenever my father was angry, he spoke with fury for a moment, then stopped speaking entirely. This time, he aimed the silence at Frieda and the children, too, as though we were all party to a familial conspiracy to undermine his astute intentions. 

~ 

At Toronto’s Union Station, my aunt Bessie’s bulky arms engulf me as my cousin Max takes hold of my new second-hand suit-case, and we head to the streetcar that will take us to their home off of College Street. “Everyone’s been looking forward to you,” says Bessie, and I don’t answer, feeling pressured to deliver exemplary companionship without indicting her brother, my father, Isaac. “And how is your father?” she asks. “Everyone’s fine,” I say quickly.

Bessie is in mourning. A year earlier, her husband, Nathaniel Gold, died as the family waited in anticipation for him to bring home his first brand-new car. Nate and Bessie had been farmers in Russia. In Canada, at first they operated a farm near Palermo, just south of Toronto, but they soon moved into the city, and Nate lost most of their savings playing the ponies. Nate had been doing be4er of late, having invested in a small hand-sewn hat factory, but returning home with his new Studebaker, a truck swerved head-on into his lane, driving his car’s long steering rod into his heart. 

When I arrive in Toronto, Bessie and her six children are living in a red brick semi-detached house, with a small living room filled with music and chatter and friends from across the neighbourhood. It’s two storeys with an attic overlooking Grace Street. The previous summer, the Gold residence was a different semi-detached house on another of the Jewish streets off College. After Nate died, Bessie worked as a seamstress in a Spadina Avenue garment factory, and the older children quit school and found whatever work they could, with the eldest, Milton and Solly, providing most of the rent. 

Milton manages a neighbourhood bakery and Solly is a recent middleweight champion of Buffalo. Like many Jewish boxers of the Depression era, he fights with a Star of David on his trunks. Bessie is frantic with worry on Solly’s fight nights. Although she’s urged him to quit fighting and refuses to watch him do it, being the uncritically supportive mother that she is, she sewed the star on Solly’s trunks when he asked. 

Bessie knew to bring my cousin Max to the train station to meet me, and he is the relative I become closest to. One month older than me, Max is a young man on the prowl, with shoulders in a permanent hunch and lips in a cynical curl, unable to remain in any one place for more than a few seconds. Being with Max is a quick way to learn Toronto, especially this Jewish neighbourhood. Its main streets are College and Spadina but its heart is bustling Kensington Market, with its pickle barrels and schmatta vendors and bagel bakeries. The next neighbour-hood over is Italian. 

One late July evening, after a day on the Canadian National Exhibition’s rides and midway, even Max is immobilized from the humid heat. Drained, sprawled out on the living room floor watching the radio, I’m instantly wide awake when my cousin, Florence, passes my line of vision with a friend, Lena Horowitz, I’d not seen before. My eyes follow Lena across the room and out the front door. The following day, Max, his friend Rosey Goodman, and I stop by the City Dairy for ice cream just as Lena and Florence exit with cones. Florence rolls her eyes as they pass, Lena nods unenthused. I look down and walk quickly into the Dairy. “Let’s go to Sunnyside Beach,” Max says. “Do Florence and Lena ever go to that beach?” I say. “Who cares?” Max says. 

The next few days, Lena, back from counselling at a summer camp near Pickering, is at the Gold house again and again. While I am thoroughly taken by her, I’m also certain she is unaware of my existence. In her presence, I am mute, but it is a blissful mutation, lost in smitten glances at her dark brown, waist-length hair, her large blue eyes, and blushed red lips. Slowly, I draw a biographical sketch of Lena Horowitz. Born in Toronto, a classmate of Florence at Harbord Collegiate high school, Romanian immigrant mother a seamstress on Spadina Avenue and father a butcher in Kensington Market. She likes swimming, art, and politics, and she is going to the ball game today at Christie Pits. 

I’ve been planning to go to Christie Pits too, because my summer in Toronto is ending and this is my last chance to watch Rosey Goodman play baseball. Today he’ll be in centre field for Harbord, the Jewish nine playing St. Peter’s for the city championship. In the first half of the twentieth century, baseball is the Sport of Entry for young immigrants, especially in American cities but in Canada too. In the beginning, it was called the New York Game—North America’s most popular sport which, once understood, could take on a kind of secular religiosity. Instead of ever studying scripture, each morning I absorb box scores with the studiousness of a Talmudic scholar. To me, it almost seems as though high holiday gatherings are timed to celebrate the World Series. In Vancouver, I played second base on the Strathcona school team and would walk across town to Athletic Park, where I witnessed the first night ball game played in Canada. Nothing, however, prepared me for Rosey. Max and I go with Rosey to shag balls at a schoolyard one day. When I begin this activity by smacking one to centre field, Rosey makes a spectacular catch, then throws a wire to home plate. I put down my bat, turn to Max and say, “Can I just stand here and watch him.” I jog into the deep outfield, and Rosey steps to the plate and casually whacks 400-foot flies to my cousin and me. “Next spring,” Rosey says walking home, “I’ll go down to Florida, try out for the Dodgers.” 

Arriving early at Christie Pits, Max and I sit with the other supporters of Harbord on a steep slope down the first baseline. Milton and Solly soon show up, but no Florence, no Lena. Farther along the slope, short-sleeved St. Peter’s fans pass beer and chant at the diamond in the pit below. Harbord is down 3 to 2 in the third when Rosey comes up with two out and a teammate on second. Between pitches, both slopes are ethereally still. Then Rosey swings, and it’s as though the ball is a choreographer taking everyone on the field into its dance. The quiet shatters, and the players are in motion as I watch the ball arc towards left centre field, past an outstretched glove. I’m on my feet with the rest of the Harbord section as Rosey slides feet first through a dust cloud into third base. All of this activity takes just a few seconds, then both slopes again are quietly awaiting the next pitch. The lead flip-flops until the final inning. When Lena finally enters the Christie Pits ballpark, she stands at the bottom of the slope, with Florence, looking upward at the crowd, considering where to sit. As I silently plea for her to sit near me, a Harbord fly ball ends the game, 6 to 5 for St. Peter’s. What happens next I miss because I’m fixed on Lena. 

It begins with a wail. Everyone around me is on their feet and shouting. I look across the infield at St. Peter’s slope and see that a giant swastika banner has been unfurled, shouts of “Heil Hitler” rising around it. Everyone on Harbord’s slope has seen the newsreels from Germany and now we move en determined masse towards the St. Peter’s slope. Fighting erupts all over the diamond and spreads through the park. 

This hot summer evening the ba4le spills into the park’s side streets. A couple of miles away, word of the baseball riot quickly reaches Spadina Avenue’s crowded street corners and pool halls. The Spadina-College-Kensington Market area is a tough, working-class Jewish neighbourhood with plenty of young boxers and wrestlers as well as the Bluta Boys—Blood Boys—street gang. These tough, young Jews have lots of friends in the equally tough Italian neighbourhood next door. With news of the riot spreading, stake trucks arrive on Spadina to load up scrappy children of immigrants—Jews and some of their Italian neighbours. They break police lines to war with the swastika mob that’s armed with baseball bats, blackjacks, rubber hoses, and knives, and draw reinforcements from its neighbourhoods too. 

In the days that follow, I learn the riot was incited by the newly formed Swastika Club, which has spent the summer attacking Jews and other immigrants on Toronto beaches and initiating brawls at ball games. Next door, in Quebec, a fascist movement led by Hitler dress-alike Adrien Arcand is on the march, and there are brown shirts and white sheets across western Canada too. I would find out about this later. This night, after getting separated from my cousins in the chaos, I throw some bricks and fists then walk the eight blocks to the Gold residence. I finally unclench my fist to open the door. 

“Jake, are you okay?” my beside-herself Aunt Bessie greets me, as her youngest children, Sally and Jerome, huddle frightened in the hallway. Milton is home from the war too. “Where are the other boys and Flo?” Bessie says. 

“I don’t know,” I say, sighing my first words since the riot started. Then I fall into Bessie’s warm welcoming arms, unclenching my other fist, the aches and anger jumbled into a matrix of confusion.

“This,” Bessie says, “too shall pass.” 

~

My mother meets me at the Canadian Pacific train station on Vancouver’s waterfront, and we make our way to the house on Keefer Street. As we walk, I fill her in on Bessie and the cousins and summer in Toronto. She stops walking, gives me a searching look, then walks and talks faster than before.

“Your father has gone back to Fort Harold.”

“You’re not going back there with him then.”

“No,” she says.

“Eddie is looking for work here and Rachel wants to stay too. Do you want to stay?”

“Yes, I do,” I say without hesitation.