On Being a Jew

By David Solway

When I was five years old I was dragged off the street by our Catholic neighbour, stood before a picture of the suffering Christ which hung on her living room wall, and accused of murdering the poor bastard. I assured her as best I could that the man I had apparently offed was a complete stranger to me. I was under the vague impression that he was a close relative, perhaps her uncle, who had undergone a horrible fate at the hands of some vicious neighbourhood bully she had obviously mistaken for me. Her fury increased with each subsequent denial and so did my terror until the Lord God personally intervened by causing the chicken roasting in her oven to catch fire. I made my escape through plumes of black smoke and I can still recall her face, etched in the window as I fled past, glowering over the charred bird, which I later came to see as an avatar of the Holy Ghost.

Growing up ghettoized in a small French-Canadian town was not like trying to survive in Gdansk or Vilna but it was still no joke. When I was six ‘Ti-Paul Parent, a midget who lived directly across the street, stepped out on his balcony, loaded his slingshot, and, in a bizarre parody of the David and Goliath story, put a stone right between my eyes. A direct hit which, to my great good fortune, was also a near miss. I came to several hours later still in the dark. Illumination arrived when I was eight. I was stopped on the street one afternoon by a large muscular boy of fourteen or so whom I had never seen before. He merely asked me if I was a Jew, nothing more. When I said yes, he promptly delivered a roundhouse right that loosened my teeth and sent me into another mini-coma. The raw taste I carried around with me for days was my belated revelation of the bitterness of being a Jew. And when, at the age of ten, I was detained at the police station and threatened with a spell in the seau à glace for defending myself against a pack of determined assailants-the ambush on the way to school was an entrenched school ritual-I learned all I needed to know about the world’s vaunted justice.

These are the people whom I remember as my early teachers for, although I did not have a Jewish upbringing, the world can always be counted on to supply the deficit. The fact is that a Jew simply cannot help being educated. He is the perpetual scholarship student, the prodigy who receives his doctorate before puberty, whose fabled intelligence is not a consummation of angels in the blood but the tainted gift the world bestows on him and is then resentful of. He goes to the head of the class to answer the question and be punished for it.

My Portuguese grocer, who claims a tribal grandmother, is convinced that so-called Jewish intelligence is the result of abstention from pork which he regards as a thickening or clotting agent. Pork clogs the mental pores, as it were, and obstructs sensitivity. He chuckles as he articulates the paradox: you have to stop eating pork to stop eating pork. A Hassid I once knew informed me that Jewish smarts were the product of a mystical substance the Jew harboured within him, like a kind of invisible pocket bible. An old farmer I met many years ago in northern Quebec fingered the intellectual complicity of the Jewish nose, the repository of cranial surplus.

It seems as if being a Jew is like being born with six fingers. It is the kind of fact there is no way around. Even the most skillful of surgical operations must leave a telltale stump or scar-like the cicatrix I still bear between my eyes-as brail for blind antisemites. Being a Jew is forever. The peculiar sourness of the apostate is ample testimony here: forgotten by his own, he is sure to be remembered by the others. The Nazis would not have spared Noam Chomsky for all his twisted, ideological blather and an irrelevance like Susan Sontag would have experienced a stark and long-overdue awakening from the fugue of sectarian rhetoric and pharisaical moralism into which her work has increasingly subsided. At the very least, a Jew is a Jew by negative definition. And his putative intelligence is the stigma he brings with him, the brand that renders him both conspicuous and resilient-the mark of Cain on the forehead of Abel. And since many of my Jewish friends are barely solvent or just getting by, I can only assume that money is the world’s tainted metaphor for brains.

On Being a Jew — 2003, 29 pgs, $20, David Mason Books, 342 Queen Street W., Toronto, ON, M5V 2A2