Heroes in My Head Read online

  This is the first home I remember. We lived in my grandma’s basement when my parents moved back to Brooklyn just after I was born. A Catholic hospital in Reno, Nevada, was an odd place for a Jewish girl of my generation to make her debut in the world. I can’t imagine how my mother, Ruth, must have felt, living on the other side of the country from her family. A devoted wife, she had gone west to be with my father, a soldier who was stationed at a base in Nevada during the Second World War. I was born on August 15, 1945, the day Japan announced its surrender, thus ending the war.

  My mother’s family came to the United States in the late nineteenth century from Russia. My grandfather Harry Schutter immigrated first, to establish a life before bringing his wife and son. My mother was born into a modest but comfortable middle-class home in a Jewish neighbourhood in Brooklyn. She was the middle of three sisters; Ceil, my mother, Ruth, and Clara were close until their deaths. They had an older brother, but he moved to Florida before I was born.

  There is no question that Grandma was the matriarch of the family. My grandpa was quiet and kept mostly to himself, but Grandma was a powerful figure in my childhood. Despite the picture I have of her standing in front of the house, holding me as a baby, for as long as I can remember she was always in a wheelchair. As a child I was sure she became crippled falling down the stairs holding me. So I always helped her do the dishes, bake, and cook. I also helped her practise walking with her walker.

  Aunt Ceil was the disciplinarian in the family. She was small and mighty and married to Uncle Sol. They had two children, my cousins Bobby and Ann. Aunt Clara was the single aunt and our favourite. She had married twice and gotten annulments rather quickly after both marriages. This was a constant cause of speculation among the adults that we kids never understood and a source of amusement for my father and Uncle Sol that we didn’t share. We loved Aunt Clara because she was more fun than Aunt Ceil and she let us stay up late when she babysat.

  The only one in her family to graduate from university, my mother was an accountant, a rare profession for a Jewish woman of her generation. When I think of it now, I realize that my mother must have been very strong-minded to have insisted on going to college and getting a degree. She was very intelligent and loved reading; there were always books in the house. Even her older brother didn’t get past high school. But after she married my father, she stayed home to raise the kids.

  Ruth was quite talented. She did a lot of knitting, needlepoint, and petit point. She was also kind and generous with her niece and nephews, her siblings, and her neighbours.

  My strongest memories of Grandma’s house were of Passover Seders, a Jewish holiday celebrating Moses’ freeing the Jews from slavery in Egypt. Grandma supervised the making of the Seder feast for the whole extended family, and I helped bake the sponge and honey cakes, which we laid out on my grandparents’ double bed to cool.

  Grandpa would give us a little sweet red wine diluted in seltzer so that we could participate in all the rituals, including dipping our pinkies into the wine for each of the plagues God brought down on the Egyptians. We kids had to fight hilarity during this solemn ceremony, as we had already had enough wine to make us all a little tipsy. My job was to open the door for Elijahu, who represented the stranger we should always invite to the Passover Seder. Opening the door to an invisible being who supposedly drank the glass of red wine in the centre of the table was pretty funny, too. Grandpa tolerated our giggles. It was probably the only way we kids could sit through the endless Passover ceremony.

  Until I was almost ten, I lived among grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins who were as close to me as my own parents and brothers. My older brother, Leonard (whom we called Lenny at the time), says that our mother’s large, warm, extended family was the stability in our lives, the keel that stopped us from overturning in the years that followed.

  * * *

  The family of my father, Jack, were refugees fleeing the vicious anti-Jewish Russian pogroms that killed two thousand Jews. They made it to Canada in 1916. My father was a toddler when he, his older brother, Norman, and his parents walked across the European continent to a port where they could find safe passage to the new country. Three more children were born later in Canada.

  By the time the Rebicks landed in Toronto, the Schutters were already well settled in Brooklyn. Unlike the Schutters, who were among the almost two million Jews in the New York area, the Rebicks found that anti-Semitism was rampant in early-twentieth-century Toronto. The beaches had signs saying, NO DOGS OR JEWS ALLOWED, and my father told stories of having to fight his way to school almost every day against goyish brutes. No doubt he and Norman gave as good as they got, probably better. They had grown up with a violent father who used both humiliation and his fists to discipline his two oldest sons: at seven years old, little Jack was punished by being forced to stand in his father’s store window with his pants down. When my father was fifteen he and Norman, both now old enough to fight back, were forcibly shipped off to stay with an aunt in Brooklyn. There, according to one of my father’s favourite stories, he fell in with gangsters who loved jazz, booze, reefers, and women, and not necessarily in that order.

  As he neared thirty, his doctor told him that if he kept up his lifestyle he wouldn’t last long. When he met my mother, a nice middle-class Jewish girl from Brooklyn in her late twenties, he snapped her up. Despite his lack of education, sharp tongue, and sometimes crude behaviour, my mother figured she had quite a catch. When Jack Rebick walked into a room everyone turned to stare. He had a presence, an energy, a kind of charisma. He was a good dancer and an accomplished athlete who looked a little like Gregory Peck. He was tall, and handsome, and luckily, he also turned out to be quite a good provider. In those days, that was all that mattered.

  Jack was a great baseball player, a slugger. When he connected with the ball, he almost always hit it out of the park. He was so good that when he joined the army, his base commander in Reno lost the paperwork every time my father was ordered to go overseas so he could stay and entertain the town and the troops there. Later, he was offered a position on the Brooklyn Dodgers farm team, but he turned it down because in those days playing baseball didn’t pay enough to raise a family.

  Lenny and I loved to watch him play ball, most of the time. Saturday we would watch the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field and Sunday we would watch my father play ball. It seemed to us that he was just as good as the pro baseball players. When his ball sailed over the bleachers, he would jog around the bases, half-dancing and wearing a big smile. He could set a dislocated shoulder on the field, too, and that made him seem like a hero to us.

  Watching him play baseball was also sometimes a trial. My father was one of the few people who got into fights on the baseball diamond. He’d accuse someone of tripping him and they’d be into it. Sometimes there was just pushing and shoving, but once in a while Jack took a swing. Lenny and I would close our eyes tight, move closer together, and even hold hands, hoping he wouldn’t get hurt. Sometimes he’d see us like that, stand up extra tall and strong, and laugh. “Take it easy, nobody’s gonna hurt me.”

  Even after he became a husband and father, Jack kept drinking and sometimes seeing other women, but now he was part of a good family. He thought that would keep him safe, and he was right. My mother took care of him until the day he died, an old man.

  * * *

  My memory of the basement where we lived until I was five is shadowy and fearful. My older brother, Lenny, and I shared a tiny room under the stairs. My parents’ bedroom was on the other side of the wall. There was a living room in the front and a small kitchen. It was dark. I didn’t like it there. The only shower was in the corner of Lenny’s and my room. Everyone except my father bathed upstairs at my grandma’s house. He would come into our room at 4 or 5 a.m. to shower. In most families it’s the kids who wake the parents up. Not in ours.

  When I was five years old, we moved to East 94th Street,
not far from Grandma but too far for us to walk there. We moved into a small three-bedroom modern duplex on the ground floor. I slept in the bedroom off the kitchen. Lenny and Alvin slept on the other side of the house next to my parents’ bedroom. I was always scared in that room.

  Most people I know who grew up in the 1950s remember their mother best. Not me. I must have spent a lot of time with her — she was home all day — but I remember very little. My father dominated my life.

  He was never physically violent with us, but he had an explosive temper. Because his own father beat him and his mother, he promised himself he would never use violence at home; but he often flew into incredible rages. He rarely shouted at my mother, at least not in front of us, but he got mad at us kids a lot and his outbursts were almost completely unpredictable. At the kitchen table, we would be laughing and telling each other stories when suddenly he would start screaming at Lenny for some minor offence. The worst was when Alvin and I would start giggling, especially when Jack woke up from his nap. He would scream at us to stop, but that just made us giggle more, and the more we giggled, the less capable we were of stopping; the more he yelled, the more hysterical our giggles. It was a slowly intensifying dance of hysteria between the man and his children, anger vs. laughter, rage vs. fear. There were no winners.

  My father lost his temper more frequently once we moved. I guess he didn’t want to display his anger in front of my grandmother or maybe he was under more financial pressure. Decades later, my mother admitted that my father was “a little crazy” when we lived on East 94th Street.

  He hit Lenny once. I remember the incident clearly because it was the only time I ever saw Jack apologize. Lenny did something that set him off, but this time, instead of just hollering, he smacked Lenny, who was probably about ten, across the face. My father was very powerful, and he split Lenny’s lip, which started to bleed. I don’t remember Lenny crying; he must have been in shock. But my father cried. He fell to his knees, taking Lenny’s hands in his. “I am so sorry, so sorry,” he said through his tears. “It will never happen again,” he promised. “Never, never.” And it never did.

  Both of my brothers tried to stay out of Jack’s way, but my strategy was to provoke him. I found it easier to deal with his anger when I knew it was coming than when it came out of nowhere. An early riser, he would be home from work napping on his chair by the time we got home from school and we had to be quiet. Why can’t he nap in the bedroom? I thought. Why does he have to plop himself in the middle of the living room? It made me so mad that accidentally on purpose I’d trip over his feet. He would wake up in a fury, start yelling at me, and then at the boys.

  “Why do you have to do it?” Alvin whimpered, but I wouldn’t listen.

  When I complained to my mother about my father’s angry outbursts, she’d only say, “Don’t you know your father by now? Why let it bother you?” She figured we should learn to ignore his temper the way she did. He never hit her or even yelled at her very often, but his sarcasm could be like a blow. She put up with a lot but she didn’t see it that way. Mostly she made sure that the marriage worked. In those days, when a marriage failed, it was always the woman’s fault. And my mother was determined and not willing to fail. Once in a while she defended us against my father’s attacks, but she would always back down when he accused her of choosing her children over him. Just before she died, in November 2005, she told me, “Your father and I had a wonderful relationship.” I remained silent.

  My mother always treated me and my brothers equally and had the same ambitions for all three of us, hoping we would become doctors or lawyers or teachers. We were all expected to do the same chores. She never taught me domestic skills and that was rare. In the way she treated her children, she was a feminist. But it was the fifties so she wanted me to be a pretty little girl. My hair was very long, usually pinned back with a barrette, and in pictures I was always wearing a dress, Mary Jane shoes, and a bow in my long hair.

  I may have dressed like a girl, but I liked doing things with the boys. According to my mother, I got expelled from ballet school at age seven because I refused to dance “like that.” I was a tomboy, in the parlance of the day. A talented athlete, I was always the first one picked for the team. And I could more than hold my own in fights with my brothers.

  “You’re more of a man than your brothers,” my father used to say to me, insulting all three of us with that single comment.

  We used to go to Coney Island in the summer. I remember one year, when I was about four years old, I got lost on the beach. I had come with my mother, Aunt Ceil, Bobby, Ann, and Lenny. Baby Alvin was probably there, too. I don’t know how it happened, but somehow I got separated from the family. I remember walking along a beach and seeing grown-ups’ legs, so many legs, and I didn’t recognize any of them. I was scared, on the verge of tears, and suddenly there was my cousin Bobby. He was seven years older than me, a big boy, and I loved him more than anything. They must have sent him to look for me. I never remember feeling happier than at that moment of running into his arms and looking into his smiling face. I was safe.

  Another summer, our extended family went to a cottage near Yonkers for a week. When we were about six, my best friend Johnny Klein (who was my cousins’ cousin) and I ran away and climbed into an open pipe that was sitting on some grass. Our fathers were searching for us but we were hiding. The sad part is that by that time, I didn’t really want to be found.

  * * *

  I was nine years old when my mother told me that we were moving to Toronto. She sat down on my bed just before bedtime. Lenny was still up in the living room. He was three years older and sometimes got to stay up later.

  “Judy, I have something important to talk to you about.”

  “Okay,” I murmured, wondering immediately what I might have done wrong that day. It was rare for my mother to speak with me privately so I figured I was in trouble.

  “Daddy and I have decided to move to Toronto this summer. He is going into business with his brothers. You’ll love it there, Judy. You have so many cousins and we’ll have a big house.”

  “But I don’t know those cousins. I want to stay here with Bobby and Ann and Johnny.”

  “Daddy has a very good job there. He wants to go. It will be better for all of us,” she replied. I knew she didn’t want to go. How could she? It was her family we were leaving.

  “And what about Grandma? Who’ll take care of her if we leave? Tell Daddy we don’t want to go. Please.”

  “Don’t worry, dear,” she said with her usual calm assurance. “Aunt Ceil and Aunt Clara will take care of Grandma, and we’ll visit all the time.”

  “But our family is here,” I insisted. “Why do you want to leave our family? What’ll we do without them?” What would I do without them? “I’m not going. I’ll stay here with Grandma.”

  “No, you won’t.” My mother was losing her patience. “Daddy has decided.”

  “It isn’t fair.” I didn’t cry. I never cried anymore.

  But it was the first time I consciously thought about the power my father had over the family.

  Four

  Toronto

  We moved from Brooklyn to Toronto in July 1955, just before my tenth birthday. Crossing the border was the first time I had ever had to sign something — I think it was the landed card. I felt very grown up and still remember reaching up to the counter to sign my name. But even that didn’t change how I felt about the move. I was heartbroken.

  My father’s parents still lived downtown on Markham Street, and my aunts and uncles lived north of them in Forest Hill. My parents had moved us even farther north, to a suburb called North York, which at the time was still mostly farmland. We lived in a detached bungalow on Waterloo Avenue with a big front lawn and a huge backyard. We didn’t even have a backyard in Brooklyn. In Toronto, we had so much space. Jewish families were buying houses in a new subdivision in the su
burbs. We were one of the first Jewish families in the neighbourhood. In Brooklyn, I didn’t think much about being Jewish — almost everyone we knew was Jewish.

  That first fall, I was coming home from Wilmington Elementary School when I saw Lenny surrounded by a group of big farm boys. He was thirteen at the time and still quite small. The boys pushed him down and started pummelling him, calling him names.

  “You stink, dirty Jew boy.”

  “You’re yellow like all them Jews, scaredy-cat.”

  I was shocked. They were hitting my brother. I got mad and jumped them. “Leave my brother alone!” I cried, pounding their backs with my little fists.

  Laughing, they said, “Hey, Jew boy, your sister’s more of a man than you are.” An eerie echo of my father.

  We told my mother about the taunts, but Lenny made me promise I wouldn’t tell her or Daddy what really happened, that I had rescued him from the beating. Always tolerant, she responded, “Don’t call them dirty Christian just because they call you dirty Jew.” My mother was very careful to make sure we didn’t have or express prejudice against others. When my parents could afford house cleaners, they were usually Black women. I remember when Alvin was two or three he was fascinated that our cleaning lady had such dark skin. My mother explained to all of us that different people had different colour skin and sometimes different accents because they came from a different part of the country or a different part of the world. I never remember her putting a higher value on being Jewish, and it’s something I’ve always appreciated about my mother.

  Still, it didn’t stop me from socking one of my classmates in the face when she yelled, “Dirty Jew!” at me. No doubt I remembered my father’s stories of fighting the goyim in downtown Toronto. After that, no one called me “dirty Jew” again.