Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [100]
This poignant tale of true love gone awry among the seniorboppers put me in mind of one of my few surviving septuagenarian buddies, and so that afternoon I bought a box of handmade Belgian chocolates in Westmount Square, and went to visit Irv Nussbaum, now seventy-nine years old, yet frisky as ever, and still active in community affairs. Irv, bless him, was angst-ridden about the fate of our people, but uppermost in his mind was the coming referendum. Only yesterday The Weasel’s most rabid pointman had warned les autres that if we voted No massively we would be punished. “That’s good news,” said Irv, “because that prick must have started at least another thousand nervy Jews packing. I’m grateful. Now if only they’d opt for Tel Aviv rather than Toronto or Vancouver.”
“Irv, what’s to be done with you, you’re a terrible old man.”
“Remember how when we were young the pepsis43 marched down the Main chanting ‘Death to the Jews,’ and Le Devoir read like it got its ideas from Julius Streicher? Do you recall how in those days there were all those restricted hotels in the Laurentians, and a Jew couldn’t even get a job as a cashier in one of the banks here, never mind marry out. Like damn fools we complained about it. We fought discrimination bitterly. But, with hindsight, it was a blessing, anti-Semitism, if you feel as deeply as I do about Israel and Jewish survival.”
“Do you think we ought to bring back pogroms?”
“Ho ho ho. I kid you not. Now we’re accepted, even welcomed just about everywhere, and the young think nothing of marrying a shiksa. Look around, will you. These days there are Jews serving on the boards of banks, and on the Supreme Court, and even in the cabinet in Ottawa. That Gursky suck-hole Harvey Schwartz sits in the Senate. The lasting problem with the Holocaust is that it made anti-Semitism unfashionable. Ah, the whole world’s gone topsy-turvy. I mean you’re a drunk today, what is it? A disease. You murder your parents, sneaking up behind them with shotguns and blasting their heads off, like those two kids in California, what do you need? Understanding. You slit your wife’s throat and you walk because you’re black. Excuse me, African-American. You’re a homosexual now and you expect to be married by a rabbi. Once that was the love that dared not speak its name, but you know what mustn’t show its face today? Anti-Semitism. Listen here, my old friend, we didn’t survive Hitler so that our children could assimilate and the Jewish people disappear. Tell me something. Do you think Duddy Kravitz will beat the charges this time?”
“Insider trading is difficult to prove.”
The last time I ran into Duddy, attended by a bimbo of a secretary, was at the airport in Toronto. “Hey, Panofsky, you going to London, let’s sit together.”
“Actually, I’m flying to New York, where I’m going to pick up the Concorde,” I said, hastily adding that it was not me, but MCA, that was paying for the ticket.
“You think I can’t afford the Concorde? Shmuck. I’ve done it and I don’t like it. You fly the Concorde everybody on it is worth millions. D.K. likes to go first class on a 747 flying out of Montreal, so that I can stroll back through club and economy and all those shits who used to look down their nose at me can see how well I’m doing and choke on it.”
Irv went on to say, “I even hope their fucken Parti Québécois wins the referendum this time and scares the hell out of the Jews who still remain here. Only I want them going to Tel Aviv, Haifa, or Jerusalem this time. Yes. Before Israel is overwhelmed by Ethiopian blacks or those new Russian immigrants, most of whom are not even Jewish.