BESIDE DA POINT
Beside da Point
Concordia University recently gained the dubious distinction of becoming the first campus in North America to actually ban a Hillel Jewish Student Union for its support of Israel. But anti-Semitism on a Quebec campus was no news to me; I'd learned all about it at my junior college, Vanier, outside Montreal.
Vanier exposed me to my earliest, and, intellectually perhaps most formative, mentor, a history professor by the name of Leo W. Bertley. A barrel-chested crackerjack from Trinidad, Leo showed me that a subject so ignobly sliced, diced and mangled by sundry uninspiring high school teachers could be reanimated and made to sing. Leo even made Canadian history exciting.
He was also an anti-Semite. And he broke my heart.
Eyes invariably glinting with humor and mischief, Leo would march up and down the aisles, pontificating, gesticulating, launching into rarified leaps of oratory. Inevitably, he would halt by the desk of some hapless, horrified onlooker, brace the desk with two beefy arms, bring his broad, grinning face to within two inches of his victim's, and in his inimitable brogue, sputter, "Or you don' get da point?"
One point we all got was that Leo was a black nationalist. And one of his heroes was the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, who, come to think of it, looked like his twin. Boy, did he love to see Idi put it to high and mighty Whitey! So what if he put the boot to an entire population of industrious Asians, or ended up sitting upon a mountain of human skulls?
Yet there was something a little off-putting about Leo's attitude toward his Jewish students -- a sense of, well, thinly veiled contempt. He spoke often of the "nice little Jewish boys and girls" in his class. You didn't know if he wanted to knip them or gobble them up like the witch in Hansel and Gretel.
And then there was that book assigned in his Quebec history course. "The Patriot's Handbook to the History of Quebec" by Leandre Bergeron was not so much a handbook as a separatist propaganda pamphlet. It made the invidious and repeated claim that by not aligning themselves with the French Canadian population when they first arrived during the 18th century, the Jews were "vendeurs" -- sellouts. No mention that Jews were first banned from coming. Nor that until about 1960, the Quebecois did their darndest to restrict their influence economically and politically.
Despite my slowly growing suspicions something was not entirely kosher with Leo's regard for my kind, he never seemed to let any of his bottled-up anti-Jewish animus spill over into our relationship. Ironically, he supported me when, three years after leaving his never-tender mercies, in 1977, I decided to move to Israel. He was no fan of Israel, but he prized gumption. We wrote to each other over the years. Once, when I came to Montreal on assignment, he even asked me to speak to his class (which didn't stop him, however, from snapping at some of my conclusions). Later, he introduced me to a colleague, a political science teacher from Nigeria. He showed the guy a picture of me from my Israeli army basic training that I'd sent him. Then he gave him a copy of The Jerusalem Report. The fellow looked at both incredulously. "I suppose there are all kinds in the world," he said. I bristled.
But Leo was, in his fashion, a lifelong Zionist too. He is listed in a history of black Canadians as a distinguished disciple of Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican who immigrated to the United States at the close of the 19th century and who created a vigorous self-help movement that became an international force. An erstwhile ally of the Zionist movement who espoused an Africa-directed "Zionism" for American blacks, Garvey eventually fell out with his Jewish allies and became increasingly anti-Semitic.
Ditto, alas, poor Leo. I called him up at his home a few years ago after he had retired from teaching. He began to shout at me. He had attended some kind of town hall meeting about funding for a school for African Canadians and believed he had been thwarted by a prominent Jewish macher. Livid, Leo ranted: "You people will all pay for this. You have your own schools. Why can't we have ours? You will all burn."
"Leo, are you telling me that my newborn is going to burn in hell because this person pissed you off?"
"You, him, her, every last one of you."
"Well, that settles one of life's mysteries. In any event, we really have nothing further to discuss."
But Leo does. The current Vanier course listing reveals that Leo's come out of retirement. I think I'm finally getting da point about Leo. I hope the "nice little Jewish boys and girls" in his Western Civ class who find themselves unwittingly in his sway don't take 25 years, as I did, to figure it out.
Sheli Teitelbaum