Aliyah at Seventy — Post One of Three

Nine months ago I asked an editor in Jerusalem to erase me.

She did it in two days.

Two days. I have waited longer than that for a plumber. I have waited longer than that for a rabbi to return a phone call. Ask a newspaper to make you vanish, however, and suddenly everybody is extremely efficient.

That is not normal for a writer. We spend our lives trying to be read. Then, one grey November evening, I sat alone in my apartment in Montreal and asked this publication to pull years of my work — de-index it, take my name off it, make me disappear. Within two days I was gone.

Today I am starting again, under a different name, to tell you why I am leaving Montreal after seventy years and making aliyah to Karmiel.

I am not leaving for the sunshine, the cheaper rent, or a late-blooming passion for chickpeas. I am leaving because I am Jewish, and I no longer trust this city as a place where I can be publicly Jewish without first doing the math.

There. I said it plainly. It only took me seventy years and one very patient editor.

Menachem Elyah Paull. I published for years as Mark E. Paull.

Mark is not dead. Montreal did not manage that. Menachem is the name I will carry to Israel, and at seventy I will answer to whichever one reaches me first — including “excuse me, you with the dog.”

And yes: a reasonable person will notice that a man who asked to be de-indexed is now publishing under a byline that names the old one. I have thought about it.

Disappearing was a decision I made in one evening, in fear, with the door locked. This one I am making in daylight, on purpose, with my name attached. Given the choice between being findable and accountable, or absent and assumed, I will take findable. The first version of me is not coming down again.

My mother was born in Montreal. My daughter was born in Montreal. My granddaughter was born in Montreal.

I was born in Ottawa.

My father had taken a job there for a year. I arrived here at four months old and have lived here ever since, and in seventy years not one person has ever asked me where I was born, because in this city four months old is close enough.

For seventy years, so was I.

There is a reason my parents were in Ottawa that year, and I will come to it in the third of these posts, because it turns out to be the reason for a great deal else besides.

Three generations of this family were born in Montreal. My granddaughter is the third. She is two years old, and she is staying.

I am the one leaving. I am also, it turns out, the one who never quite began here.

That fact sits underneath every spreadsheet I make. And I make a great many spreadsheets. We will come to that.

My grandmother was not born here either. She arrived. And what she did once she got here was run kosher hotels in the Laurentians — the mountain resort country an hour north of the city — through the thirties, the forties and into the fifties. The Mount Carmel was hers. There were others. There was a boarding house as well, because in that business you took whatever roof you could get your hands on and filled it.

She ran them because Jews were not welcome at the other ones.

This is the part readers outside Canada tend to assume happened somewhere else. It happened here. The resort towns north of Montreal had signs, property covenants and a beautifully polite vocabulary for telling a Jew where he could and could not sleep. Restricted clientele. Selected guests. A private atmosphere. You always knew which door was closed, because they had the courtesy to put it in writing.

My grandmother, Mina Kornfeld Geiger, solved the problem by feeding her own people. My mother, Rose, grew up in those dining rooms and later became one of the first women in Quebec to own a travel agency.

I ran that agency for thirty-four years. Thirty-five. Thirty-six, if I am telling the story to somebody I am trying to impress.

The agency represented the great Jewish resorts of the Catskills — the Concord Resort, Brown’s, Kutsher’s Country Club, the Pines, Granit, Brickman’s and Gibbers. For anyone under sixty: picture an all-inclusive resort, except that everybody is Jewish, nobody is relaxing, and the evening entertainment is a man in a tuxedo dismantling a........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)