Music for Second Grade

Digital art collage by Stella Kalaw

Mornings at Algonquin Elementary began with “God Save the Queen.” We stood at attention in our neat navy tunics, or trousers, knit ties, and white shirts, straight as the Union Jack, singing full-throated and proud. A portrait of the Queen hung behind the teacher’s desk. This is what it means to be Canadian.

Mrs. True had a comforting steadiness about her. Tall, gaunt and graying, her appearance belied a kind heart. She paid attention to each one of us, even Michael Wharton, a scrawny boy with auburn hair and matching freckles. His striped vest twirled along with him, like a pinwheel, as he laughed and shrieked, unable to stop.

Mrs. True understood that he could not help himself and devised a curious technique: she assigned another boy to “Michael duty.” When he began to hop from desk to desk like a mad hare, the other boy gave chase, wrangling Michael back into his own seat. For his trouble, the boy received a shiny silver dollar while the rest of us looked on, wide-eyed.

In the 1960s, Canada was a melting pot except in French-speaking Quebec. Although my parents wanted us to be educated in French, all non-Catholic immigrants to the province were tossed into the English Protestant public school system. The Catholic Church had decreed that only Catholics were permitted to attend French public schools.

It is thus that generations of immigrants — Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, some, like us, already French-speaking — were shut out of French Quebec society for decades to come. The English-speaking community appeared less concerned about religious purity than the French Québécois, long-suffering folk who had spent centuries squeezed between the boot of English economic power and the chokehold of the Catholic Church.

Among my school friends, there were fifth-generation Jews whose ancestors had escaped Cossack massacres in the Russian Empire. Others, like me, had recently arrived from North Africa and the Middle East, where Jews were no longer welcome.

The most unfortunate, however, were survivors of the Holocaust and their children. One day my friend Malka Cohen and I skipped home from school, careful not to step on the cracks in the sidewalk. She leaned over, her blonde curls tickling my ear, and whispered, “My father says we shouldn’t tell anyone we’re Jewish because they’ll kill us,” and then she hummed softly, a mournful Yiddish melody. The tune floated between us for a moment, thin and unnameable. We kept walking, careful not to step on the cracks.

In 1963 the English Protestant schools were still imbued with the music and values of the British Empire. “Onward Christian Soldiers” was my favourite hymn. The music swelled as did my heart when I imagined those stalwart soldiers marching off to war. In later years, we Jewish kids slyly changed the lyrics to “with the star of David going on before,” singing quietly of the exploits of biblical soldiers led by the legendary King David.

The approach of winter meant Christmas would soon be upon us. It signalled the start of the carolling season. We embraced the festive mood and sang carols door to door with our Christian friends to raise money for those less fortunate. I felt bad because my family couldn’t celebrate the holiday. No strings of lights and tinsel glittering on a tree. No gauze-draped angels, shiny ornaments and presents piled high beneath the tree. In those days, Chanukah was not a Christmas-adjacent gift-giving holiday. Strictly dreidels, prayers, songs and chocolate gelt.

Other musical and cultural traditions were inculcated in me at Hebrew day school, where we were taught the popular Israeli song “Jerusalem of Gold” and “Hatikvah,” the national anthem of the fifteen-year-old state of Israel. The teachers made a valiant effort to teach as much Hebrew as our brains could absorb in a few hours a week.

Arabic was woven into the fabric of my home life where the music of Umm Kulthum, the famous Egyptian songstress, crackled on the record player. My father had hurriedly packed that scratched 78 just prior to our expulsion from Egypt. It elicited fond memories of his Egyptian friends, some Muslim, some Christian, who remained in the old country. Sworn enemies after 1948, Israel and Egypt were intertwined in our everyday, in the food, the culture, and in the Arabic that was spoken so that little ears could not understand conversations reserved for adults.

French was the language spoken at home. Educated at the Lycée Français in Cairo, a legacy of Napoleon’s colonial ambitions, my parents imparted their love of French poetry, the plays of Molière and the music of Edith Piaf and Charles Aznavour.

In keeping with his family tradition of learning to play an instrument at a young age, my father had bought a gleaming upright piano, which was hauled up the stairs of our duplex for me, the eldest. Piano did not come easily and became a study in laziness on my part and ear-shattering pain for my teachers. Mr. Baranovsky, a Russian émigré, his fingers and nail beds stained a dark amber, trailed his misery into our house along with the unwelcome stink of his Marlboros. He was succeeded by Soeur Marie-Thérèse, she of the stark habit and stiff ruler, at L’École de Musique Vincent d’Indy. Fortunately, the good sister slapped the piano, not our fingers, the repeated blows taking the shine off the upright.

What did all that music make me? I carry it still, those layered, unruly chords. It is the sound of belonging everywhere and nowhere. It is the sound of Montreal in 1963. It is the sound of me.