Chesterfield suite

Earl Fowler

The NorDon Drugs strip mall between our house and my school had a Dutch bakery (Bavarian cream-filled and nutty Long Johns, apple fritters, butter tarts, sausage rolls, caramel and chocolate doughnuts for a nickel) my friends and I frequented until the old woman (German? Polish? Swedish? probably Dutch) who worked there became nutty as a fruitcake and started scaring the crap out of kids with Struwwelpeter-intensity rants about fingers cut off by the bread-slicing machine.

Every Saturday morning my mom and my aunt would return from the shopping centre “beauty parlour,” as the hair salons with the alien dryer helmets were called then, with identical, unchanging “perms” harder than infrangible crystal lattices. Next door, for the menfolk, there was a barber named Brent whose breath could strip the paint off walls. I don’t know what he told men his own age or older. But Brent spent much of each day alternately tantalizing and boring young boys with longwinded stories about his girlfriends, all of whom resembled Dr. No-era Ursula Andress, and none of whom ever seemed to stick around very long.

One time my best friend Paul convinced our other best buddy Bob to buy a Playboy from the drugstore magazine rack, which seemed like a cracker of an idea until the clerk at the till turned out to be a blabby friend of his sister.

To my untrained ear, the bakery lady spoke with the same accent as Frau Kilbach, who did part-time work as a cleaner for Paul and Bob’s moms and barely spoke English. Frau Kilbach spent most of her afternoons on her employers’ chesterfields watching Another World and The Edge of Night. She didn’t understand a lot of the dialogue, but it wasn’t hard for her to suss out shenanigans and tragedies.

Prairie dwellers still called sofas chesterfields in those days of doilies and rock-hard weekly perms from beauty parlours. Paul’s house had the best chesterfield on our block but children weren’t allowed to sit on it; just in case, though, his mom kept it draped in shipping plastic to protect it.

Later on, after colour TV arrived, we were permitted to sit on the chesterfield, where the plastic squirmed underneath our butts and made fart noises when we sat down. We were obliged to wear sunglasses because Paul’s mother was afraid the TV X-rays would damage our eyes.

Paul’s mother was a Sudeten German who became what my parents called a DP after the war and nevertheless served expensive European chocolate-covered marshmallow cookies, not the cheap ones my mother bought along with the Puffed Wheat and Puffed Rice we had for cereal, so I kept my mouth shut about the chesterfield bubble wrap and the indoor sunglasses. I kept it open when enjoying European biscuits.

Frau Kilbach’s husband had been a German soldier during the war who disappeared when he was captured by the Soviets near the end. Most of the three million or so German POWs taken by the Russians died while doing forced labour to rebuild the Soviet economy, before and after the war.

Paul’s father, too, had been pressed into service for the Wehrmacht after Germany captured Poland, where he grew up, and there was likely an undercurrent of antisemitism in their home that I never picked up on. Not, that is, until half a century later, when Paul started to rant like a demented pastry chef about Israel — well before the incomprehensible horror now unfolding in Gaza; there was something older and uglier and bred in the bone there — and so I hardly ever see him anymore.

When I do, rather than get into a quarrel as a braver, more principled man would, I switch the topic to our childhood and the NorDon Drugs neighbourhood or the Beatles or something along those lines. This usually works. If it doesn’t, I go home.

My wife and I went to Cuba once and I brought Paul back a baseball cap featuring the Flag of the Lone Star on the panels. This pleased him enormously because he watches Russian TV and thinks he is a communist, but the truth is that he has become a wambling old fascist who backs Trump on most things (though not American support for Israel). In my opinion, this is one more example of why it’s a bad idea to smoke 12 blunts a day over a vast expanse of time stretching back more than half a century, as Paul has. Our parents were right about that part.

Which brings me to the point I actually wanted to make here.

You know how Trump’s campaign against campus antisemitism is a barefaced, hypocritical pretext for his assault on American higher education? This being the same Donald Trump whose 2016 presidential election campaign boasted: a) a television ad featuring Hillary Clinton against a background of hundred-dollar bills and a Star of David, and b) a second ad promising protection against global special interests and featuring the portraits of three Jewish financiers, Janet Yellen, George Soros and Lloyd Blankfein? The same Donald Trump who found there to be “fine people” on “both sides” in 2017 when demonstrators marched with swastika and Confederate flags in a Nazi-style torchlit parade in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting the Nazi slogans “Blood and Soil” and “Jews will not replace us!”

Behold the ardent defender of Jewish students on college campuses, the statesman who proclaimed going into the 2024 presidential election that if he lost, it would be because too many American Jews had failed to vote for him. That classic antisemitic tactic: If things go wrong, blame the Jews.

What I find just as hypocritical are the people on the left and right alike who use Netanyahu’s atrocities in Gaza, in the wake of the Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas, to justify a “none is too many” antisemitism that was always there, festering and scratching at the surface, eager for an excuse to desecrate a synagogue or terrorize innocent children at a yeshiva. All the plastic chesterfield covers and all the doilies in all the living rooms in all the NorDon Drugs-like suburbs in all the world amount to an awfully thin veneer, a blistering patina, a froth-corrupted pretense to civilization when a post-Christian society continues to inculcate in its children, ardent for some desperate glory, that old Christian calumny: If things go wrong, blame the Jews.

A further hypocrisy: Outrage laser-focused on Israel while blithely ignoring the carnage going on every day in Syria, Yemen, Congo, Myanmar, Sudan, Mali, Niger, Ethiopia …

And I don’t hear many voices over here demanding that broken treaties with the First Peoples be honoured, land returned, settlers relocated, compensation paid.

Like Hitler before him and a murderer’s row of merciless tyrants and dictators, Putin styles himself a Christian. Are all Christians to blame for his heinous immorality? Nobody thinks so. That would be absurd.

So why are all Jews deemed responsible for the actions of the Netanyahu government, regardless of which side one comes down on in the Gaza war? It’s easy to write off this way of thinking as a form of irrationality or insanity, but of course it’s way more sinister and deep-rooted than that.

As former Saskatchewan premier Roy Romanow used to say, citing a Ukrainian adage that applies today more than ever, “If you want to beat a dog, you can always find a stick.”