Read Online The Street by Mordecai Richler - Free Book Online

snuff, at the delicatessens we were allowed salami butts, card players pushed candies on us for luck, and everywhere we were poked and pinched by the mothers. Absolutely the best that could be said of us was, “He eats well, knock wood,” and later, as we went off to school, “He’s a rank-one boy.”
    After the shopping, once our errands had been done, we returned to the Main once more, either for part-time jobs or to study with our
melamud
. Jobs going on the Main included spotting pins in a bowling alley, collecting butcher bills and, best of all, working at a news-stand, where you could devour the
Police Gazette
free and pick up a little extra shortchanging strangers during the rush hour. Work was supposed to be good for our character development and the fact that we were paid was incidental. To qualify for a job we were supposed to be “bright, ambitious, and willing to learn.” An ad I once saw in a shoe store window read:
    PART-TIME BOY WANTED FOR EXPANDING
BUSINESS. EXPERIENCE ABSOLUTELY
NECESSARY, BUT NOT ESSENTIAL
    Our jobs and lessons finished, we would wander the street in small groups smoking Turret cigarettes and telling jokes.
    “Hey,
shmo-hawk
, what’s the difference between a mail box and an elephant’s ass?”
    “I dunno.”
    “Well, I wouldn’t send
you
to mail my letters.”
    As the French Canadian factory girls passed arm-in-arm we would call out, “I’ve got the time, if you’ve got the place.”
    Shabus
it was back to the Main again and the original Young Israel synagogue. While our grandfathers and fathers prayed and gossiped and speculated about the war in Europe in the musty room below, we played chin the bar in the upstairs attic and told jokes that began, “Confucius say …” or, “Once there was an Englishman, an Irishman, and a Hebe …”
    We would return to the Main once more when we wanted a fight with the pea-soups. Winter, as I recall it, was best for this type of sport. We could throw snowballs packed with ice or frozen horse buns and, with darkness falling early, it was easier to elude pursuers. Soon, however, we developed a technique of battle that served us well even in the spring. Three of us would hide under an outside staircase while the fourth member of our group, a kid named Eddy, would idle provocatively on the sidewalk. Eddy was a good head-and-a-half shorter than the rest of us. (For this, it was rumoured, his mother was to blame. She wouldn’t let Eddy have his tonsils removed and that’s why he was such a runt. It was not that Eddy’s mother feared surgery, but Eddy sang in the choir of a rich synagogue, bringing in some thirty dollars a month, and if his tonsils were removed it was feared that his voice would go too.) Anyway, Eddy would stand out there alone and when the first solitary pea-soup passed he would kick him in the shins. “Your mother fucks,” he’d say.
    The pea-soup, looking down on little Eddy, would naturally knock him one on the head. Then, and only then, would we emerge from under the staircase.
    “Hey, that’s my kid brother you just slugged.”
    And before the bewildered pea-soup could protest, we were scrambling all over him.
    These and other fights, however, sprang more out of boredom than from racial hatred, not that there were no racial problems on the Main.
    If the Main was a poor man’s street, it was also a dividing line. Below, the French Canadians. Above, some distance above, the dreaded WASP s. On the Main itself there were some Italians, Yugoslavs and Ukrainians, but they did not count as true Gentiles. Even the French Canadians, who were our enemies, were not entirely unloved. Like us, they were poor and coarse with large families and spoke English badly.
    Looking back, it’s easy to see that the real trouble was there was no dialogue between us and the French Canadians, each elbowing the other, striving for WASP acceptance. We fought the French Canadians stereotype for stereotype. If many of them believed that