My grandfather's north end was a safe place to land after Russian pogroms, war and revolution. The landing took him the rest of his life. He stayed suspended between two worlds. His backyard showed it - chickens, a garden, a shed for smoking fish - an Old World farm squeezed into a tiny New World plot. He opened Obee's Steam Bath where the guys sweated in the steam and around card tables stacked with poker chips, corned beef sandwiches and Canadian Rye whisky. Others sat in the mikvah, the ritual bath for purification, or worked out in the weight room with my dad and two of his brothers (all three became Western champs). Even my baba pushed weights on ladies night, though she pushed her boys even harder - to make it in a world she hardly knew, the New World outside the door.
My grandfather understood his north end by where he came from. My father knew it by where he was heading. For him it was a place to start from, on the way to something better.
He had to scramble even as a kid, hawking the Free Press on the street, fighting for his corner, staying out till every paper was sold. Everywhere were bootleggers and bookies, fast-talking men and slow-walking women who took money where they found it, no questions asked.
My dad ran a clothing store, then Bert's Corned Beef House, a motorcycle hang-out he ran like a gym, keeping his "boys" happy and well fed. While my grandfather hardly landed in the north end, my father hardly left. The "better life" he'd wanted he found right there. He lived out his days on Main Street and when the hearse took him to the cemetery, passing the stores, apartments and coffee shops,.it was a final tour of everything he knew and loved.
I've loved my north end just as well. My bassinet was set beside the cash in our store, Dobies on Main Street. I grew up in the apartment above. Our first family vehicle was a delivery bike with the handlebars reserved for me. Yet I knew we weren't poor. We were rich in expectations. Everyone, even the tramps and oddballs, had a glow, a belief that somehow, we were headed towards something terrific.
The north end was no ghetto. I was raised to leave it; to complete the myth my parents and grandparents lived, the myth that gives the north end life - the myth of making it.
Sure, I scrambled like my dad, selling door to door, hauling furniture, working the trains and factories, anything to save for university. Yet it was as easy for me as it had been impossible for him. I was riding so much higher on the same wave of prosperity that gave my parents and grand- parents better lives. It carried me through university and into a profession. Made it.
Making it meant leaving it. I moved out of the north end but never thought that it would change. I got a warning shock after my baba's death. She ended her years in the Olympic towers near Main and College. I called it the Old Timers Towers for the babas and zeydas who filled the lobby like whimsical checkpoint guards, "So, who's your baba? Nu? And who's your parents? Oy, I knew your mama from ven she had diapers! And vat kind living are you in?"
I passed them one last time to clear out my baba's suite. The lobby was still full of old folks gossiping, but something was missing. The it came to me. No accents. These were new "old timers" born in Canada. Not just my baba was gone but her whole generation.
Now my dad's generation is going along with his north end. And my north end, as well. I tried to find it through writing. I wrote an adult fiction called This Business With Elijah. Two main characters are a boy and an old caretaker who tells him mystical tales. I wanted the book cover to show the boy in front of his parents' store window. He would be watching clouds reflected in the glass as he imagined the mystical Elijah in the sky. I set out with a photographer but was shocked that I couldn't find a clothing store typical of my old north end.
\Ve finally shot the cover at Ragpickers a vintage clothing store off Old Market Square. I felt badly at the deception but worse about how much of the north end was lost.
Much later, I drove my mother past the window. "Look, mom," I said. "I used that for the book cover." "That's in the Whitlaw Building," " she said. "I once worked on the third floor for the Chmelnitskys." "Oh, yeah?" I replied. "And your father, he was a shipper across the street at Kay's Limited." "I must have known that," I said. "The main floor was Ernie Bronstein's lunch counter. You didn't know that." "OK, mom. So?" "So, if you were that boy on the cover of your book and you were looking through that window in 1947, then you would have seen me meet your father for the very first time.
In some ways the north end will never change. It keeps finding me and I keep finding it.