The sky over Camp Wooden Acres in St-Adolphe-d’Howard, Quebec erupted in color and light; the flashes and trails of the fireworks reflected in the lake below. It was 4 July, and we had had a similar pyrotechnic display just three nights earlier. But these fireworks were for another occasion, and I fully grasped their meaning. These fireworks celebrated my father’s birthday, which I knew came the next day, 5 July.
I was, of course, wrong. In my defence, it was 1969, and I was five years old; it would be a few more years until I fully grasped the finer points of global geopolitics, national identity, and “the world’s longest undefended border.” Neil Armstrong and “Buzz” Aldrin, and Michael Collins, who would wait in orbit as they landed on the moon two weeks later, were simply astronauts, and not American astronauts in my imagination. The Banana Splits were just goofy animals who might as well have come from Ottawa, for all I knew.
Joe Friedman was the director of Camp Wooden Acres, a Jewish summer camp in the Laurentian Mountains north of Montreal. For him, the fireworks, the raising of the Stars and Stripes and the singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which my elders knew from hockey and baseball games, all had a very deep and important meaning. He later told me that the celebration of the Fourth of July was meant to help the campers who had come from the United States, maybe ten percent of our complement, feel more at home and less homesick. There was certainly some truth to that, homesickness is the plague of sleepaway camp, and I remember one of my camp buddies from a later summer, Harley Cohen, from faraway Georgia, feeling it keenly.
But there was more to it than that. The truth is that my father, who died 13 years ago, loved the United States and what he believed it represented. He would have turned 100 tomorrow, and I can’t help but wonder how he would have felt about Canada’s southern neighbor were he alive today. Would it have destroyed him?
My father was born into a different world. He remembered the first telephone that he had ever seen, although he was not allowed to use it for many more years; it had been installed, with great ceremony, at his father’s haberdashery on Saint Lawrence Boulevard sometime around 1929. My father watched the R100 airship fly over Montreal in 1930, its silver majesty inspiring a lifelong fascination with aviation and space exploration. And he told me of how he listened to Joe Louis’s first fight against Max Schmeling in 1935 on the radio at the grocery store on Saint Joseph Street; it was the only one in the neighborhood.
While one might quibble about what the United States was actually like in the 1930s, to a young boy obsessed with aviation, who read Action Comics, and never missed an episode of The Shadow on the Mutual Network (he would have loved Flash Gorden, but children under 16 were banned from Montreal theatres until 1961), the United States seemed like a golden land – di goldene medineh. This, even though his father had made a bee-line from Philadelphia to Montreal when he crossed to America in 1913.
There was certainly something heroic about the United States; it was where baseball, jazz, and everything modern came from. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, its president during the Great Depression, was a larger-than-life-figure who rallied not just his own country during the crisis, but was a model of principled, creative, leadership. Prime Minister William Lyon MacKenzie King introduced a New Deal of his own in Canada, including Unemployment and Agricultural Insurance, but everyone knew where he got the idea.
When war came in 1939, the United States, with its vast wealth and industrial capacity, became the “Arsenal of Democracy.” My father once told me that he and his chums at Bancroft Elementary School were puzzled about why Americans didn’t just “jump into the fight,” but welcomed the corvettes, tanks, and all the other things that kept Britain and its Dominions alive. When the American giant did finally stir in 1941, my father knew that the war would soon be over. The United States was our great ally, our friend.
Joe Friedman enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1943, joining more than a million other Canadians who served in the Second World War. It was a teenaged adventure, to be sure, but for a Jewish kid from the mean streets of Montreal, it was also a crusade against totalitarianism and antisemitism. And the Americans, with better rations, cleaner uniforms, and altogether more stuff, were there alongside us. The airmen of RAF/RCAF Bomber Command struck the enemy by night, and the Yanks of the USAAC’s Eighth Airforce hit them by day.
My father was shot down on a bombing mission over Germany near the end of 1944. He was held for the remaining months of the war in Stalag Luft I on the Baltic coast, along with other British and Empire airmen, and a whole lot of Americans. The Americans were more than comrades; they shared the misery of the prison camp, swapped their chocolate and cigarettes, and their senior officer, Colonel Hub Zemke, was the commander of all the Allied kriegies. The Americans were family.
After the war, despite his left-wing political inclinations and his flirtation with the Communist Party of Canada, that personal connection with Americans defined his opinion of the United States. Whatever he might have thought of Harry Truman (unimaginative and too much the cold warrior but, overall, probably a decent man) and Dwight D. Eisenhower (he was, after all, the Commander in Chief), my father held the unshakeable opinion that Americans were good people, Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy aside.
One of his POW buddies, an American P-51 pilot shot down while escorting allied bombers to their targets in 1944, came to visit Montreal 28 years later. I remember the two old comrades embracing in our living room. They had a spirited discussion about Nixon, Pierre Trudeau, and Vietnam. But they smiled over dinner and remembered shared experiences and departed friends. When Frank left for the evening, back to his hotel in Montreal, my father turned to me and winked, “I don’t really understand him, and some of his ideas are meshuggene, but he’s a good man… a warm man… a friend.”
He could do that. My father had an amazing talent to navigate human contradictions and embrace complexity. He never forgave John F. Kennedy for “betraying Cuba,” yet he celebrated how he advanced the cause of civil rights and mourned the loss of “a great man” for many years after his assassination. Just as he mourned for Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.
The United States is capable of great goodness, even if it sometimes loses its way, he told me when I asked questions about the footage from the Vietnam War that appeared on the news every evening. He was appalled by the imperialistic carnage in Southeast Asia and made it a point to hire American draft resisters and deserters for the staff at Wooden Acres. It was something concrete that he could do.
Some of the first Americans whom I knew as Americans were camp counselors and activity coordinators who had escaped to the North. One, who I only remember as Haig (I don’t know if I ever knew his last name) taught me drawing and linocut printing. I remember some of the dark pen-and-ink drawings he made to channel the trauma that he had left behind when he went AWOL in the Pacific Northwest rather than go back to Vietnam after his first tour, crossing to British Columbia and then to Wooden Acres,
My father knew; it was no secret that Haig was a wanted criminal back home, but it did not matter. He was family, an American neighbour, and my father was adamant that we have an obligation to help our neighbours in times of need, as communities and as individuals, even if our obligations to each might sometimes conflict.
Joe Friedman was a deeply moral man, yet he had a keen sense of both his own and others’ fallibility. He did not care for Ronald Reagan or for Brian Mulroney, his Canadian doppelganger, but he never doubted their humanity. Mulroney was “too hungry” to be fully trusted, and Reagan “is going to create big trouble in the world,” he once told me; he was skeptical of Free Trade – “you don’t want to let your friends get too close.” My father did welcome the end of the Cold War and the easing of the cognitive dissonance the one-time Canadian Communist had lived with for so long.
My father’s morality motivated his commitment to social justice, he was an advocate for the poor and oppressed, and a social worker in the Montreal Jewish Community. Yet, he did not see morality as a simple binary of good and evil. “No one is absolutely good,” he once said. “The best that we can do is to aspire to righteousness and to make the world better – tikkun olam – as much as we can.” Quoting the Talmud, he reminded me that “you are not required to finish the work, but you are not free to abandon it.”
For Joe Friedman, the meaning of life was always to do this work, doing mitzvahs, while acknowledging that everyone else was engaged in the work themselves. We all are capable of doing evil, and we all do evil; the point is to be conscious of good and evil, and to choose to do good. “To think, and not just to act,” he said. Only after his death in 2011, when I inherited some of his books, many dogeared and annotated, did I realize that he was teaching me the wisdom of Rabbi Maimonides.
My father was born one hundred years ago tomorrow into a different world. He experienced so many of the social, cultural, and technological changes that created our contemporary world. Joe Friedman witnessed the emergence of the United States as a global hegemon and hoped that it would be a force for good. He was present at the birth of mass culture, listening to the fights and hockey games on the radio at the shop down the street, and his Facebook profile, created almost a century later is still up. “I haven’t seen it all,” he said when I visited him as he was recovering from chemotherapy at the Catherine Booth Hospital the month before he died. “No one ever will. But I’ve seen a lot of it.”
One thing that he did not live to see was what the country that he celebrated with fireworks and festivities at Camp Wooden Acres as a friend of the homeland he loved, and as an ally in the crusade against fascism, would become under Donald Trump. I don’t know how he would have been able to navigate MAGA totalitarianism and the shocking realization that his “good neighbors” would so consciously and explicitly choose to do evil.
Joe Friedman was a good man; one of the best. The word that comes to the mind of everyone who knew him is mensch. He was a man of kindness, deep understanding and expansive wisdom, Reb Friedman to many whose lives he touched. He is very much the man I aspire to be.
But, looking back over the century, I know that he was a man of another time, and that the brutal, stupid age in which we live would have destroyed him. I miss my father so much, but it is perhaps a mercy to him that he never lived to see this moment. Happy 100th, dad.
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Photo by Aaron J. Hill