Canajun, Eh?

When I was a child my immigrant parents
struggled to survive as best they could and
I grew up in poverty, ashamed of my parents'
accented English in my country whose
immigrant population made it what it is
a land of plenty; natural resources, great
natural beauty and opportunities to succeed.
Succeed they did and their children thrived
and became educated and were proud to be
Canadian. When I was a child other children
on the shabby urban street I lived on shouted
after me 'Christ killer!' so I asked my father
who and what and learned to love being a Jew.
When I was a pre-teen walking on a city street
travelling on a city bus, smiling strangers 
would approach to ask where I was from
where was I born never accepting Canada. 
By then I was puzzled and indignant to learn
that Jews were excluded from elite clubs and
universities. By then I also knew that six
million Europeans had been annihilated in a
vast paroxysm of Jew hatred and listened
incredulously as my parents and their friends
spoke in hushed tones of the emigration of
German Nazis to Canada. When I was just
married I worked alongside a new immigrant
and in a spirit of generosity and welcome
invited her and her husband to our home for 
dinner; an awkward moment arose when 
her husband, young like us, toasted us as 
good Jews and said what a pity it was that
good Jews died among the bad ones. When 
I was a mother of three settling into a new
house, new city, wearing my hair in a long
dark braid, a bicyclist called after me 'go
home, Paki!' Now in my 80s that ancient
scourge has been revived as immigrants and
refugees from the Middle East bring their
incendiary hatred of Jews with them along
with their Islamic tradition of imperialism
in the jihadi heritage of global conquest.