When did the CBC ever have a Jewish flavour? Apparently, as soon it discovered television.
Following in the footsteps of early American TV programs with Milton Berle and Sid Caesar, and the series The Goldbergs, the Mother Corp acquired a certain tam.
The venerable broadcaster’s first dozen or so TV years are the subject of a sidebar series at this year’s Toronto Jewish Film Festival (May 5-15). “Jewish Images from a Golden Age of Canadian Television” is devoted to exploring expressions of Jewish identity on CBC-TV from roughly 1952 to 1964.
It was a time of immense creativity. “During this almost-forgotten era of inspired drama and comedy, expressions of Canada’s ethnic diversity began to appear on TV,” writes TJFF program director Stuart Hands in this year’s festival program. “Among these CBC shows, one can also find drama and comedy that reflect the lives of Jewish immigrants and children of immigrants at the time.”
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Hands got the idea for the series following last year’s festival tribute to the late Al Waxman and the screening of writer and filmmaker Jack Kuper’s 1959 autobiographical CBC production, Sun in My Eyes.
Hands and Kuper started talking about the era, and “it’s fascinating,” Hands told The CJN. “When you consider all the [Jewish] directors, writers and actors who were there, it’s really quite amazing, this sort of community that was.
“Canadian Jews don’t know a lot about this history. It was a revelation to me. I thought it would be a revelation to do at [this year’s] festival.”
The series focuses on three significant Jewish contributors to the CBC of those days: Kuper, the comedy team of Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster, and actor Sylvia Lennick.
Moving from radio to TV in 1954, Wayne and Shuster “presented to their audience who they were – university-educated children of Jewish immigrants,” Hands writes in the program. “Although their Jewish roots were rarely openly addressed – other than scattered expressions understood primarily by their Jewish audiences – their urbanity and sophistication spoke to a diverse Canadian population, as well as international fans.”
Lennick, who was married to fellow CBC mainstay Ben Lennick, may be best remembered for playing Calpurnia, Julius Caesar’s wife, in the Wayne and Shuster sketch in which she delivered the immortal warning, in a Bronx drawl, “I told him: Julie, don’t go! It’s the Ides of March! Beware, already!”
Kuper, a Polish-born child survivor of the Holocaust, began at the CBC in 1952 as a graphic artist and went on to create some of the broadcaster’s most memorable teleplays and films, many based on his experiences.
The CBC series promises that “even a young William Shatner makes an appearance.” (It’s in the 1955 drama On A Streetcar, written by Kuper).
By the early 1950s, the CBC had something it “never had before: a considerably Jewish flavour,” Mavor Moore, the writer, producer, actor and polymath is quoted in Mary Jane Miller’s 1996 book Rewind and Search, a look at the heady early days of CBC television drama.
Moore recounted that he and another executive once drew up a list of appointments. It “contained the names of a half dozen very able young Jewish men and women, and the reason was enormously simple: they hadn’t been given a chance before.”
It was presented to the director of television, who looked up and said, “a lot of Jewish names on that list.”
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It was a time of “a great deal of anti-Semitism at the CBC,” Moore noted. Actor Lorne Green, apparently, had difficulties. So did John Adaskin, who went on to success in radio.
Kuper recalled his early days at the CBC as “a struggle. We were all learning how to do it and fighting to get what we did accepted.”
It was uphill, he told The CJN, if “you were stupid enough to step out of the norm, like I did, by writing about subjects and people I knew. This was not the norm, the way people running the CBC understood life. [It was] not what they were looking for or knew or understood or expected to see. Naturally, it was not easily accepted.”
While he did not encounter overt anti-Semitism, resistance from CBC brass sprang from their “non-acceptance of the other.”
Still, it was “an amazing place. I could not believe I was working there and getting paid. It was my education. Without the CBC, I don’t know where I would have ended up.”
The series on the CBC will feature seen rarely-screened archival TV shows, accompanied by guest speakers: For schedule and venues, click here.
