Naivelt: This Land Was Our Land

It made for an interesting read and it certainly brought back childhood memories when I came across the article Canada's Favourite "Traveller" featuring Jerry Grey, in latest issue of Fifty-Five Plus magazine that my husband happened to pick up a few days ago. The Travellers were a feature of Canada's folk song groups, and by all accounts, the first to import and popularize socialist, union- and folk-type songs into Canada, inspired by the movement that took shape in the  United States.

The group of young people who made up The Travellers accompanied their parents to Camp Naivelt just as I did as a slightly younger child. They were hugely admired, their singing prowess evoked the spirit of working-class, cultural-rich Jews that called themselves socialists with a bent toward communism in the 1940s. Social and political life revolved around a society called the United Jewish Peoples' Order [UJPO] which had a building in central Toronto, across from a nice little park. Within that building a parochial school was operated, the Morris Winchevsky School, and while my parents attended meetings at the centre regularly as well as cultural events, I made a daily trek to the school across from Bellwoods Park, after normal school hours and on weekends, to take classes in Jewish history, culture and language.

I made that trek for years, beginning when I must have been around six or seven until I was in my mid-teens, by which time before I 'graduated', my husband, then my boyfriend, waited for me until class was over on weekends, so we could spend time together. His parents moved in a different social circle than mine did, and he attended a conventional 'chaider' for boys, in preparation for bar-mitzvah.
My parents were social 'progressives' and secular, my husband's parents were nominally orthodox, completely disinterested and oblivious of politics and neither saw much in common with the other.

Camp Naivelt, the summer recreation property close to Brampton, owned and operated by the UJPO was a place of natural wonder to me, a large 'park' in a fabulous natural setting that gripped me with pleasure in its environs where familiar people congregated, some owning their own cottages, set apart from smaller rudimentary cabins that people could rent for the weekend. There was a large centrally located building where a large dining hall offered meals to camp-goers, and there were large extended out-houses nearby the cabins which anyone with common sense would walk a wide berth around until nature desperately called.

Deb O'Rourke, Orion Magazine

Best of all, there was an in-ground swimming pool, a lovely large swimming pool that was the pride of the camp, and there, after stepping into and out of a small footpool to be properly skin-sanitized, one entered the confines of the swimming pool itself to submerge oneself into lovely, cooling water during hot summer days.

There were volleyball courts and other competitive recreational sport activities were in full sway that attracted the athletic-minded of which I certainly was not one. It was the close proximity to nature, the green and the trees that sent me into a state of perpetual bliss.

And in the evenings often there was entertainment, along with the giant campfires where people were invited to sit about and join in singing popular folk songs. And there was The Travellers, whose performances were almost venerated, their gutsy, lusty singing of a world of fairness and justice opposed a world of injustice and longing sent listeners into spasms of acclaim. And there we are, sixty years later, and Jerry Grey beams from the pages of the magazine 'promoting a positive, active lifestyle', banjo-playing singing voice still intact and still performing, now 82 years of age.

Oh, and Pete Singer, too. And that's the year, 1955, when my husband and I were married.

Barbara Blaser / Winchevsky Centre

Pete Seeger sings with his five-string banjo at Brampton's Camp Naivelt in the summer of 1955, the same year he famously refused to speak about any communist sympathies before the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington.