by SHELDON TEITELBAUM

The Passover firebombing of the Ville St-Laurent branch of the Montreal United Talmud Torahs put me in mind of the time, some 40 years ago, when I came perilously close to blowing up the school myself.

My family had moved into a singularly distinctive gold-stoned duplex a block-and-a-half up the street a year or so after the school opened its doors in 1962. Kindergarten and Grades 1 and 2 were a breeze. But my relationship with the principal, Dr. Maurice Ogulnik and his deputy, Joseph Liebowitz - never ideal - reached a nadir in the third grade when news broke that I had engineered a neighbourhood heist.

It seemed that I had somehow purloined a shopping bag laden with firecrackers, blockbusters, cherry bombs, roman candles and sparklers from the Giftland shop at the nearby St. Louis Street Shopping Centre. In fact, I had quite brazenly walked into the shop, filled my shopping bag with incendiaries, thanked and said goodbye to the owner's son, Allan, and then schlepped my ill-gotten goods into the deli next door. There, a neighbour and I (it was his idea!) celebrated with a couple of mustard-lathered smoked meats on rye, side orders of karnatzel and fountain-drawn cherry cokes.

Still inexplicably unperturbed, I headed off to Chamberlain Park, just behind the school, with as much stealth as a 20-pound bag of explosives would let me muster, and stashed my haul in a skate locker. Recovering from my exertions, I headed back home, my air of studied innocence betrayed only by the intermittent pinwheel explosions lighting my imagination and, I suppose, my eyes.

Days of torment

What I never imagined was that the kid I was with (the one, you'll recall, who goaded me into a life of larceny) returned home and spilled the beans to his father. His father paid a visit to mine, who proceeded to thrash me with a yardstick. So soundly that another neighbour, now a renowned cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, spent an hour on our steps with a few other appreciative miscreants listening to me shriek.

Word of my dubious accomplishments quickly reached the ears of "O.G." and "Leibo," and the result was not pretty. Never a prized pupil of pilpul, I had antagonized my instructors with cheeky questions and religious conundrums they could never hope to address. This, a penchant for daydreaming, an occasional impulsiveness and various other behaviours now treated with prescription stimulants, were then deemed worthy of ear-yankings, ritual humiliations and other forms of abuse that included rote memorization of page after page of tightly-compressed Hebrew text culled from the Psalms or Pirkei Avot.

Robbing Giftland of its holiday noisemakers, though, proved a sin of a whole other magnitude. Suffice it to say that my days, months and indeed years of mistreatment ahead - most of it meted out with gleeful impunity until my father confronted O.G. and Leibo and threatened them both with a punch to the snoot - would have given pause to the arch-schoolyard bully Harry Flashman himself.

Each day during lunch I would rush home to catch my beloved Johnny Jellybean Show on TV, dreaming, meanwhile, of dispatching the school and my tormentors with the same fury Ted Ziegler reserved for the shattering of his "Squawk Box." This while wondering why nobody had ever inquired as to the whereabouts of my stash, which remained untouched in my skate locker at the park.

Pyro panic

Believing I had paid my debt to society, I quietly bided my time until Firecracker Day, the Monday before May 25 otherwise known as Victoria Day, when at dusk I removed my pyrotechnic pretties from their refuge and prepared the punk sticks I would use to liberate them into the night sky. As I set about this task, alas, I spotted my shtinker neighbour approaching. Fervently hoping to spare myself another drubbing, I repaired to the back entrance of the shuttered school, where I could complete my preparations unmolested.

Now I am sure you will believe me when I tell you that I didn't plan, nor can I explain even today how and why, I accidentally managed to drop my punk stick into the bag. I mean, had I wanted to blow up the school, I could have lit a very long fuse. Indeed, I learned how to do that from my cousin when we glued a blockbuster to the window of Madame Desjardins, the notorious Catwoman of Trout Lake, two or three years before. What kind of maniac, moreover, would deliberately ignite 20 pounds of explosives without first clearing the area by several city blocks at least (or in my case, repairing to our finished basement a block away)?

Fortunately for me and I suppose for the school, a bag of fireworks does not explode in a single blast. Rather, my punk stick ignited a concussive crescendo of smoke, sound and light that took 10 minutes to play itself out. But I didn't know that because, like the Biblical Lot, I was too terrified to look back. At least not until I reached my doorstep, when I beheld that the school and adjoining park had disappeared under what looked perilously like a mushroom cloud.

I didn't dare peek out of our tiny basement windows for fear of radiation burn, or worse, of being pinched. And so, I spent the night, atremble, convinced that I had obliterated the school. Whatever else I felt about its less-than-hallowed halls, I surely didn't mean to level the building. And I certainly didn't want the Firecracker Day I had waited for so patiently, and suffered for so mightily, to go up in so much - you wouldn't believe how much - smoke.

Fiery flashbacks

When I gingerly ventured out the next day, I discovered that the school and its surrounding environs had somehow survived their travails at Ground Zero. Even more astonishingly, no one I subsequently encountered ever mentioned the previous day's Armageddon.

Over the years, I tried to make myself believe it had been a bad dream, the product, perhaps, of an overactive imagination. Sure I suffered the occasional guilty flashback, most notably during my Israeli army days, when I got to play with real fireworks - RPGs, frags, Bangalore mines and even bazookas. These were nothing, though, compared to the wild thoughts that coursed through my brain the first night of this last Passover, when I learned of the odious, cowardly and, I hasten to add, deliberate attack on the school from the pages of Haaretz.

I hope the bastards who did this, whoever they turn out to be, pay big time. I hope my fellow Montreal Jews stop shrying gevalt over this outrage, and perhaps take a cue from Mordecai Richler's Bronfman-inspired character Solomon Gursky, who claimed never to suffer ulcers but happily inspired it in others. Or failing that, to pass on to their children the same advice Irving Layton gave his sons when he urged them to shed their neurotic Diaspora affiliations and join an Israeli combat unit instead.

Sound advice, that, and I am glad to have followed it. It's probably a good thing, though, that I was leading the Seder at my mother's house in Las Vegas when the firebombing went down. After 40 years on the lam - and two stints of patrol duty in Lebanon - I'm running out of alibis.

Sheldon Teitelbaum is a Los Angeles-based senior writer for the Israeli news magazine Jerusalem Report. His work has appeared in, among other publications, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wired, Time and Entertainment Weekly