by Ann Huber
Our stay with Lily ended abruptly because of an unfortunate misunderstanding. Due to space constraints, my aunt stored a bag of oranges in one of the bedrooms. Sandu thought she was hiding food from us, an unforgivable insult. This resulted in a terrible argument, lots of screaming and accusations between these two fragile and insecure beings.
That evening, to assert his independence and his pride, my father took my mother and me out to dinner at the counter of a local pharmacy—my first restaurant dining experience and novel food. We ate grilled cheese sandwiches and French fries with gravy, a Canadian specialty called “poutine.” No one seemed to care that it wasn’t kosher. The meal was just slightly better than the counter food at Woolworth’s five and dime store where I would have many future meals.
Our first home in Montreal was a modest, one-bedroom basement apartment (which we shared with a colony of silverfish) on Decelles Street, about three blocks from Lily’s. Decelles was a steep grade down the west side of Mount Royal, two blocks from the University of Montreal and one block from the drugstore where we had our first “restaurant” meal. With the apartment windows at street level, at first it seemed like an improvement over the below street level window in Haifa. Alas, it was not. In Haifa, the window was still up from ground level and I could not touch the grass outside the window.
The apartment was furnished with donations my mother and I picked up at the B’nai B’rith thrift store and carried home on the bus, plus the goodies my father rescued from the trash collection area in the bowels of the building. One great find was an entire collection of 78-RPM records of wonderful music by artists such as Mario Lanza. I can still hear the scratchy version of O Sole Mio which I listened to over and over. With few friends, I had a lot of time to listen to the many classical records like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Mozart’s Messiah. The record player too was a hand-me-down, as was the little black and white television set, given to us by a kindly, betteroff neighbor. She must have given us a lot of things because I still remember the short, large-breasted and portly woman with dark hair and a booming voice who came to deliver treasures.
The worst hand-me-down, origin unknown, was a folding bed on which I slept in the living room. I hated that bed and lived in fear of its collapse. Many nights, the top half did just that in the middle of the night, waking me without warning and flinging my head down backwards where silverfish, the scourge of all basements (though certainly better than cockroaches), threatened my existence. I asked my mother, “Can’t we take a bus back to Haifa?”
On our first day in Montreal, my mother and I walked three blocks from Lily’s apartment to Young Israel, a private parochial school. I don’t know if she was unaware of the high cost, or she was willing to pay whatever it took, but when she tried to enroll me, fortunately for all of us, the principal turned me down because I spoke too much Hebrew but neither English nor French. Instead, he suggested I attend a public school for a short time to learn English. That was the last they saw either of us.
My mother and I walked two blocks to the Logan School on Darlington Avenue. There were both Protestant and Catholic public schools. In the former, the dominant language was English, although French was also taught. The reverse was true in the Catholic schools. The Logan School was Protestant. We entered through the front door of the sprawling one story building. The principal tested my cognitive abilities by pointing to numbers on a calendar that he expected me to read off in English. I could not. He placed me in the “slow learners” class—always the “dummy” class to me.
I was led to a classroom and shown to a seat. I know I was introduced because I heard my name, but I understood nothing else. I do remember copying the date, December 1, 1959, learning the cursive capital letter “D” following along as another student showed me how to form the letter. That day and many others, as a “slow learner,” my teacher sent me to the back of the small classroom with another student, smarty-pants Allan. It was humiliating. Due to my conspicuous lack of “intelligence” I had to go over the Dick and Jane early readers with the catchphrase “Run Spot Run” countless times with Allan. It did not take long before I memorized those books, but I had little idea what the words meant.
My teacher, Mrs. Zinman, was cruel and unfeeling in other ways. The class recited the pledge of allegiance every morning, which of course, I did not know. I memorized those words phonetically, too, but they meant nothing to me. I pronounced many words incorrectly. She regularly humiliated me by calling me out, insisting I repeat words that I mispronounced. It was the worst year of my short life. With no one to talk to in school, I was miserable.
In retrospect, I find it very strange that my mother, who spoke both English and French, made no effort to teach me. Until now, we spoke both Hebrew and Romanian at home, though my father’s Hebrew was sketchy at best. Now as I struggled in school, they both refused to speak to me in Hebrew, which only served to improve my now useless Romanian. My mother didn’t start speaking to me in English until much later in life. Sandu and I spoke little—he was always somewhat detached from the everyday goings on at home—but it was always Romanian between us.
With the loss of my first language at home, and my inability to communicate at school, I felt there was no longer any safe place to be. Yet, my parents were so pleased with this Protestant school, attended primarily by Jewish immigrant children, that we never talked about the private school again and my religious education came to a halt.
Lucille Ball became my primary English teacher. I watched I Love Lucy for many years. At first, I thought her name was “Lucy O’Ball”—there were so many other English surnames starting with “O.” But when neither school nor television resulted in my learning enough English to master the materials of fourth grade, my mother took the school’s advice and engaged a tutor.
Hannah, a gentle teenager who reminded me of the teenager next door in Haifa was a joy compared to the torture of school. And she taught me a lot more than English. It was from Hannah that I began to learn how to fit into the culture. She curled my hair into a more fashionable style. She critiqued my outfits and helped me put together more stylish ones. Together, we listened to popular music like Tossin’ and Turnin’ by Bobby Lewis and Del Shannon’s Runaway.
Still at school for some time, I remained a stranger in a strange land, didn’t speak the language, wore hand-me-downs and knew no one except a cousin who pretended not to know me during recess, even for the couple of weeks that we lived in the same apartment. Yes, Lily’s daughter Anna, who was only a year younger, and also an only child, went to the same school. But no one would have guessed we were first cousins. Why did she ignore me when I felt so alone? Was I a threat to her because her mother doted on me? I was Lily’s only niece, and she showered me with love and attention.
“As a young child, I went to live on a farm with an elderly aunt and uncle. Even though I hardly knew Sandu, I always loved you because you were his child,” Lily explained. She was affectionate, generous and protective of me. While there was no doubt that Lily was fierce in her protection of Anna as well and would have killed anyone who would try to harm her, as sometimes happens between mothers and daughters she did not show the same affection to Anna, always criticizing her and comparing her to others.
Anna and her father, on the other hand, were very close and even looked alike. Lulu, too, was always very kind to me but very quiet, often deferring to Lily to avoid conflict.
Lily, Lulu, and Anna soon moved away from the neighborhood to the suburb of Cote St. Luc (nicknamed “Cote St. Jew”), so my embarrassment on the playground was short-lived. After they moved, we rarely saw them but my aunt always remembered my birthdays with presents—a child-size beautifully dressed doll, a ring with my birthstone, a green party dress.
Anna and I did not get to play much, but despite that and the rough start, we eventually bonded. As we got older, we got to know each other better, realized that we had much in common and a powerful affinity pulled us together. Eventually, my
childhood resentment melted away. We have felt close as adults, each of us growing up lonely, only children with parents damaged by war and displacement.
Chapter Four
BECOMING CANADIAN, EH?
MY FOLDING BED was set up nightly in front of an old, upright piano that finally enabled me to take lessons. In Israel, my interest in piano lessons had been diverted by a flirtation with a recorder, but my wish finally came true in Montreal. My mother arranged for lessons offered by the school, where we were taught on a cardboard keyboard set up on a desk. My teacher was a fellow immigrant from Hungary, Mr. Andre, who later gave me private lessons until I graduated from high school at age seventeen. He was a quiet, soft-spoken man with the longest, slimmest, strongest fingers I ever saw dance across the keys. Under his tutelage, I continued with the Toronto Conservatory of Music yearly exams, graduating from their program at the end of high school. Mr. Andre promised to play at my wedding.
With Lily’s help, my father quickly found work in the negligee factory where she worked. The factory was not far from our neighborhood and my father walked there daily, but he complained about it bitterly and incessantly.
Eleven years old, playing the piano.
My mother got a job in a small, privately owned grocery store on St. Lawrence Street, Montreal’s long-established equivalent to New York’s Delancey Street, both neighborhoods populated by successive waves of immigrants. In the early 1960s, all the shops on bustling St. Lawrence Street were operated by Jewish immigrants and frequented by the newest arrivals. Moishe’s and Schwartz’s Steakhouses are still present reminders of that time. Often, the noise was deafening especially when the street hawkers worked their way up and down the street with used clothing, pots, pickles—you name it.
My mother worked in the tiny, smelly grocery store through the worst months of our first winter. It was a difficult environment, with no heat in the brutal Montreal winter and my mother’s hands were raw, chapped and bleeding from reaching into the waist-high wooden pickle barrel to fill customer orders. Unlike my father, my mother never complained about her job, at least not to me, working stoically, determined to make a life for me. I see this now as evidence of how she had toughened up as a result of the multiple migrations. She had come a long way from the embroidering days of Galati.
I realize now how remarkably resourceful she became, although some today might call it stingy. She turned every sack of flour into an apron or towel, every napkin was cut in half to make two, and she always went shopping with a list and sales coupons, never buying anything not on her list. Her cupboards and refrigerator had nothing extra beyond the week’s meals. She did not pass that characteristic onto me.
In what I admired even then as a remarkable example of her frugality, each year she wore a new hat for Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year). Of course, she did not buy a new hat each year. Rather, she exchanged the previous year’s hat for a new one at Eaton’s Department Store. Each receipt had the date of the transaction, but without the year stamped on it. No wonder Eaton’s went bankrupt after 130 years in business.
On one of my mother’s first days off in the winter of 1960, she took me to see the movie, Ben-Hur, an epic with Charlton Heston about a Jewish prince, betrayed and sent into slavery by a Roman friend, who regains his freedom and comes back for revenge. The movie was in French with English subtitles that made very little difference to me since I couldn’t understand or read either language. I did understand the dramatic, close up chariot scene, in which protruding blades from one chariot’s wheel-spokes, methodically and brutally, sliced through the spokes of the wheels of the others. This scene only re-fueled my recurring nightmare of the Chinese dancers and still makes my heart race whenever I see a replay.
The violence in Ben-Hur was overwhelming for me, which might explain my life-long abhorrence of it. Who could have guessed Charlton Heston would become a spokesman for the NRA, an organization not exactly dedicated to promoting non-violence.
My father didn’t work on Saturdays. During our first year in Montreal, he took care of me when my mother worked or whenever there was no program for me at the Neighborhood House on St. Lawrence Street. Since Sandu had no circle of friends as he’d had in Haifa, on Saturday mornings we either sat alone in nearby Kent Park or we ambled our way through Montreal’s streets. Mostly, as we sat or walked we talked about history, government and politics, which ignited a lifelong interest in these subjects for me.
“Do you remember who Ben-Gurion is?” he said one time.
“I remember he is the President of Israel.”
“But, do you know how he got to be president?” he asked. “Let me tell you….”
When we got far from home, my father would have to coax me back. I was too tired to walk. He couldn’t get on a city bus because he was fearful whenever confronted with anything unfamiliar. To him, a bus was a monstrous and uncontrollable machine. He never learned to drive for the same reason.
It became my responsibility to serve the meals my mother had prepared when she was at work. When she needed gallbladder surgery and was hospitalized for about a week, I was pleased that at age eleven I was able to cook for my father, if you could call what I did cooking. Mostly, I again served meals my mother had prepared in advance.
Years later, my father who remained painfully shy, tried to be sociable with my husband. Smiling awkwardly, he told Herm that I almost killed him when I tried to make gelatin by putting it in the freezer to congeal faster, where it froze without ever setting. It was like eating frozen crystals. My father was funny because as bad as it was he still tried to eat it all. I was pleased to hear him tell a story since he never really talked much to anyone but my mother, grandmother, and me.
I missed my grandmother who was still in Israel. However, I found some comfort and joy in our little family because this was the first and only time in my memory that we lived together without oversight from my grandparents.
Chapter Five
THERE IS NO GOING BACK
MY AUNT LONTZI and her family were finally granted visas to go to Israel shortly after we left. According to my cousin, Rodica, when she and her brother, Mircea, arrived in Haifa, she and Lontzi lived with Mamaia in our old apartment. Rodica slept in the same bed I’d slept in only a couple of years earlier. Lontzi’s husband, Costel, lived and worked elsewhere in Israel, in one of the new settlements, where he tried unsuccessfully to establish a place for the family. Mircea, the older of the cousins, lived on a kibbutz but was unhappy there. After debating whether to join us in Canada, they moved to Brazil to join friends from Romania. It was then, in 1962, that our grandmother finally followed us to Montreal.
I learned years later from Rodica that my leaving Israel was just as traumatic a separation for Mamaia as it was for me. She would not let Rodica forget for a moment that she missed me terribly. “Nothing I did was ever good enough or as good as you did,” Rodica lamented to me years later.
Rodica confided she had come to hate our grandmother for the way she treated her. I was sad to hear of Mamaia’s cruelty, but I understood her desperate longing. Talking to Rodica about our grandmother seemed to bring us closer. Like me, she hated watching Mamaia go through her weekly buying frenzy at the food market. She felt bad for the food vendors.
By the time Mamaia was finally able to join us, I was a different person than the child she remembered. Mamaia noticed quickly that I had changed from a happy, carefree youngster into a not-so-happy 12-year-old, shaken to her core. Although I now had a real bed and my very own room in a new three-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a building with marble floors and stairs, I was miserable.
I still struggled to make it out of the dummy class and to form friendships with my peers. It was common for me stand conspicuously and painfully alone on the playground at recess. By then I understood that there would be no going back home for me. I realized I had to learn the foreign ways of a culture where Jews were the minority, and this did not come easily. Yes, I had learned to speak s
ome English, to imitate others by repeating phrases, to read body language—not always correctly—and to infer missing pieces of information. I even learned how to cover up the gaps in my understanding or knowledge. It was not uncommon for me to get the wrong idea about what had been said and take offense, which would make me blush. My reaction was to swallow my pride rather than laugh along with the others.
I also did all the things that were expected of me like going to school, making superficial friends, helping the family navigate the difficult terrain. However, a part of me was missing, longing to return to Israel, where I felt I belonged. I didn’t belong in Montreal. I felt the pain of my wound all the time, and I’m not sure it has ever fully healed. I still find that I get words mixed up—such as defuse and diffuse—and my mixed metaphors are the stuff of family lore.
I did not have very many friends in our first few years in Montreal, but for a little while I was part of a threesome. Esther who lived a block down the same street, Kathy who lived around the corner, and I were classmates. We walked to school together daily and were best of friends. Daily at lunch, we crossed the street to the small corner store to buy five cents worth of candy. More often, I saved my nickel for Saturday’s morning matinees with them.
One day out of the blue, Esther shot me, verbally. She told me she was not allowed to play with me anymore. Her mother thought I was promiscuous. I didn’t know the word but understood from her body language and speech what she meant. Apparently, unbeknownst to me, I was maturing faster than she was, which her mother saw as a threat to Esther. I was confused and heartbroken. I really liked Esther. She was witty, funny and pretty. Our friendship was so easy and comfortable. But we no longer spoke as we passed each other on the street or in school. Kathy, my one remaining friend, and I were friends through high school but Esther moved away about a year later and I never saw her again.