by Ann Huber
The adults around me showed little compassion, or understanding perhaps, for the trauma I suffered. Or perhaps they simply didn’t understand my unhappiness although it was their role to be concerned about me. Perhaps it was just a generation more preoccupied with basic survival and their own traumas than with my emotional health. Unwittingly, the adults who loved me caused irreparable harm, shaking up my sense of security and self-confidence in part because of their continued false assurances that I could go back to the place where I felt safe. I was yanked from home to a stranger’s land from which there was no quick departure or recovery. I felt lost.
For years, I yearned to go back, at least to visit or say a belated good-bye.
Chapter Six
RESILIENCY
THINGS STARTED TO IMPROVE when, a year or two later, a local shopping center was built only a block from my school, five blocks from our apartment. My mother applied for a sales job when Woolworth’s sent out a hiring call. She landed a job because of her proficiency in both English and French although she mutilated English with such funny expressions as, “I beg your pardon me.”
Every day after school I walked over to Woolworth’s where I would spend the remainder of the afternoon, having milk and cookies at the old-fashioned luncheonette counter or chatting with my mother’s friends. At the end of her shift, my mother and I would walk home together.
The other saleswomen (no men except for the manager) were like my foster parents, each with her own role in my life. Mary, an ugly spinster of Greek descent, with large protruding teeth, always smiled at me, watching, but saying little in her broken English. Sadly, she died young of a brain tumor. Madame La Robardier was childless and relied on my mother for advice about life. We spoke only French together which was a great help to me. Finally, there was Mrs. Klein, a Jewish grandmother to whom my mother went for advice and clothing. She lent my mother a dress to wear at my sweet sixteen and another for my wedding. It was also Mrs. Klein who gave me as a wedding present, a new copy of “Second Helpings,” a now famous cookbook compiled by Montreal’s B’nai B’rith Women from which I learned how to cook. My book was a first edition. One of my daughters has a thirteenth edition!
The other saleswomen at Woolworth’s were friends as well as foster mothers. We consulted on my party dress for the sixth grade dance. A boy named George, a very nice and studious young man, had asked me to accompany him even though I was a foot taller than he was. My mother picked out my dress, pink cotton, with a wide, full skirt, fitted waist and short puffy sleeves. The hem was below my knees and not much higher than my flat white shoes. More like a birthday dress than a prom dress. Yet, it was my first real date even if only to the school gym.
Dressed for the big dance, 12 years old.
Not only did my parents take pictures when George picked me up, but we had to stop at his house for his parents to take pictures, too. The teachers were chaperones as a disc jockey played records for us to dance to. Neither of us was much of a dancer. George’s main hobby was chess. Mine was reading and playing piano.
George was really not my type, and the courtship did not develop, although our friendship did. I actually had a crush on a muscle-bound hunk I met in my dummy class, Stephen, also an immigrant. We hung out together at parties on Friday nights. There was always music on a record player and dancing. To my chagrin, I had the earliest curfew. At many of these parties, I would hide out in a remote corner of the apartment with a telephone, begging my mother to let me stay longer. No parties on Saturday night because it was hockey night in Canada; if you did not have a ticket, you watched it on television.
Stephen was not my beau for long. When I went to the middle school at Strathcona Academy, I met another boy, Tommy, who would become my steady. He was tall, slim and good looking and his proficiency in English and French grew at about the same pace as mine. His family was part of the wave of 200,000 Hungarians who fled the military crackdown by the Soviet Union, following the failed uprising in 1956.
My grandmother strongly disapproved of the friendship. “Romanians and Hungarians have been enemies for centuries,” she explained. Tommy and I did not feel the same way.
Often, we worked on our studies together, by telephone as I sat in our hall closet or on my balcony while Tommy sat on the fire escape of the building across the way. As I was the better student, he came to rely on me for homework and test preparation because he had ambitions to go to medical school. We were going steady by the time we got to ninth grade in Outremont High School.
My mother’s colleagues were also a large influence on my work life. They all beamed with pride when I was hired at Woolworth’s at the age of fourteen, for a few hours on Saturdays, straightening out the comic book section. The next year, I was selling ice cream sandwiches, which I constructed by layering toasted, previously frozen waffles and identically sized, thin rectangular slices of Neapolitan ice cream. The entire operation was set up on a table just outside the store where I had a freezer and cash register. I felt like an entrepreneur!
They were even more proud of me when I started to attend college, still working at Woolworth’s at seventeen although by then I was a supervisor. They all attended my sweet sixteen and eventually my bridal shower.
By the time my mother started working for Woolworth’s, my father had developed his own business as a jobber, a wholesale merchant. He picked up fruits and vegetables at the farmers’ market very early in the morning for delivery to various delicatessens, diners and restaurants, most of which were owned by our fellow immigrants—the Greeks. My father never actually learned to speak English but he did become conversant in Greek.
It was backbreaking work but my father didn’t complain as he had with his factory job. He liked being his own boss, regardless of whether he was actually making any money. Whenever he had some extra cash, he would bring gifts home for my mother—a vacuum cleaner, a fur hat, a crystal vase. Unfortunately, his business acumen was no better in Montreal than it had been in Israel.
I never really understood why we left Israel until we were in Montreal where I saw my father struggling once again in his own business. The problem in Israel was that the hundreds of thousands of war refugees who managed to make their way there, arrived penniless. There was little money in the economy. A lot of my father’s grocery sales were on credit because he had no choice. People had to eat. But they had no ability to pay their debts. As a result, my parents couldn’t pay their own debts. When we left in the middle of the night, secretly, we were running away from creditors. I never knew why my father went bankrupt in Montreal, but I suspect it was a similar issue—an inability to collect on bad debt.
It was when Sandu started to struggle again when I was about 12-13 that I started to understand what was going on. I knew he was struggling because my mother would ask whether he brought money home and he would say, “no.” She would then ask whether there would be money the next day and he would avoid answering her. Their accountant started to come to the apartment. By then I was part of the discussions acting as a translator and (strategist!) for my father and grandmother as well as my mother. Sandu went bankrupt around then, and a second time after my wedding. My mother was always the main wage earner, supporting my grandmother and the three of us on her Woolworth’s salary.
I think he was beaten down by one failure after another and living with a wife who did not seem to love him. Sandu felt a defeated man and became very unhappy. He began to drink a lot, coming home very drunk a few times a week. Although he was a happy drunk, my mother nagged him about his drinking until he became so furious he wildly threw something across the living room. One time it was the crystal vase. It shattered into a million pieces. Whatever joy he got out of drinking quickly dissipated.
Shortly after I was married, he finally gave up and went back to selling shoes, the trade he had been taught by my mother’s father, Carol. Sandu found a job in a fashionable shoe store on St. Catherine Street, Montreal’s famous downtown shopping district. When I visi
ted him there, he took great pleasure in helping me try on a shoe. He slipped the shoe onto my foot, with the broadest smile I had seen in years. His happiness was palpable. I knew that he finally found some peace of mind.
Chapter Seven
SUMMER CAMP
FOR MANY THOUSANDS of immigrants arriving in Montreal in the 1950s and 1960s, summer camp afforded their children the opportunity to enjoy the Canadian outdoors, an integral part of the Canadian identity. Camp also gave hardworking immigrants the chance to have their children cared for during the months between school terms.
Before sleep-away camp, I spent two summers in Neighborhood House’s rowdy day camp, a staple of the immigrant community. Housed in an old brick multi-story structure on a corner of St. Lawrence Street, Neighborhood House was not only affordable but also close to the grocery store where my mother was working.
But, by the time I was thirteen, my mother had saved enough money to send me to sleep-away camp. I loved Camp B’nai B’rith. The two-hour bus trip from Montreal took us north into the Laurentian Mountains. We girls sang camp songs the entire way and were fast friends before we even arrived.
B’nai B’rith was set amidst lush vegetation, all variety of evergreens and maple trees flanking a lake with a gravel path that meandered from the green painted wooden mess hall down to the lake and then up to bunkhouses set in the woods across the way. You could hear the soft wind rustling leaves and smell the fresh woody scent of pine needles. In front of the mess hall was a gathering spot around the flagpole on which both the Canadian and Israeli flags waved in the breeze. One of my favorite parts of the day was the raising of the flags, with everyone assembled to sing both the Canadian and Israeli anthems. In the evening while the flags were being lowered, we also sang “Taps” in Hebrew—a reminder of better times for me.
It was at sleep-away camp that I re-discovered my Judaic roots; since my religious education had been largely ignored since we’d left Israel, I even learned an important prayer, the blessing after the meal, which we never said at home
In Israel, religion is embedded in the fabric of everyday life. Israelis, some more than others, lived by religious tenets. Israel’s laws and social institutions arise directly out of the Jewish interpretation of the Old Testament, the Torah. Hebrew was the dominant language. All business ceased on Shabbat. In school, we studied the Bible as an historical text. I never needed to go to after-school Hebrew school in Montreal, as other children did to learn about the Jewish faith and their Jewish roots.
The First Amendment to the American Constitution is interpreted to provide a separation between Church and State. But in fact, in deference to the dominant Church, all businesses are closed on Christmas except of course, Chinese restaurants and movie theaters. Canada’s Constitution is different and although religious freedom is protected, Catholicism reigns in Quebec. For years, I listened to so much glorious music for weeks before Christmas that I knew the words to all of the popular holiday carols. “Oh Holy Night, the stars are brightly shining, it is the night of our dear Savior’s birth,” was among my favorites. The music is beautiful and inspiring and I still enjoy singing it. If my grandmother knew what I was singing, she would turn over in her grave.
I never really thought I was missing out on religious training until I got to camp in Montreal, where the others all knew so many more rituals and songs. It seemed strange to me that religious instruction was available here to children of other faiths as well, since formal instruction was never deemed necessary in Israel.
Camp was special in other ways. At home, I was surrounded by adults. At camp, I could escape into the life that I imagined others had with brothers and sisters. I cherished the companionship and camaraderie of the bunkhouse. “This is what it must be like to live with siblings,” I thought.
One year, I read and fell in love with Margaret Mitchell’s best-selling novel Gone With the Wind. Quite a metamorphosis for a girl in the dummy class, to go from Dick and Jane to Gone With the Wind in four years!
Every night, after lights out, with the aid of my trusty flashlight, I would read parts of the book out loud to the rest of my bunkmates for as long as I could. “Put the book away,” one of the counselors from outside the bunkhouse would have to yell. “Lights out now.” I do not remember when I first saw the movie on TV, but it is still vivid for me. Both the book and the movie have all the necessary ingredients of a heart-rending romantic saga—love, war, a love triangle, and tragedy—with an unconventional ending. In reality, it is a story of survival—not altogether unlike our family story, with strong women at its heart.
“As God is my witness, I’ll never go hungry again.” I still find it such dramatic dialogue, though maybe a little dated and silly.
Chapter Eight
ATLANTIC CITY
IN THE SPRING of 1965, as Montreal melted the last of its black snow, we reached a milestone. My parents studied; they took a test. Then, one day, I put on the powder blue sweater my mother bought me for my birthday and the matching short, A-line skirt I had sewn.
Instead of going to school, I took the bus with my parents to some official building (with an elevator!) on Drummond Street, later renamed Rue Renée Levesque after the French Minister of Quebec who was elected during the separatist battles of the 1960s and 1970s.1
“We are citizens!” proclaimed my parents on the elevator back down. As naturalized citizens of Canada, we now could travel to the States without a visa. This was a big deal for immigrants, war refugees really, still looking for a permanent home since being displaced by World War II. I say we—but it was really our parents—a lost generation after the War.
_______________
1. The Separatist Movement was responsible for a huge exodus of Jews from Quebec Province, particularly Montreal, significantly shifting the balance of English and French speakers and voters. Much of the City’s wealth migrated, too, to other parts of Canada, mostly Toronto.
My Canadian Citizenship photo,
15 years old.
That spring, my mother gave me a choice about my summer plans after she explained, “We now can go to America because we no longer need a visa to go to the States. What do you say? Instead of camp, let’s go to the ocean this year. It will be just the two of us. Maybe you will meet a nice boy,” my mother said, ignoring the fact that I was already “going steady.” More importantly, she added, “We will be able to go to the ocean, just as we did in Israel.”
My mother also explained that there was not enough money for me to go to both sleep-away camp and to Atlantic City, her first choice. And there would not be enough money for my father and grandmother to accompany us. I could choose one or the other.
What did I know about Atlantic City? It was in New Jersey where every year they televised the Miss America Pageant. There was a boardwalk and the Atlantic Ocean. On TV it looked like a fun place. I would be giving up three weeks of camp for five days in the sunshine. B’nai B’rith would still be there next year. Although I loved camp and had a steady boyfriend, the enticement of the ocean and meeting new boys was irresistible. I chose Atlantic City.
It had not been easy for my mother to leave my father who preferred to keep her at his constant beck and call. But, she was determined to go and taking me on a vacation was an acceptable excuse.
On a hot July morning, my mother and I found ourselves in Atlantic City’s crowded bus terminal as the sun streamed in through large windows. Atlantic City was then Montreal’s number one travel destination, particularly for Jewish immigrants. The number of Quebec license plates on the Garden State Parkway still bears witness to the many Quebecois who like to travel to the Jersey shore, although Wildwood is now the preferred destination.
On our Greyhound bus, a traveling tube of humanity with its own rules of etiquette, (such as, one must not extend an arm beyond the arm-rest and intrude into someone else’s space), we tossed and turned all night in our narrow, uncomfortable seats. A short customs break at the Canadian border and then again a br
ief stop in Saratoga Springs, allowed us to stretch our legs. In New York’s Port Authority, we boarded another Greyhound.
Sleepy and dazed after the overnight Greyhound bus rides, we planned our next move. We must have made quite a sight; my mother, a pretty though heavyset woman in her midlife and I, her physically mature 15-year-old daughter, both of us tastefully overdressed in dark, long pants and matching button down blouses. I was carrying my first purse, a small, compact navy blue leather bag with shoulder strap, given to me only a few months earlier by my best friend for my birthday. Amid the oppressive heat and the morning rush of honking cabs and people hurriedly making their way to their destinations, I suddenly smelled the refreshing salt air. It was such a welcome, familiar smell, reminiscent of my happy childhood on the Mediterranean. I could not wait to get to the beach. My mother tightly clutched our confirmed reservation for a room in the New Yorker Hotel.
With determination, we made our way through the crowd to one of the waiting taxis whose driver was incredulous that we were going to the New Yorker Hotel. “No one under the age of 70 stays at the New Yorker,” said the cab driver. “Do you want me to take you to another hotel?”
“No. We want to go to the New Yorker,” said my mother. Having survived a war and two immigrations by her wits, she was not about to fall prey to some shifty taxi driver. She insisted on being driven to the hotel recommended by our elderly landlord. After all, it was supposed to be a reputable, kosher hotel where he himself had stayed numerous times. She figured that we would be safe there among our fellow Jews.