by Renee Rodin
In pregnancy the brain shrinks in an unfamiliar stew of hormones and begins to expand a few weeks after a woman has given birth. The hormonal haze lifts, although mothers and fathers continue to be affected by extreme sleep-deprivation. But even after children start to sleep through the night, as parents we remain permanently altered, in a heightened state of intuition and awareness. And always on call.
Sometimes I’d tell the kids, “Pretend I’m not here.” But that inane suggestion never went further than the breath it took to say it. The first word that was imprinted on them was “space.” “Give me some space,” I’d implore when I felt overwhelmed. But what do children know about that concept? They just naturally occupy every part of you, mind, body and soul.
If you haven’t had children it’s hard to imagine how your entire world changes after they’re born, how profoundly your focus shifts. It is an amazing out-of-ego experience. With infinite rewards. My children are my greatest teachers, my greatest blessings.
Once in a blue moon when the kids were very young I did manage to write a poem or a story—something I could work on later—and the satisfaction of that kept my fires stoked. But who knows if my level of creativity would have been any different if I hadn’t had children? It still comes in ways I can’t predict or control. Only now I have the luxury of more free time.
As all-encompassing as motherhood was, I had to learn to own all parts of my identity. To tell others, especially my children, that I was also a writer, because they too liked to make things and could begin to understand. My kids, who have all become parents themselves, have continued to think with imagination. They encourage and expect me to be involved in one creative project or another; they recognize it as my work and value it. The very laptop I’m writing this on is a gift from them.
The Real Deal
For Vera and Josef Slymovics
When I was five, we moved to Park Extension, a working-class district in Montreal with blocks of attached brick duplexes, row housing and lots of uncultivated fields. It was in that setting that I discovered a goddess living just a few doors away. Her eyes were the colour of chocolate; she had long wavy princess hair and a warmth that was irresistible. While the other mothers wore shapeless housedresses, Vera, in tailored slacks that showed off her tall, svelte figure, could easily have stepped off the pages of Paris Match. At the time, my mother was barely five feet tall and weighed around two hundred pounds. She was to weigh a lot more before she died.
When Vera was a teenager she and her mother, Czech Jews, had been sent to Auschwitz. After the war Vera met and married Josef, also a Czech Jew, who had fought in a special Czech/ British unit, at Dunkirk and Normandy, to help liberate Europe. They immigrated to Canada and in Montreal Vera joined a book club where my mother Florence was translating books from German (similar to Yiddish) into English so that newcomers could learn the language. Florence used to say, “I fell in love with her at first sight.” Within two years of their first meeting, we had moved to Park Extension where Vera and Josef were living.
The couple had an aura of glamour and romance that I associated only with film stars and movies. Not only were they unabashedly in love but they also showered everyone within their orbit with gentle attention so that it was sheer bliss to be in their company. While Josef went out to work at a series of small business ventures, Vera stayed home with their daughter, two years younger than me, and their son, four years younger, after whom I named all my dolls, “Susan” and “Peter.”
Despite her meagre height my mother could look down her nose at anyone, no matter how tall they were, and demolish them with one look. But her most formidable weapon was her tongue, and when she wielded it no one, dead or alive, was exempt. The only people she loved unreservedly were Judy Garland for her suffering, René Lévesque and Tommy Douglas for their humanitarianism, and Vera.
Florence’s bouts of depression were frequent and prolonged, and during them she would recite all the wrongs that had been done to her from childhood on. Both her parents had been born in that fabled land “somewhere between Minsk and Pinsk” in what was Russia but is now Belarus. Because pogroms were a Cossack sport, many Jewish people, including her family, had left for North America around the beginning of the twentieth century.
My grandfather, who died before I was born, was blond and blue-eyed, while my grandmother had the dark looks of her Persian ancestors. My mother looked like her mother. As Florence told it, her father demeaned her mother. While my grandfather was out gallivanting, my grandmother was isolated at home with several children and little money. If there was ever anything extra, she’d hoard it for herself.
My mother grew up to become a compulsive eater, and so resentful of her mother she could only talk to her through clenched teeth. My father had a more affable relationship with his mother-in-law whom he saw as depressed and lonely. She was essentially alone for several decades after my grandfather died.
As a grandmother she was thoroughly indifferent, as bored with my sister and me as we were with her when we had to visit. But she seemed to take no interest in anyone else either. At the age of eighty, her children put her into Maimonides, an old age home in Montreal. By then I was an adult living in Vancouver and because I was intrigued by what made her tick, how she could maintain such steady coldness, on one of my visits to Montreal I taped an audio interview with her.
With more emotion than I’d ever heard from her, she told me how much she had hated her husband. She also divulged that as a young woman, “I loved a Gentile but my parents wouldn’t let me marry him.” None of her children had previously known about the thwarted love affair, this particular source of her bitterness, though the new knowledge did little to mitigate their anger towards her.
On my next visit to Montreal, my grandmother was eighty-four years old and had just fallen in love with one of the other residents at Maimonides. The staff often found them cuddling; they wanted to get married. This time it was my grandmother’s children, not her parents, who stopped her. But she had transformed. She wanted to know about my life and about my kids and for the very first time, she touched me. In the subsequent short film I made of her, I focused on her hands, which, though gnarled with arthritis, I suddenly found beautiful.
Protracted wars were common between my mother’s siblings. During periods of détente, which might last months, my sister and I saw certain relatives and then, after their inevitable falling out, for years we didn’t see them at all. Often the decisive battles were waged on the phone. A superficial remark could tear open an old wound and before you knew it someone was screaming the kiss of death—“You should see a psychiatrist!”—before the eardrum shattering slam of the receiver.
Then new alliances would be formed. Or not. My mother was the most isolated of her siblings because she had the least self-control. Florence topped the charts in terms of meltdowns and body size. There were civil wars between siblings on my father’s side too which may have been exacerbated by my mother’s mad sense of and mad pursuit of “justice.”
In early photographs, my mother had been a tiny little girl, and by her twenties just slightly chubby. I remember her only as enormous, lumbering with weight that wrecked her knees, often kept her in bed and ultimately killed her in her early seventies because of the stress on her heart. One of the first big words Sandy and I learned was “metabolism,” which Florence said was the problem.
We never saw her eat anything but salads and other low-calorie foods, yet a whole salami and a dozen bagels could disappear from the fridge overnight. It was only as adults that the metabolism theory was finally debunked by our family doctor who told us Florence was fat because she over-ate. Morbidly obese, eventually she weighed around three hundred pounds. She must have felt empty, small, scared and in need of a huge shield. She must have eaten in memory of past hunger and in fear of future hunger.
Florence’s outbursts were tsunamis from which none of us could escape. Once they subsided she would hide for months at a time in silence
and solitude. It is hard to create space when you’re living in a small flat with three other people, but my mother managed to build an unscaleable wall around herself, a wall none of us ever attempted to breach. Her privacy was our protection.
For sure she had her wonderful qualities. Fiercely egalitarian she would remind us that even the Queen had the same bodily functions as the rest of us. When I was about ten and allowed to hang out on my own during the day on weekends, I went downtown to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, which was where the Royal Family stayed when they were in Montreal. I cajoled a chambermaid into letting me into the royal suite and headed straight for the royal bathroom to see if the Queen really did have a toilet.
And for sure we had our good times, but they could so quickly and unaccountably morph into misery they were hard to trust. By the time I was pre-pubescent, Vera and Josef had moved to a more affluent area in Montreal and we didn’t see them that often any more. But for the rest of my mother’s life when a memory conjured her up, she’d say, “Ah Vera,” with great yearning and wistfulness. Vera had attained mythic proportions in her eyes.
Lifetimes later, while raising my own family on the West Coast, I read that Vera was touring the country giving public talks to students and other groups about the Holocaust, its tragedies and its triumphs. Even when her fellow prisoners were near starvation, they managed to fashion a paste cake and candles out of stolen flour and sing to her on her birthday.
In recognition of her work, Vera had received the Order of Canada as well as many other awards, and was the subject of documentaries and books. I’d heard she might be living in Vancouver but was too involved in my own life to look her up and doubted she’d remember me anyhow; we’d known each other for such a brief time, so long ago.
Sandy had lived for years in the West End and once when she dropped by her local thrift store, to her astonishment, she bumped into Vera. She and Josef had been living in the same neighbourhood for a long time but they had travelled a lot. When Sandy called to tell me who she’d met, I drooled with envy and then asked, “But how on earth did you recognize her after all these years?”“You’ll see for yourself, she wants us to visit.”
A week later, Sandy, with an armful of red and yellow tulips, and I, with a chocolate babka, arrive at their ten-storey apartment building near Stanley Park. I’m beside myself with excitement and nervousness about this reunion—how will the grown-up me be judged, will I measure up? As the elevator door opens Vera greets us with open arms. Now in her eighties she looks the way she always did, soft and beautiful, only older. Her smile still wraps itself around us like silk. Josef, in his nineties, is slightly stooped and has lost some hair but has retained his handsome looks and old-world charm. He is a bit calmer than Vera who has remained a firebrand of energy. They are both still incredibly vibrant and attentive. When I admire her coral cashmere turtleneck and Josef ’s charcoal one, Vera says, “We dress up every day to go out to the cafés and to walk, to meet people. Our newest friend lives in Stanley Park and I told him he’s a prince.”
For our nosh she has set their Italian marble dining room table with delicate dishes and gleaming silverware. Their windows overlook Lost Lagoon, which ripples like platinum on this otherwise flat grey day.
Among the many family photographs on the walls, including great-grandchildren, there is a black-and-white glossy headshot of Josef and Vera, cheek to cheek. This is how I remember them from my childhood. The first time I saw Casablanca, Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart, with all their worldliness, reminded me of them. But Vera and Josef are the real deal.
With broad brush-strokes we fill in the intervening decades. In reference to the speaking tours she went on for years, Vera says, “I was lucky to have been in a camp. Had it not been for that I would never have found the amazing people I met there and afterwards.” She is neither a Pollyanna nor a slave to positive thinking, admits to occasional bouts of depression.
While catching up on our lives, Josef says, “I must apologize in advance, there might be a slight interruption, we’re awaiting a phone call about a complicated business transaction in Germany.” I’m surprised he deals with Germans considering what he and Vera have been through. “Those we fought are no longer alive,” he says. The ambiguity of his statement chills me, but I refrain from asking if he ever killed anyone when he was in the Resistance.
We ask about his current work as a financial consultant. He’s away a lot, in New York, Paris, Berlin, Geneva and other capitals of the world, making money, sometimes losing it. Vera worries when he travels, he has minor health problems, but she doesn’t get lost in anxiety, nor does she pine. Friends seek out her company, she’s always busy, there are always new projects.
Josef jumps up the moment the phone rings and takes it in the other room. Five minutes later he returns and Vera asks, “Was it the phone call?” He says, “No, it was a phone call.” She turns to Sandy and me to complain, “He never tells me anything.” Amusement skips across Josef ’s face. Then he says very solemnly: “Vera, you may ask me one question.” She pauses a moment and looks straight at him. “Do you still love me?” He doesn’t answer. Instead he and Vera exchange looks of such passion I think I should avert my eyes but I can’t get enough.
Once the air becomes room temperature again, we shuttle back into the past. She is full of praise for Florence who taught her English, though sometimes she’d yell at her impatiently. And then, “She was such a good woman but she was very sick.” My father lived by a code of silence and my sister I never talked with anyone about our childhood. If the rest of us had no language to describe what was happening in our family, my mother certainly did. Invariably, she would start her endless tirades by lamenting: “How I wish I’d never had children.” It was terrible for Sandy and me to hear, especially knowing it also signalled the beginning of a depression that could last for months. When I was forty my mother called from Montreal, with my father listening on the extension. She said, “Daddy says I’ve been a bad mother. Have I?”
“No,” I answered, wanting to protect her. “But why did you used to say you wished you’d never had children?”
Without skipping a beat she replied matter-of-factly: “I didn’t mean it like that.” That was the extent of our most meaningful conversation. She died not long after. I used to regret that I hadn’t had the gumption to ask her more, but now I fill in the blanks and our relationship has greatly improved.
My father worked long, hard hours but when my mother was out of her mind he’d disappear for even longer. As Sandy and I got older we saw others react to Florence’s unprovoked attacks by withdrawing in fear, running for cover or lashing back. But no one had ever said point blank, “Your mother was very sick,” the way Vera had. Overcome by this true and simple statement, I had no idea I had waited almost all my life for someone to say that. She recalls how Florence took the neighbourhood by storm as the lead in the local synagogue’s production of The Goldbergs. And “how she loved to dance.” Sandy and I well remember her rich contralto voice but dancing ? We are further stunned to hear: “Florence loved for me to hold her, she couldn’t get enough affection.”
Seeing our expressions, Vera says, “I saw that she wasn’t like that with you. She never held either of you. She told me she didn’t want to spoil you.” Vera tells us all this as if she feels personally responsible. But I burst into laughter, suddenly remembering that as a kid I’d brush against any woman, even strangers on the bus, if they were wearing fur or velvet, something soft I could pat, hoping they’d pat me back. Vera’s been running back and forth from the kitchen to the living room to serve us, refusing to let us help. As she stands pouring the coffee she shifts her weight from foot to foot, and admits her legs are sore from arthritis. When I suggest she lie down on the nearby sofa to rest a bit she agrees, but, “Only if you lie down with me.” I freeze but in less than an instant slip into her arms.
Even when Florence was profoundly paranoid, reciting the litany of wrongs done to her by the living as
well as the dead, Vera’s name was never on her hit list. This I now mention to Vera. She says, “When your mother would start in on me, I’d flash her my tattoo from the camp, that was the only thing that would shut her up.”
We knew of others who had been in concentration camps. Right next door existed a sorrowful kerchiefed ghost, Mrs. K and her son Feivel, seven like me at the time. Florence made several attempts to reach out to Mrs. K but was always rebuffed. She had already escaped one fire and did not want to be scorched by my mother. Feivel went to a parochial school and his mother didn’t let him come to our house, maybe because we weren’t at all observant.
Our ritual for the Jewish high holidays, so as not to flaunt our absence from the nearby synagogue, was to high-tail it for the day to Plattsburgh, the American town just across the border. On the way my mother would be singing and cracking jokes in the car, exuberant we were going to a place where she could buy what was impossible to find in Montreal, oversize clothing, which she said was made by “Omar the Tent-Maker.” And for us she’d buy Hershey’s Kisses.
The best part about being in Plattsburgh for us and maybe for her too, was that there were tons of other fat women there, no one stared at Florence the way they did in Montreal. We were spared the concoction of confused feelings we had whenever we were out in public with our mother—shame, embarrassment and pity. Returning home I’d fantasize our family would be stopped at the border and not allowed back into Canada. The United States I associated with happiness.
Cheating was an integral part of playing. We all knew we weren’t supposed to do it, but inevitably someone would try. One time, when Feivel and I were playing Snakes and Ladders and I caught him and yelled, “You’re a cheater,” his mother came running from her bedroom and spat “anti-Semite” at me. I didn’t know what it meant but it made my ears burn and I ran home to tell on her. Florence grabbed my hand, and moving faster than I could ever think possible for anyone, never mind someone her size, she raced me down our snowy outside stairs and up the ones next door. Feivel and I took shelter in separate corners and watched as hot incomprehensible sounds spewed out of our mothers’ mouths. He and I knew without saying a word, that we would never again say another word to each other.