Passages: Welcome Home to Canada (17 page)

That year, 1992, my new life was only three years old. I was desperately fragile. Sadly, childhood experiences are hard to erase, and the memory of this brutal encounter with a police officer at the airport will accompany me to the end.

Since then, I have been on the road again. Those who don’t understand my condition would think that travelling is second nature to me. Sometimes I have to stop at borders and take out my Canadian passport, hesitating. Now I myself have doubts about this passport, which I’m no longer proud of. It doesn’t seem to have the same value as the Canadian passports of others. So fear seizes me each time. And after each customs interrogation I need to sit down for a moment.

I’ve decided not to send you this letter, my dear friend, so that I’ll no longer receive letters from you. I have written it in a language that you don’t understand. (Here is one of the uses of knowing other languages.) Your letter touched me to the core, and it forced me, maybe a little too soon, to make a stop on my journey. I’m trying to see clearly what I could
have had and don’t have, what I could have given and have lost, in the past as well as the present, in your land as well as others. I don’t like to show you such an outcome, as you would take it as proof of my failure. But I’ve neither failed nor succeeded. I don’t speak in those terms. I’ve lived moments of joy, moments of desolation and years of solitude, that’s all. If I had lived in another place, if I had stayed in Shanghai, the outcome would not be any better—probably worse.

It’s important to me to be able to choose. I lived a long time in China, but I didn’t choose it. I even had difficulties getting out, given the circumstances at the time. There’s the nub of the problem. Now, at least, I live in a place of my own choosing. I even had the audacity to reproduce here. Sometimes I ask myself if a woman has the right to give birth when she hasn’t even acquired solid ground, but I’ve never regretted making my children Canadians. They won’t have an ancestral culture to vaunt and defend. And they won’t be likely to go anywhere else permanently, because I believe they won’t find another land that will be more favourable to them. Everything is relative. You say I’m not objective. Maybe it’s true. You can’t stay objective towards a place where your shell if not your soul has found its rest for years already. What vagabond doesn’t dream
of a roof, of a nest, of a grave? And as long as there are children, there’s hope.

So, twelve years after the fall of my shell on this land, I am still walking towards it. I don’t walk from one country to another, but from one place to another. The word “homeland” left my vocabulary the moment I left Shanghai. I don’t have the desire to confuse my own fate with that of an entire nation. I wouldn’t do it under any circumstance. I’m alone on my path. Patriotism of any kind troubles me, because I’ve suffered from it. Throughout my childhood I was isolated from the rest of the planet in the name of patriotism. I was searched like an enemy, a spy or a drug trafficker at the Toronto airport by a man who without doubt was patriotic to the bone. Spare me all this.

If a second birth is nothing but a play, I intend to perform it right to the end. Maybe I have two identities, as I’ve been told, but I have only one passport. It’s an important fact. Concrete facts make us who we are. Roots are a luxury that beings like me can no longer dream about. We aren’t able to keep them long in our pocket because it inevitably becomes worn with time, as our memory develops gaps. We become shifting trees whose roots cross over and around each other and lose themselves. We are transformed into a
different species. Maybe it’s what we always were, from the beginning, even before our voyage. And this new species, each day growing in number, rolls along a road that is, after all, solitary and ancient, without a precise destination, contented by approximations, because its own identity is constantly being formed.

But I need a reason to continue. I want to know where to go, precisely. I want to take daily steps. So I try to think that each day I’m approaching the land to which I will entrust my children, although I must still return to my own shell to fulfill my destiny. I think I’ve left my birthplace behind me and now I’m approaching the place where my journey ends. I’m glad to know approximately where I’ll finish; it’s not always evident amidst the dust of the road. I hope that wherever I’m put to rest, there won’t be a flag or an inscription or a flower, but that nearby will be the sea, the sand, and grass without name.

Translated from the French by LEXique Ltd.

Moses
Znaimer

D.P. WITH A FUTURE

I
T IS DIFFICULT TO
be sure whether what we think of as our earliest memories are actual memories or stories we were told when very young. Perhaps a picture of such a story forms in the imagination of the child and, over time, takes on the detail and gravitas of memory. As is the case with many Canadians today, my earliest memories—whether they are in fact stories told to me long ago or images that are truly remembered—have to do with the passage from a troubled place to a place of refuge.

We arrived in Canada in May 1948: Father, Mother and me. That’s all that was left. We were post-war refugees from a displaced persons camp outside a town called Kastle in Germany. Just getting to that
DP
camp had been a saga for two frightened Jewish kids, barely out of their teens, on the run from the Nazis, each the survivor of a substantial family, who had been thrown together by the fortunes of war and had produced me in the middle of it all.

I now live and work in and out of Toronto, a city that has become to an exciting degree, a city of immigrants. When I step out of the ChumCityBuilding and walk along Queen Street West, I’m forever amazed at just how wonderfully diverse T.O. has become. But how many of those passersby, I wonder, are visited by memories of uncertain journeys, nervous anticipation, fear? People born and raised here can barely conceive of how many of their fellow citizens carry with them echoes of tragic events and places that seem all but impossible within our experience, here in the peaceable kingdom.

That’s why I’m so proud of the strength my parents showed in completing the journey from that shattered old world to the promise of this new one. During that passage, how many times did Chaja and Aron swallow what must have been overwhelming dread, and press on? How many times did they look at their infant son and wonder what on earth the future could possibly hold for him? For them? I often think that one of the great strengths of this country is the simple courage that so many now-quiet, now-ordinary citizens showed in just getting here.

My father, Aron, was born in Kuldiga, Latvia, where his family was in the shoe business. He escaped on a borrowed bicycle minutes after hearing that the
Nazis were invading. It was June 22, 1941. My mother, Chaja, was Polish. She was born in Dubienka, and spent her teenage years in Lodz, where the family owned a stocking factory. Despite Chaja’s “bourgeois” background, when the Russians occupied she got work in a munitions factory because of her education and was then evacuated to the Soviet Union as the Germans advanced. By the time she got together with Aron, she had acquired a Komsommol (Communist Youth) card, an indispensable entree to jobs and rations, and had done a stint in a
kolkhoz
(collective farm). She escaped with the help of an older man who fancied her. She then escaped from him too and, ever the confident one, approached Aron on a boat leaving Markstadt, when she heard him humming a familiar Yiddish tune.

Thus they began an epic journey of survival, moving constantly, east and south, marrying, and having their first child, Moses
(moi)
, in Kulyab, Tajikistan, one of the Central Asian republics of the U
SSR
. Aron had foresight. He always knew when it was time to leave, and at each stop they left behind young colleagues they would never see again. Chaja was shrewd and had a magical way of making friends—a quality that soon proved to be a lifesaver.

At that time, Aron was working in a granary.
He found himself accused of giving short measure. It turned out someone had tampered with the scales. It was wartime, and the penalty was death. He was arrested and interrogated by the dreaded N
KVD
(the Soviet secret police). Chaja, all of four foot ten and ninety pounds, bullied her way into a meeting with the prosecutor’s wife. This connection, together with the gift of Aron’s only valuable possession, a St. Moritz pen, secured his release and bought them enough time to finger the real culprit.

Because Aron had the foresight to use Chaja’s surname, Epelzweig, instead of his own, the family was able to get out of the U
SSR
when Polish nationals were repatriated after the war. Poland remained relatively porous and easy to get out of until the Iron Curtain was firmly brought down in 1947–48. So it was that a midnight rowboat ride across Berlin’s Spree Canal brought us into the Western Zone.

After a stay in Hesse-Lichtenau, a
DP
camp in the American sector of occupied Germany, the three of us managed to emigrate to Canada. We steamed into Halifax harbour aboard a converted troopship, the SS
Marina Falcon
. From there we went by train to Montreal, where Aron had found two living relatives, our sponsors—“Auntie” Lina Goldberg and her son Gershon. And that’s where, seven years
later, in 1955, I was “naturalized” as a Canadian citizen. I’ve always liked that word
naturalized
, as if life before had been somehow unnatural, which, of course, it had been.

Two strong personal recollections emerge from the period before we got to Canada. One relates to food, the other to drink—not surprising, perhaps, given wartime shortages. Both, I have no doubt, are actual memories. In the first, I’m lying in my cot and Mother gives me a piece of bread. It’s a warm crust that’s been rubbed all over with garlic and baked with bits of the garlic pushed inside. Nothing could be simpler. It’s so good, I start to cry.

In my second memory, some soldiers come by the camp mess and offer me a drink. It’s cold and dark and sweet and effervescent—and I love it! When I get back to our barracks, I tell my parents about it, but they have no idea what it could be. In the following days and weeks I keep after them to get me that taste again. Was it dark beer? Was it kvass (a Russian drink made from black bread)? Was it strong, sweet iced tea? None of these! (Only when we were finally settled in Montreal and I tasted my first store-bought Coke did I realize what that treat had been. Even more wondrous was that something so scarce and unknown in that camp was, in my new world, available in every
cooler, in every drugstore and corner store in town, for five cents.)

It’s at this point—our arrival at the
DP
camp in the American Zone of occupied Germany—that my memories start to accumulate into something certain. This is where I begin to have my own stories. One of the most vivid of these has to do with some munitions that a couple of playmates and I found in a stream near the camp.

Towards the end of the war, piles of ammo, big machine-gun bullets and larger shells, were dumped in that stream, by a retreating army, I imagine. This day, we are amusing ourselves by fishing them out and trying to set them off. An adult comes upon us just as I raise a howitzer-type cartridge in my hand, poised to smash its base on a rock. He lets out a wild holler and starts to run towards me, gesticulating wildly. I drop it and take off. He follows. He chases me into a nearby abandoned building. (In retrospect, I’m sure he was only concerned for our well-being, but at the time his determination frightened me.) I get away by jumping out of the second floor of that bombed-out building. It’s quite a leap, and I wake up the next day with a serious hernia as a result.