From There to Here with Jane Hawtin

There are times when I stand disorientated in front of a large group, wondering how the hell I arrived at this point where I am facing a crowd of people who are just about or already have watched our documentary, My Mother, the Nazi Midwife and Me. 

            I always call it ‘our’ documentary because although it’s about me and my life, what’s on that screen is really the result of one woman’s farsightedness and tenacity.  And that woman is Jane Hawtin, my friend, executive producer, director, whisperer of key questions, advisor on how to heavy-up on the make-up for an unrelenting camera, and the driving force behind what’s up there for all to see.          

            It requires an ocean of determination to take a jumble of words and images, and shape it into something that will impact those who view it.  Jane’s indomitable spirit is what held our little team of three that includes editor, Jason Acton, together.  Unafraid to ask questions (and listen carefully to the suggestions), change direction, follow her instincts (always sound) or to invest more than her heart and soul, Jane is the reason why I am standing in a spotlight, slightly dazed.

            It started innocently enough with a simple dinner.  Jane had come from Toronto to spend a week with me in Montreal.  Although we had known each others for more than a decade (and liked each other enormously from the start), we had only just reconnected after many years without a word.

            We were chatting about what I was up to.  Writing a novel, I said, and going to Germany with Anna Rosmus of ‘Nasty Girl’ fame, to do some research.  And then, I recounted how Anna had corroborated the story my mother had told me for years about too many babies dying in the DP camp which was why I was born in Anna’s hometown of Passau.

            Jane looked at me with her big brown eyes and her mouth pursed in an ‘O’ something she does when she’s had a stirring thought or a revelation.  “But that’s a documentary,” she said.

            My reply, tinged with gallons of self-doubt was, “Do you really think so?”

            We went to Germany with two cameramen, no script, no confirmed broadcaster, and no clue as to what we would find when we got there.  Angels were sitting on our shoulder at many turns in the road but it takes one to recognize one.  Jane’s finely-honed instincts seemed to know when something was right and she seized every opportunity.

            We came home after five days in Passau and weren’t quite sure which o story line was the right one to follow.  Nor did we know who the midwife was.  It took another two years to track down the source of the story – Salomon Brunner - but we still didn’t have the midwife’s name.  It was also a time when Jane needed to heal after a terrible accident.  The hurdles Jane had to overcome would have daunted a lesser warrior.  Anyone else would have surrendered.

             In the end, however, through all the trials and tribulations, the outlay of personal cash, the uncertainty of how we would market this, when the doc was finally finished, we had a national broadcaster in less than a month after completion, and in less than three, an international distributor.  After chugging uphill for so long, you can imagine how this dizzying increase in speed can cause me to wonder how I got from there to here.  The answer to that question is that, to my great good fortune, my story fell into the hands of an angel-warrior named Jane Hawtin.  

 Happy Birthday, Jane

https://www.facebook.com/pages/My-Mother-the-Nazi-Midwife-and-Me/497591100290986

A Month of Sundays
Edward O. Phillips
Cormorant Books
$22.95
paper
252pp
978-1-77086-211-1

The Golden Guy

Review by Gina Roitman   •  Posted on mRb  May 15, 2013

If Edward O. Phillips’ novel, A Month of Sundays was a film, it could easily fall into the category of screwball comedy, a genre that featured urbane characters, a few loveable scoundrels, and a fistful of snappy dialogue liberally sprinkled with wry observations. As a novel, it’s just as delightful despite a storyline that begins and ends with a death in the family.

In this, his latest novel in the Geoffrey Chadwick series set in Montreal, Phillips tackles the double-barreled bane of getting old and of dealing with the grief of losing a loved one. Chadwick is a retired lawyer, a gay man who found love and a binding relationship with Elinor, his wife and closest friend. As the story begins, Elinor has just died and Chadwick is planning her funeral while juggling the onslaught of emotions that comes with loss.

Despite his grief, Chadwick is always ready with a wry observation. He opines that gay men “are perhaps the last bastion of what may be considered to be an outdated and quaint civility,” which may be why he has neither a cellphone nor the inclination to check his email every hour. To honour Elinor, he plans a party in celebration of her life and gets out the Rolodex to hand address the printed invitations.

His party planning and reminiscences of Elinor are interrupted by the arrival in his life of a son he never knew he had. Suspicion morphs to pride when the son, conceived hastily one night in college, turns out to be a dead ringer for Chadwick in more ways than one. The middle-aged Harold, a retired schoolteacher, has inherited Chadwick’s quick wit and love of repartee, as well as a penchant for Broadway tunes. When Harold accidentally breaks his ankle, preventing him from returning to Toronto, Chadwick sees it as an opportunity to bring them closer together and offers Harold a bed in which to recuperate. What starts out in hope, however, ends in sad resignation. Chadwick discovers that Harold does not resemble him in the ways that truly matter. And in this too, there is a loss to be dealt with.

Phillips has created a memorable cast of characters including Chadwick’s controlling sister; a boozing buddy who’s committing suicide by martini; and his 97-year-old mother who, though mostly silent, comes to life through Phillips’ deft descriptions: “Colour leached from her hair, her skin, eyes. She gave the impression light could pass through her, that she cast no shadow.”

The writing is often evocative, such as this description of a young niece: “With Jennifer, I feel I exist for her even when I’m not in the room.” But what come off best are the observations that, when not biting, often nip at the funny bone: “When I was in college…the only thing worse than being in bed with a live man was being caught with a dead woman.”

By the end of the novel, Phillips has handed his alter ego two dead women, and still has made the journey between a wonderful read. A formidable feat.

My Birthday Blog: January 19, 2013

Sixty-five and counting!  This is an opportune moment for an open letter to all my female friends and family who are working their way to the mark upon which I have landed today in a state of grace.   

I’m sitting in my office, with Neil Diamond on deck reminding me of the years that were, but what I’m reveling in is the year that can be. 

We all travel at the same speed, that is, one day at a time, (and a year is about as far as I can plan) but I have to admit that life does tend to speed up when you’re busy with other things. 

Sometime around my mid-forties, I began to notice that I was losing track of a few weeks per annum.  I looked everywhere for them but it soon became clear: they had evaporated.  I chastised myself for being careless, for wasting or misplacing my time.  But it continued to get worse. In fact, over the years, an increasing number of weeks have continued to vanish. I’m now down to having only 37 weeks per year.

Age, however, has taught me the trick of adaptation. So I’ve learned to cram more into every day – more people, more projects, more loving, more of just about everything.  Sometimes, I feel like I’ll bust open with so much crammed into my life. Which is why I have no time for artifice.

I have learned to say what I think (always mindful that words can sear and scar) and have no expectations about the affect my words may have on others.  In short, I don’t anticipate anything although I hope what I say and do is helpful. It’s a case of accepting that one cannot do better than their best. I try to do my best.  That’s one of the Four Agreements I think.

Somewhere along with those vanished weeks, a part of my ego evaporated as well.  Not the part that can’t believe the face in the mirror or the softness around the waist (in short, I’m still vain) but I lost that portion of ego that needs approval and recognition for who I am.  That might sound boastful, I know, but it was an element of learning to acknowledge the progress I’ve made in my life.  It’s not ego to be proud of the kind words gathered from friends, family and colleagues.  And it’s lovely to feel valued but I still hold my own council.  I am ever more the pragmatist and so, I am the arbiter of what are my successes and failures. 

I am now two years past the age at which my mother died of cancer.  She would say I am tempting the evil eye (ptuh! ptuh! ptuh! Kinenhora) when I say I have never felt strong and more able to fulfill my potential than at this very moment.  If I can accomplish half of what I have started, I will be grateful. 

Some of us are late bloomers.  At 65, my buds are just beginning to open. And for this and so much more, I am grateful every day.

Defining Lyrics

For as long as I can remember, movies and songs have been the touchstones of my emotions.  I shaped my notion of who I was by the songs that ‘sang’ to me.  Brenda Lee’s “All Alone Am I” defined the pain of a summer-long parting from my boyfriend but, years later, along with Simon and Garfunkel’s, “I am a Rock,” the lyrics somehow came to define my memory of who I was as a teen - too mature and too trapped in my head to ever feel part of any group.

In my radio days, these were called ‘trigger songs’ for the memories they triggered in baby boomers, bringing them back to a youthful place and time, to an event or an emotion.  PBS has made a pretty penny trading trigger song programming for cash.  There’s gold in ‘them there tunes’.

If for many of us, music defines our past, is it possible that it also can direct our future?  If music is a mirror of a mindset, does it tell us something about where we are going?

The other day, I was listening to Galaxy Oldies while doing my Pilates. Two oldies, played back-to-back, unsettled me enough to make me wonder if perhaps our futures were not defined – possibly shaped – by the songs we cleaved to as youth?

I knew a man whose two favourite songs, “Rhythm of the Rain” and “Just Walk Away, Renee,” were brimming with abandonment and regret. He was 18 years old when the heard the first one. 

Fifty years later, I can read the entrails of these lyrics and see how a future was shaped by the words. 

Listen to the rhythm of the falling rain
Telling me just what a fool I've been
I wish that it would go and let me cry in vain
And let me be alone again

The only girl I care about has gone away
Looking for a brand new start…

-          Rhythm of the Rain by The Cascades (1962)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9c5rWhrCF0

Married almost three decades, I believe this man loved his wife but could not accept that he could be loved in return.  In the end, she gave up trying to prove him wrong.  Maybe as a result of some inability to see himself as lovable, he finally convinced her that he was right.

His other favourite song became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Just walk away, Renee
You won't see me follow you back home
The empty sidewalks on my block are not the same
You're not to blame

From deep inside the tears that I'm forced to cry
From deep inside the pain that I chose to hide…

-          Just Walk Away, Renee by the Left Bank (1966)

I grew out of my loneliness and have become adept at re-invention which explains why, at different times in my life, I found new songs to define myself by. Sadly, not everyone does.

Memories of Chocolate and Love

A recent story in The New York Times Travel section about Brussels and its history of chocolate making brought me back to my first heavenly encounter with real chocolate and the man who introduced me to it.

I called him Uncle Shamsheh but, in fact, he was really my mother's first cousin. Shamsheh had emigrated to Brussels in 1932 in hopes of a better life than the one he had left behind in Chrznow, Poland. In Brussels, he fell in love, married, and had a daughter. Then Germany invaded Poland and, in short order, The Netherlands and Belgium. One day, while he was off working to earn a little bread, there was an aktion. When he returned home, a neighbour intercepted him with a warning not to return home. He never saw his wife and daughter again.

She was four years old the last time he saw her.

I was four when Shamsheh arrived on a visit to Canada with the thought to moving to Montreal. After all, he was without family in Brussels, spoke French and, from the first sight of each other, we were madly in love.

I had been having a difficult time following the birth of my brother. His arrival forced me to face a terrible truth - I was no longer the centre of my parent's universe. But Shamsheh showed no interest in the baby. He had eyes only for me. And to prove it he brought me two amazing gifts: a large walkie-talkie doll and chocolates, delicious creamy chocolates.

It took me some forty years to learn that the explosion of flavour that had melted on my four-year-old tongue was a Godiva confection. It tasted nothing like the Cadbury Milk chocolate bars my mother would bring home as a treat. Absolutely nothing tasted as good. But it wasn't until 1990 when I went to visit Shamsheh in Brussels (he never did move to Canada) that the memory of that first encounter came flooding back.

We were taking a walk after a lovely lunch of osso bucco in one of those tiny little restaurants that no tourist could ever find. Shamsheh lived in the heart of the city, around the corner from the Place de la Monnaie, and just blocks from Brussels' impressive Grand-Place. Our week together was almost over and Shamsheh seemed a little agitated as he steered me through the narrow streets that eventually spilled into the Grand-Place. He stopped to catch his breath and then, smiled proudly as he took me by the arm and led me towards a store. The awning read: Godiva Chocolatier 1926. I was unfamiliar with the name. 

On our wanderings during that week, we had passed several chocolate shops.  They had names like Leonidas and Neuhaus, and front windows that slid open onto the street so you needn’t enter the shop in order to indulge yourself.  Buying chocolates this way was infinitely more elegant than ordering frites and a hot dog from a chip wagon.    

The Godiva shop, however, had no open window onto the street, only a door to enter.  Inside, as a scintillating aroma insinuated itself, a fastidious woman wearing white cotton gloves stood behind the counter delicately transposing perfectly-formed chocolates from a tray in her hand onto a tray under a glass counter display. Everywhere I looked, chocolates were lined up as neat as regiments of soldiers. Beneath the glass counters, tray after tray after tray were laid out with such precision, you could practically hear the marching band.

While I was busy gaping at the luscious layout, my uncle had taken on the air of a man who knows what he wants.  He pulled himself up to his full height of 5’7” and in a voice deeper than I was accustomed to, addressed the woman who had deigned to put down her tray and acknowledge us. 

Shamsheh instructed the woman to fill a two kilo box with pralines, pralines simplement. He pointed at a section and she began to fill the bottom of the box.  Then, placing a foil on top, she moved to the next counter, to add a new layer. 

Non, non, non.  S’il vous plait, madam, said Shamsheh, a rigid index finger directing the woman to another counter.  Under his watchful eye, there were no further transgressions and I was presented with a two kilo box of Godiva chocolate to bring home to Montreal. But not before my uncle had the woman offer me a choice from the still open box. I hesitated until the woman delicately nudged me on with an Ahem. 

I placed a chocolate on my tongue and as it melted, it sent out little waves of pleasure. For a moment I was a little girl again.  And I needn’t have fretted over what to choose.  These were real Godiva chocolates hand-picked by my Uncle Shamsheh. How could I go wrong? 


http://travel.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/travel/brussels-the-chocolate-trail.html?nl=travel&emc=tda1

About a Murder of Crows

Recently, as dusk lengthens in the lower Laurentians, I’ve spotted large numbers of crows flying over the house. This murder of crows, maybe as many as a hundred of them, comes in waves that blacken the sky, their incessant cawing urging each other on to return to their roosts before sunset.


The next morning, just before sunrise, a cacophony of crows rising up from somewhere in the woods behind the house, rudely rouses me from dreams. I think about getting out of bed to see what all the ruckus is about. Are they flying back over the house to some appointed spot? But following through would mean opening my eyes, putting my warm feet on the cold floor and going into the kitchen to look up at the large transom window over the back door.

My curiosity has not yet been moved to such extremes. But it has been sufficiently piqued to explore why we called it a murder of crows. Is it because of their annoying voices and how we’d like to still them?

No one has a definitive answer but the term goes as far back as the 15th century. Maybe it’s because crows feed on carrion and are seen picking at the dead after a battle in short, crows follow murder.

Crows and their larger cousins, ravens, are also called other words we associate with nastiness - scavenger, schemer, trickster, and omen of death.

I have to admit, seeing them fly over the house every night gives me a shiver. This reflex is not learned but drawn perhaps from some collective memory because I’ve always found crows and ravens really interesting.

Visiting the Tower of London a few years ago, I found the six ravens that are kept captive but well fed and cared for by the Yeoman Warders. There is a belief (no one is sure when it started) that should the ravens ever abandon the Tower, the kingdom will fall. Do these watch over Britain?

Crows watch us and have been doing it forever but, for the most part, we don’t return the compliment. Maybe we should. Here’s what I’ve learned about crows:

There are parallels between crows and humans in as much as they are omnivorous, problem-solvers and prefer living in cities. In fact, they’re found on every continent except Antarctica.

Like us and other great apes, they not only use tools but can fashion them. And they’re quite clever about it. They will use a tool to acquire a tool. That’s complicated thinking.

A young crow may stay with its family up to five years, mate for life and that’s saying something since they can live 20 years. They might have humans at a disadvantage there as currently I don’t know many marriages that have lasted that long.

They can pick a face out of a crowd. Research has shown that not only can they remember the face of someone who's done them wrong but can pass on that knowledge to their offspring.

That voice of theirs is grating but that’s not the voice they use to speak to each other. Amongst their ‘family’ members, they speak in a trill-cum-burr sort of way, totally disassociated with anything crow-like.

Finally, they are exceedingly social and seem to need affection and the closeness of other crows. Close is warm and fuzzy but last December in Ottawa, a murder of crows was some 20,000 strong. The sight of them peppering the sky like swirling oil on water forced people to take notice and watch their step.

Conclusion: Since crows have been observing us and follow us into the urban areas where we have paved over nature, perhaps we should rethink whether a crowd of people might be called a murder of people. The crows, after all, are just there to help us clean up the mess we leave behind.

For more, check out this wonderful Nature of Things episode: http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/natureofthings/2009/murderofcrows/


And an interesting concept on developing a symbiotic relationship with crows: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/joshua_klein_on_the_intelligence_of_crows.html

Review of "Anatomy of a Disappearance"

Anatomy of a Disappearance by Hisham Matar
Hamish Hamilton Canada

“There are times when my father’s absence is as heavy as a child sitting on my chest.”

With this tender opening sentence, Hisham Matar begins to weave a subtle pattern of absence and loss that defines the emotional territory of Anatomy of a Disappearance, his second novel.

The narrator of this beautifully paced story is Nuri el-Alfi, who at 14 loses his father when he disappears from an apartment in Geneva, likely the victim of a political kidnapping. The loss is unbearable yet even before his father’s disappearance; we discover that Nuri is no stranger to the subtractions of life.

At birth, Nuri had already lost his native country because his father, a close advisor to the deposed king, had been forced to flee to Egypt when a military regime took power. Safe in Cairo, the small el-Alfi family lives in a quiet luxury that belies the friction Nuri, an only child, senses between his parents. Nuri’s mother is habitually withdrawn, wrapped in a self-imposed silence, and his father travels often on business. The only constant in the boy’s lonely life is Naima, a young servant girl who is devoted to him in a way neither parent can seem to manage.

When he is ten, Nuri’s mother dies suddenly of an unnamed malady that the narrator, in retrospect, believes was the result of deep sorrow. “So old and persistent did Mother’s unhappiness seem that I never stopped to ask its true cause. Nothing is so acceptable as that which we are born into.”

Although in the end, Nuri will have three mothers, this is a story about the complicated relationship between fathers and sons. Like an insatiable thirst, Nuri craves an intimacy with his father that their love for each other fails to summon. He yearns “...for an easy sympathy... a kind of emotional eloquence and ease.”

Instead, his father unwittingly becomes Nuri’s rival when they both fall under the spell of the sensuous Mona whom they meet poolside at a resort in Alexandria. Mona is half-English, provocative and quickly, inspires a new nexus of desire in Nuri. The triangle – father, son and Mona - grows more brittle and difficult when Mona becomes Nuri’s stepmother despite his insistence that “I saw her first.”

Soon after the marriage, Nuri is sent off to a boarding school in England where he concocts schemes to steal time with Mona. As is often the case, you must be careful what you wish for. After his father’s disappearance, the relationship with Mona unravels as his father’s secret life is slowly revealed and Nuri learns what most children rarely acknowledge, that we really know little about the lives of our parents.

This is semi-autobiographical ground for Matar who was born in New York City to Libyan parents and raised in Tripoli and Cairo. His father, Jaballah Matar, was an influential businessman and a Qaddafi opponent, who was disappeared from Cairo in 1990 and interred in Libya. It is not known whether he is still alive as no one has seen him since 2002.
Now a resident of London, Matar’s first novel, In the Country of Men, was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2006. It also was narrated by a young boy growing up in Libya with an unhappy mother and an absent father. Yet knowing how closely his fiction runs to Matar’s life in no way undermines the power of his writing - the aching simplicity by which he builds mood and pitch.

“Relatives and neighbours who might have filled the chairs in the hall if Father had died were silent in the face of his disappearance...A great emptiness began to fill the place of my father. It became unbearable to hear his name...At times it was almost possible to imagine he never existed. Yet every morning, when I opened my eyes, I believed he was there, that I would find him sitting at the dining room table, holding a cup of coffee in the air as he looked down at the folded newspaper in his lap.”

In passage like these, Matar limns the borders of loss with a fine, delicate hand and reminds us that not knowing can be the heaviest burden to bear.