UNPACKING THE SUITCASE

Upon birth, I believe we are handed a suitcase that someone else has packed.  It is baggage we will carry all our lives and yet, if we were passing through customs with it, what would we answer when asked: who packed it?

This suitcase that we lug everywhere is filled with the hurts and happiness, triumphs and disasters, traumas and terrors that our parents have gifted us and often includes leftovers from what their parents handed to them.  The burden is passed along without conscious intention; it’s inexorable.

Some suitcases are no bigger than tote bags while others, often those handed to children of survivors who struggled to stay alive through one war or another, weigh the most.

Being accustomed from birth to shouldering the weight, most of us accept the burden as if it is an integral component of our make-up – an intrinsic part of who we are.  Of course, as we grow older, we will acquire a new and empty suitcase, and start filling it with our own things.  It is only around middle age, when exhaustion and aching backs start setting in do we think to stop in order to examine the contents. 

If our parents are still with us, we might tentatively begin asking questions.  Many of us don’t, however, either because we’re afraid to learn that we are more like our parents than we thought or because we fear that we will be forced to question what we believe (the notions we are most comfortable with) and who we truly are. 

If death robs us of our parents at an early age, that is, before exhaustion can set in, we have forever lost the option - the luxury - of asking for an explanation. We are left to our own devices to decode the DNA of our history.

That is my story. 

By the time I realized that I was carrying someone else’s bag, I was 45 years old and had been an orphan since 30.  Compelled to explore the contents, all I found were fragments of memories and puzzle pieces that failed to make a complete picture.  I struggled like an apprentice shaman, trying to divine a narrative from bones and shrouds, shreds of stories.  When you wait too long, the runes do not give up their mystery easily, if at all.

And so I was forced to learn how to pull apart the shreds and spin a story.  I now take these stories and send them out as cautionary tales. 

“Stop,” I say.  “Put down that suitcase.  Open it.”

Until that time you have examined the contents, you will be lugging two suitcases through your life.  You need to empty one to make room for understanding your own story.  With any luck, the load will grow lighter after that.

After war’s end (Books Review)

Motherlode: A Mosaic of Dutch Wartime Experiences

by Carolyne Van Der Meer

Wilfred Laurier University Press

Appeared in roverarts.com  23.02.2014

In reading Carolyne Van Der Meer’s remarkable work, Motherlode: A Mosaic of Dutch Wartime Experiences, I was reminded of the intricate lace curtains found on the windows throughout Holland. In this creative reinterpretation of memories and experiences, Van Der Meer has eloquently succeeded in intertwining short stories, poems, and essays with the delicate touch of a fine Dutch lace maker. 

Based on the recollections of the author’s mother and other Dutch Canadians, as well as letters from and interviews with Canadian soldiers and resistance fighters, Van Der Meer takes these accounts and her first-hand research to craft a compelling view of what we are left with after war’s end.

]The journey begins as the author, a journalist, PR professional and university lecturer, goes in search of her mother’s memories as a young child in Nazi-occupied Holland.

Her quest is fuelled by the need to find a connection between that childhood – a world of hunger, bursting bombs and a father in the resistance who hid Jews in the space between the home’s two floors – with the placid, safe world they now live in. The fear of traumatizing her mother leads the author to seek other recollections as well, and these individual memories are seamlessly interwoven linking the past to the present with the power of shared memory.

Van Der Meer visits her mother’s hometown and even the house where she had lived.

However, it is in Amsterdam, after exploring museum archives that she is struck by “the taste of memory” while eating speculaas, her favourite Dutch spice cookie. Despite being Canadian-born and raised, she notes: “I get that odd feeling again – of being home, of feeling like I belong.”

That feeling of belonging when there is no experiential history is not uncommon among first generation Canadians. In the poem, The Bartender, the author wryly muses about a young Pakistani,

…in September. He goes home to find
his, I leave home to find
mine.

Van Der Meer is also driven to understand what forged the woman who became her mother, to understand the connection, that indefinable element that separates yet binds women to their mothers. The gentleness and awed respect that arises from the author’s journey to her mother’s town will resonate with all those who have gone searching for clues as to what forged the strength they both struggle with and admire.

It is in Van Der Meer’s poetry, in its sparse clean lines, that she best delineates the lasting tragedies of war – the inescapable memories – as in the poem, The Department Store that describes people hopelessly trapped beneath the rubble of a bombed building.

No more Vroom & Dreesman
Only a fine coating of dust –
and echoes everywhere.

In Search of Roots

Ten years ago I  began a journey with a visit to two cemeteries in Poland.  I did not know then I was beginning a journey. I had no way of knowing that it would be what I didn't find which would set me off on the road I have been travelling for the past ten years.  A decade is a benchmark, worthy of a little introspection.  It warrants stopping a moment to turn your head and see where the path began.

Chrzanow's main square

It is the Fall of 2004. I am standing in the Jewish cemetery at Chrzanow, searching for graves that have been numbered and correspond with the list I printed off my computer back in Montreal months earlier.  It’s a long way to have come to learn that there are weeds in this Polish cemetery with roots deeper than I will ever have.  Suddenly, I’m not even sure why I am here.

In my hand is the piece of paper with five names – all Klugers, like my mother – who are buried here, the last in 1924.  I printed the list off the JewishGen website. But I don’t know how these people were related to me, merely that we are connected somehow by these six letters.  I watch oversized snails trail slime across the face of a stone. My driver, Zbigniew, says that many tons of these fat, juicy snails are exported from Poland to France each year. I wonder if some are harvested from cemeteries.

I have come to Chrzanow, 35km west of Krakow, 15km north of Auschwitz, looking for my roots but have little to go on, only my mother’s memories and five names with six letters to connect me to them, to prove to me that I will not forever remain a displaced person.

~~~~

My hunger for some personal history began in 2000 with a casual visit to Pier 21 in Halifax. In 1949, my parents and I landed there, just three of the 100,000 Displaced Persons who immigrated to Canada after the war. I was 19 months old.

Exploring the exhibit four decades later, I recognized in the stories a familiar blend of the hope and sadness inherent in every immigrant tale about what was lost and what might be found. In the centre of the exhibit were two banks of pews and facing them, a wooden teacher’s desk. Across its front in big, block letters was: IMMIGRATION, and behind, a sign in several languages, proclaiming Welcome to Canada.

I sat down facing backwards, surveying the immensity of the space now so quiet, so empty. When I turned around, however, I was dumbfounded. As if in a dream, I recognized the immigration sign. I suppose we had sat there for a very long time. And I wondered, if I could recall the sign, what else was buried in me? What if I went back to my birthplace in Passau, Germany, or to Chrzanow where my mother was born?

My mother never ceased telling me stories - about life in Poland before the war; what was lost; how she met my father in the DP camp outside Passau; and how she insisted on giving birth in town because too many babies died during childbirth in the camp, even though the war was over. My mother told me stories I didn’t want to hear. It was her road to sanity. But for me, it was a road littered with corpses. When she died in 1976, I believed the stories were laid to rest beside her.

I have been a Holocaust denier. Not in any of the usual ways: I don’t deny that it happened, but I have denied the need to turn and face the horror head-on, and enter into it fully. Was it not enough to grow up without grandparents and only a handful of relatives I’ve rarely, if ever, seen, or that my mother carried a palette of grief that coloured the happiness in our lives?

When asked where I come from, I tell my parents’ stories, how my father left Belarus and a wife and three children when he was conscripted by the Soviets. He went to Siberia; they went to Auschwitz. My mother and her husband escaped to Kazakhstan (or was it Uzbekistan?) where she had a son. Her husband died of malaria, her son of starvation. When my parents met, they married to begin life anew. I was the new but I didn’t want the history, just the hope.

When I was young I planned to be a journalist, but quickly learned I couldn’t ask the tough questions. Putting a positive spin on things is my natural inclination, so I became a publicist instead. But now I would gladly trade a rosy future for some family history. Today I want facts, street addresses, a genealogy – some notion of where I sprang from. I want to ask questions and get answers.

~~~

The town where I was born is trying to bury its strong Nazi predisposition says Anna Rosmus, a Passau native and author of several books including, “Out of Passau: The Town That Hitler Called Home.” But I’m unconcerned. I’ve been to Germany before. On my initial trip, the first sight to greet me in Frankfurt Airport was a pious Jew, facing west and saying his morning prayers wrapped in phylacteries and a tallis. I took it as an omen that it was safe to come back.

Street sign in Berlin

Passau is a little jewel of a town and I find myself playing the tourist because, although I was born here, I am not from here. I’m not sure where I’m from.

In a small shop next-door to the superb Baroque St. Stephen’s cathedral, I find a tiny Star of David, silver with an amethyst set in the centre. Leonardo da Vinci believed amethyst was able to dissipate evil thoughts. I buy it and place it on my bracelet, ensuring I will have a story to tell.

Here in Passau, three is a magic number. Three rivers - the Ilz, the Inn and the Danube flow into one. The corners of three countries - Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic – uneasily touch borders. And here, my father, mother and their respective ghosts came together to form me. Where no memories exist, I invent metaphors.

Heading back to the train station, I pass a travel agency, its window filled with Maple Leaf flags and signs touting the wonders of Canada. One sign proclaims: “Human Nature.” I catch myself reflected in it and smile.

I go from Passau to Chrzanow but there is nothing left there, either. After the cemetery, Zbigniew takes me to the City Hall where a young man explains that all records of the Jews in Chrzanow were destroyed during the war. Zbigniew tries again, rephrasing the question, but there is nothing. He looks at me sadly. The young man too seems sad to have disappointed me. But I’m not sure what I feel, definitely not hopeless; perhaps I feel adrift, rootless.   

It is my belief that we need to know where we come from to know where we’re going so I went to those towns looking for the past but all I found was my reflection in the Canadian flag. Perhaps, it’s another metaphor, suggesting we’re each responsible for building our own history.

- 30 -

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.