Passages: Welcome Home to Canada

by Michael Ignatieff

  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 USSR. 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 NKVD (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 USSR 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.

  This is bad news. Our longed-for emigration to Canada depends on passing our medicals. So, prior to mine, I am literally tied down to keep me from jumping about, and on board ship, and later on shore, the hernia is suppressed with a truss.

  Remember, I was born in the early 1940s in wartime Tajikistan—not the most developed place in the world even today—where, needless to say, health conditions were not what they might have been. Infant mortality was murderously high. Modern Western medicines, vaccines, and even simple preventatives like clean water and sterilized instruments were not readily available. As a result, unprotected from some of the world’s most dangerous diseases, I immediately, in the first hours and days of my life, contracted—and, in a curious way, was thus inoculated against—malaria, hepatitis, TB and who knows what else.

  I survived, obviously, and in fact grew up quite robust, thereby demonstrating the truth of the old adage that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. The only problem was that the antibodies I had acquired were still present in my system, and my anxious parents feared that I would test positive for TB and the rest. Quite rightly, they suspected that the Canadian authorities would not be very interested in the fine distinction between my unusual condition and that of a carrier of some extremely dangerous diseases.

  As a result, Aron and Chaja hatched a scheme, as ingenious as it was brazen, to get me past the famous TB patch test, which I would surely fail. They simply substituted another child—a boy about my age, the son of DP camp friends and neighbours—and presented him to the authorities in my place. He passed with flying colours, and it was his certificate that finally got us on board the Marina Falcon. Apparently, he and his family left for what would soon become I
srael around the same time that we sailed for Canada.

  While the hernia caper and the TB switcheroo make for great stories today, both ruses troubled my parents, in particular my mother. It’s probably a common fear among would-be emigrants, especially refugees, that at some stage in their difficult and dangerous escape, one overzealous official, or a small bureaucratic detail, will block their passage and make them return to what they are so desperately fleeing. My mother was never entirely free of this nightmare, and even in the safety of Montreal, years after our escape, she lived in apprehension of being caught. This insecurity isn’t something you can shake, forget or leave behind; it infiltrates dreams, and the habit of constant worry and vigilance never goes away. My mom always half expected to hear the proverbial knock on the door. She was haunted by the worry that someone, somewhere, would notice a discrepancy, would compare two forms and say, “Hey wait a minute …”

  The substitute boy’s name was Yosel. That’s all I know: not a family name, not a nickname, not a single distinguishing feature. It’s a measure of just how spooked my parents were about the entire episode that they never told me anything more. I guess they thought the less said the better, lest something inadvertently slip out of a child’s mouth at the wrong time, in the wrong place.

  In fact, I might have gone to Israel too, like Yosel, but for the Jewish politics of the day. In his youth, my father had been a passionate member of a Jewish self-defence organization whose founder also led a centre-right party in the then nascent Zionist movement. The big point of dispute between the right and the dominant left wing of that movement was whether or not Jews should fight. The majority argued that militarism was not in the tradition. My dad and the party he belonged to felt that the precarious, too often persecuted condition of Jews around the world could only be alleviated if Jews too had a territory to call their own and a strong army to protect them.

  With the end of World War II and the full realization of the extent and horror of the Holocaust, this argument was joined with particular ferocity. Where were the Jewish survivors to go? Who would take them in? How would they get there? Many dreamt of the peace and economic prospects of the New World, but Zionists believed that Jewish life could only become “normal” in the Promised Land. As Palestine was then under a British mandate, and as the British responded to Arab resistance to increased Jewish immigration by allowing in only a legal trickle, illegal immigration boats were organized to run the blockade. Some boatloads made it ashore. Many didn’t, and Jewish refugees once again found themselves behind barbed wire, this time in British detention camps on Cyprus. These boats were under the control of the Zionist left, who, moreover, controlled much of the civic machinery of what would eventually become the State of Israel. But they reserved those desperately scarce, desperately wanted places for their own partisans. So, no room for Dad. No room for us.

  Instead, we went sailing, legally, into the eerie calm of Canada—a country without conscription—while Yosel and his family sailed off into the Israeli War of Independence, followed by the Six Day War, which was followed by the Yom Kippur War, which was followed by the Iraqi Scuds of Desert Storm, all accompanied by the never-ending wear and tear of constant terrorism. I wonder if Yosel ever made it. I wonder if that boy who, for a few crucial hours, pretended to be me is still alive, and if so, where?

  I also wonder what would have happened if the Znaimers had never got out of the Soviet Union in the first place. I shudder to think how I, a free-enterprising, freethinking nonconformist might have fared amid the anti-Semitic paranoia of Stalinist Russia, with its ubiquitous secret police; or in the stultifying collectivism of the period that followed; or during the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. There but for the grace of God …

  Of our two-week passage to Canada on that converted troop carrier, I remember a stormy Atlantic, my parents deathly seasick down below and me on my own, hanging out with the sailors, including the very first black man I’d ever seen. I remember the vast sheds where we new arrivals were slowly processed; then another long train trip; and finally, Montreal.

  Immediately, I was sent to a hospital for my hernia. Cut off from the Yiddish, German, Russian, Polish, Latvian, Hebrew and God knows what else that flew around my milieu, I came out, two weeks later, with a functional command of English and quite a few colourful words of French.

  Aron’s first job in Canada was as a pants and blouse presser, and Chaja began work in a bakery. We settled into a third-floor walk-up on St. Urbain Street. Libby and Sam, my sister and brother, were born. Chaja continued to work. Aron was reunited with his sister Becky, who had managed to escape to Northern Rhodesia. Of that generation she was the only surviving sibling on either side.

  Eventually, Aron was able to open a small shoe store, but his heart wasn’t in business. Every spare moment, his head was in a book; he could savour a newspaper all day. Although Saturday was the busiest day of the retail week, he would be happiest if there were few customers so that he could sit in the back listening to Live at the Metropolitan Opera.

  Chaja became a waitress, or at least that was her title. She essentially ran a successful steak house for a Damon Runyon character whose clientele included Jimmy the Book and Obie the Butcher. In addition to serving, she did the ordering and bookkeeping, and played mother confessor to a staff worthy of a soap opera. She was always grateful to be working and never dreamed she was being exploited, though we were convinced she was. Chaja never got over the loss of her entire family. It was a black hole she didn’t let us into, and we barely know the names of all the Epelzweigs. However, she built a new extended family, the “Kollezshankes,” a group of immigrant women who were like sisters to her until the day she died.

  Our parents lived for their children, working endless hours at jobs they did not love. They gave us a great education, a sense of independence, and a love of learning and Jewish culture. Though they were earning breadcrumbs—she as a waitress, he as a presser and shoe salesman—still they found a way to send me to the United Talmud Torah. UTT was a “parochial” or private school, and cost precious extra money we didn’t have. In the Quebec education system, all schools were held to be denominational, with the world crudely divided into Catholic and Protestant school boards. If you weren’t Catholic and couldn’t afford or didn’t care to go to a Jewish school, you could go to a public one, called Protestant even if 99 percent of the student body were Jewish. That was the case at the famous Baron Byng High School that Mordecai Richler attended, which was around the corner from our own Herziliah, the high school extension of UTT. I stayed in the parochial system all the way through matriculation, until I started at McGill.

  Looking back on it now, I see I was lucky to have that experience. The education was rigorous: half a day in Hebrew, for religious and cultural studies; half a day in English, pursuing an enriched form of the standard curriculum. On Saturdays we held our own “junior congregation” in the school gym. I led the services as cantor and was pretty good at it. In fact, I developed a bit of a following, mostly Orthodox girls who would come every week to catch my solos. It was my first taste of performing, of being in the spotlight, and of what we would today call groupies.

  The overflow of American McCarthyism into the Canada of the day threw a few more elements of a non-traditional upbringing my way—most notably in the person of the great Canadian poet Irving Layton. Temporarily denied access to the universities, where he properly belonged, and unable to make a living solely from his writing, he taught English literature and history and grammar at Herziliah. He was an enormous influence on me, and indeed on many of the students. He had an extremely powerful personality—one that I was actually wary of, because I didn’t want simply to ape him, as several of my classmates did. Layton was the centre of a kind of literary cult, and I’m not much of a follower. But I was happy to be inspired by him—inspired to believe that words, ideas, art and education matter; inspired to believe that thinkers, writers and doers matter. Layton demanded that we read
a wide range of material. He interrogated us, debated with us, performed for us. He was also my first real connection to the world of media, which would later become my life. I remember him returning to class in triumph after having been “all the way” to Toronto, mixing it up with the celebrated theatre critic Nathan Cohen on the nationally televised CBC program Fighting Words.

  Another part of my education derived from outside school. In fact, my extracurricular activities were probably as formative as my long days and years in class. I worked as a delivery boy, as a tutor, as a pin boy in a bowling alley. I worked as a waiter in a country club set up by wealthy Jews who’d been turned away from establishment WASP clubs. Most Sundays I sang at weddings—a dollar and a half if in the choir, three bucks if I did the solo, plus all the hors d’oeuvres I could eat. I got to wear a white silk caftan and a high domed cap, but even so grandly attired, and especially because my rendition of that great Mario Lanza hit “Because” invariably stole the show, I knew I was being exploited by what Layton called the “Booboisie.” So I took full advantage of the privileges of the hors d’oeuvres table, once managing to eat sixty cocktail hot dogs between two engagements. Sweet revenge! Terrible tummy ache!

  In the middle and late 1950s, Montreal was justifiably called the Paris of North America. Despite its apparently oppressive Catholicism, it was open and full of excitement, sophistication, exoticism, grit, sleaze. The city had theatre and jazz and a joie de vivre that distinguished it from the pinched cultural wasteland that was Toronto. One of my jobs landed me pretty much at the centre of Montreal nightlife. Friday and Saturday nights, I worked as a busboy at one of the city’s most notorious nightclubs, the Chez Paris, on Stanley Street. It had pretty much everything: strippers, homosexuals, gamblers, the soap opera that was the kitchen staff, the rich rounders as well as the poseurs, and the endlessly entertaining night owls who frequented such an establishment. I loved it, and being underage and quite cute, I made out like a bandito.