by Jeanne Beker
The guilt started right after Bekky was born in 1987. I was thirty-five years old, having waited patiently for my career to take off before I ventured into motherhood. I felt tremendously fulfilled. Still, I couldn’t stop to savour the joys of parenthood for long. My career seemed just as demanding as my newborn baby. In retrospect, I can hardly believe that my little Bekky was only four months old when I first left her to go on a two-week trip to London and Paris. I’m not sure how I found the strength. But there wasn’t any option—this was what I’d signed up for.
It was Moses Znaimer, the innovative mastermind behind Citytv, who deserves credit for toughening me up. Fashion Television had been on the air for less than two years, and the show—and the team—was just hitting its stride. I was about eight and a half months pregnant— and determined to work for as long as I possibly could—when Moses, in his wily way, started putting the show’s lovely young production co-coordinator on camera, encouraging her to hone her reporting skills. Whether or not this ambitious young woman was ready for “prime time” wasn’t the issue. Call it old-fashioned insecurity, but I had the sneaking suspicion that this gal was after my job, and Moses appeared more than happy to dangle the notion that I could be easily replaced. He also taunted me at least once with the questionable greeting “Hi chubby!” when he passed me in the hallway. Add to all that my hormonal rage, burgeoning belly, hefty weight gain (I gained something like forty-five pounds during my first pregnancy!), and you had the perfect recipe for professional paranoia.
One of the lovely young production co-coordinator’s duties was to pull my wardrobe for the show—not an easy job at a time when people still tried to disguise pregnant bellies with tent-like maternity wear. To make matters worse, it was the year Lycra gave new meaning to body-conscious fashion, and skinny silhouettes were all the rage. I remember this enthusiastic young woman bringing me a silver leather jacket that made me look like a human Sputnik. “Oh, gawd!” I wailed. “This is so wrong!” Granted, I must have come off as some difficult diva, but the co-coordinator snapped and said something unsympathetic, like, “Well, what do you expect?” It was depressing, but it fuelled my determination to hang on to what I had achieved. So when Moses made a point of reminding me that my job might be in jeopardy if I didn’t hop right back as soon as I possibly could, I took the bait.
“When do you plan on coming back after you have the baby?” Moses asked me about a week before my due date.
“Well, I hadn’t really thought about it,” I replied.
“Because you know there’s a long lineup of twenty-two-year-olds outside my office door, all vying for your job,” he said.
“Oh, don’t worry about me,” I replied instantly. “I’ll only take a couple of weeks off.”
And so, much to the chagrin of my potential competition, I convinced my producers that there’d be no need to replace me. They’d only have to go into two or three repeats, I assured them, because I would be back in a flash.
True to my word, I was out covering my first story only two and a half weeks after delivering my baby. Actually, I was back even before that. Two days after I got home from the hospital, my producer sent a crew to my house to record some voice-overs. To this day, I’m not quite sure how I did it.
Unquestionably, it had a lot to do with the weekends we spent together as a family, all cozied up at our quaint Muskoka cottage, and with the comforting bedtime routines we followed whenever I was in town. In later years, when I was away, I had a cellphone with me at all times. I smile when I think of the times I was just about to interview some VIP halfway round the world when my phone rang and I had to field a question about homework or weekend plans or a favourite piece of clothing that had disappeared. I was there for my kids as much I could be. They were on my mind every moment I was away from them. These were the days before text messaging and email, so I kept the home fax line busy, sending loving missives, and Denny would help the girls send their notes and drawings to hotel fax machines wherever I was staying. Every spare minute was spent shopping for the kids, seeking out the perfect little gifts. I always delighted in seeing their faces when I finally got home and unpacked my bags to reveal the treasures I had brought back.
I may have looked back a few times over the years and wondered how things would have played out if I hadn’t been so career-driven, but I can’t say I would have done things any other way, even if I were given the choice. Has it torn me to pieces sometimes, this excruciating split between home and work? Without a doubt! But it’s a torment that I’ve thrived on in a way—the kind of crazy head/heart dilemma that makes me feel alive sometimes. Nothing worth anything comes easy in this life. We’d all be bored if it did.
SURVIVAL MODE
WHEN WE CELEBRATED the twenty-fifth anniversary season of Fashion Television in the fall of 2010, interviewers kept asking me how I had managed to beat the odds in an industry that eats its young. Not only had I hung in there for over a quarter century, but I had thrived, and fresh fuel was continually being added to my career fires. “How do you do it?” reporters asked. “How do you explain your longevity?” There are a thousand reasons. But one answer, the most succinct and all-encompassing, says it best: because I’m a survivor. It’s just who I am, and how I was raised—as the daughter of two courageous people who were themselves true survivors.
For as long as I can remember, my mother was adamant about sharing her personal story. Actually, both my parents felt compelled to talk about how they had survived the Holocaust: the terror, the anguish, the hunger, the pain, the loneliness, and then the miracles. Their poignant stories became part of my DNA, and took me to a place that was light years away from where most of the kids I played with dwelled. I knew from a very young age that I was on this planet thanks to my parents’ wits and some kind of divine intervention. And even though I remember hiding under my bed when I was about five years old, just so I wouldn’t have to listen to any more “war stories,” I’m thankful my parents expressed themselves so openly, sharing the experiences that helped define them.
My parents were both from Kozowa, a small town in eastern Poland (now Ukraine), which was invaded by the Germans in 1941. My father, Joseph, was born in 1913—the son of Beryl, a cobbler, who died when my dad was just fourteen years old. Since he was the eldest in the family, my dad had to leave school and find work to support his mother, Gitl (Genia in Polish), after whom I’m named, and his two brothers and sister. In 1937, my father joined the Polish army and became an officer. A couple of years later, when the Polish army was overwhelmed by the Germans and then the Soviets, he defected and returned to Kozowa, to be reunited with my mother, whom he had been dating secretly (to avoid the disapproval of her religious father).
My father, seven years older than my mother, was a handsome, strapping man who had an incredible zest for life, a great love of people, a huge heart, a strong sense of entrepreneurship, and an uncanny ability to reinvent himself. His strong work ethic inspires me still. He used to tell us about the diverse opportunities he created for himself in his native Poland, from raising honeybees and selling horses to organizing big-band dance parties. After he and my mother immigrated to Canada in 1948—both penniless and unable to speak a word of English— he began laying the foundations for his own company, since he was adamant about being his own boss. By the early 1950s, Quality Slippers, a tiny slipper-manufacturing company, was born. For the rest of his life, my dad worked seven days a week, usually twelve hours a day, just so he could put a roof over our heads. He was selfless, brave, tenacious, and wildly generous. Undoubtedly, it was his heroic spirit that helped see both him and my mother through the war.
My mother, Bronia Rohatiner, was born in 1920. Her father, Moses Baruch, was a very religious, revered, and learned man who was a successful village merchant—a purveyor of leather goods. His first wife died giving birth to his ninth child. Nine months later, my grandfather married a woman twenty years his junior—Esther Malka Gold, a nineteen-year-old who would bear hi
m another two children: my mother and my beautiful aunt Sarah. My mother always delighted in telling stories about her magical Polish shtetl, Kozowa—a lively place filled with colourful characters—and her joyful girlhood. But in 1941, with the arrival of the Germans, her perfect world came crashing down.
After the Nazis gunned down two of my mother’s half-brothers in a mass killing in a nearby forest, ten members of her extended family moved into her parents’ large house. With the help of neighbours, they dug a small cave in the cellar. “There were two pipes for air circulation,” my mother explained to me countless times. “Often, all of us had to spend hours down there. Sometimes, we stayed there for a whole day, when the Nazis came and were looking for people to kill. We heard them walking around upstairs, and only when we were sure they had left would we come out of the cave.”
Before long, my mother’s mother died of typhoid fever. Two months later, in April 1942, there was word that the Nazis were coming to liquidate the Kozowa ghetto. The family—my mother; her father; her only remaining half-brother and his two daughters; the wife of one of her late half-brothers and their three children; and my mother’s sister, Sarah—went that night to their hiding place. In the morning, they heard the Nazis walking around upstairs. “They were shouting, and yelling, and searching for our family,” my mother would tell me. The Nazis couldn’t find the entrance to the cave, but they must have spotted the two air pipes. They stuffed them with something, blocking the flow of air. “I was the first to faint,” my mother recalled. “That was because I’d just recently recovered from typhus myself.” When the Germans finally left, some people from the ghetto came to open the cave, and they pulled out the family, one by one. Everyone had suffocated, except for my mother. She would often tell the story of how her family’s corpses were being loaded onto wagons to be taken away when someone noticed her eyelids fluttering. They poured cold water on her, and she was revived. The next thing she knew, she was in her bed, surrounded by strange people and the town’s one remaining doctor. “He told me what happened. I was shocked and angry, and asked him, ‘Why did you revive me? Now I’m all alone!’” That day, the Nazis killed one thousand Kozowa Jews.
My father arrived on the scene and took my mother to his family’s home. But shortly afterwards, they heard of the Nazis’ plans to make the town Judenrein (clean of Jews). My parents fled, and for the next fourteen months, relying on their wits and the kindness of gentile strangers, they scrambled to hide from the Nazi terror. My mother would tell me how she and my father had to ration scraps of food; how she “made friends” with cute, tiny field mice; how she dreamed of being able to read a book or eat a piece of bread with butter. I remember being puzzled as a kid whenever my mother would yawn and let out a big, loud sigh. She explained to me once that she yawned so loudly because she could never make a noise when she was in hiding for all those months. From then on, her loud yawns became music to my ears.
My parents were open about their hellish memories, and adamant about raising us to appreciate that nothing should be taken for granted. Their stories built a kind of fire in my belly that fuelled that passion and desire to lead a truly exceptional life—one that would allow me to realize all the dreams they never could, and then some.
My mother often spoke about her longing to return to Poland, and maybe even visit Kozowa, now in Ukraine. But it was hard for her to get up the nerve to confront her past. After my father died, my mother said she would consider going back only if my sister and I accompanied her. The opportunity never arose. And frankly, I was afraid that a trip to Poland might be too emotionally exhausting for my mother. But fate has a funny way of delivering things that are meant to be.
In 1995, thanks to the LINK Group, a fashion promotion agency that had bought the rights to Fashion Television for satellite broadcast in Poland, I was given the opportunity to travel to Warsaw. Apparently, our show had been pirated across the Eastern European airwaves for years, and I was a well-known entity there—a mini-celeb, if you will. Now that FT was going to be delivered to Poland legitimately, the broadcast execs wanted to celebrate by bringing me over. It was too good an opportunity to pass up, especially because I knew the perfect roommate and translator—I asked my mother to accompany me. My supervising producer, Marcia Martin, and the Toronto exec who had made the deal were also on board for this first-class trip.
Days before we were to leave, my mother expressed concern as we filled out our visa applications. “It’s asking what my father’s name was,” she said apprehensively. “I don’t want to write ‘Moses.’”
“Why not? That was his name, wasn’t it?”
“Because then they’ll know we’re Jewish,” she explained.
“Mum, you don’t have to be afraid anymore,” I told her. “You’re a Canadian citizen now. And the war is over.”
The next day my mother phoned to tell me how excited she was about our impending trip. “But please try to understand,” she said. “I was so scared for so long.”
Our welcome at the Warsaw airport was ultra glam: four gorgeous models dressed in prim grey suits, each carrying a huge bouquet of roses, marched towards us upon our arrival. It was 8:30 in the morning, and there was a posse of Polish TV crews and newspaper photographers there to capture the excitement. My mother turned to me in disbelief. We felt like rock stars.
Our host in Warsaw was Jack Orlowski, an affable fellow who headed up the LINK Group. He had known my mother was coming, and he offered to drive her directly to the Natan Rappaport Memorial, which commemorates the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 19, 1943. The massive monument depicts Mordecai Anielewicz and other members of the community who barricaded the gates of the walled ghetto against the Nazis. (By the time the uprising ended, on May 16, 1943, at least seven thousand people had been killed, and tens of thousands more had been captured and transported to concentration camps.) In the trunk of Jack’s Mercedes was a glorious wreath he had thoughtfully brought for my mother to place at the monument.
We arrived at the Umschlagplatz, the centre of the infamous ghetto, and stepped out of the car onto the cobblestone square. Jack carried the flowers. My mother’s eyes were misty. She turned to me, incredulous that she had made it this far. “If you live long enough,” she observed, “you live to see everything.” She gingerly climbed the stairs and rested the wreath at the base of the monument. I was overwhelmed by disparate emotions—joy, sorrow, peace, loss, and a sense of profound reverence. In a strange way, I felt as though I had come home. I closed my eyes and sensed those thousands of tormented souls, screaming out to be remembered. When I opened my eyes, my mother hugged me and, wiping away her tears, thanked me for bringing her on this amazing trip. As frivolous as I’ve sometimes found the fashion arena to be, I silently thanked it for making all this possible.
We spent most of the rest of the day riding around the old city in a horse-drawn carriage. My mother was cooing like a kid in her native Polish. “How I dreamed of visiting Warsaw when I was a girl. This was the big city!” she said as she took in the sights. “But who could ever afford to come here in those days?”
The next morning we visited a seventeenth-century palace that had been transformed into a kind of private club used by the business community. This is where I was to introduce FT to about twenty journalists. At the beginning of my speech, I mentioned that this was a kind of homecoming for my mother. When it was time for questions, an elderly gentleman asked if she would say a few words. To my surprise, my mother had prepared a little speech, just in case someone asked her to speak. She pulled a paper out of her purse, and then, in her perfect Polish, provided the audience with a riveting description of how she had survived the war and how emotional it was for her to return after all these years. You could have heard a pin drop. My heart swelled with pride as I realized yet again what a remarkable, fearless woman I had for a mother.
When the press conference ended, several journalists approached her. The elderly gentleman who had asked her to speak flashed me his
card. He was a former White House correspondent. “You were the sunshine of this press conference,” he told her. My mum was kvelling, especially because of her ability to speak Polish so well after so long, and she was amazed that having left this country as a second-class citizen fifty years earlier, she’d come back as the toast of the town.
Back at the Bristol, our lavish five-star hotel, my mother took a call from a reporter with a Warsaw newspaper who had been unable to grab her at the press conference. After a twenty-minute interview, she hung up. “I wonder if I told him too much,” she mused. Later that night, a full-scale fashion show was staged in our honour at a local theatre. The director of Polsat TV approached my mother to tell her that she had been featured on the national newscast earlier that evening. They had aired part of her speech from the press conference. We all teased her about her new-found fame as Poland’s media darling.
“I don’t care,” she said defensively, biting into a perogy at the post-show dinner. “Make fun of me all you want.” A few beats later, evidently pretty satisfied with herself, she smugly added, “You know what? My perogies are better!” I had never seen my mother so self-assured, so fiercely proud. And this time, it wasn’t because of her children or her grandchildren. She was radiantly happy with herself. I had never loved her more.
It was well past midnight when we crawled into our beds, complaining about our aching feet, exhausted but giddy, laughing and kvetching about how tough it was to be a celebrity. As I fell asleep, I thought about the last time we had shared a hotel room. In 1983, we had accompanied my dying father to a renowned hospital in Boston in a last-ditch effort to save his life. His heart condition was rapidly worsening, and we were desperate. That night, at this ritzy Warsaw hotel, I distinctly felt my dad’s presence, as if he were watching us share this wondrous homecoming.
