Final Fire

by Michael Mitchell

  But the best room of all housed the reactor at Chalk River. It was a big spooky-looking 2001 monolith surrounded by swimming pools that held spent fuel rods. You could look down through weird water to where those things seemed to glow on the bottom. We still haven’t figured out what to do with those rods. It feels like we’ll be arguing about them for another 10,000 years while they lie about quietly giving us all cancer or kids with six fingers.

  I’ve always felt like the perfect child of the nuclear age. I’d lived through fallout shelters with boxes of beans and macaroni stored in the basement should rockets and bombers fly in over cottage country. But my closest link of all was the fact the initial full day of my life, November 4, 1943, the graphite reactor at Oak Ridges, Tennessee, went critical for the first time allowing scientists to make plutonium from uranium, a crucial step in the creation of the bomb. Just three months before my second birthday nearly 130,000 people got incinerated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — all this and that other huge Holocaust nestled inside my lifetime.

  I was charged with solving a puzzle. A well-known but anonymous donor had given the Art Gallery of Ontario a collection of negatives and prints made in the Lodz ghetto during the Second World War. They were the work of Henryk Ross, a 1930s Polish photojournalist who freely plied his trade until the Nazis goose-steeped their way across Poland on their march to world domination. Ross and several hundred thousand fellow Jews were subsequently penned into the Lodz ghetto for the duration of the war. There the Jewish inmates self-managed the internal affairs of the ghetto while German peasants dressed as soldiers patrolled the periphery.

  Ross became the ghetto administration’s official photographer. By day he recorded the scenes the Germans wanted to preserve and promote; by night he recorded the events they didn’t — the casual violence and the concentration camp cattle-car rides to industrialized executions. He got those photographs by hiding in sheds and poking his Leica lens between the buttons of his overcoat. He had vision and guts as did his wife, Stephania, who assisted.

  In 1944 Ross, sensing that the Thousand Year Reich was ending somewhat early, buried his photographic evidence in a corner of the ghetto. After liberation he returned and dug it up. The negatives, prints and posters were water-damaged but had, by and large, survived. He took them on his postwar exodus to Israel and there tried to organize his material. One of the things he did was contact print his 35mm negatives, cut them up into tiny individual frames and paste them, about 40 images to a page, in a sequence to make a book. It was a huge amount of work — he fiddled with the sequence for years. The result makes no sense.

  My writer’s and photographer’s job was to interpret this broken narrative of weird juxtapositions and random repetitions. I had a headache for days. The most frustrating part of the process was my own mind. I kept recognizing something in Ross’s sequence but I couldn’t articulate it. It was only after the AGO/Yale University Press published my attempt in the book Memory Unearthed that I began to understand what I’d been looking at.

  A quarter century earlier I’d returned from the perilous process of photographing the Sandinista’s revolution in Nicaragua and experienced the strange and powerful dislocations that we now call PTSD. Ross’s scrapbook of images was an unconscious graphic representation of his emotional and intellectual trauma. It wasn’t his intent but it proved to be the only way he could cope.

  The exhibition Memory Unearthed at the Art Gallery of Ontario had its costs. The Jewish community of Toronto gave generously. It wasn’t just part of the history of a people; it was an intimate part of many Toronto Jewish families’ lives. Among the big supporters was Barry Sherman, the founder and CEO of Apotex, the generic drug giant. At the exhibition opening I watched Barry corner Matthew Teitelbaum, then the AGO’s director. After their animated conversation Matthew wandered toward me. When I asked about the subject of their exchange Matthew said it had been about the high prices charged for original works of art. Barry couldn’t understand them. He thought paying so much was crazy when you could buy a reproduction in the gallery shop for a few bucks.

  “Did you convince him otherwise?” I asked

  “No. How can you argue with a guy who makes copy drugs for cheap?”

  One of my obligations was to join the project’s curator and the other three writers for two nights of public readings and dialogue focused on the exhibition. The first evening, attended largely by members of the photography community, went well. The audience was alert, interested and vocal. It put those of us on the stage at our best. However, the following evening, a private function for the financial supporters of the exhibition, was dismal.

  The hundred or so invitees were a good cross-section of the country’s richest Jews. They represented many millions made in finance, retailing, real estate as well as generic drugs. Many of them had roots in the ghettos and historical connections to the Holocaust. The room seemed redolent of gloom. And very still. Despite all of us having laboured to reduce our months of work to individual five-minute presentations, the attendees couldn’t stay with us. While we raced through our slides and expositions much of the audience was lit by the glow of their smart phone screens. We talk, they check their emails. We debate, they text. A 70-year-old shadow darkened the room. This shadow will darken yet another century.

  And another trauma. Barry Sherman claimed to have an IQ of 180 but he spent much of his career suing his competitors in patent wars as well as his family members and friends to whom he’d lent money. He’d become worth some four or five billion over the years, but this way of life didn’t seem all that smart to me. As it turned out the Shermans had their own terrors. In December 2017 he and his wife, Honey, were found hanging above their basement swimming pool.

  A long dark shadow stalked the Jews that shared my generation. Born during or just after the Second World War, many had had parents or close relatives in the camps. The stressed environment they grew up in was manifested in many strange behaviours. The hands of these 20-year-old university students would shake while doing the simplest tasks. They had a wry humour that combined some sense of superiority with self-loathing and deprecation. Many had eating disorders. They were a little bit crazy. My own difficult mother-in-law — she had spent four years in the camps as young woman — told me that she had never met Jews in Europe like the ones she encountered daily in Toronto.

  For one raised as a meat and potatoes WASP the food obsessions were immediately most noticeable. Food, food, food. Eat and eat. Before one meal was finished they were talking about the next. One year in the early ’70s I drove from Toronto to southern Mexico with a Jewish friend who eventually became a political economy professor. For me it was a voyage through ever-evolving landscapes and cultures; for him it was a perilous expedition from meal to meal. Everything was anxious appetite. He’d awake talking about what we’d have for breakfast. Soon as we got rolling on the road each day the talk would immediately turn to lunch. The pitch of his voice would rise ever higher as noon approached. There would be long speculations about menus. I’d pull off the road and he’d rush into a diner where he could barely read the menu for the shaking of his hands. After ordering he’d break into a sweat in anticipation of the delivery of food. When it arrived he’d be unable to hold a knife and fork. He’d have seconds and thirds. It was nuts.

  Another food-obsessed North End Winnipegger lived in a world where in a prelapsarian past the restaurant food had always been better, tastier, cheaper. He lived in a present of precipitous and perilous decline. I once took him with me on an assignment to Washington because I knew he wanted to experience its new Holocaust museum. I paid for his transportation, accommodations and all meals save one. The morning we planned to return I suggested we have breakfast in the hotel in order to save time. When he was presented with a $12 bill for his meal he raged out of his seat. I’d ruined his day, even his entire life by forcing him to eat a hotel breakfast instead of driving all over D.C. looking for a cheap
diner. The entire breakfast room looked on in slack-jawed horror as he crashed his plate on our table scattering cutlery across the floor. He looked insane. By the way, we did get to the Holocaust museum. He lasted less than 20 minutes before skulking out to the forecourt of the building. He said not a word for the rest of the day.

  In the early ’70s I decided to take a gap year from graduate school and left Mexico for Toronto. To support myself during that break I took what I assumed would be a simple, relaxing job doing maintenance at the 22-storey “free university” called Rochdale College. Within months I was one of the managers of the building with an extremely stressful job. I did it for a year and then returned to graduate school to study film and photography. I gradually lost touch with the Rochdale crowd.

  Years later I ran into my Rochdale co-manager on an east end street. A prairie WASP, he’d converted to Judaism and married the daughter of a rich Jewish scrap metal dealer. He invited me to have a beer and catch up at the large house they’d bought together. As we hadn’t seen each other for decades I went. We sat at the big eat-in kitchen island with our beers. His wife stood between us with a J-cloth in her hand. Every time one of us lifted our glass she’d dart in and wipe the imaginary ring from the granite countertop. Gulp, wipe, gulp, wipe, gulp, wipe. It was the most stressful drink of my life.

  The shadow. I still struggle to comprehend the experience of my late mother-in-law who, captured in Paris at age 19 by the Nazis, was locked up in a concentration camp for four years to daily experience unimaginable horrors. She talked little of it but at one point told me that after days of screaming hunger they were served soup with human body parts floating in it. She worked as a nurse so she knew.

  Many of them spent years in psychotherapy, going twice a week for decade after decade. This became an integral part of the culture. There’d be periodic announcements: “I’ve graduated!” Then the sessions would begin again. I could never see signs of much improvement from all this talk therapy but perhaps it allowed them to function out there in the world at all. The costs to the health care system of this postwar immigration must have been enormous but by later in the century they were giving back. The old WASP donor families sitting on the charitable boards of hospitals, orchestras and museums were gradually replaced by generous Jewish ones. And they, in turn, are now moving aside for Italian, Chinese and South Asian generosity.

  Living in a city as culturally mixed as Toronto is an enriching experience but not always easy. Those of us who have been in Canada for generations — those that our former leader, Jurassic Steve, crudely called “Old Stock Canadians” — are too polite to talk about the sometimes difficult accommodations required. I will.

  It took me a long time to make peace with Portuguese neighbours from the Azores. They always seemed primitive, dour and uncommunicative. In my part of town the fathers often beat their sons who would then hit the streets in a vengeful rage, stealing and vandalizing. Those kids smashed into our cars at night so often that the Anglo professionals on the street took to leaving their cars unlocked with windows down in order to minimize the nightly destruction. Let them have the parking change in the ashtray. Forget owning a car radio or a GPS.

  At the time, in addition to a van, I owned a late ’60s black Ford fastback with the Mustang V8 and a manual tranny — three-on-a-tree as we then called it. The girls I knew in the photo world named it the Black Beauty and asked for rides, but to those sons of the Azores it was the devil. They’d come at night, climb onto the garage roof next door and jump onto the car’s. Day by day the profile of that car got thinner until eventually you had to slouch in the seat to clear the head liner. While those guys were at it they’d steal whatever photo gear I’d left locked in my van, itself locked in my garage. Usually it would be my lighting kits that were too bulky and heavy to lug into the house at day’s end. Those thieves were never very smart about it, often dragging the big cases into the Silver Dollar Room a few blocks away in order to fence the stuff to lounge lizards. It never seemed to occur to them that it would be a good idea to remove my shipping labels, Air Canada baggage tags and other ID. Sometimes a sober Samaritan would surreptitiously tear off a tag and phone me. I’d trot over, with or without the cops, reclaim my gear and buy the caller some drinks.

  At that time my sister lived in a small industrial building situated on one of the very few designated laneways with full services — water, sewers, power. They were on their roof deck one day when police arrived in full force, cordoned off both ends of the block and began breaking into the garages lining the lane. Most of them contained a brand-new Mercedes and a shipping container full of appliances. Each local family had a family business. The wives worked as night cleaners at the big department stores downtown. They’d stuff goods into garbage bags, put them out on Queen and Yonge for their husbands to pick up and store before the big move back to southern Europe. All these old ladies in black were cuffed and stuffed into paddy wagons. Canada was just a short-stop free shop.

  Integration and acceptance takes time. I’m now on another old downtown street and once again have Portuguese Canadian neighbours. The retired dad often secretly shovels my walk. His son supplies me with exotic tomato seedlings every spring. They take in and feed my cat when I’m late getting home. In short, they’re perfect Canadian neighbours.

  I think in some way the issue is peasant culture. They’ve left their country of origin where they had little and encounter here a world of plenty that seems inaccessible. They’re in a hurry to join the party. Here I’m also trying to understand the behaviour of the many immigrants from China — not the educated and assimilated from Hong Kong who become doctors, architects and engineers here, but the destitute immigrants from the hinterland. When Sheila and I were making a film about the last year of photographer Mary Pocock’s life I filmed her several times in the palliative ward at Princess Margaret Hospital. It was a very beautiful new facility that featured interior room windows filled with huge colour transparencies based on photographs that Mary had made in Italy. Everything in that ward was designed to give extremely ill people some peace and comfort. Mary loved it.

  Across the hall from her was a room occupied by an ancient Chinese grandmother. Once a week her extended family would come and visit her for an hour and every week they’d exit carrying off everything in the room that wasn’t screwed down. The grandmother would be left on a bare mattress with no sheets, no covers, no bedside lamp, no water jug or glass, no cushions, food tray, nothing. It took the “nice” Canadian nursing staff weeks to get up the courage to confront the family and demand that they bring everything back. It was a strange way to thank their newly adopted country for giving the family matriarch such tender care.

  We’d also done a free fundraiser film for a downtown special needs school with a playground that was just a barren muddy yard behind a chain-link fence. Our short film encouraged people to donate monies to buy playground furniture and plantings. Money was indeed raised, furniture installed and shrubs, trees and flowers planted. The next day the stuff was gone. The very committed principal wouldn’t discuss the security videos that revealed that old Asian grannies from the neighbourhood had come after dark to liberate the hard-won goods.

  Nobody wanted to deal with them or knew how. The thinking behind it was literally so foreign and we’re so constrained by ideas and ideals of political correctness. My way of dealing with this kind of stuff has been to go and visit the country of origin of people who were driving me crazy. When I got to experience first-hand the very overcrowded, unequal and uncivil society that was the legacy of Mao’s Cultural Revolution then I had some compassion for those who behaved badly here. I knew I had to go there when after several years of trying to live beside an utterly irresponsible and indifferent Chinese neighbour — garbage everywhere, no house maintenance and numerous illegal units — I retreated one summer to my Canadian-spoiled-brat private island in Georgian Bay. En route I stopped at a marina in Parry Sound to
pick up some boat parts. When I saw that a group of giggling Chinese guys there had just rented an outboard and were heading out into Georgian Bay, my Georgian Bay, I suddenly felt sick to my stomach, I was so upset. Then I was upset with myself having such a racist reaction. I’d had numerous close Chinese Canadian friends, including some great girlfriends. It was a strange and unsettling emotional schizophrenia. I was dealing poorly with the experience of the Other and I was supposedly once an anthropologist.

  ***

  I created much of this building with my own hands. Its cupola leaks, a few doors stick, and various animals and bugs sneak in through unintentional gaps, but I did get a few things right. When I sit in the reading chair in the main room I can see through the washroom door to a tall, narrow window placed next to the glass shower stall. It gives out to a view of the island close behind where white pines crown a beautiful rock face rising out of a slim channel graced with water lilies and wild rice.

  This building has taught me many things — not just the role of architecture as shelter but also a damper of the world. In its back bedrooms the world is low-level white noise — a faint song of surf, a hiss of wind in the pines and the sirens of insects. Yet in the big front porch, a room of slim columns and floor to ceiling screens, the world roars. Waves break a dozen feet away, air bullies through the screens and the whole world stomps about. I now realize how a building can impoverish the senses and put distance between the self and the environment. It protects but also diminishes.

  A light bulb swings over a small table in a log cabin on an island where two photographers duel at the midnight hour. Outside, on all sides, the black Ottawa River is a night train racing for the St. Lawrence, the Gulf and a dark cold sea.