by Joyce Wayne
“My brother?” Vine pleaded. “Can I go back for my brother?”
“It’s too late,” the colonel replied. “Return to Nesvicz now, and you’re as good as dead.”
At that moment, I was only too relieved to flee the station and the wounded and dying Cossacks it was overflowing with, and I especially wanted to escape the colonel. Yet Colonel Zabotin’s words rang in my ears. I didn’t wish to be a shtetl Jew. I wanted to emerge from the confined world of religion. I wanted to be a person who discovered her own way, made her own decisions.
But I was afraid, and I never could understand why Zabotin let us go. Not then, not now. Why save us, when so many others were slaughtered? It all came down to luck or fate. No matter how tenaciously I struggled to find a definite answer, one that fit with a religious or even a political doctrine, it was impossible. I was let off the hook.
If I were to ask Nikolai now, as we sit cross-legged atop a picnic blanket below the shade of a horse chestnut tree in the Chernobyl forest, he might smile and claim that he fell in love with me the moment he saw me. “So young and unspoiled,” he might say. “I saved you because I loved you. Right from the beginning. Nothing has changed.” Or at least, I hope that’s what he would say.
On our voyage to the New World, I met an old lawyer from Minsk. He took an interest in me when he saw me praying, beseeching my God to let Vine live when he fell ill with typhus.
“What your boyfriend requires is fresh air and water and not to be huddled in blankets in your cabin deep below the sea. I’ve seen you with the boy. He’s very sick. He must breathe the sea air or the fever will burn his brains as sure as the Whites are setting fire to the villages of our people,” the lawyer said.
So I dragged Vine from the hull and onto the deck. The old lawyer gave me his great woollen coat to cover him. For two days Vine did not eat or drink. I sprinkled water on his cracked lips and put cool compresses behind his neck. The fever burned his cheeks red, and then orange splotches broke out on his skin. He was covered in them. I held him close, not caring if I caught the typhus from him, knowing I would do anything to save him.
Aside from the lawyer, we kept to ourselves on the ship, not speaking German or Polish. All we had for money were the rubles Vine kept in his pocket. If I hadn’t understood Vine before we left Nesvicz, I came to know him on the ship as I watched him fighting for his life, whispering that he wanted to survive to be together with me. If Vine died, I had no idea how I’d survive without him, a girl from the Pale entirely alone in a strange country.
Afterward, when Vine recovered and was sipping a glass of sweet tea, the lawyer found us again and began talking about Socialism. He knew a thing or two about the modern world. He thought it strange that I’d begged God to save Vine when, in the lawyer’s mind, God wasn’t concerned about either of us.
“What a waste of time,” he said. “You think He listens to you, shayna meydl?”
I didn’t answer, knowing that whatever I confessed would be wrong. And I still worried that if I took the name of the Lord in vain, an interfering Baba on the ship would give me the evil eye.
Insistent, the lawyer asked me if we were going to family in Canada. When I said all of our people were back in Nesvicz and that we would be alone in the New World, the old lawyer devoted more time to us.
During the long, lingering days of our passage across the Atlantic, Vine started to warm to the lawyer. He recounted the story of the terror in our village and how his brother had hidden in a ceramic stove. And when the lawyer asked Vine if the soldiers who came to his home were Whites or Reds, Vine answered: “They were the Red Cavalry.”
“Didn’t you wish to join them?” the lawyer asked Vine, incredulously.
“Yes and no,” Vine replied. “But there was Freda to consider. What they might do to her.” Vine evaded my eyes. “I did bring the doctor to the train station to help the wounded soldiers.”
“Don’t be timid,” the old lawyer taunted Vine. “Think big. You protected your girlfriend. In Canada you must stand up for yourself and for her.” He pinched my cheek with his right hand and patted Vine’s covered head with his left. “Do you want to be nobodies all your life? Afraid of everything?”
We both shook our heads. We didn’t wish to be nobodies, but we couldn’t imagine how we could be anybody in Canada. No one outside of our shtetl even knew our names.
“Sha, don’t worry, my little lovebirds,” the lawyer said, assuring us that in the New World we would learn English. “I’ll give you the names of my comrades in Toronto. It’s like Minsk, only Canadian. A modern city. You can make a difference there. You’ll meet people just like you; men and women who are trying to break free of the old ways. They’ll teach you everything you need to know and what you need to forget.”
And the lawyer from Minsk was as good as his word.
Chapter Four
1922
Toronto
During our first year in Toronto, Vine and I shared two rooms in a cold-water flat on the third floor of a lodging house on Beaconsfield, just off Queen Street in the city’s west end. Toronto was stretching out in every direction from Lake Ontario. The rich were moving farther away from the lake and from the burgeoning immigrant neighbourhoods where we landed. Most of the people on our street occupied large homes that had seen better days and were broken up into flats, one or two to each floor. The paint on the Victorian gingerbread trim that decorated the eaves was no longer white and the painted doors were streaked with mud.
The landlords lived on the main floor. Some were elderly ladies who’d been born in the master bedroom upstairs and depended on the rent to survive. A few crones offered room and board, dividing their dilapidated homes into more than ten tiny rooms. I was young and accustomed to living in a fine, clean house where the sofas were piled high with silk embroidered cushions and the carpets were soft and woolly and not threadbare. I was full of ambition for myself and for Vine, and viewed the landlords harshly, never considering that I might turn out to be much worse than any of them.
At the time, I believed Vine and I would be together forever; that we’d marry and have children. In my head, I made plans for our wedding: me dressed in white, standing underneath the hoopa as we pledged our souls to each other. It never crossed my mind that Vine might look for someone else or that he’d desert me after bringing me to Canada. I was his girl from the old country and I expected him to bring me with him wherever he went. It felt like being born again.
Toronto was a huge net, catching all of us—those who ran from the barrel of a gun or those who left in search of wealth and security in a distant land. For Vine and me, it would be impossible to forget the Red Army colonel’s silver pistol pointed at Vine’s temple, or the colonel’s amused looks aimed at me. But for all that terror, the colonel had also lit a fire in Vine’s belly. I felt the same way and I was determined to work hard to become the person Vine wished me to be, whoever that might be. One thing I knew for certain was I would be entirely different from my mama, more like a person with Papa’s brains and his eagerness to be modern. The old country seemed claustrophobic, while this one felt wide open with thousands of possibilities for a girl like me.
Our landlady, Mrs. Meretsky, was a Communist Party member who’d emigrated from Vilnius at the turn of the century. She was an old friend of the Minsk lawyer. He’d provided us with her address when we parted ways at the pier in Halifax.
“We should rent this flat,” I said to Vine when Mrs. Meretsky showed us the two rooms with peeling paint and broken furniture. “You’ll paint the walls a bright yellow, and I’ll make curtains.”
Vine was skeptical. He didn’t care for the other tenants. They weren’t Jewish and the landlady didn’t keep kosher.
“I thought we agreed with the lawyer from Minsk,” I reminded him. “We must be open-minded and try new things.”
Reluctantly, Vine agreed to rent the flat. He coughed up his first breakfast of bacon and eggs that our landlady served, but I didn’t.
I enjoyed the new taste of the salty, smoked bacon on my tongue and the aromatic scent of coffee wafting through the kitchen. I drank my coffee with cream and I didn’t gag as Vine did, even though I’d never before mixed milk with meat.
“Next thing you know, you’ll be eating treif in restaurants,” Vine said, not convinced that my open-mindedness was to his liking.
“Why not?”
Mrs. Meretsky’s husband was a layabout and a shiker, a drunk, who stirred himself only to take the tram eastward across town to Greenwood Racetrack. After a few weeks on Beaconsfield, I realized how dependent she was on our rent and how her husband often squandered it on the horses before she could buy groceries. A few times there was only dry toast for breakfast.
Right from the beginning I knew I never wanted to be in Mrs. Meretsky’s position, with a lazy, evil-minded husband who used her without thinking twice about it. I was dependent on Vine, yes, for a time, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t judge people and situations on my own. I admired the courage Vine had shown in Nesvicz, but I expected him to pay a great deal of attention to me and not to ignore me as Mrs. Meretsky’s husband ignored her.
When Vine held me in his arms, his kisses were passionate. I’d never kissed a man before, but I fell in with his advances. I grew ready for him to take me if that was what he wanted, but he didn’t need me, not in that complete way.
Our rooms weren’t far from Kensington Market, where most people spoke Yiddish and kept kosher. Vine found a job slaughtering chickens in the butcher shop where the shoichet blessed the meat to make it kosher. On warm days, I walked over to meet him at the shop when his workday came to a close. Most of us in the market were greenhorns and the local adolescent boys who played road hockey in the alleys beside the storefronts taunted us for our old-country garb and our timidity when we walked by with eyes pointed downward.
“Greenhorn,” they shouted, in their gruff Canadian voices, throwing shards of glass at us. I was frightened of them and so was Vine, although he tried to show his courage by not avoiding them and finding another route. The boys were known to beat up new immigrants.
“Remember the Red Army colonel asking me if I wanted to be a shtetl Jew my entire life?” he inquired.
I remembered. I didn’t wish to appear afraid either. Every day it was becoming easier to forget the way we’d lived in Nesvicz, immersed in the day’s schedule of prayers and evocations to a God who now appeared to have forgotten about us.
“The colonel was talking to me, too,” I said. “He looked straight into my eyes.”
“No, he was talking to me.” Vine never liked it when I put myself on the same level as him.
“I don’t want to be that girl anymore,” I told him. “But I can’t figure out how to be a person here in Canada.”
“We can learn, we can change,” he said. “Become real Canadians.”
And so I tried, but it turned out to be more difficult than I’d imagined. If I became more of a Canadian perhaps Vine would find me more desirable. During our first months in Toronto, we’d stroll uptown searching for real Canadians, not the ones living in the market or along Queen Street. We walked past the big university and the government buildings and up into the proper neighbourhoods where families resided in their own brick homes, not in shabby flats.
No one called us names or threw glass at us, but they never met our eyes or came close. Not once. When I stood directly in front of an exquisitely dressed woman and her two fair-haired daughters, rather than face me, the woman turned the corner as if I might contaminate her.
“She won’t look me straight in the eye,” I said to Vine.
Vine stroked his long beard. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to shave it off, even though it made him look like he’d walked off the boat that morning. He answered, “These fine people, with their good manners and their lofty voices, they’ll never accept us. They’ll never let us in. We must try to find others who will accept us. We should consider what the Minsk lawyer advised, to talk to Mrs. Meretsky. She could introduce us to the right people. Talk to her, Freda. See if she will take you under her wing. She can instruct you. Show you how to act and what to look like.”
“You mean to act like Communists?” I asked. “That’s who she gathers in her parlour for meetings. They’re Reds, the same people who broke into our homes, who threatened us. They want to topple the government and set up the same system as in Russia. Is that what we came to Canada for?”
Vine didn’t answer me, but the next night, he sat on the stairwell landing intently listening to Mrs. Meretsky and the comrades talk about revolution. Before long, he never missed a meeting, and since his English was improving more quickly than mine, he gave me his interpretations of their speeches once they departed.
I did as I was told. After the meetings adjourned, I offered to help Mrs. Meretsky with the cleanup. All the comrades smoked, the women too, and the ashtrays were overflowing by the end of the night. Together we rinsed out the coffee cups, swept the remaining crumbs of strudel into the wastebasket and washed the kitchen floor so the house no longer smelled of tobacco.
“You could join our meetings,” Mrs. Merestsky coaxed. “No need to hover in the stairwell.”
I couldn’t muster up the courage to sit in the parlour with the comrades. “Not yet,” I whispered in Yiddish. “My English, I can’t speak.”
She was a kind woman with a generous heart. “Of course you can speak! We’ll practice, you and I. You’ll learn. Everyone does. Do you think I could speak English when my parents brought me over? You’re smart and you’re pretty. The Party could use someone like you.”
In our rooms, Vine and I forced ourselves to speak English. I was cooped up on the third floor on Beaconsfield when Vine was working, so I needed to practice my English more than he did. I stacked library books under our three-legged table to keep it steady, replacing an unread book with a read one every few days. Mrs. Meretsky called me down to her kitchen in the afternoons, to drill me on what I’d learned from the library books. She was a gifted teacher, helping me to understand the nuance of the words. We started with simple picture books for children and later moved onto primers about the history of Canada, and eventually pamphlets by V.I. Lenin, who my landlady revered more than anyone else.
Vine slept on an army cot in the makeshift kitchen, giving me the single bed beside the window in the tiny bedroom. I’d keep the kitchen tidy for him, polishing the aluminum tea kettle that I placed on the gas ring to boil water for tea. Back home, we called a kettle a tshaynick. “Hak mir nit keyn tshaynick,” my mama cried when I was annoying her, begging for another slice of buttered black bread. In English it meant “Don’t bang the kettle at me,” which, like most things in translation, sounded absurd.
In Toronto, I was a girl in translation. Awkward but imbued with potential usefulness: like a plain metal tshaynick. I began to sit beside Vine during the comrades’ cell meetings, listening to the speakers rise, one after another, explaining why revolution was necessary. Lenin was their hero. Without his insistence, the Revolution would not have been successful, they said once or twice at every meeting.
The comrades shared news from the Soviet Union, a letter from Uncle Yosel, another from Auntie Faiyge. Everyone back home was delighted with how they were prospering. In the new Russia, Jews were included in everything, members of the Central Committee, and at the highest level of the military. There were Jewish generals in the Red Army, something I found almost unimaginable, but the comrades could name them, officer by officer. For the first time in my life, I felt enlightened, as if what I knew about the changes in Russia counted.
When we were invited by Mrs. Meretsky’s comrades to join the Party, both Vine and I were flattered. If wealthy, established Canadians didn’t want us, the comrades did. Before long we began to throw off our old country ways. Vine shaved his beard and cut off the long, straggly ringlets that had framed his face since childhood.
Mrs. Merestsky took me shopping on Spadina, where th
e garment factories were open day and into the night. She had friends among the foremen, some of whom were organizing for the Party. She ordered two dresses cut for me, one yellow and one navy. “Modest,” Mrs. Merestsky ordered. “She just arrived from the old country.” The girls sitting at the machines whispered about me and giggled. I was wearing the same black skirt I’d worn when we boarded the boat. Peaking out front under my skirt were scuffed brown boots with torn laces, and on my head was a paisley kerchief tied tight under the bun at the back of my neck.
“Don’t pay attention to them,” Mrs. Meretsky said. “Pay attention to me.”
She’d taken a shine to me, as Vine hoped she would. She had no children of her own and spent her days cooking meals for her lodgers, washing sheets and towels by hand and then hanging them out to dry on the line in the back garden. There were no servants as my mother had in Nesvicz and my landlady’s life was harder than ours was back home. Yet she devoted whatever spare minute she had to the Party, calling the comrades from the phone mounted on the kitchen wall, hogging the party line and only hanging up when a neighbour on the same line threatened to report her to the telephone operators.
At first, I was curious where her husband went each day, before the track opened. He was rarely home even in the mornings when I awoke, and Mrs. Merestsky came and went as she pleased, never bothering to cover her head when she left the house. I admired her independence while convincing myself that a husband like hers was worse than no husband at all.
Inside the Pale, Jewish women were Orthodox and that meant covering your head. My mother did, keeping only a tiny fringe of dark hair showing under her scarf. She kept covered in front of everyone except her husband. Mama and I visited the mikvah, the ritual bath next to the synagogue, once a month to purify our bodies after menstruating. There might have been mikvahs in Toronto, but I didn’t circulate with the devout women who frequented them and Mrs. Meretsky, as far as I knew, wasn’t interested. For certain, the comrades would have laughed at me if I’d asked about a mikvah. None of the old traditions mattered to the modern Jews who befriended me. Party members ate pork sausages in front of the Minsk synagogue in Kensington Market on Yom Kippur. They taunted the Orthodox believers and imitated their fussy old country ways.
