Or her father, before he died. Fact was, I hadn’t, and now that Bessie had brought it up, it took on a new urgency.
I became aware of Pearl smiling at me again.
“This is taking forever. I’m gonna take the stairs.”
“Good idea,”she said, just to be completely maddening, and followed me.
When we reached the ground floor, I said, “Goodbye, Pearl,” and hurried away before there was another opportunity for interaction.
Ari was sitting at a small table in the atrium, clutching a cup in one hand. The day had started cool but Baycrest was always overheated and I could tell he was suffering for it, because he clawed at the collar of his turtleneck. He was tapping a thick-soled boot against the base of the table, probably from too much caffeine. He’d become a serious addict ever since he’d moved to Montreal and decided that coffee served in bowls was a sign of urban sophistication. In Toronto, where we were sensible enough to know that coffee wasn’t soup, he had to settle for one of those café whatchamahoozits, topped with nutmeg or chocolate sprinkles or God knows what. Whatever happened to a simple cuppa joe made with a Melita filter?
He stood up and hugged me, towering at six feet. He thrust a paper bag into my hands. “I lied to Grandma. I’d already gotten the bagels. You can take them back to your room.”
“Thanks,” I said, and sat at the table with him. “How’s your research coming along?”
“Pretty good, actually. You know that grant application I told you about? It came through yesterday, so, guess what? I’m going to St-Tropez to try to find Bon Esprit, the house Emma lived in there.”
“You are? When?”
“In a few weeks, so it doesn’t give me much time to get ready. I found some journal references this morning, but I still need your help researching Goldman’s years in France. I didn’t want to bother you when you were moving, but I know you found a box of your old letters. I remember a few years ago you said there were some letters that Goldman sent to Aunt Lil. Can we take a look in your locker and see if you can find them?”
“There’s no point; I gave them away.”
He dropped his jaw for dramatic effect.
“Don’t look at me like that. I didn’t know you’d be doing this research. And it’s not like I gave them to a passing stranger. A few years ago, I read they were starting an archive in California, so I donated Lil’s letters.”
“I know those archives; they’re at Berkeley.”
“Then you should be able to get a hold of copies if you want. That’s the whole point of the archives.”
“I know...” he said. “I’ve been meaning to call them. I suppose I should get on that this aft.”
“Don’t despair. I think I have something that might help: letters your aunt Lil sent me when I was in prison. Emma was in France for part of the time I was locked up, and I think Lil mentions her and that house. Also, I still remember a few things my sister told me when she visited. When you’re in prison, news from the outside world sticks with you. Also, Lil once went to work for Emma in France.”
“I never knew that.”
“She made the trip in secret. Our family thought she was in Montreal on a medical internship.”
I walked back to The Terrace, leaving Ari to his visit with Bessie, and went down to my storage locker. While I did, an idea formed, and I turned it over and over. It was one I’d long ago given up on, but today’s events had given it new life.
I searched for the letters from Lil, but I didn’t need to find them to recall the words. A lot from those prison days had stuck with me, and not just news. Things I wished I could forget but couldn’t. The curse of a photographic memory was that I saw everything, and closing my eyes only made the image glare brighter.
The orange sunset
To trace the moment, the very first moment when my life was set upon a different course, that was impossible. Too many factors, too many decisions, too much being determined by whim and personality and random untraceable influence. Still, if I tried to pick a little, like dragging a thumbnail across a roll of tape, I could snag a beginning of sorts, even if it wasn’t really the beginning, even if it was only the remnant of a previous tear that had settled back and now clung to the rest of a sticky, tightly wound past.
There was a day that I remembered, a day when Lil’s fascination with Emma Goldman began, that set in motion a chain of events that would affect us all. It was in November of 1926, and I was only ten. I remembered that day for two reasons, and the first had nothing to do with Emma.
The day started with all of us at the kitchen table, as it always did. We were a family who sat and ate breakfast together no matter what, because other things—jobs, the store, political meetings—might interfere and separate us for lunch or supper.
My parents were avid readers of the morning newspaper. One newspaper, the Toronto Mail and Empire, they read to keep track of their class enemies. Others, they read because of political interest or because the writers spoke to our community. The communist weekly Vochenblatt and the daily Yidisher Zshurnal—the Hebrew Journal—were in this category, though I believe they also read these two to see who was the latest person to be denounced. The Yiddish press was vicious and retributive and heaven help you if you were on the other side of their graces. Reading those papers satisfied a ghoulish fascination: who would be torn to shreds this week? Whose character would be assassinated ruthlessly? My parents read these denunciations, clucked, and shook their heads, but they kept going back for more.
Our father, Saul Wolfman, had emigrated, along with his parents, from Russia. They settled in the Ward, the neighbourhood in Toronto mainly populated by Jewish immigrants, bordered by College and Queen on the north and south, and Yonge and University on the east and west. Our mother was born in New Liskeard, of all places: a small, bilingual farming community near the Quebec border in northeastern Ontario, where her Galician peasant parents had settled. There, isolated from any other Jews, they eked out a livelihood. But farm life proved difficult, and in 1908, after too many harsh winters, they moved to Toronto, where they opened a second-hand clothing store with money borrowed from a cousin.
My parents’ families attended different synagogues—in those days they were organized along ethnic lines—but Ma and Pop met at a secular community dance one weekend. The next year, they married at the Holy Blossom Temple, which upset their families, but it upset them equally, which was the important thing. By 1910, the Holy Blossom had become notorious for its more liberal congregants, some of whom didn’t even wear head coverings when they prayed.
Maybe it was there my parents first became interested in politics. Not that they needed the Holy Blossom. If a person was working class in Toronto in the early 1900s, the rising proletarian movement in Russia was an irresistible draw to one of the city’s numerous labour organizations. My parents chose the Arbeiter Ring—the Workmen’s Circle, a local organization of mostly Jewish workers in the shmata trade. Much later, in ’27, they joined a more left-leaning faction that broke off and became known as the Labour League. By that time, the Russian Revolution had fired their imagination, and, choosing from an ever-lengthening menu on the spectrum of the political left, my parents identified themselves with the Russian Mensheviks, though they were proud to remain officially unaffiliated.
We grew up with a steady diet of Menshevik ideology and promotion of Labour League activities. I use the word diet in the sense of a regimen, or the modern American sense that connotes near starvation with nutritional value coming a distant second. Political thought in the Wolfman family was doled out in spare but regular allotments at the table, like dessert. To us children, it was an uninteresting dessert, much like stewed prunes or an apple. None of us joined the Labour League, much to our parents’ chagrin. Bessie was not interested in politics in any way, Lil became involved with an anarchist branch of the Workmen’s Circle, and me? Well, I just got in trouble and went to jail.