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 the 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.

I was among those who accompanied the protesters to the Minsk on High Holy Days during my first year in the Party. At first I hung back, not touching the pork sausage. Not in front of the synagogue, but soon I joined in. Worshippers standing on the steps outside the front door shouted down to us, calling us bad names. “Momzers, bastards,” they cursed, shaking their fists at us. The comrades shouted back, promising the day would come when the workers revolted and the temples would be boarded up forever. It was mayhem. Everyone was screaming at each other, until a comrade in a black cape pulled the trigger on his pistol. “Religion is the opiate of the people,” he declared as the excited comrades sang “The Internationale,” raising the red flag high above our heads, while throwing pigs’ feet at the Orthodox Jews.

Two policemen were sitting on enormous horses, watching us, doing nothing. “Leave the Yids alone,” I heard one shout to the other. “Let them murder each other.” They were snickering at us. This dispute was a joke to them. It was supposed to be better in Canada. Tall men riding horses were meant to protect everyone, even immigrants, even Jews. But it wasn’t better. The excitement back in Russia about the new society the people were building felt tangible to me. The comrades described it in detail. In Canada only the Party took our side and made us feel equal.

The early days in the Party were thrilling. More like a rollicking costume ball than a political movement. After my sheltered upbringing, I was startled by the absence of rules concerning modesty and proper feminine behaviour. At the Canadian National Exhibition fairground, I watched a girl, no older than me, being shot out of cannon and landing on a net beside the grandstand. The audience gasped in disbelief and then applauded loudly when she stood up to take her bow. I believed, at that moment, that I, too, could get away with anything, even though I was only fifteen.

Vine was more cautious. On Labour Day, I convinced him to return to the CNE with me, but he wasn’t about to pay the five-cent admission to ride the Ferris wheel.

“Come on, let’s try,” I was speaking English more often.

“Communists have no time for silly things,” he said sternly when a comrade from Mrs. Meretsky’s cell group sidled up next to me.

“I’ll go with you, Freda,” he offered.

“Come, you too, Vine. I can’t go without you.” I reached out my hand but he pushed it away.

Vine held his ground, standing beside the giant wheel as I waved to him from the top. The young man next to me had wavy black hair and spoke without an accent. His face was clean shaven and he wore black and white shoes, not boots. His name was Leonard, but he insisted I call him Lenny. As we rose and fell with the movement of the Ferris wheel, he placed his arm around me, holding me tighter each revolution. He was the second man to touch me.

When the ride was nearing an end, he turned to me and asked, “Would you let me take you out? We all meet at a speakeasy on King Street not far from the exhibition grounds. Just on the other side of the tracks.”

I had no idea what a speakeasy was.

“It opens after hours,” he explained. “The police turn a blind eye. Nothing bad will happen to you, trust me. I could pick you up at Mrs. Meretsky’s around ten tonight.”

The Ferris wheel was slowing down. We were about to disembark when I agreed. “Sure, ten o’clock.”

I discovered that the Canadian-born comrades were not as serious as those of us who’d come over by boat to start a new life. They took having fun as a given, not as a transgression of the rules. Mrs. Merestsky encouraged me to spend evenings with Leonard whenever he called.

“Don’t you like Vine?” I asked her.

“He’s not for you,” was all she said.

I took to dancing the Charleston in a short, flimsy dress at a speakeasy down along a back alley off Spadina Avenue below King Street. It was Prohibition in Canada, and I felt like a fairgrounds’ daredevil, dancing long after midnight with comrades older than me. I quickly lost interest in Lenny, finding men who were more prominent in the Party, and offered to buy my drinks.

Usually Vine eschewed the speakeasies, but from time to time, he’d rush in, sit down at the bar and order a shot of rye whisky. He never offered to buy me a drink. I asked him if he thought our brothers and sisters back home in the Pale were having as much fun as we were.

“Don’t joke. It’s been over a year since anyone has seen my brother Yitzhak,” he replied. “Mama says the Red Army colonel took Yitzhak into the cavalry and she doesn’t know if he’s dead or alive.”

I danced away from him, wiggling my hips in time with the piano player, crossing the speakeasy’s rough-hewn floor to grab another soda. The floor was littered with empty cigarette packages and chewing gum wrappers. No one cared if I was underage. I was young, unattached and beautiful. A comrade from the Central Committee pushed a drink toward me. It was the first time I tasted their Canadian whisky, and I spat it out. A woman from the Party looked at me disapprovingly.

“Meydele, listen to me young girl,” she said. “Time to grow up. You must learn to drink like a man if you want to be a good Party member.” She shoved another glass of the golden liquid before me. “Try again,” she coaxed.

Over time, I came to relish my new-found liberties. I was free of the Talmudic rules that my family and all others in Nesvicz imposed upon me. What surprised me was how easy it was to forget who I once was, and where I came from. All the ancient observances began to appear pathetic, like a discarded teddy bear after a child has matured to adolescence.

As the lawyer from Minsk promised, I started to believe that I could be somebody in Canada and that the comrades were the only ones who could turn me into the intoxicating woman I now wished to be. There were young women in the Party who I came to emulate. They spoke up at meetings, letting their strong opinions be heard. Soon I would have the nerve to speak up too, and to argue for what I believed. Until then, what I desired most was to speak without an accent and to dress without one, too. If I could look like an independent woman, I believed I could be one.

Before long, I depended on the comrades for everything. If they decreed that I should eat pork in front of the synagogue, I did. If they said I should dress in shorter skirts and remove my shawl, I did that too. If they said, I should apply pink rouge to my cheeks and cherry lipstick to my mouth, I did as I was told and repeated the revolutionary slogans I knew they wanted to hear. They became my family, when I had no other.

It was only in the early hours of the morning, alone in my room that I yearned to retain a little of myself apart from the Party. After a night of dancing and drinking, I found I couldn’t settle down. When I thought about Mama and Papa, I cried silent tears. How disappointed Papa would be if he knew how I’d spent the night drinking and dancing. And Mama. She would weep and ask me why I was turning out to be a bad girl, not at all like the child she’d raised to be an obedient, modest wife and a good example to my children.

In truth, I was a little shocked at how loose the Party women were. One night they went home with one comrade, and the next night, with another man. Some lived in large houses that they called communes where couples were together for only one night. I wasn’t certain I could be like them, no matter how politically educated I became. I wasn’t even certain I wanted to be like them, although taking risks felt wonderful.

Vine, on the other hand, was unconcerned about Party romances. He was worried about whether his brother could survive riding with the Cossacks, and even admitted that his father’s letters were not nearly as flattering to the new order as the Canadians comrades’ proclamations. Why wouldn’t the Red Cavalry officer, the one who’d let us escape, who’d practically ordered us to leave Nesvicz, not allow Yitzhak to return home after completing his service? Was it up to the colonel’s discretion to release the boy, or was it an edict of the politburo to keep young men from the Pale in the military once they’d trapped them? I didn’t wish to exchange one brutal regime for another, but I kept quiet, not willing to take the chance of antagonizing the comrades with my doubts or putting my new-found life in jeopardy.