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"The Basketball Game" is a graphic novel adaptation of the award-winning National Film Board of Canada animated short of the same name – intended for audiences aged 12 years and up. It's a poignant tale of the power of community as a means to rise above hatred and bigotry. In the end, as is recognized by the kids playing the basketball game, we're all in this together.

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Tag: Cyril Leonoff

Discovering my 99% family

Discovering my 99% family

The author’s one photograph of her great-grandmother, Betty Brotman, “stiff-necked and corseted, with her dark hair combed tightly across her head.” (photo from Shula Klinger)

I have been researching my family history for many years, on and off. Much of my research has been online, using resources like JewishGen, the internet database of Jewish genealogical records. I have also found a home at Czernowitz-L, an email group hosted by Cornell University for people whose families come from what is now the Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi. Once known as “Jerusalem on the Prut,” Czernowitz – as it is still called by those who recall its Habsburg past – was once home to 50,000 Jews. Less than a third of this number survived the war.

Like many third-generation Czernowitzers, I write messages to Czernowitz-L in the hope that someone, somewhere, will remember hearing my family name and be able to point me in the direction of a lost relative. Very often, we hear nothing, but once in a blue moon, we strike gold.

That’s what happened when I sent out an email asking list members if they knew of the family name Brotman. I had just received an image of my grandmother’s birth certificate from Czernowitz in 1902, which showed that Regina Picker’s mother, Betty, had been born a Brotman.

Shortly after I shared this information, I received an email from a lady in Portland, letting me know that she had married into the Brotman family in Oregon. She asked me if I would be interested in contacting one of her in-laws, whose mother had been a Brotman. He was very well-informed, she said. A conversation with him might yield some results. Not knowing that I lived here in Vancouver, she told me that Cyril Leonoff here. Naturally, I was thrilled and eager to talk to him as soon as I could.

Having corresponded with Cyril’s daughter, Anita, for awhile, we set a date and I drove over to meet them both. My children were very excited to find out if this man was a relative. I fielded the same question from them over and over again: “Are we 100% for sure, for sure related to him, Mommy? Or just 99%, do you think?”

On arriving at the Leonoff home, I was greeted by Anita. She showed us into the house, where a beautiful table had been set with fresh fruit and homemade poppy seed cake. Anita showed the children where to find some toy ships and I brought out my family photograph: my one photograph of my great-grandmother, Betty Brotman, stiff-necked and corseted, with her dark hair combed tightly across her head. Betty Brotman, who passed away at a young age, leaving her husband and children behind to survive the fall of the Habsburg Empire and the devastation of two world wars. But, back to the present.

Cyril asked me about the photo. I was eager to ask him a host of questions. Was I about to discover something extraordinary? Would I learn, after almost 20 years in Canada, that I had been living a few miles away from a relative, all this time? And after growing up in England, completely isolated from my extended family, was this man one of my elders? What did he know? What could he tell me? What did he remember of his people and their original home in Europe?

I watched his face as he calmly – and silently – looked at my photo. I tried to guess at what he was thinking. He suggested that we sit for tea before looking at his records upstairs. I accepted, glad of the tea, but thinking that this was a wonderful opportunity to practise mindfulness. Peace. Serenity in the face of burning curiosity and decades of longing for grandparents that I could talk to, family members who were able to tell me about their journeys, their struggles, their triumphs.

We sat quietly and poured tea while I tried not to boil over myself. We drank our tea and talked about the delicious poppy seed cake, which Anita’s daughter had made. And then Cyril asked me, “What are you looking for? What brings you here?”

His gaze was direct, his voice was polite. I told him the truth: I have no story, and I need one. My family was fractured, over and over, between Czernowitz, Cairo, Haifa and London. What little I do know of our history was told to me by an unreliable witness. A witness who had not wanted me, or anyone else, to find other, more reliable witnesses. A man who went to great lengths to separate his children from their story, or anyone that might refute his own accounts. A man who may have survived the war – and wars – physically, but who continued to fight their battles every day of his life, until he died. And, when he did die and I was finally able to say, rest in peace, it was truly the only peace he had ever had. He was traumatized, barely existing, unable to communicate or listen, to tell the whole truth or make any kind of authentic connection with another human being. My father, who I spent a lifetime trying to love, but who would never let me.

Cyril is 10 years older than my father was when he died. His intelligent gaze was steady and he listened quietly when I answered his questions. Difficult questions whose answers may well have been a lot longer than he had anticipated.

He didn’t respond directly, but we finished our tea slowly and he asked me up to his library. He said he had a book to show me. We climbed the stairs and entered a room with a high ceiling, filled with books. It reminded me of the shelves of my own family home, now gone. My father’s books.

Cyril walked over to a shelf by the window and removed a small volume of poetry. He opened it on a table and said, “I think you’ll want to see this.”

“This” was the inside cover of an old book inscribed in sepia copperplate. “Betty Brotman.”

“May I take a photograph of it?” I asked, after a few seconds, feeling a little superficial but not knowing where to put my happiness or my hands, other than on a camera.

“Yes,” said Cyril, so I did.

When the emotion had subsided and reason returned, I considered the facts: Cyril’s Betty may not be my great-grandmother, but still: there have been not one but three women named Betty in my family and the first was Betty Brotman. It isn’t impossible that his Brotmans were cousins to mine. It’s tenuous but, still, it’s a trace. A faint trace that proves we exist. That we left our mark on the world somewhere. That I am still connected to my people, even with my father’s concerted efforts to keep us all apart.

Cyril brought me to another room, where he kept his family records. He laid out a map showing where his family had come from. Indeed, our families were from nearby cities, again suggesting a possible link. He showed me his work on the history of Jewish farmers in Canada, where his branch of the Brotman family had homesteaded in 1889, and gave me some of his books to read. I thought about taking notes but was too moved to multitask. Simply sitting down with a man who might be a member of my family, who cared so deeply about his roots and was so proud of his family’s achievements, was overwhelming. He had done his own research and he had written it down – he had not hidden from it, or excised the story from memory. He is devoted to talking about and preserving it, just as I am.

And not only that, he wanted to talk to me, and he wanted to listen. To find out what I knew that might prove to be an irrefutable link between our families. He was curious; wanted names, dates, places.

“How old are you?” he asked me.

“Forty-four,” I replied, and cringed, feeling self-conscious. There was a pause.

“That old, eh?” he said, sounding shocked. Then he smiled – with his bright blue, 90-year-old eyes.

We looked around the room at framed photos and other artifacts of his family’s past. His record was abundant, both in photographs and documents. He pointed out a carved wooden picture frame that had been made by one of his relatives. I told him that my great-grandfather and my uncle were both carvers, that our family had worked in the lumber industry in Czernowitz. That our family had worked with trees for generations, in one way or another – whether as lumber, through sculpture or carpentry, or tree-planting in Israel in the 1940s. Another connection. Maybe.

image - The author’s grandmother’s birth certificate from Czernowitz in 1902, which shows that Regina Picker’s mother, Betty (“Betti”), had been born a Brotman (“Brutmann”). It also shows that Regina’s father, Betty’s husband, Simon Picker, was a carpenter
The author’s grandmother’s birth certificate from Czernowitz in 1902, which shows that Regina Picker’s mother, Betty (“Betti”), had been born a Brotman (“Brutmann”). It also shows that Regina’s father, Betty’s husband, Simon Picker, was a carpenter. (image from Shula Klinger)

When it was time to go, my older son asked me again. “Is he a relation? Is he ours?” I told him, “Very possibly.” And, again, he wanted to know the percentage probability. “Ninety-nine percent, then,” Benjamin decided.

It was hard to leave. After so many years, I wanted to stay until I dealt with that niggling one percent of doubt. I wanted to be sure. I had to know.

I don’t know how much of Cyril’s story is really my story, which he has taken such pains to write down. I don’t know if his Betty knew my Betty, if they were cousins, second cousins, or even more remotely related than that – or not at all. And I may never find out.

But, then again, even if we are just an appendix to his main narrative, I had a chance to read between the lines. To meet the Leonoffs, to eat with them and to ask questions about our fractured family stories. Because what matters is that we tried to knit those fractures together, to heal the tremendous wounds created by the past and the efforts made by those who refused – or were unable – to heal them on their own.

Months later, my children still talk about “our 99% relative.” They are proud to have an elder in Vancouver and they mention Cyril regularly. I love to hear them talk about him with affection and respect.

When it comes to family, I have discovered that 8- and 4-year-olds aren’t too worried about evidence. They really don’t care about that missing one percent. And now, as my children are also my teachers, neither do I.

Shula Klinger is an author, illustrator and journalist living in North Vancouver. This article is written with grateful thanks to Anita and Cyril Leonoff.

Format ImagePosted on December 4, 2015December 3, 2015Author Shula KlingerCategories LocalTags Brotman, Cyril Leonoff, Czernowitz, genealogy

JI writers show off their stuff

There are some very talented writers who contribute to the Jewish Independent, so it’s not surprising that many of them have been published elsewhere. Here are brief reviews of six books that feature contributions from, or are authored by, freelancers who have written for the JI at some point.

***

Living Legacies: A Collection of Writing by Contemporary Canadian Jewish Women, Volume 3 (PK Press, 2011), edited by Liz Pearl, comprises essays from more than 35 women, including at least two who have contributed to the JI – Shoshana Litman (Victoria) and Ricki Segal (Winnipeg) – as well as three other British Columbians: Shelley Halpern Evans, Dale Adams Segal and Helen Waldstein Wilkes. In this most recent volume, Pearl has once again collected from women across the country stories that create connections, both spiritual and human.

image - Living Legacies cover
Living Legacies Vol. III was released in 2011.

In writing about her family and the role that food plays in their expression of love, for example, Evans touches upon rituals that are important to secular and religious Jewish life; the way in which a recipe passed down from a grandmother or the care that a parent or a spouse puts into making a meal brings family and friends closer. Litman’s Shabbat dinner at a friend’s home in Brooklyn offers her “[h]ints of heaven,” and also reconnects her to a woman she knew from Vancouver – these “divine encounters” not only make Litman “feel encouraged and uplifted,” but also, she writes, “The thin veil that separates me from others disappears, like overcast skies swept clean by spring winds to reveal the warm sunlight that is always there.”

In writing about how she’s been composing prayers all her life, despite her non-religious upbringing, Dale Adams Segal notes that she has “paddl[ed] down many rivers of growing up: of being married and divorced and married again, of birthing children and witnessing the birth of a granddaughter, of finding those whom I would love and losing those whom I have loved…. I share with you that this practice of writing prayer has restored me to life again and again….” And Ricki Segal pays tribute to her mother, who at the time of writing was suffering from dementia, in sharing some of what she has learned from her mother about love, attentiveness, tenacity, forgiveness and other important facets of life.

Wilkes’ essay is about her personal journey, from being made to feel ashamed about being Jewish by antisemitic classmates when she was a child to “com[ing] home” when she heard the Barchu: “I began to weep,” she writes. “Something deep inside me had been touched, and I knew that I had indeed come home.” She now sees Jewishness as a bridge that helps her “see aging as a purposeful process. Hopefully, the passing years will be accompanied by a growing measure of wisdom. If this means that I can be a role model to my children and grandchildren, then I will be blessed indeed.”

Role models would describe all of the contributors to this and previous volumes of Living Legacies – and this fact offers reassurance that there are many more women (men and children) who would also fit that bill.

***

Canada’s Jews: In Time, Space and Spirit, edited by Concordia University’s Prof. Ira Robinson, was published by Academic Studies Press in 2013. It is part of the Jews in Space and Time series which, according to ASP’s website, “brings together some of the best scholars in their respective fields to explore the histories of Jewish communities in different geographical areas and historical eras, deepening our understanding of Jews and the relationships that they forged within their host countries.”

image - Canada's Jews cover
Canada’s Jews “brings together some of the best scholars in their respective fields.”

Canada’s Jews is special for several reasons, including its dedication to two men who for a part of their lives called Vancouver home and contributed to several local institutions, including the JI’s forerunner, the Jewish Western Bulletin: David Rome (1910-1996) and Abraham Arnold (1922-2011). These men, as Robinson notes, also “broke new ground in the field of Canadian Jewish studies.”

For Canada’s Jews, Robinson has amassed almost everyone who is currently attempting to continue Rome’s and Arnold’s legacy. Local contributors are Jewish Historical Society of British Columbia historian emeritus Cyril Leonoff, who co-wrote the chapter on Vancouver with me; University of British Columbia Prof. Alex Hart, who contributed an extensive essay on Jews in English literature; and UBC Prof. Richard Menkis, who wrote two chapters, a revised version of a previous article on Reform Judaism in Canada, and a comprehensive look at Conservative Judaism, as well as Reconstructionism and Renewal.

In the preface, Robinson notes that Canada’s Jews “will be of interest to scholars, students and readers of Canadian and Jewish studies,” however, the essays are, on the whole, very accessible and most people will find something to engage them.

The book has three parts: the first spans the history of Canadian Jews from the mid-1700s to after the Second World War; the second looks at contemporary Canada, beginning with a couple of chapters on general demographics and politics, followed by chapters on Jewish communities across the country; and the third comprises chapters on Judaism, Yiddish, literature and art, with the volume’s concluding chapter being a detailed inventory of the state of Jewish studies in Canada and recommendations for how the field might expand.

Canada’s Jews is full of factoids that can be gleaned on a quick reading. For example, “While almost all Canadian Jews in 1945 were Ashkenazi, today close to 20% have Sephardi roots” (Franklin Bialystock); Regina’s Jewish population in 2001 was 720, “about the same as it had been since 1951” (Debby Shoctor); and 2005 calculations show the average household size for the Jewish community as a whole in Greater Montreal to be 3.46, compared to that of the Satmar/Belz/Skver, 5.69; Lubavitch, 5.45; and Tosh, 6.37 (William Shaffir).

Because of how data are collected and the fact that such essay collections take a long time to put together, hunters for current statistics will be frustrated, as many of the survey and census figures are almost 10 or more years old. As well, the chapters on specific cities’ communities are quite brief in some cases and, while they provide a general overview and raise some issues for future research most – including the chapter I co-wrote – do not delve into any analysis, for example, of issues such as the effects of immigration on communal participation and/or fundraising. Perhaps the situation in small communities is similar – limited availability of information and little previous analytical work on which to build.

These small criticisms aside, the volume will contribute much to readers’ knowledge of Jews in Canada, and there are several in-depth analyses in the collection, including a couple of chapters that provide fascinating reading for anyone interested in the evolution of the mainstream Jewish community’s structure on a national level.

***

On the fiction front, readers of chick lit will appreciate Masada Siegel’s first novel, Window Dressings (Cupcake Press, 2012). It begins with the main character, Skye Silver, attempting – and failing – to manouevre her body into a position that her boyfriend Gregg wants her to try from the Palmasutra, a mobile operating system version of the Kamasutra. The trouble in bed is but one of the problems this couple is having in their soon-to-be over three-year relationship. Religion (Skye is Jewish, Gregg is Protestant), lack of communication and insecurity, among other things, lead to the betrayal that sends Skye into singlehood.

image - Window Dressings cover
Readers of chick lit will appreciate Masada Siegel’s first novel.

Despite a poor body image, sadness over her break-up and very high standards for the outward beauty of possible mates, Skye manages to find many suitors, and much of Window Dressings is about what happens on those dates. She is supported by two besties: Josh, a writer/editor, with whom “mutual attraction had turned into a strong friendship”; and Karen, an international model.

While Skye is getting used to her new status and trying to meet “hot neighbor boy” – both a real character and Skye’s ideal man – she loses her job at Xtremedream advertising. Halfheartedly looking for a new job, she takes on some freelance work, falling back on the journalism degree she got in addition to her master’s in business admin. With relative ease, it seems, she lands a job at the New York Times and, dream job in hand, life gets even better for Skye.

***

In Lost and Found in Russia by Olga Godim (Eternal Press, 2013), Amanda anxiously awaits news about her daughter, Gloria, who is in the hospital after a car accident. Amanda volunteers to give blood for the needed transfusion and, while the lab work is being done, we find out that Amanda is a linguist. A contract decades earlier had her teaching Russian to a group of Toronto journalists. She fell in love with one of them, Donald, and married him a week before they moved to Russia, where Gloria was born. For Amanda, it was Gloria who “filled the emptiness left after Donald’s death.”

When the blood work reveals that Gloria is not Amanda’s biological daughter, the doctor makes a comment about a possible switch at birth, and Amanda recalls that, 34 years ago, “Two red-headed girls were born on the same day in that decrepit hospital with peeling paint on the walls and one washroom for the entire corridor.” As she sits by Gloria’s bedside, Amanda resolves to find her other daughter: “Of course, Gloria was her daughter, her blood type notwithstanding. She just had another red-haired daughter somewhere in Russia.”

image - Lost and Found in Russia cover
Olga Godim’s first novel explores mother-daughter relationships.

Meanwhile, Sonya is steeling herself to kick out her drunk of a husband, Alexei, as she can no longer afford to support him, herself and their teenage daughter, Ksenya, on what she earns from working two jobs. The Russian family arrived in Canada two years earlier from Israel, where Sonya had been a dancer and a dance instructor, and they now live in Vancouver, where Alexei’s supposed musical genius is as underappreciated as it was in Israel. Sonya not only has to deal with an alcoholic partner and trying to scrape out a living, but with her daughter’s understandable frustrations.

The book follows Amanda’s search for her other daughter; along the way, she also opens herself up to life for the first time since her husband died. It also follows Sonya’s struggles with Ksenya, and their rapprochement. Godim writes authentic dialogue, and captures the intricacies of relationships, mainly that between mother-daughter. Most interesting, however, is the view of Judaism from a Russian perspective, not only how one self-identifies culturally, religiously or otherwise, but the prevalent antisemitism. The fairytale ending is over the top, and there are a few odd scenes that could have been replaced with more development of the main characters, but the writing style and especially the Sonya-Ksenya relationship, make Lost and Found in Russia a good read.

***

It’s hard to know what to think about Curt Leviant’s Zix Zexy Stories (Texas Tech University Press, 2012). Leviant is an excellent writer, he’s knowledgeable about literature, Yiddish and Judaism, among other topics, and he has what to say. But he has a weakness, or made a poor choice. In pretty much every one of the seven (not zix) stories in this collection, he features a young, blond, big-breasted, non-Jewish, beautiful, dumb woman who admires, lusts after or is married to an older, professorial/rabbinical Jewish man. Perhaps this is an intentional attempt to link the stories – with the trope of the shiksa goddess – but, if so, it doesn’t work. Better the Franz Kafka connection that ties at least four of the stories.

image - Zix Zexy Ztories cover
Curt Leviant’s short stories are thought-provoking.

Zeven Ztrange Ztories would have been a better title, in that the collection successfully channels Kafka-esque absurdity, and intelligently considers existential matters. For example, in “From Helena; or, Sanskrit is Sexy Too,” a professor named Keller is introduced to a woman who is the object of many men’s desire, including the married man who introduces Keller to her. At this woman’s house, Keller runs into her professor father, who is doing kabbalistic research that entails cracking open walnuts to see if they’re all “built the same.” The father is dressed in a cloak and cowl. When Keller asks him why, he explains, “… A wise man, I believe it was Thomas Mann – you heard of Thomas Mann, I suppose – said that an esthetic worldview is incapable of solving world problems that cry for solution. Nevertheless, esthetics is crucial. Without esthetics we would be dogs barking at the moon. That’s why I don this unseemly garb. To put myself in the medieval mood. I am doing research.”

Throughout the collection, such thought-provoking passages appear. As well, Leviant is a strong storyteller. In “From Golden Necklace,” about an architect who travels to Italy to see a special collection of art, the tension is palpable when the architect sees the necklace his mother – who, along with his father, was killed in the Holocaust – on the woman escorting him around the palazzo. As another example, ignoring the object of Shmulik Gafni’s supposed affections (a shiksa), Leviant masterfully exhibits the ability of words to both accuse and acquit someone: none of the facts substantiates the rumor that Gafni is an adulterer, yet that very fact fuels it. All of the stories have something to recommend them.

***

image - Brothers Schlemiel cover
Mark Binder’s The Brothers Schlemiel is a good story very well told.

On the inside cover, The Brothers Schlemiel by Mark Binder (Light Publications, 2013) is described as “… a novel of Chelm … being the reasonably complete adventures of Abraham and Adam Schlemiel, identical twins, born in the village of fools and confused from birth.” As most readers know, from Chelm – from dim-wittedness and confusion – comes great wisdom and clarity, along with, of course, much humor.

Binder has created characters with whom we empathize, not just Adam and Abraham, or Abraham and Adam, who can’t even tell themselves apart at times, but their parents, sister and the other villagers. He ably manages some fine balances: writing about silliness without the story becoming stupid, and evoking sentimentality while not becoming saccharine. There are parts of The Brothers Schlemiel that could even be called scary – encounters with Russian soldiers and gun-wielding robbers. As well, through the vehicles of comedy and fantasy, The Brothers Schlemiel touches on many serious topics, from poverty to racism, to ethics in business, to whom people choose to be, and more. At the end of the day, however, The Brothers Schlemiel is just a good story very well told.

Posted on April 11, 2014May 3, 2014Author Cynthia RamsayCategories BooksTags Abraham Arnold, Alex Hart, Canada’s Jews, Curt Leviant, Cyril Leonoff, Dale Adams Segal, David Rome, Debby Shoctor, Franklin Bialystock, Helen Waldstein Wilkes, Ira Robinson, Living Legacies, Liz Pearl, Lost and Found in Russia, Mark Binder, Masada Siegel, Olga Godim, Richard Menkis, Ricki Segal, Shelley Halpern Evans, Shoshana Litman, The Brothers Schlemiel, William Shaffir, Window Dressings, Zix Zexy Stories
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