history – Page 17

A call for toughness

Rabbi Dr. Michael Berenbaum spoke at Congregation Schara Tzedeck on Nov. 5. He said: “We can’t raise a generation that is scared of being Jewish.” (photo from kolotmanagement.com)

The mood at Congregation Schara Tzedeck was solemn Sunday night, Nov. 5, when parents, grandparents and students from the Jewish community gathered to listen to Rabbi Dr. Michael Berenbaum, an American professor who is considered one of the world’s preeminent Holocaust scholars. Berenbaum came to discuss the importance of campus conversations, and specifically how to handle the critics of Israel who are voicing their support of Palestinians vociferously on college campuses throughout Canada and the United States.

Until the Oct. 7 terror attacks, Berenbaum said, our children had never known serious difficulty as Jews. “They’ve had the privilege of living in the greatest time to be Jewish, maybe in the history of the Jewish people,” he said. “Now, we’re asking our kids to toughen up, because they’re now going to face difficulty, pain, anguish and danger – physical or intellectual – for being Jews. This is our test of the hour, and it comes with the shattering of easily held assumptions about Jewish life.”

The Oct. 7 pogrom, he said, was worse than the 1906 Kishinev pogrom and worse than Kristallnacht in 1938 in terms of the number of Jews killed and the vehemence with which they were killed. “We believed Israel was founded to protect its people from these pogroms, and yet we were not safe.”

Berenbaum said it is crucial for Jewish students to be armed with accurate knowledge so they can counter the anti-Israel rhetoric they hear on campus. That means refuting claims that Israel is committing genocide. “Understand that this is war, and it has both direct and collateral consequences,” he said. “You cannot deal with war at this point without significant civilian casualties. While Israel is taking significant steps to avoid that, it’s unavoidable.” He noted that, since March 2011, the conflict in Syria has claimed the lives of 500,000 people – “and the rest of the world has heard nothing about this.”

On the claim that Israel is “occupying Gaza,” he clarified that Israel left Gaza in 2005, displacing 8,000 settlers so that Gazans would take control of their lives. “Israel is the only country in the world who has sacrificed land for normalization. We gave up Sinai for normalization with Egypt, and the reason the invasion happened now was because it appeared Saudi Arabia would establish a certain kind of peace with Israel,” he said. “Normalization represented a danger to the lateral forces in the region and that’s why this broke out now.”

On the claim that “Jews are colonizers,” he noted that Jews have never forsaken their connection to the land of Israel, and that there have been five cities with a permanent Jewish settlement in Israel. “When they came to Israel, they settled and worked the land, which is the opposite of colonization,” he said. “They didn’t take its resources and export it elsewhere.”

He noted that Palestinians were offered a state in 2000 and again in 2006, and they turned both opportunities down. “The Palestinians have never lost an opportunity to lose an opportunity, because their leadership is weak and corrupt,” he said.

There are a few things we can do now to ensure we are strong, he continued. One is to educate ourselves on the history of the state of Israel and Zionism. Another is to ensure we have solidarity by reaching out to one another.

“These are not easy times and we need Jewish toughness and resilience,” said Berenbaum. “We can’t raise a generation that is scared of being Jewish. I want our Jewish students to be proud, tough and confident enough to accept the animus that will come their way, but to have the human capacity to respond to it.”

He ended his talk by calling Jews the “canary in the coalmine. You want to know if a society is healthy? See how it treats its Jews. We’re living in a world that’s fundamentally unhealthy, but it’s important to remember that we have many friends, we are not alone. We have to cultivate and respect those friendships, and not take them for granted.”

The events of Oct. 7 precipitated an earthquake, he added, “and the ground won’t settle for awhile. But earthquakes give the opportunity to build in a different way. We are in for a tough and difficult time, which will demand the best of us. But I fundamentally believe we have it in us to rise to the occasion.”

Lauren Kramer, an award-winning writer and editor, lives in Richmond.

A mission to encourage

Aren X. Tulchinsky is Vancouver Public Library’s new writer in residence. (photo by Jeff Vinnick / VPL)

As this year’s writer in residence at the Vancouver Public Library (VPL), Aren X. Tulchinsky proudly represents his two cherished identities as a transgender man and as a Jewish person.

“I bring all of my lived experience into the residency,” said Tulchinsky in a Jewish Independent interview. “I am out and proud as a member of the Jewish community and the LGBTQ2S+ community, and I bring my identities with me into the residency. I guess you could say this is a very Jewish and queer residency. The library has been very supportive of me.”

Tulchinsky wears his heart on his sleeve or, at least his right bicep, which is ringed with a tattooed chai in Hebrew letters. “We celebrated the launch of my residency with an evening of words and music, during which I read from new and previous work, and was accompanied by local klezmer musicians,” he noted.

The 65-year-old Toronto native is probably best known for the award-winning 2003 novel The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky, under his former name, Karen X. Tulchinsky, which evokes the 1933 antisemitic riot at Toronto’s Christie Pits park. He has had a varied career in film and television writing, editing and directing, and penning short and long fiction, including lesbian romance, notably the novel Love Ruins Everything.

Tulchinsky came out as lesbian as a teenager, and has been writing stories since.

Tulchinsky was named in September to the VPL post, which was launched in 2005 to promote Canadian literature. Among past resident writers are Miriam Libicki (jewishindependent.ca/drawing-on-identity-judaism), Sam Wiebe, Rawi Hage and Gary Geddes. Last year’s appointee was Black Canadian writer Harrison Mooney, author of the critically applauded Invisible Boy: A Memoir of Self-Discovery.

Tulchinsky, who lives in Vancouver, responded to the VPL’s call for applications and was shortlisted. “Then I was called in for an interview with about 10 people from the programs and learning department at the VPL central branch,” he said.

“It was a bit intimidating to be interviewed by a whole group of people, but I must have impressed them because, a few days later, the manager of the department phoned to let me know that they had chosen me for the position.”

Asked if he thought his being transgender was a factor in his selection, Tulchinsky replied: “Not really. The only way my identity as a transman was significant is that in the posting the VPL was encouraging writers from under-represented groups to apply.

“Judging from most of their past writers-in-residence, I assumed they would give the position to a more mainstream writer, so I have never applied in the past. Their encouragement for writers from diverse backgrounds … is what motivated me to apply.”

One of his chief responsibilities is acting as a mentor to emerging writers, in particular, those from marginal communities.

“It is my mission to encourage writers from marginalized communities, specifically, BIPOC, Indigenous and LGBQ2S+ writers, to attend my (free public) workshops and apply for a spot on my one-on-one consultation afternoons,” Tulchinsky explained. “I think Jews, People of Colour and queer and trans writers all have a lot to teach the mainstream world about our lived experiences. I want writers from under-represented communities to feel comfortable to come forward and let their voices be heard.

“Traditionally, Canadian literature has been dominated by white, straight, cis-gendered men (and a few women). We have a lot to catch up on. We all gain from a more diverse society and more diverse voices in Canadian literature.”

The residency will also allow Tulchinsky time for his own writing, principally, the first draft of a novel entitled Second Son, a family saga that draws on events in his own past.

The main character, Charly (formerly Charlotte) Epstein-Sakamoto, is a biracial, transgender man coming to terms with PTSD resulting from a tragedy that devastated his family decades earlier.

“The heart of the novel is based on my own journey transitioning from female to male, a child’s death in my family, and my experiences in a long-term, interracial, cross-cultural (Jewish-Japanese) relationship,” said Tulchinsky.

“Charly knows he’s a boy, even though his parents, his doctor, his teachers and all the other kids at school insist he’s a girl. When Charly’s brother (the first son and his only sibling) Joshua is killed in a tragic bike accident, his dad is so devastated he sinks into a deep depression, his mother begins an affair with her sister-in-law, and Charly finally begins to assert his true gender identity.”

Tulchinsky is also developing another novel, based on family stories and beginning in Russia in 1941.

“As I was writing the novel and researching the Holocaust, I started thinking about how many Canadians think the Holocaust began in 1939, with World War II, but the reality is the oppression of Jews by Hitler and the Nazis began years before the war, within days of Hitler becoming chancellor of Germany in January of 1933.

“I began writing another novel that begins in 1932, when Germany – Berlin in particular – was one of the most progressive places in the world. In Berlin at that time there were numerous gay clubs and cabarets, safe places for gay men, lesbians and trans people to gather, and the Jewish community was also thriving.

“That all changed overnight once Hitler came to power. I ended up with two new historical novels that I am still working on.”

Tulchinsky’s CV is lengthy, and one wonders how he has been able to be so productive.

“To be honest, part of my diverse career has to do with the fact that I found it impossible to survive as a novelist, even though I had numerous books published,” he said. “I am a graduate of the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto, which provides advanced training in film and television. Since then, I have worked as a writer and video editor on numerous television series. I have found it more possible to make a living in film and TV than I could as a novelist. The downside is I rarely have time to work on novels. This residency at the VPL is affording me time to write, which is a real gift.”

His advice to aspiring writers is be disciplined and tenacious.

“You need discipline to sit in a chair and write or you will never finish a novel. And you need tenacity to get your work published. Most writers get a lot of rejections before they find a publisher. Every time you get a rejection, just send your work out again,” he said.

Being Jewish and queer, Tulchinsky looks with growing dismay at what is happening today.

Twenty years ago, The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky reminded Canadians of a shameful history. It remains among the top 10 Canadian books ever borrowed from the VPL.

The Five Books of Moses Lapinsky follows a Jewish family living in Toronto’s Kensington Market in the 1930s and ’40s and is set against the backdrop of a massive antisemitic riot.

“On Aug. 16, 1933, at an amateur league softball game in Christie Pits park – a neighbourhood filled at the time with Jewish and Italian immigrant families – members of the antisemitic Swastika Club showed up with a giant swastika flag, which set off a riot between Jews and gentiles that involved 15,000 people and lasted throughout the night and is the largest race riot in Canadian history,” Tulchinsky said. “Unfortunately, with antisemitism, racism, transphobia and homophobia back on the rise throughout the world, the themes in the novel are just as relevant today as they were when I originally wrote the book.”

Tulchinsky thinks the current polarizing, often acrimonious, debate over sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) issues is “an effort on the part of the political right-wing to inflate the importance of cultural wars to distract people from the real issues we should be focusing on, such as climate change, wealth inequality and homelessness.

“I once saw a bumper sticker that read: ‘If you’re against abortion – don’t have one.’ I think it is the same when it comes to SOGI. If you are heterosexual and cis-gendered, you can either be an ally to the LGBTQ2S+ community and actively support us and fight for our rights, or you can leave us in peace.

“As an out and proud transman, I am just living my authentic life. And I hope I can serve as a positive role model to trans and non-binary kids who are struggling with their identity.”

Janice Arnold is a freelance writer living in Summerland, BC.

Toronto artist reclaims past

Yvonne Singer (photo by Ron Csillag)

As an artist herself, Yvonne Singer can well appreciate the esthetic merits of the open-air monument to Swedish Second World War hero Raoul Wallenberg that was unveiled last June at Churchill Park in Hamilton, Ont., in a ceremony attended by those whose families owed their survival to Wallenberg.

Though she has not personally viewed the installation, called “Be:longings,” Singer spoke admiringly of the 10 bronze-cast suitcases dispersed along a gravel path adjacent to the Hamilton aviary. She knows Simon Frank, one of the project’s three creators, and is aware that suitcases are a potent symbol of the Holocaust.

“I like the fact that the suitcases are scattered,” Singer, a well-established visual artist and teacher in Toronto, said in an interview over lemon tea in her sun-drenched kitchen. “I think the imagery and symbolism are very effective in conveying the idea of displacement and emigration.”

The old-timey valises evoke not just Wallenberg, Singer noted, but all victims and survivors of that terror-stricken era. The outdoor project is also “minimal, which I like. I don’t like public sculptures that scream at you or are clichéd.”

photo - Part of the “Be:longings” monument in Hamilton’s Churchill Park to Second World War hero Raoul Wallenberg — Part of the “Be:longings” monument in Hamilton’s Churchill Park to Second World War hero Raoul Wallenberg. (photo from Hamilton Jewish Federation via Hamilton Jewish News)

Singer connects to the installation on a whole other level. The 78-year-old resident of Toronto’s trendy Cabbagetown neighbourhood is Wallenberg’s goddaughter. She was born on his bed.

It’s a Hollywood-worthy tale that evolved over time, in a series of eye-popping twists, turns and coincidences – all amid Singer’s own personal voyage of self-discovery.

The backstory is its own blockbuster: The non-Jewish scion of a wealthy Swedish industrial and banking family, Wallenberg, then just 32, was recruited by the US War Refugee Board and dispatched to Budapest to assist and rescue as many Jews in the Nazi-occupied Hungarian capital as possible. He arrived in July 1944, just as the Nazis had finished shipping some 440,000 Jews from the countryside to Auschwitz. They and their Hungarian collaborators, the Arrow Cross militia, now set their sights on the Jews of Budapest.

Accorded diplomatic status, Wallenberg famously set off on a frenetic pace. He designed, printed and distributed thousands of the famous “Schutzpass” – an official-looking document that placed the holder under the protection of the neutral Swedish Crown. He also scoured the city for buildings to rent, finding 32, and crammed in as many souls as possible. The “safe houses” flew the yellow-and-blue Swedish flag and were declared protected by diplomatic immunity.

Known for his bluster and bravado (and for bribes using American cash), his greatest coup came when he reportedly persuaded Nazi commanders to call off the liquidation of Budapest’s Jewish ghetto, with its 70,000 inhabitants.

The number of Jews Wallenberg is said to have rescued peaks at 100,000. He is credited with saving more Jewish lives during the war than any single government.

By January 1945, the Red Army was laying siege to Budapest, and Wallenberg was taken into custody on allegations he was a US spy. He promptly vanished into the massive gulag system. A Soviet report in 1956 dryly noted he had died in July 1947 of a heart attack in Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka prison, but supposed eyewitness sightings and stories of contact with him from former inmates continued well into the 1970s.

A nine-year joint Swedish-Russian investigation, ending in 2001, came to opposing conclusions, with Moscow sticking to its story about Wallenberg’s 1947 death, and Stockholm stating that absent any proof, it was impossible to reach a conclusion about his fate.

In 2012, the diaries of a former head of the KGB, discovered stuffed into the walls of his Moscow home, stated there was “no doubt” that Wallenberg was “liquidated” in 1947.

But back to Singer.

On the night of Nov. 3, 1944, a desperate Tibor Vandor, who worked for Wallenberg as a courier and liaison to the underground, needed help for his wife, Agnes. She was in labour and had been turned away from Budapest’s hospitals, which barred Jews. Wallenberg allowed the couple to use his own room, while he slept in the corridor using his coat as covers.

The next morning, he was called in to see a dark-haired newborn girl. Asked by the grateful parents to name her, Wallenberg chose Nina Maria Ava (Nina was his half-sister’s name, Maria his mother’s). The couple changed the first name to Yvonne, and Wallenberg agreed to be the child’s godfather.

Singer knew nothing of this until she was 34 years old.

It was October 1979 when she read an article in the Toronto Star, reprinted from a US newspaper, about Wallenberg’s plight. The story included a reference to Singer’s unusual birth, taken from a Hungarian book on the Swedish hero written after the war. The baby with the Toronto connection, the parents, the godfather, were all there, mentioned by name.

When she read the piece, “I burst out crying,” she told the Star after contacting the paper. Her story spilled forth a week later in a large Saturday article headlined “Swedish hero saved my life: Metro woman.”

Singer is still struck by “the incredible coincidence of it all. Here I am in Toronto in 1979, reading the paper … it boggles the mind. I could have easily gone through life not knowing the story. Suddenly, I had a connection to this man, who sounds like he was fascinating.”

Her parents had not told her the story. And there was another missing piece of the puzzle: their Jewishness.

At war’s end, the Vandors went to Switzerland and Holland before settling in Montreal in 1949, where they shed their Jewish identities, doubtless seeking to blot out the legacy that had caused them so much pain. Tibor Vandor even became an elder in the United Church (Yvonne attended church until she was about 14).

Her parents never revealed being Jews. “I always pressed them for more information, and they always refused,” even following the revelations in the Toronto Star, Singer recalled. “They told me very, very little.” Their silence encompassed “anything to do with the war.”

Singer graduated from McGill University and went on to teach high school English and French. She married her husband, Ron Singer, a theatre director and educator, in 1966 and, because her Jewishness was unknown to her, converted to Judaism.

A few years later, a cousin in England recalled being a flower-girl at Yvonne’s parents’ wedding, which she said took place in a synagogue. The parents denied it, but Yvonne believed it.

Singer’s feelings of alienation as an immigrant child would evaporate on discovering that she had been born Jewish, whether the knowledge came from a cousin or the Toronto Star. “I felt like I’d come home, part of a history that goes back thousands of years. I no longer felt rootless,” she said.

The Singers moved to Toronto in 1971, where Yvonne later began a prolific art career in various media and teaching visual arts at York University. Raising three daughters and a busy life meant there was little time to get involved in the Wallenberg file, though she was pleased when he became Canada’s first Honorary Citizen in 1985 and when Canada Post issued a stamp commemorating Wallenberg a decade ago.

In 1997, even Queen Elizabeth heard Singer’s remarkable story. The artist was among the dignitaries in London when a bronze statue of Wallenberg was unveiled by the Queen. The two were introduced.

“The Queen listened attentively and I was told she was very interested in my story,” Singer said at the time. “It was a highlight of my life.”

It’s no surprise that Singer’s art has explored themes of identity, history and memory. The outsider status she felt in her early life “is what made me think about ways of expressing that, either through language or visual imagery. So, you go to what you know when you’re an artist.”

In 2016, the Swedish government declared Wallenberg officially dead, but, to Singer, that offered no finality. “From what I learned, the Swedish government is not exempt from blame for trying to get Wallenberg out. I cannot reconcile the fact that [Wallenberg’s family] could not exert any kind of leverage over the Russians to find out what happened to him.”

The title of godparent in Judaism is largely honorary, and Singer considers the godfather connection to Wallenberg an honour. “But I’m also very sad that I never met him,” she said. “I think he would have been a fascinating person to talk to. The story is just very, very tragic.”

The grandmother of nine sighed. Over the decades, the story for her was very personal, obviously, “and I was still processing it. Maybe I’m still processing it, for a long, long time.”

A version of this article originally appeared in the Hamilton Jewish News. It is reprinted with the author’s permission.

Victoria link to UK honours

More than 20 girls were rescued from Nazi persecution and brought to Tynemouth (photo from Summerfield family via BBC)

On Jan. 26, 2023, a blue plaque at a house in Tynemouth, a coastal town in northeast England near Newcastle, was unveiled. The marker recognizes the efforts of David Summerfield, the grandfather of Victoria, BC’s Henry Summerfield, to help rescue Jewish children before the Second World War.

David Summerfield’s undertaking was part of the Kindertransport, which, from late 1938, after Kristallnacht, to the declaration of war in September 1939, brought Jewish children to the United Kingdom.

“My grandfather ran a jewelry store in Newcastle. He was very well known and well thought of inside and outside of the Jewish community,” Henry Summerfield told the Independent. “He got a committee together and they raised funds and got a house in Tynemouth. In those days, they would not have boys and girls in the same house. Thus, they decided girls were more vulnerable and they would take them in.”

The house at 55 Percy Park provided lodging for 24 Jewish girls, aged 3 to 15, from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. In total, nearly 10,000 children were brought into the United Kingdom during the nine months of the rescue operation.

“It was a terrible ordeal for the children because they were in a strange country and they were going to a city they had never heard of. They were not accompanied by any adults who could guide them,” said Summerfield. “A girl from Czechoslovakia was the worst off because did not speak either German or English.”

The local Jewish community in Newcastle needed people to care for the girls after they arrived, Summerfield said, and they managed to find two Jewish widows from Vienna who had fled to London: Paula Sieber, who had owned a cinema, and Alice Urbach, a well-known chef who also operated a cooking school.

Prior to the war, Urbach had written a popular cookbook, Cooking the Viennese Way, under a false name, because, as a Jew, she was not able to publish using her real name. In 2022, her granddaughter, historian Karina Urbach, published Alice’s Book: How the Nazis Stole My Grandmother’s Cookbook, which explored Alice Urbach’s story and the Nazi appropriation of her intellectual property.

“Because attempts to avert a war failed, the parents were never able to join their children,” said Summerfield. “Instead, Newcastle and the nearby area became a war zone subject to heavy bombing and out of bounds to enemy aliens, so the girls were moved across the country to a house at Windermere in England’s Lake District. There they remained under the care of the two matrons till the end of the war. They were educated in local schools.”

As reports started to come out about the death camps, the matrons tried to be strict about keeping the girls away from the cinemas, where newsreels were shown. One girl managed to sneak out, saw the news and returned to the house in hysterics. Most of the girls’ parents died during the Holocaust.

As the years passed, the girls finished their schooling and got training for various jobs. The whole enterprise was successful – the girls grew up, had careers and raised families. Some stayed in England, while others moved to Israel, the United States, Australia and New Zealand.

The BBC recently learned of the endeavour and broadcast a report about a reunion of the refugees, now elderly, and their lives. The reunion was attended by David Summerfield’s granddaughter, Judith Summerfield, and great-granddaughter, Alison Moore. There were previous reunions, in 1988 and 1999.

A six-episode BBC podcast was released earlier in the year, The Girls: The Holocaust Safe House, detailing the stories of those who lived at 55 Percy Park. The current owners of the house, who purchased the property in 2017, hadn’t known the historical significance of the address as a Kindertransport hostel.

The newly unveiled plaque at 55 Percy Park reads: “In 1939, this house was home to more than 20 girls fleeing Nazi persecution. They came here via the Kindertransport rescue effort and were cared for by the Newcastle Jewish Refugee Committee, as well as the wider community of Tyneside. Most of those housed here lost their parents during the Holocaust. The committee funded their care for over seven years.”

Below that inscription is a quote from Talmud: “Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.”

A posthumous honour for David Summerfield has been proposed. His jewelry store, started in 1914, is still in operation.

Sam Margolis has written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, UPI and MSNBC.

Watch them blame Israel

A restaurant in Vancouver closed for a day, calling for people “to hold the Zionist occupation accountable” for the war in Gaza. Writer Loolwa Khazzoom notes, “When terrorists blow up Israelis, there is often an undertone of accusation: it’s Israel’s fault, the narrative goes, that these tragedies happen…. But who truly was responsible for creating Palestinian desperation, and who is accountable for remedying it?” (photo by Larry Barzelai)

On 9/11, I was 20 blocks away from Ground Zero, sleeping in the living room of a friend when she woke me up, screaming hysterically – something about terrorists and an airplane crashing into one of the Twin Towers. As I tried to comprehend what was happening, my friend turned on the television and, right then, the second plane crashed into the second tower, as we watched in horror.

My thoughts came in this order: Now they’ll understand what it feels like to live in Israel. Watch them blame this on Israel. OMG we’re going to die.

Two decades later, on the morning of Oct. 7 – in the wake of what some are calling Israel’s equivalent of 9/11 – I felt the pain of collective Jewish agony, and promptly reached out to my friends and family in Israel, including those living close to the Gaza border.

Unbeknownst to many, those in the border towns, such as Sderot, are predominantly working-class Mizrahim and Sephardim – children and grandchildren of the 900,000 Jewish refugees from throughout the Middle East and North Africa. They are the ones predominantly getting pummeled by Hamas rocket fire, as the world yells about “white European colonist settler Israelis.”

So, it’s no surprise that, after the initial feelings of shock and outrage, grief and concern, I once again thought, “Watch them blame this on Israel.” And they did, within hours – with a BBC News interview going so far as to compare the Hamas attack to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

It’s nothing new, of course. When terrorists blow up Israelis, there is often an undertone of accusation: it’s Israel’s fault, the narrative goes, that these tragedies happen. By creating Palestinian desperation, Israel has created Palestinian terrorism. But who truly was responsible for creating Palestinian desperation, and who is accountable for remedying it?

The Arab world is called just that for a reason. Beginning in the Arabian Peninsula about 1,300 years ago, Arab Muslims launched a brutal campaign of invasion and conquest, taking over lands across the Middle East and North Africa. Throughout the region, Kurds, Persians, Berbers, Copts and Jews were forced to convert to Islam under the threat of death and in the name of Allah.

Jews were one of the few indigenous Middle Eastern peoples to resist conversion to Islam, the result being they were given the status of dhimmi – legally second-class, inferior people. Jews were spared death, but forced to endure an onslaught of humiliating legal restrictions – forced into ghettos, prohibited from owning land, prevented from entering numerous professions and forbidden from doing anything to physically or symbolically demonstrate equality with Arab Muslims.

When dhimmi laws were lax and Jews were allowed to participate to a greater degree in their society, the Jewish community would flourish, both socially and economically. On numerous occasions, however, the response to that success was a wave of harassment or massacre of Jews instigated by the government or the masses. This dynamic meant that the Jews lived in a basic state of subservience: they could participate in the society around them; they could enjoy a certain degree of wealth and status; and they could befriend their Arab Muslim neighbors. But they always had to know their place.

The Arab-Israel relationship and the current crisis occur in the greater context of a history in which Arab Muslims have oppressed Jews for 1,300 years. Most recently, anti-Jewish riots erupted throughout the Arab world in the 1930s and 1940s. Jews were assaulted, tortured, murdered and forced to flee from their homes of thousands of years. Throughout the region, Jewish property was confiscated and nationalized, collectively worth hundreds of millions of dollars at the time.

Yet the world has never witnessed Middle Eastern and North African Jews blowing themselves up and taking scores of Arab innocents with them out of anger or desperation for what Arab states did to the Jewish people. Despite the fact that there were 900,000 Jewish refugees from throughout the Middle East and North Africa, we do not even hear about a Middle Eastern/North African Jewish refugee problem today, because Israel absorbed most of the refugees. For decades, they and their children have been the majority of Israel’s Jewish population, with numbers as high as 70%.

To the contrary, Arab states did not absorb refugees from the war against Israel in 1948. Instead, they built squalid camps in the West Bank and Gaza – at the time controlled by Jordan and Egypt – and dumped the refugees in them, Arabs doomed to become pawns in a political war against Israel. Countries such as Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Libya and Lebanon funded assaults against Israeli citizens instead of funding basic medical, educational and housing needs of Palestinian refugee families.

In 1967, Israel inherited the Palestinian refugee problem through a defensive war. When Israel tried to build housing for the refugees in Gaza, Arab states led votes against it in United Nations resolutions, because absorption would change the status of the refugees. But wasn’t that the moral objective?

Israel went on to give more money to the Palestinian refugees than all but three of the Arab states combined, prior to transferring responsibility of the territories to the Palestinian Authority in the mid-1990s. Israel built hospitals and educational institutions for Palestinians in the territories. Israel trained the Palestinian police force. And yet, the 22 Arab states dominate both the land and the wealth of the region. So, who is responsible for creating Palestinian desperation?

Tragically, the Arab propaganda war against Israel has been a brilliant success, laying on Israel all the blame for the Palestinian refugee problem. By refusing to hold Arab states accountable for their own actions, by feeling sympathy for Palestinian terrorists instead of outrage at the Arab propaganda creating this phenomenon, the so-called “progressive” movement continues to feed the never-ending cycle of violence in the Middle East.

Loolwa Khazzoom (khazzoom.com) is the frontwoman for the band Iraqis in Pajamas (iraqisinpajamas.com) and editor of The Flying Camel: Essays on Identity by Women of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Heritage (theflyingcamelbook.com). She has been a pioneering Jewish multicultural educator since 1990, and her writing has been featured in the Washington Post, Marie Claire, Rolling Stone and other top media worldwide. This article was originally published in the Times of Israel.

Did Judeans cede their lands?

The Kotel (Western Wall) in Jerusalem (photo by James Blake Wiener)

Two weeks ago, 34 student organizations published a letter blaming Israel for the violent attacks that occurred on Oct. 7, on the holiday of Simchat Torah, that killed hundreds of Israelis in a brutal fashion. The letter claimed that Israel is entirely responsible for all unfolding violence and further claimed, “today’s events did not occur in a vacuum, for the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison,” according to ABC News.

On the Stanford campus, an instructor in a civil, liberal and global education course asked Jewish students to take their belongings and stand in a corner, saying, “This is what Israel does to the Palestinians.” According to the Forward, the teacher then asked, “How many people died in the Holocaust?” The students answered, “six million”; the response from the instructor was, “Colonizers killed more than six million. Israel is a colonizer.”

Those of us who grew up in the West in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s always thought Hitler was the embodiment of all evil and the Nazis were the greatest evil known to mankind. The merging of pure hatred and technology created an evil unmatched because of its scale and virulence. However, in today’s world there appears to be a sin worse than that of being a Nazi, that is to be a “colonizer.”

The theory of (Western racial colonizing) was made famous by a professor in whose class I studied, Edward Said. The New Yorker several years ago reflected that Said’s most famous book, Orientalism, “proved to be perhaps the most influential scholarly book of the late 20th century; its arguments helped expand the fields of anti-colonial and post-colonial studies.” The crimes of colonialism cannot be ignored … including many tragedies such as the Trail of Tears, residential schools, the partitioning of India and more.

The reflexive hatred of Israel, even as its citizens are being slaughtered and taken hostage, stems from those who believe the Jewish presence in Israel is among the last vestiges of colonialism. Such rationalization theorizes that civilians are really a military asset because they advance the aims of the conquering nation and, as such, civilians are a legitimate target.

Hamas uses a similar thought model for its theory of mind for the Israeli population. Haviv Rettig Gur, a columnist for the Times of Israel, wrote the following: “Arab opponents of Israel speak of it often as an artificial, rootless construct doomed to collapse in the face of Palestinian faith and resilience. It is at heart, they say, a colonialist project that for all its outward power lacks the inner authenticity and conviction to survive.”

That interpretation of Israel isn’t just a put-down; it’s a call for action, including especially the kind of sustained terrorism and cruelty that pushed other colonialist projects out, from the French in Algeria to the British in Kenya. This interpretation of Israel is the basic logic behind Palestinian suicide bombings, rocket fire and the whole slew of terrorist tactics employed by Hamas on Oct. 7.

One thousand years ago, as the Crusaders were first launching the military campaign to recapture the Holy Land from the infidels, Rashi was musing about land rights as well. Rashi wanted to explain why a lawbook, the Torah, does not begin with laws, but rather with the story of Creation. Rashi says that the nations of the world will ultimately call the Jews thieves, or colonizers in a more (contemporary) flexible translation. The Torah, therefore, begins with the story of creation to establish that all the land belongs to G-d and G-d gave title to the Children of Israel. Nachmanides, another great medieval scholar, argues that Rashi’s explanation ignores the important stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The land of Israel is the land of their stories, of Moriah, Beit El, Chevron, Be’er Sheva. This is where our ancestors are buried.

Did the tribe of Reuven ever cede its land to Aram? Did Ephraim ever cede its land to Ashur?

If you were to walk the archeological sites in the land of Israel and look at the graves, the etchings on the walls, the seals from sites dated between 3,000 and 2,500 years ago – this is the Iron II period, from 1000 to 586 BCE, between the time of Solomon and the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon – what names would you find? The vast majority of those names carved into stones and pottery are names that end with YHU or YH’L these are Hebrew names for G-d: names like Yishayahu/Isaiah, Uriah and Or Samuel, respectively. (Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 134, No. 4, October-December 2014; pp. 621-642) The stones speak the names of tribes that never willingly gave up their land to their conquerors.

The Judeans also did not cede land to the Romans. When Omar ibn Khattab conquered Jerusalem from the Romans in 638, he did not establish a treaty with the Jews, he did not trade high-value consumer durables for the land. He conquered it and, in 717, less than 100 years later, his successor Omar II forbade the Jews from praying in Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, a policy that was to last through Muslim rule of Jerusalem.

When Omar conquered, he brought Arabic into Israel for the first time. Hebrew inscriptions in Israel were already 1,500 years old when Arabic first arrived in Israel with the conqueror’s sword. Compared to the thousands of Hebrew inscriptions from the time of Solomon, there is only one find of an ancient dialect of Arabic, likely from a traveler.

We Jews are not colonizers, we are the people from the unceded lands of Judah and Benjamin, Naftali and Ephraim, Dan and Zevulun. Our language has always been Hebrew.

Prof. Yeshayahu Gafni of Hebrew University notes that, if you want to read a letter written by a Jew 2,000 years ago, you need to know Hebrew. Jews have always spoken, read and written Hebrew. If you want to write a letter to those who will be your descendants 2,000 years from now, you should write it in Hebrew.

We Jews have to make sure there is no daylight between our identity now, and the identities of our ancestors whose graves and etchings can be found from Tel Dan to Be’er Sheva. We need to embrace our language. There is no reason not to know it; it is ours.

Furthermore, we need to know the story of who we are, of the land and the people in it. We need to know who is Yeshayahu, who is Yehoshaphat, and Yoav, and Chizkiyahu, and Uziyah, and Abigail, and Jezebel and Atalyah. And we need to know how an Ephrati pronounces Shibbolet. These names figure prominently in the story of our people and our land. We need to embody the identity that holds their story true.

When we carry that identity together, we do not allow them to call us imperialists and colonizers. We are the people of the unceded lands of Judah and Benjamin. We must embrace that identity.

Rabbi Andrew Rosenblatt is senior rabbi at Congregation Schara Tzedeck. This article was originally published on the synagogue’s special Israel page at scharatzedeck.com.

Past, present & future

Jewish tradition says that all Jews were at Sinai. The people of Israel who fled Egypt received the Torah, but not just the travelers from the Exodus story were there. In the Jewish narrative, the handing down of the word was so definitive and essential that even Jews not yet in existence – up to the present day and on into forever – were said to have been present when Moses descended from the mountain. So profound was this moment that every Jew in all of eternity needed to be there to witness it.

Talk about togetherness! A people who humour portrays as intrinsically divided – “two Jews, three opinions”; the lone Jew rescued from the desert island who had built two synagogues (“The one I attend and the one I’d never set foot in”); “Everyone to the right of me is meshugenah, everyone to the left of me is a goy”; the jokes are endless – all in the same place at the same time, all united (well, except for the little golden calf incident).

It is tempting to imagine the Jewish people today as more divided than ever, at least in recent memory, especially in contrast with the aforementioned story of togetherness across all time and space. The various divisions in the local and global Jewish community are exacerbated by significant divisions in the body politic in Israel.

It may be true. Perspective on the forest is difficult when you are surrounded by trees. The present reality depends on the future. If the current political situation in Israel proves to be an aberration – if the proposed judicial reforms were to fail, say, and attempts to impose a more permanent intolerant conservative and religious imprint should falter – future Jews might look back on this moment as just one of Jewish history’s eras of communal discord. On the other hand, the future may cite this critical moment as a turning point.

There have been many turning points in Jewish history, of course. The Exodus was a pretty big one. Another big one was the declaration of the state of Israel, tangibly marked by the signing of the Declaration of Independence. And there have been many more turning points in between.

In an article recently, the chairman of the World Zionist Organization, Yaakov Hagoel, makes an interesting historical connection. Like the unity at Sinai, he argues that all Jews were present in Tel Aviv on that day in May 1948, each adding their name to that historic scroll.

“Beside the 37 actual signatures on it,” he writes, “there are millions more invisible signatures. Everyone has signed the Declaration. Each of us with his own special pen, values, stories and hopes. Over the years, we learned to unite around the Declaration, adding more and more signatures. Today, the Declaration is the basis of Israeli identity for all.”

The Declaration is indeed a model of compromise and inclusion. Notably, the inclusion of the “Rock of Israel,” which could be interpreted as God by the religious or literally as the rock, the land itself, for those of a less traditional bent.

Today, some enemies (and, frankly, some friends) depict Zionism as inherently a right-wing ideology. Of course, it is not. The belief that Jews have the right to national self-determination transcends politics. Zionism is not left, right, centre or limited to any other segment. It is a universal belief, inclusive of all who believe in the right of Jews to be “a free people in our own land.”

This is a pretty idea, easier in theory than in practice. Recently in this space, we lamented the large number of Israelis who say they are prepared to abandon the enterprise and leave Israel. We cannot judge people for the choices they make in their lives. Israel is not an easy place to live. Most, if not all, of us reading this right now do not live in Israel. We can, though, do everything in our power to advance an Israel and a Zionism that is inclusive … a Zionism that recognizes the diversity – as well as the unity, obscure though it may seem at times – among the Jewish people. We can commit what voice and power we have to advancing an Israel that not only encourages those already there to stay, but makes it a welcoming homeland for Jews everywhere, both in the present and in the future. Even, we might add, an Israel that is welcoming to Jews of the past – that is, respectful of the diversity they represented. The 37 diverse Jews who put pen to parchment 75 years ago represented the spectrum of Jewish ideas and visions at the time. The least we can do is attempt to do the same.

Film is a tribute to Burquest

Zanna Linskaia and Rudy Rozanski were key in making the video Burquest Jewish Community: Past, Present, Future, which is available on YouTube. (screenshots)

Burquest Jewish Community, which serves people in the eastern suburbs of Vancouver, turns 50 next year. Whether that milestone is marked by a major celebration or not, a recently released video provides a permanent commemoration of the impact the group has had on individuals and Jewish life in the area. The film premièred at an event June 25.

Zanna Linskaia, a former Burquest board member and longtime force of nature in the community, had the idea of making a permanent, easily viewable history of the community and she got the support of the organization’s board. She recruited Rudy Rozanski, Burquest’s then-president, to work with her to get the project done.

They collected archival materials, old photos, newspaper clippings and historical artifacts, and identified people to interview on camera to help tell the story. A valuable find was video footage of Burquest members taken two decades ago by Jelena Fuks and longtime member and past president Dov Lank. They also hired filmmaker Lior Noyman.

Linskaia and Rozanski have several lifetimes of creative achievement between them.

“I was always a huge fan of Zanna,” Rozanski told the Independent. “I had the great honour to arrange a few of her songs and do some performances with her and so I knew she’s a composer, a writer, a poet … probably the most amazing woman I’ve ever known.”

In addition to all that, Linskaia, a journalist by background (she once wrote the Russian-language page in the Jewish Independent’s predecessor, the Jewish Western Bulletin) and a Coquitlam resident for two decades, retired in 2020 as a seniors outreach counselor for Jewish Family Services. Rozanski is a classical pianist and teacher, with a PhD in musicology. He has lived in Coquitlam for 30 years.

Through interviews with a host of longtime members – including two founding originals, Bill Gruenthal and Max Jacobson (who, sadly, died Aug. 18) – the video sets the stage by indicating how remote many suburban Jews felt from the geographic heart of the community half a century ago.

Gruenthal recalled reading the Jerusalem Post on the bus headed for Kootenay Loop those many decades ago and a fellow passenger leaned over to ask if he was “a member of the tribe.” It was Jacobson.

“Max and I have been friends ever since,” Gruenthal says in the film.

A few intrepid people plodded through the old Jewish phone book and called anyone who lived in Burnaby, New Westminster, Coquitlam and surrounding areas. A living room meeting was held in 1974, with a few more than a dozen attendees. A lawyer volunteered to shepherd the nascent group into legal existence and Jacobson became founding president.

A year later, they formed a supplementary school for kids in the community, and Burquest became a gathering place for holidays and simchas. But they were meeting mostly in private homes. They raised some money, with the support of the late Morris J. Wosk, the Diamond Foundation and other philanthropists, and hired an architect to design a purpose-built shul and community centre. But the plan wasn’t feasible and it was decided to buy an existing building instead. Gruenthal’s son-in-law was in the mortgage sector and helped the society purchase a Jehovah’s Witnesses building in Coquitlam that has served ever since as Burquest’s locus for Shabbat and holiday celebrations, classes, kids programs, seniors lunches and a raft of other activities. Visiting rabbis, including Rabbi Yosef Wosk, have led holiday services over the years. Cantor Steve Levin has been Burquest’s spiritual leader for more than two decades.

Current and past members speak in the video about the impact Burquest has had on them and their families.

“Some of the most emotional and connected experiences we had with Judaism were when we were at Burquest,” recalls Shelley Rivkin. Stewart Levitt talks about the number of intermarried families or families with converted members and how they were welcomed.

The film, Burquest Jewish Community: Past, Present, Future, is available on YouTube. The musical score is an original creation by Rozanski.

“I ended up improvising some of [the music] on the spot as we were editing and we went through the entire film and edited it scene by scene,” he said.

At the wine-and-cheese reception before the première screening, Rozanski performed the entire score, accompanied by Arnold Kobiliansky on violin.

“The music [in the film] gets cut up and only specific parts are used,” said Rozanski, “so we wanted to present the film music almost as a score, so they could hear the entire music as it unfolds … and then they would be able to recognize it in the film.”

The film project, a labour of love, was a major undertaking.

“We are not going to do a second film,” Linskaia said with a laugh.

“We both felt this was really important,” said Rozanski. “I realized immediately what an important gift this was to Burquest and to future generations. It really is our gift and we put our heart into this. We understand nothing is perfect, of course, but we really did our best with it.”

For Linskaia, the film is a tribute to the centrality of the community in her life.

“Burquest became my Jewish home,” she said.

Bud Lando’s island donated

The Lando family donated to the federal government the islet that is now West Grebe Islet Marine Park. The park will be held in perpetuity for wildlife conservation and is off limits to people. (photo from Barbara Schloss)

Barbara Schloss remembers the day in the 1970s when her father came home and announced, “Guess what I did? I just bought an island.”

Her father, Esmond Lando, was a familiar face in Vancouver’s Jewish community, known to everyone as Bud. Snapping up an island may have been a little out of the ordinary for most dads, but Bud Lando had a finger in all sorts of pies, his daughter recalls.

Neither the father nor, until recently, the rest of the family, though, had any idea of the value of the island – “islet,” to use the precise terminology – he had bought. And, while the tiny West Grebe Islet is located just off West Vancouver’s Lighthouse Park – and, therefore, a short kayak ride from some of the world’s priciest real estate – the value isn’t so much in dollars as in ecological biodiversity. So rich in bird and animal species is the one-third-hectare (about 0.8 acres) island that the federal government was delighted to accept the rocky outcrop from the Lando family through Canada’s Ecological Gifts Program.

The islet is known to some West Van locals as “Seal Rock,” due to the prevalence of the sea mammals hanging about on or around the place. But, according to North Shore News reporter Brent Richter, who wrote about it last year, birders have identified 89 different bird species that either inhabit West Grebe or drop in during migration, including black oyster catchers, turnstones, marbled murrelets and one of the highest densities of surf scoters in the region. A pair of eagles are routinely spotted on the Coast Guard light beacon.

Schloss, who is a longtime resident of Montreal, says she didn’t know the ecological richness of the place when she contacted the feds on behalf of her siblings and the family to offer it to the federal government. Now that she knows, she likes to think her late father had an inkling of the gem he rescued and preserved from development. The family will celebrate their father’s foresight this weekend at a dedication ceremony where a plaque will be unveiled acknowledging Esmond Lando’s contribution to preserving West Grebe.

But, there is a larger story.

The Landos lived in Shaughnessy – Schloss’s sister, Roberta Beiser, still lives in the family home – but Bud had a special connection with West Vancouver. That connection is a tale of discrimination and civil rights in British Columbia.

Jews were not welcome on golf courses anywhere in Metro Vancouver when the nine-hole Gleneagles Golf Course came on the market in 1951. It had been developed two decades earlier and named after the legendary links in Scotland.

Bud Lando and pal Dave Sears snapped up the golf course – and opened it to Jewish players. Golf courses would become a sideline for Lando, but only one of many.

“He really was like a Renaissance man,” said Schloss. “He loved creating, he was very creative. He painted, he sculpted – this was all on the side. At home, we had a kiln. He decided he was going to make wine, so he got a whole bunch of grapes somewhere and went to a distillery somewhere and made sure that that wine had ‘Esmond Lando’ on it. It was just another passion of his.”

photo - Esmond “Bud” Lando — Esmond “Bud” Lando *(photo from Barbara Schloss)*

Lando was a successful practising lawyer, and he partnered with friends in a vast range of entrepreneurial pursuits.

“If anyone would suggest something, he would look it over and, if it looked like a possibility, he was in it,” Schloss said of her father.

With a couple of friends, he launched Queen Charlotte Airlines, she recalled, as well as a box company, a lumber mill in Chilliwack and a trucking company. “He was into everything he could possibly find,” she said.

The golf sideline was important – not just because Lando loved to play, but because the discrimination rankled him. Sears and he soon sold Gleneagles so they could construct the full 18-hole course that is now the Richmond Country Club. Lando then developed courses in Delta and Surrey.

“Gleneagles was a very important purchase for my father, who was very plugged into the Jewish community,” said Schloss. “He was part of Canadian Jewish Congress and was very active in the Jewish community. Plus, he was on a council for Christians and Jews. He was very ecumenical, but Jews were very important for him. That’s why he got involved with Gleneagles.”

Bud Lando came by his entrepreneurial spirit and sense of adventure naturally. Bud was born in England and his parents, Lou and Sara Lando, trundled the family of six off to Prince Rupert, B.C., in 1911, when Bud was a tyke.

“That was supposed to be the metropolis,” Schloss said of the northern B.C. port town. “That was going to be where everything was happening.” She added with a laugh: “Didn’t happen.”

The family moved to Vancouver and got into the fur trade. They opened Lando’s Furs, opposite the Canadian Pacific Railways station (now Waterfront station, where Seabus and Skytrain meet).

Bud Lando graduated from law school at the University of Alberta and practised for decades, becoming Queen’s Counsel. He and his wife, Edith Mitchell Lando, originally from Winnipeg, raised four children. In addition to Schloss and Beiser, daughter Juli Hall now lives in Houston, Tex., and son Barry Lando lives in Paris. Barry was a producer for the American TV newsmagazine 60 Minutes. (Mike Wallace, the late longtime cohost of the program, said that, without Lando, “there would have been no 60 Minutes.”)

The four siblings, their children and grandchildren will gather this weekend at Gleneagles Golf Course to dedicate two plaques – one at the course itself and another a short walk away, from where the islet can be viewed.

“When my father passed away, we each took on part of the heritage of my father, whatever he left behind we divvied up and decided who would be in charge of what,” said Schloss. “I got Grebe. That was one of the things that I was involved with.”

It was Barry Lando who told her about the federal program and that the government might be interested in the property. Indeed, they were. The island was formally transferred to the federal government last year, but under an agreement with the District of West Vancouver, it will be cared for by the municipality and was officially designated as West Grebe Islet Marine Park earlier this year.

The islet will be held in perpetuity for wildlife conservation and is now off limits to bipeds in order to conserve its ecological value. Barry Lando and some of his family members are, therefore, among the few people to have set foot on the place. They once approached by boat and then swam up to the islet but its geography meant it was never a welcoming spot for casual visitors.

“My father would be so pleased and proud to know that he had the foresight to recognize a treasure and to save it from development,” said Schloss, adding that he would be happy knowing that his legacy and the island is preserved forever. “I think it would mean a lot to him to know this.”

A hippie homesteader in B.C.

“When I came to Galena Bay, I had been afraid of many things,” writes Ellen Schwartz in Galena Bay Odyssey: Reflections on a Hippie Homesteader (Heritage House Publishing Company, 2023). “Of the physical work I would have to do. Of trying new things I have never done before, like gardening and building and raising animals. Of living in isolation. One by one, I had attempted these things, and I had survived. I had even mastered some of them. Those fears had fallen away.”

This paragraph comes as Schwartz is atop a hill, “too scared to move,” and her skis start sliding. She survives the “ungraceful and disastrous” run, even pushes through a second one. But she can’t keep her vow to never to do that again because, in the 1970s, she lived in such a far-flung place that skiing was a necessary mode of transportation, not just a leisure activity.

It is easy to see why Schwartz chose to write a memoir about this period of her life. Born into a middle-class family – her father an internist-turned-cardiologist, her mother a teacher before becoming a stay-at-home mom to Schwartz, her younger sister and brother – and raised in New Jersey, Schwartz went to university in Chicago. There, she did all you might expect a young person with the new freedom of being on their own to do. And then some, as it was the late 1960s. She writes openly about her experiences with drugs and having sex for the first time: “I figured Ned was The One. I imagined that we’d go through our four years [at school] together and eventually marry.” That didn’t happen. Nor did Schwartz go on to lead the conventional life she imagined for herself at the time.

Instead, she went to join a close friend at a farming commune in Pennsylvania, the members of which ultimately wanted to move to British Columbia. Not intending to stay longer than summer break, Schwartz fell in love with one of the commune’s founders and, well, ended up in British Columbia with Bill, who would become her husband. The group didn’t last long, but the Schwartzes are still together, though no longer in Galena Bay, which is in the West Kootenays. They now live in Burnaby.

The young urban-raised couple faced many challenges homesteading, and Schwartz has many stories of taking on the unknown, whether it be camping along the route across the continent to British Columbia, building their own cabin (including chopping down their own trees), growing their own food, raising a child in a remote area (their second would be born in Vancouver), etc., etc. Not to mention finding work that would sustain them physically (keep them housed, clothed and fed), if not spiritually. She shares the details of her hippie days matter-of-factly, with humour and with the perspective of reflection. For example, after recounting her parents’ muted reaction to her and Bill’s homemade home, she offers potential reasons for their lack of enthusiasm.

Schwartz’s unique history encapsulates the overarching idealism of many in her generation. Her grandparents were “impoverished Jewish immigrants who had fled the hardships and pogroms of Lithuania and Poland” to give their kids a better life in the United States, so their grandchildren also were well set up for material success. The grandchildren – Schwartz and her peers – had an idea but no real understanding of the sacrifices that had been made to achieve the comfortable lifestyle they rejected, because of the racial and social inequality they saw around them, the environmental degradation and the war in Vietnam.

“Bill and I, part of the first wave of baby boomers, were in the privileged position of having enough education, enough wealth and enough leisure to be able to criticize our parents’ lifestyle,” she writes late in the memoir. “We were well-off enough to be able to turn our backs on materialism. We were prosperous enough to indulge in idealism and, idealistically, to define an entire new set of values. (At the time, I didn’t appreciate the irony.)”

But her desire to make the world a better place was – and is – genuine and remains a guiding force. Schwartz, who was a teacher for many years, began her subsequent career writing educational material. We find out in her memoir that the first fiction story she sold was released in 1980. She is now a celebrated children’s author, with almost 20 books to her credit directed towards younger readers, ranging from picture books to novels for teens to a couple of non-fiction publications. She is also a freelance writer and editor.

Galena Bay Odyssey is a wonderful glimpse into an integral part of Schwartz’s life. It also offers insight into North American hippie culture and the strength and ingenuity required to live in an out-of-the-way place like Galena Bay. That the “action” takes place in British Columbia will make the memoir of even more interest to local readers.