Temple Sholom pays tribute to Susan Mendelson and Jack Lutsky at its Dreamers and Builders event next month. (photo from Temple Sholom)
When Temple Sholom members and friends come together May 5, they will celebrate decades of community-building by two honourees. They will also catch a glimpse into the future, as an annual award is presented to two young people with big dreams.
Dreamers and Builders is a biennial event, the first of which was held two years ago, with renowned landscape
architect Cornelia Oberlander being honoured. This year’s honourees are Susan Mendelson and Jack Lutsky, a couple whose lives and careers have focused on building successful businesses and making philanthropic contributions.
At the same event, the annual Temple Sholom Teen Tikkun Olam Awards will be presented to young people with visionary plans for making the world better. This year, the co-winners are Sam Albert and Liana Gerber, and they will be featured in an upcoming issue of the Jewish Independent.
Mendelson is best known for the culinary empire she has built over years as a founder of the Lazy Gourmet and as a food commentator, caterer, author and business leader. Her husband, Jack Lutsky, has an equally stellar resumé as an architect and businessperson.
Lutsky, who was born and raised in Edmonton, attended the Technion, in Haifa, Israel, and completed his studies at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, in London, England. He moved to Vancouver to begin his career and soon opened an eponymous architecture firm.
“My first clients actually were from the Jewish community,” Lutsky recalled in an interview with the Independent. “People I knew, that I could approach. I did work at the Jewish Community Centre and I did work at Schara Tzedeck Synagogue.”
An addition to Temple Sholom in the 1990s, in which classrooms and flexible meeting spaces were added above the driveway, was designed by him. In addition to a few churches and other institutional projects, Lutsky’s portfolio includes many commercial and retail projects. He was also the architect for the Holocaust memorial located in Schara Tzedeck Cemetery.
Lutsky’s philanthropic work includes serving as chair of the board of Jewish Family Services, involvement in Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, serving on the Temple Sholom board and heading or co-leading many fundraising campaigns, including a retirement event for Cantor Arthur Guttman that raised more than $100,000 for the synagogue. Lutsky was also on the transition committee when the synagogue’s Rabbi Philip Bregman retired and current Rabbi Dan Moskovitz assumed the post, and helped raise funds to ensure that Vancouver’s high cost of housing would not affect the synagogue’s ability to hire the ideal candidate.
Mendelson’s life has been devoted to food and philanthropy. Born in Toronto, she came to Vancouver for university and began baking treats for sale at intermissions at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre. This was the genesis of Mendelson’s professional food career. A co-founder of the Lazy Gourmet, an iconic local caterer, she has been a regular media commentator on food, is the author of 10 cookbooks and has mentored countless up-and-comers in the sector. Her community work includes serving as honourary board chair of Big Sisters BC Lower Mainland, chairing Federation’s women’s campaign, serving on the dean’s advisory board at the University of British Columbia and being founding chair of Arts 149, whose mandate is to present contemporary performing arts that innovate and inspire new professional community arts practices. Already famous locally, Mendelson was featured last month in the New York Times, which credited Mendelson in part for the popularity of the Canadian dessert Nanaimo bars.
The couple joined Temple Sholom in the 1990s and they agree it is a relationship they are thrilled to nurture.
“It’s been a good move for us and we really love the congregation,” Lutsky said.
Agreeing to be honoured at this event is really a chance to strengthen Temple Sholom, added Mendelson.
“It’s been an incredible opportunity to bring so many people together to become part of this event,” she said. “When we were approached, we just thought this was a great opportunity for us to be able to find a way to help Temple Sholom using our network, our friends, our family and our passion for Temple…. They’ve honoured us with donations and participation and sitting on committees. It’s been a pretty joyous experience all around.”
The couple promises some unexpected components of the event, which is envisioned as more laid back than a typical formal gala.
“I’m not going to give out any secrets, but we want our event to be a fun event,” said Lutsky. “We are designing it so that it will be very enjoyable.”
Mendelson is especially excited about the tie-in with successive generations through the Teen Tikkun Olam Awards, which was envisioned by Moskovitz and is funded in perpetuity by Michelle and Neil Pollock.
“That’s a wonderful opportunity – to reach out and find young people in this community, the next leaders in the community,” Mendelson said. “We want other people to be inspired, as well, by these brilliant young kids who are out there doing remarkable acts of kindness and tikkun olam in the world. It really is about looking to the next generation and honouring them at the same time.”
To encourage a younger audience, the event offered half-price tickets for people 30 and under.
Helen Heacock-Rivers who, with Karen Gelmon, is co-chairing Dreamers and Builders, said the event was almost sold out.
“It is a testament to how much Susan and Jack are loved; also Temple Sholom, but Susan and Jack in particular,” she said. “They are a perfect example of people who should be honoured.”
Heacock-Rivers lauded Mendelson and Lutsky for being hands-on in promoting and planning the event.
“They are the honourees, they don’t have to do anything,” she said. “But they are very invested in making sure this is successful for Temple Sholom, to make sure that we can have the means to support the programs that they have earmarked for the monies that come in.”
Because many younger members are moving outside of the city proper, outreach programs to suburban congregants and potential members will be funded with revenue from Dreamers and Builders. Upgraded security at the synagogue is another project earmarked for funds.
Alpha Epsilon Pi chapter members with the fraternity’s “sweetheart,” Rachel Meadow. A “sweetheart” is elected every year at the chapter’s formal. (photo from AEPi)
The Vancouver chapter of Alpha Epsilon Pi, the traditionally Jewish fraternity, is 20 years old this year. So is Benny Stanislawski, the chapter’s president, who will help oversee the anniversary celebrations next month.
AEPi, as it is commonly known, was not the first Jewish fraternity at the University of British Columbia. Another frat operated on campus in years past but eventually disbanded. In the summer of 1999, the former longtime international executive director of the fraternity contacted Jeff Waldman, a student at UBC, suggesting he consider founding a chapter. A group of eight “founding fathers” came together and Adam Propp, a high school friend of Waldman, also a UBC student, was chosen as the first president, or “brother master,” as the role is called internally.
Hillel has been on the UBC campus since 1947 and provided an avenue for Jewish fellowship and involvement for many students. But the founders of the fraternity saw advantages in creating the male-only society.
“I think all of us had different reasons,” Propp recalled. “For me, to be able to have an impact on the university experience for young Jewish men like myself was important. When I look back at it, Hillel appealed to many, but not all. [The fraternity] just appealed to a different set of people who might not have been attracted to Hillel right away. It was a way to get more people more active and involved in a Jewish experience on campus, especially since UBC is such a commuter school.”
Propp became philosophical reflecting on the chapter’s founding two decades ago, noting that, in the next few years, some sons of the original brothers will likely be pledging to the fraternity. In recent days, Propp has been reconnecting with many of the original brothers, as they plan to gather for the 20th-anniversary celebration with a series of events over the weekend of April 5-7.
Benny Stanislawski, president of the Vancouver chapter of Alpha Epsilon Pi. (photo from AEPi)
The relationship between AEPi and Hillel differs from campus to campus and, at UBC, it has generally been extremely strong, sometimes highly symbiotic.
Gabe Meranda, who was executive director of the Vancouver Hillel Foundation at the time the chapter formed, admits he had some trepidation about a Jewish fraternity, not having had any experience with what is called “the Greek system.”
“I was skeptical at first, since I was cautious about fraternities. But these first few guys were so excited about launching the chapter in B.C. that I decided I must get behind it,” Meranda recalled. “I remember the night of their first party at Hillel. I didn’t know what to expect, but all seems to have gone well and it’s taken off from there.”
The chapter made Meranda an honorary brother and he still proudly has the pin, he said.
While fraternities have a reputation for certain excesses, Canadian campuses tend to be a little more low-key, in part because the lower drinking age in Canada means access to booze is not a motivator to joining a frat. What is less obvious to the general public are programs of leadership development, philanthropic ventures and, in the case of AEPi, Jewish cultural activities and, to varying extents, Israel programming or education.
Stanislawski stressed that AEPi has no political or religious orientation. Jewish young men, as well as non-Jewish ones who want to pledge – of which there are usually a few each year – are welcome without concern for their religious affiliation (or lack of affiliation) or their approach to Zionism.
The chapter’s main annual philanthropic event is Hoops 4 Health, an all-day, three-on-three basketball tournament that takes place this year on March 31 at War Memorial Gym. The chapter’s charity beneficiary used to be different health causes, but the Heart and Stroke Foundation has a special meaning to the brothers. A couple of years ago, an AEPi member, Nitai Weinberg, suffered a stroke at the age of 18. Now fully recovered, he and his brothers raised $8,000 for the cause last year, and this year have significantly upped their goal to $25,000.
As an example of the range of programs, the chapter recently hosted a presentation on sexual assault awareness, led by the UBC Mental Health Network. They also host “Greek Shabbats” at Hillel House, where members of all the university’s fraternities are invited.
“The Greek community is fairly large and it’s also influential,” said Lenny Tabakman, who was master brother last year and is chairing the organizing committee for the anniversary celebration. “A lot of people that join fraternities and sororities are leaders in their own community. The fact that they mingle with us and we get to meet the leaders of other communities, I feel like it’s beneficial for the Jewish community at large because we’re basically creating allies of the community by bringing them in. They probably would never even enter Hillel and, every week, we have people who are not Jewish come into Hillel and hang out with AEPi.”
Lenny Tabakman is chairing the organizing committee for AEPi’s 20th anniversary celebration. (photo from AEPi)
These connections are helpful, Tabakman said, when issues like anti-Israel incitement happens on campus and allies are needed to counter them.
Tabakman sees fraternities in general as a place to nurture leadership.
“A fraternity is kind of like a learning laboratory where you get to practise your leadership skills and your teamwork skills,” he said. “It’s kind of a safe place to fail. It prepares you for the business world.”
AEPi has an added mission, agreed Tabakman and Stanislawski: “Developing leaders for the Jewish community.”
Founded in 1913, the fraternity now serves 190 campuses in seven countries; it claims 90,000 living alumni. The UBC branch, officially called the Beta Chi chapter, welcomes students from Langara, Simon Fraser, Emily Carr, Capilano and all post-secondary institutions in the region. The chapter usually has 40-plus brothers in any given year, peaking last year at 49.
“I’d love to see the organization get into the 70s,” said Stanislawski. But, given the limited number of Jewish students on campus, slow, steady growth is the realistic goal.
Samuel Heller, the current executive director of Hillel at UBC, congratulated the fraternity and thanked them for their contributions.
“Both the Hillel community and wider campus community are enriched by this brotherhood of young men who exemplify leadership and champion Jewish values,” said Heller. “Brothers of AEPi are a positive force on campus … by creating a group of young leaders who are changing the face of UBC and who, in turn, will change the world.”
Pat Johnson is an honorary brother of Alpha Epsilon Pi Beta Chi chapter.
Penny Sprackman receives the special shoes on her 60th birthday, in 2006. (photos from Shirley Barnett)
Some things just happen and, before long, they become a tradition. In 1987, Harvey Shafron, while working at Freedman Shoes on South Granville, came across a rather clunky pair of women’s shoes on a top shelf and gave them to his sister, Rhoda (Shafron) Brickell.
Brickell, in turn, presented them to her friend Lola Pawer for her 50th birthday. Since then, the shoes have been passed from friend to friend among a group of Vancouver Jewish women on birthdays that end in a zero or five.
“It just happened,” said Shirley Barnett, a two-time recipient – on her 60th and 70th birthdays. “It became kind of fun to say, ‘Oh my God, it’s the shoes again.’”
The pair is not casually delivered; the recipient is formally presented the shoes at a celebration, usually at a restaurant, in front of the assembled pals.
“I really believe, as they were passed around, that it’s a story about friendship,” Barnett said. “When you reach a special age of some sort, everybody seems to say girlfriends are really important. It doesn’t matter if you’re divorced or widowed or you’re still married. At a certain age – and that could be 60, 70, 80 or 90 – a light seems to go on in women’s heads that says girlfriends are important. They are the ones you call in the middle of the night – maybe not, maybe you call your kids, I don’t know – but there seems to be an unwritten code that the older you get, you just need a few good girlfriends.”
The “traveling shoes.” (photo from Shirley Barnett)
The size 8C shoes have fit every recipient, Barnett said. A ceremonial walkabout by the birthday celebrant is a part of the ritual.
Leslie Diamond and Pawer have received the shoes five times. Sylvia Cristall and Darlene Spevakow have received them four times. Karla Marks is a three-time recipient and Carole Chark and Penny Sprackman have gotten them twice. Others who have been honoured with the pair are Maja Mindell, Shelley Lederman, Anita Silber, Sandy Magid, Esther Glotman and Cynthia Levy.
At the start, the names of the recipients were written on the soles of the shoes but, as Dorothy Parker said, time wounds all heels, and the inscriptions have become mostly illegible.
What has remained indelible are some of the remarks made by recipients over the years. Barnett, who is sort of the informal archivist of the group, has collected words of wisdom shared over the years.
“It is the friends we meet along life’s way who make the trip more fun,” said one birthday celebrant.
“Friends make good things better and bad things not so bad,” said another.
“Being older sets you free,” reflected one. “You care less about what other people think, you no longer need to question yourself. You have earned the right to be wrong and not think about what could have been or what will be.”
On one birthday, a friend declared: “Remember, growing old is a privilege and old friendships are rare. So, when your ‘old’ friends reach for your hand, grab it.”
Another gem Barnett has collected: “The better the friend, the less cleaning you have to do before they come over!”
Robbie Waisman and Dr. Uma Kumar
spoke Jan. 24 at UBC’s Hillel House. (photo from Hillel BC)
History’s resonance in the present was a
recurring theme at a commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day
last week.
The event at Hillel House on the University of
British Columbia campus, featured Holocaust survivor Robbie Waisman speaking
about his experiences in Buchenwald concentration camp and his life before and
after the Shoah.
Thirteen survivors of the Holocaust lit
yahrzeit candles, after which Hillel’s Rabbi Philip Bregman chanted the
Mourners’ Kaddish.
Before Waisman’s presentation, the audience
watched a 1985 video from CBC television’s national program The Journal,
which followed Waisman as he traveled to Philadelphia to meet Leon Bass, the
American soldier who had liberated him from the camp 40 years earlier.
Bass, an African-American, was the first black
person Waisman had ever seen. At the age of 13, Waisman thought Bass and his
fellow American soldiers must be angels.
“Indeed, they were,” he said.
At the event Jan. 24, which was co-sponsored by
the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, Hillel BC, the Centre for Israel and
Jewish Affairs and UBC’s department of Central, Eastern and Northern European
Studies (CENES), Waisman said the thing that kept him and his fellow survivors
alive was the hope of being reunited with family.
“The enormity of the Holocaust was not yet
known to us,” said Waisman. When it did become known, he said, “we had to find
a way to deal and cope with the huge loss of all our loved ones.… How are we
going to live with all these horrors?… Has anyone survived? If not, what is the
point of my own survival?”
He and his father had seen one of Waisman’s
brothers murdered, and his father died later in the same camp. He would learn
that his mother and his other three brothers were also murdered, as were his
uncles, aunts, cousins and friends. Of the family, only Waisman and his sister
survived.
“I search for answers,” he said. “I only find
more questions. How could anyone remain sane and functioning as a human being
when humanity was destroyed in front of our eyes? Worst of all, how do you come
to terms with the tragic loss of all our loved ones, fathers, mothers,
brothers, sisters, friends that we grew up with, all innocent – everything gone
– how is it possible? We started questioning the existence of God. How could
this happen to us?… Before the war, we all came from Orthodox homes, rich in
heritage and traditions. After coming out of the terrible abyss, the darkness,
we questioned angrily. But what we learned in the home, from our parents, was
not lost. The sense of humanity slowly returned to us. Our faith was shaken
yet, in spite of it all, we remained true to it.”
Waisman said his experience in the Holocaust,
and the experience of other survivors, has taught that “evil must be recognized
and that we all have a responsibility to make sure that it never happens again
to anyone. And yet … what is the world doing about it now?”
He reflected on the concept of “Never again.”
“Noble, thought-provoking words, but only if we
act upon them,” he said. “Today, over 70 years after my liberation, the promise
of never again has become again and again. There have been a number of
situations that have tested the world’s resolve, in Cambodia, the former
Yugoslavia, in Darfur and in Syria – I could go on and on.
“When I speak at high schools, I try to convey
to students the pain of my experience in order to inspire them to prevent such
events from occurring again,” he said. “The world must learn from the past in
order to make this a better place for now and the future. We must teach
compassion, we must eradicate racism and religious persecution. We must teach
ourselves, teach our children, each generation must learn.”
IHRD at Hillel, right to left, Michael Lee, Rabbi Philip Bregman, Robbie Waisman, Sam Heller (Hillel BC), Joyce Murray. (photo from Hillel BC)
Also at the Jan. 24 event, Dr. Uma Kumar, a
lecturer with CENES, noted recent reports that indicate many Canadians and
others are ignorant of the most basic facts of the Holocaust.
“Nearly half of Canadians cannot name a single
concentration camp or ghetto that existed in Europe during the Shoah,” she
said. “However, there is a positive point: 85% of the respondents of the study
said that it was important to keep teaching about the Holocaust so that it does
not happen again. Hence, there is a pressing need for more and better Holocaust
education at schools and universities in Canada. We, as Holocaust educators,
still have a lot of work to do.”
Joyce Murray, member of Parliament for
Vancouver Quadra, brought greetings on behalf of the federal government and
also reflected on her visit last year to Auschwitz.
“The Holocaust reality, for me, shifted from
being a part of history that I thought I understood and regretted to a reality
that I feel in my body and in my heart,” she said. “Commemorating mass atrocity
and genocide in the continued sharing of the story of survivors is a vital part
of prevention. These stories serve as a reminder of the dangers of hate,
prejudice and discrimination, the dangers of seeing human beings as ‘us’ and
‘them,’ the dangers of excessive nationalism to the detriment of others that is
stalking so many nations today.”
Murray also mentioned the Canadian government’s
recent apology for refusing admission to passengers on the MS St. Louis in 1939
and reminded the audience that Canada is not immune to bigotry.
Michael Lee, member of the B.C. legislature for
Vancouver-Langara, was also present.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day was
officially marked worldwide on Jan. 27, the date when Allied forces liberated
the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps in 1945. Another ceremony and a film
screening took place Sunday at the Peretz Centre.
Mary Kitagawa was honoured with the
Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Award on Jan. 20. (photo by Pat Johnson)
At a convocation ceremony at the University of
British Columbia in 2012, a group of graduates stood out from the rest.
Twenty-one elderly Japanese-Canadians, ranging in age from 89 to 96, were
awarded honorary degrees in recognition of an historic injustice that had taken
place 70 years earlier.
In the winter of early 1942, right after
Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour, the Government of Canada ordered all
Japanese-Canadians to be relocated from the coast. This included students at
UBC. For the next seven decades, the injustice went unrectified and largely
unrecognized by the university until Mary Kitagawa, a community leader whose
own family history was ruptured by the events of the war years, took up the
cause. It was her tenacity that led the university to acknowledge and make some
amends for its complicity in the injustice. It awarded honorary degrees to 96
students – most of them posthumously.
For this achievement, and others, Kitagawa was
honoured with the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Award on Sunday afternoon,
Jan. 20. This was the 14th annual Vancouver commemoration of Raoul Wallenberg Day,
which, since 2015, has coincided with the presentation of the Civil Courage Award.
In her remarks upon receiving the award,
Kitagawa reflected on the social conditions that permitted the internment of
Canadians of Japanese descent.
“This happened because those in power in Canada
at that time forgot that this was a democratic country, sending her men and
women to war to preserve our freedom,” she told a packed auditorium at the H.R.
MacMillan Space Centre. “The excuse they used for incarcerating us was that we
were a security risk. However, if you read all the newspaper headlines of the
1930s and ’40s, you will find that the B.C. politicians’ hatred of
Japanese-Canadians was deep and abiding. They wanted to ethnically cleanse this
one small group of people from the province.”
Kitagawa said that, at a January 1942 meeting
in Ottawa to address “the Japanese problem,” a B.C. representative declared,
“The bombing of Pearl Harbour was a heaven-sent gift to the people of British
Columbia to rid B.C. of Japanese economic menace forevermore.”
“My family was swept away from our home in this
storm of hatred,” Kitagawa said. From their home on Salt Spring Island, the
family was transported to Hastings Park, in East Vancouver, which served as an
assembly point for dispersal to the interior of the province.
“Our journey through incarceration was brutal
and dehumanizing,” she said. The family was separated from her father for six
months and they feared the very worst. Eventually, the family was reunited, but
they were moved from place to place around the interior of British Columbia and
in Alberta a dozen times during seven years of incarceration.
When the War Measures Act, under which the
internment was justified, ceased its effect at the end of the war, Parliament
passed successive “emergency” laws to permit the continued incarceration
through 1947, and it was April 1949 before Japanese-Canadians were granted
freedom of movement and permitted to return to the coast. Her father and
mother, aged 55 and 50 respectively, took the family back to Salt Spring and
began all over again.
“It wasn’t just the material things that they
lost,” Kitagawa reflected. “They lost the dream for the future they had planned,
their community, their opportunities, education for their children, their
friends, their youth, their culture, language and heirlooms. But never – they
never lost their pride nor their dignity.… My parents believed in forgiveness.
Like Nelson Mandela, they believed that forgiveness liberates the soul. They
refused to look back in anger. Instead, they chose to continue to move forward
with the same resolve that helped them to survive their terrible experience.”
In 2006, Kitagawa read in the Vancouver Sun that a federal building on Burrard Street in Vancouver was being named to honour Howard Charles Green, a longtime Conservative member of Parliament from Vancouver and a leading advocate of Japanese-Canadian internment. “Immediately, I knew that I had to have that name erased from that building. To me, no person who helped destroy my parents’ dream and made them suffer so grievously was going to be so honoured.”
With help from a quickly mobilized group of
activists and sympathetic media coverage, Kitagawa successfully had Green’s
name stripped from the building, which was renamed in honour of Douglas Jung,
another Conservative MP, but the first MP of Chinese-Canadian heritage.
Kitagawa also led an initiative that saw
Hastings Park declared an historic site related to the internment.
In her talk on Sunday, Kitagawa emotionally
credited an “unsung hero,” her husband Tosh, who, among other efforts he played
in supporting Kitagawa’s activism, spearheaded the reprinting of the 1942 UBC
yearbook to include information about the internment and biographies of the
students affected. It was also through his persistence that they were able to
track down the 23 living students and the families of those who had passed
away.
The Civil Courage Award is presented by the
Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society, which was formed by members of the
Swedish and Jewish communities in Vancouver.
Raoul Wallenberg was a Swedish architect,
businessman, diplomat and humanitarian who became Sweden’s special envoy to
Hungary in the summer of 1944, several months after the Nazi deportation of
Hungarian Jews had begun. He issued protective passports and sheltered people
in buildings that were declared to be Swedish territory, saving tens of
thousands of Jews. He was taken into Soviet captivity on Jan. 17, 1945, and was
never seen again.
Chiune Sugihara was a Japanese diplomat who
served as the vice-consul in Lithuania during the Second World War. Acting in
direct violation of his orders at great risk to himself and his family, he
issued transit visas that allowed approximately 6,000 Jewish people from Poland
and from Lithuania to escape probable death.
The award presentation was followed by a
screening of the 1995 film The War Between Us, which dramatizes the
events of the Japanese-Canadian experience through the lives of a single
family.
Councilor Pete Fry, Vancouver’s deputy mayor, read a proclamation
from the city. Consular officials from Sweden and Japan were in attendance.
Prof. Amir Amedi of the Hebrew
University answers questions from attendees at a Jan. 16 presentation. (photo
by Pat Johnson)
A white cane has been used for generations to
help guide the mobility of people who are blind. Researchers at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem created the EyeCane, which added technology that
indicates to the user the distance to obstructions. From there, other
technological advances were added to identify the types of items in the area –
a couch, chairs, table, lamp – and convey the information to the user’s ear.
Still not satisfied, the scientists combined the invention with artificial
intelligence and complex auditory accompaniments so that the user could
identify the size, shape, colour, brightness and other attributes of the space
around them to get a full “picture” of their surroundings.
Presented by the Vancouver chapter of the
Canadian Friends of the Hebrew University, Prof. Amir Amedi spoke at Schara
Tzedeck Synagogue Jan. 16. Amedi is a professor in Hebrew University’s
department of medical neurobiology and an adjoint research professor at the
Sorbonne in Paris. He is currently a visiting professor at McGill University in
Montreal.
The interdisciplinary marriage of computer
science, neurology, philosophy, rehabilitation, physics and other fields is
leading to unprecedented advances in aids for people with disabilities. Some of
the foremost innovation is taking place at Hebrew University, where Amedi works
with a large team across many faculties.
The EyeCane is just one example of the sorts of
tools being developed in Amedi’s lab, items that are known as
sensory-substitution devices (SSDs). The most common SSD is the written word,
Amedi explained. For millennia, humans communicated only verbally. Written
language is a device that substitutes two senses – speaking and hearing – into
a different form: writing and reading.
Amedi discussed the development of agriculture,
then cities, then written language, then printing, each of which took tens of
thousands of years to evolve, allowing the human brain plenty of time to
accommodate the changes. Today, though, new technologies come flying at us
daily and the question this raises, according to Amedi, is how our brains are
able to adapt so readily to such sudden changes – an issue Amedi refers to as a
“real estate problem” in the brain.
“How can the brain, in the slow evolutionary
process, adapt to more and more information, more and more technologies?” he
asked.
One theory posits that parts of the brain get
recycled to deal with cognitive tasks it has not previously confronted.
A parallel invention of Amedi’s lab is an
auditory process that allows blind people to “see” with their brain. Sight is
really a function of the brain, not the eyes, he said. The eyes are the
conduit, but the brain does the cognitive work of seeing. Bypassing the
non-functional eyes and going through the ears directly to the part of the
brain where sight is computed, Amedi and his team have been able to create a
complex musical language that allows blind people to absorb immense amounts of
information about the environment around them.
In a demonstration, Amedi walked the audience
through the first lesson users of the technology are taught. Simple sounds –
similar to Morse code – represent lines. A musical scale going up or down
represents stairs. A smile is depicted by a falling then rising tone. Pitch is
added to determine height. Timbre is introduced to depict different colours. In
a remarkably short time, blind people are able to ascertain immense awareness
of their visual environments.
Significantly, Amedi added, brain imaging
indicates that the part of the brain processing the information is identical,
whether a sighted person is looking at something with their eyes or a blind
person is “looking” at something using the auditory sensory-substitution
process.
More information about Amedi’s work is online at brain.huji.ac.il.
Susan Mendelson, founder of the Lazy
Gourmet, shares a little about herself and her business at the launch of this
year’s The Scribe. (photo by Kenneth I. Swartz)
One of Vancouver’s most successful food
industry professionals shared her story recently, helping to launch this year’s
edition of The Scribe, the journal of the Jewish Museum and Archives of
British Columbia.
The topic of the 2018 issue is food, covering
restaurants and related sectors from the early days of the community up to destinations
that are still operating today. Susan Mendelson, best known around town as
founder of the Lazy Gourmet, brought her thespian side to the audience at the
Western Front Nov. 28, eliciting laughter as she guided the packed hall on a
tour through her remarkable career.
“My mother’s mother, Grandma Faye, was a large
influence in my life,” Mendelson said. An extraordinary baker and cook renowned
in her small Jewish community of Quebec City, Grandma Faye took it as a
challenge to keep a deep freezer filled with baking for when friends dropped by
or to be ready for a tea party.
As a child, Mendelson loved to cook and bake.
When the Six Day War broke out in Israel, in 1967, the family rallied to raise
funds to send to Israel. Young Susan planned a bake sale in their backyard. She
made all of her favourite squares and cookies and the neighbours snapped them
up. Mendelson’s mother only told her years later that the cost of the
ingredients was on par with what was raised that day. Thankfully, Mendelson told
the audience, that wasn’t a harbinger of things to come.
Mendelson came to Vancouver to study at the
University of British Columbia and gravitated to the theatre department. Her
theatre professor, Larry Lillo, became a close friend. He broke the news to Mendelson
that she would never be a great actress … though he really loved her
cheesecake.
After third year, Mendelson took a break from
school and worked in a group home for troubled teens. There, she met Deborah
Roitberg, with whom she made the food for the kids in the group home. An
instant friendship developed.
After traveling to Europe and Israel, Mendelson
thought she would return to school and pursue social work. Around that time,
Lillo had founded Tamahnous Theatre, an experimental ensemble that was becoming
the resident company at the Vancouver East Cultural Centre. He hired Mendelson
as house manager, which allowed her to go to school during the day and work at
the Cultch, as the institution is familiarly known, at night. But the salary
didn’t cover her expenses, so she began to make cheesecake to sell at
intermission, later adding carrot cake and Nanaimo bars to her repertoire –
“when the curtain came down at intermission, the lobby was stormed by people
pushing in line to make sure that they got their piece of the cake.”
Anne Petrie of CBC radio’s afternoon show
called Mendelson, having heard about the cheesecake phenomenon, and asked her
to come on the program.
“I told her that I was putting myself through
university with the recipe, but that I would come onto her show to tell her
listeners how to make chocolate cheesecake, a recipe that my friend Miriam
Gropper had given me,” Mendelson said.
Her cheeky attitude was a hit with audiences,
and she was asked back. She returned for Valentine’s Day, talking about
aphrodisiacs. Soon she had a regular radio gig paying $25 per appearance.
Mendelson’s boss at the Cultch started asking
her to cater opening night parties. Wedding catering followed and then
Mendelson was given the responsibility of catering to all the performers at the
first iteration of the Vancouver Children’s Festival. She and Roitberg
discussed opening a take-out food business.
“Our concept was that people would bring in
their casserole dishes and platters and we would fill them with our food and
they would take them home and pretend that they had made them themselves,” she
said. “We would call ourselves the Lazy Gourmet, in honour of our customers who
wanted gourmet food but were too lazy to make it themselves.”
Over the years, Mendelson had shared scores of
recipes with radio listeners and some asked her to put them in book form. Mama
Never Cooked Like This sold out and went into reprints; it was picked up by
an American publisher.
To coincide with the publication of her second
book, which was written for children and titled Let me in the Kitchen,
the producer of the Children’s Festival, Chris Wootten, asked Mendelson to
produce her own show. The best part of that experience, Mendelson recalled, was
that a single dad in the audience brought his 7-year-old son and they bought
the cookbook and made recipes
from it. “Six years later, I met those two,”
she said. “And, seven years later, I married the dad and became stepmother to
the most wonderful young teen. I was so happy that Jack and Soleil had experienced
that show and that in some way we shared that amazing experience of my life.”
TV appearances followed and Mendelson was asked
to write a souvenir cookbook for Expo 86.
But the trajectory was not entirely positive.
After expanding the Lazy Gourmet from one store to three, the company began
losing money. They eventually abandoned two of the storefronts and Roitberg
left the business to raise a family.
Soon after the birth of daughter Mira,
Mendelson was invited to cater a new event that was coming to Vancouver: the
Molson Indy Vancouver.
“If you thought that the Children’s Festival
wore me out … you can’t even imagine what that event did to me physically,” she
said. “But, of course, I loved it and, by the last few years of the race, which
took place on Labour Day weekend – Jack will tell you that it was our
anniversary weekend that we didn’t celebrate for nine years – we were also
catering the Abbotsford Airshow, which took place two weeks beforehand and, two
weeks before that, we catered the Skins Game at Predator Ridge in the
Okanagan.”
In addition to hard work, Mendelson credits her
success to hiring people who she says are smarter and more talented than
herself. A couple of years ago, she gave shares in the company to two long-term
team members and moved into a part-time role. The company continues to expand,
including a lifecycle catering department. “We call it womb-to-tomb catering,”
she said, citing baby-namings, britot milah, b’nai mitzvah, weddings and
funerals, as well as personal events. More recently, Mendelson took on catering
the lunches at Vancouver Talmud Torah.
The Scribe launch also
included words from Cynthia Ramsay, editor and publisher of the Independent,
who has also, for the past nine years, edited The Scribe.
“When I started the job, the journal was a mix
of academic essays and community-related history,” Ramsay said. “But it soon
changed to become a means by which the museum could highlight its collection;
the oral histories, photographs and other artifacts that it houses on the
community’s behalf. We’ve done issues on the Jewish Western Bulletin,
the Jewish Independent’s predecessor; on the furniture industry; scrap
metal dealers; the clothing industry; on some of the community pioneers who are
buried in our cemeteries all around the province; and, this year, of course,
our issue is on the food and service industry.”
She credited museum staff Alysa Routtenberg,
Marcy Babins and Michael Schwartz, and the publications committee, which this
year included Routtenberg, Perry Seidelman, Gary Averbach, Debby Freiman, Fred
Swartz and Ronnie Tessler. The JI’s production manager, Josie Tonio
McCarthy, does the layout for the journals.
Seidelman, president of the JMABC, urged audience members not to
throw out photographs or documents. “Give them to us,” he said.
Crimes against identifiable groups in Canada have spiked sharply, according to the latest data from Statistics Canada on police-reported hate crimes. Jews and Jewish institutions were the foremost targeted group, but hate crimes against Muslims comprised the largest increase.
Across Canada, there were 2,073 police-reported hate crimes in 2017, an increase of 664 incidents over the previous year. Almost half of all hate crimes were reported in Ontario. In British Columbia, 255 hate crimes were reported to police, including 68 that targeted Jews, 36 incidents against black people, 19 against Muslims and 18 crimes based on sexual orientation. Reported hate crimes against the Muslim, black, Arab or West Asian and LGBTQ+ communities all increased nationwide.
Across the country, hate crimes against the Jewish community rose by 63% between 2016 and 2017 – from 221 incidents to 360 – and the Jewish community remained the most frequently targeted group in both absolute and per capita terms, the report stated. Hate crimes against the Muslim community increased 151% between those years, from 139 police-reported incidents in 2016 to 349 in 2017.
In one of few comparatively bright spots in the report, violent incidents decreased as a proportion of all hate crimes, accounting for 38% of reported hate crimes in 2017, down from 44% in 2016. But this proportional decline is tempered by the raw numbers. The actual number of violent hate crimes increased 25% but decreased as a proportion of hate crimes overall only because the number of non-violent crimes increased that much more – non-violent offences like mischief and public incitement of hatred increased 64%.
Of the 360 police-reported crimes against Jews or Jewish institutions across Canada in 2017, 209 of those were in Ontario and 49 in Quebec – making British Columbia not only the second province in raw numbers of anti-Jewish attacks, but almost tying Ontario on a per capita basis and surpassing all other provinces by far.
Hate crimes in Canada have been creeping upward relatively slowly since 2014, according to Statistics Canada, but 2017 saw a leap of 47% over the previous year. Most of the crimes involved hate-related property crimes, such as graffiti and vandalism.
Despite the large increase in 2017, however, hate crimes still represent a very small proportion of overall crime – about 0.1% of the more than 1.9 million non-traffic crimes reported by police services in 2017. That said, a 2014 Statistics Canada study, General Social Survey on Canadians’ Safety (Victimization), in which Canadians self-reported incidents of perceived hate crimes, indicated that two-thirds of such incidents were not reported to police, suggesting that the numbers in the hate crimes reports might underestimate actual incidents substantially.
(image from Statistics Canada)
“Police-reported hate crimes refer to criminal incidents that, upon investigation by police, are found to have been motivated by hatred toward an identifiable group,” explains StatsCan. “An incident may be against a person or property and may target race, colour, national or ethnic origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, language, sex, age, mental or physical disability, among other factors. In addition, there are four specific offences listed as hate propaganda offences or hate crimes in the Criminal Code of Canada: advocating genocide, public incitement of hatred, wilful promotion of hatred, and mischief motivated by hate in relation to property used by an identifiable group.”
Hate crimes against Muslims, particularly in Quebec, contributed significantly to the overall spike in 2017 reported incidents. Hate crimes in that province increased 50% over the previous year, with incidents targeting Muslims almost tripling to 117 reports in 2017 from 41 the previous year. Perhaps most disconcertingly, the biggest spike in anti-Muslim incidents in Quebec occurred in the month following the mass shooting at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec, where six Muslim men were murdered in a shooting rampage on Jan. 29, 2017.
In response to the statistics, which were released Nov. 29, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs called on the federal government to take a three-pronged approach to hate-motivated crime and related matters.
“In the wake of this report, we are reiterating our call on the Government of Canada to take three key steps to combat hate,” Shimon Koffler Fogel, chief executive officer of CIJA, said in a statement. “First, we are grateful that the prime minister announced he will enhance the Security Infrastructure Program. We urge the government to expand it to cover training costs, especially given that emergency training saved lives during the Pittsburgh synagogue attack. Second, we need a national strategy to combat online hate. Experience shows that vicious rhetoric online can fuel and foreshadow violence offline. Third, the federal government should strengthen the capacity of law enforcement to combat hate crime. This should include enhancing legal tools to deal with hate speech and supporting the creation of local hate crime units where they are lacking.”
University of Ottawa’s Prof. Jan Grabowski delivered the Rudolf Vrba Memorial Lecture at the University of British Columbia Nov. 15. (photo by Pat Johnson)
Jan Grabowski, a University of Ottawa professor who is a leading scholar of the Holocaust, delivered the annual Rudolf Vrba Memorial Lecture at the University of British Columbia Nov. 15 – the same day he filed a libel suit against an organization aligned with Poland’s far-right government.
The Polish League Against Defamation, which is allied with the country’s governing Law and Justice Party, initiated a campaign against Grabowski last year, accusing him of ignoring the number of Poles who saved Jews and exaggerating the number of Jews killed by their Polish compatriots. Grabowski’s book, Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland, won the 2014 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research. An English translation of an even more compendious multi-year analysis undertaken by a team of researchers under Grabowski’s leadership will be published next year. His Vrba lecture provided an overview of some of the findings in the new work. It is a harrowing survey that brought condemnation from Polish-Canadians in the Vancouver audience.
The new book, which does not yet have an English title, is a work of “microhistory,” Grabowski said. Holocaust studies is one of the fastest-growing fields of historical research, he said, partly because it got off to a slow start and really only picked up in the 1980s. Much of the written work being completed today is in the area of survivor memoirs, second- and third-generation experiences, including inherited trauma, and “meta-history,” the study of the study of the Holocaust.
“This assumes that we actually know what has happened,” he said. Grabowski maintains there is still much primary research to be done. “We are still far away from knowing as much as we should about this, one of the greatest tragedies in human history.”
There are millions of pages of relevant historical documentation almost completely untapped – primarily in provincial Polish archives, police records and town halls – that spell out in detail the often-enthusiastic complicity of Poles in turning on their
Jewish neighbours. By combing through these previously ignored records, Grabowski and his co-authors have amassed evidence of widespread – and eager – involvement of Polish police and other Poles in assisting Germans to identify, hunt down and murder Polish Jews.
The work has been met with official condemnation. Earlier this year, the Polish government adopted a law that would expose scholars involved in the study of the Holocaust to fines and prison terms of up to three years. The criminal component of the law, including imprisonment, was rescinded after international backlash, but the atmosphere around Holocaust inquiry in Poland remains repressive.
Grabowski said that the “explosion of right-wing extremists, xenophobia and blatant antisemitism” in Poland is related to the “undigested, unlearned and/or rejected legacy of the Holocaust” – the fact that Polish society has, by and large, refused to acknowledge the wounds of the past or to deal with its own role in the extermination of three million of its Jewish citizens between 1939 to 1945.
The concept of microhistory, which is the approach Grabowski’s team uses, is not local history, he said, “it is an attempt to follow trajectories of people.” He instructed his researchers to focus on the exact day, often hour by hour, when liquidation actions took place in hundreds of Polish shtetls and ghettoes. To do so upends a conspiracy of silence that has existed for decades.
“Why the silence?” he asked the audience. “There were three parts to the silence. One was the Jews. They were dead. They had no voice … 98.5% of Polish Jews who remained under German occupation, who never fled, died. You have a 1.5% survival rate for the Polish Jews. So, the Jews couldn’t really, after the war, ask for justice, because they were gone.”
The communist regime that dominated Poland for a half-century after the war was viewed not only as a foreign power inflicted on Poles from the Soviet Union, Grabowski said, “but, more importantly, as Jewish lackeys – that was a term that was used.
“So, it wouldn’t really stand to have trials of those accused of complicity with the Germans for murdering the Jews,” he said. “That would only confirm the widespread accusations that the communists were here doing the Jewish bidding.”
The third factor in the silence were the interests of Polish nationalists, whose ideology is inherently antisemitic, and who are the dominant political force in the country today.
Hunt for the Jews won the 2014 Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research.
While clearly not all Poles were collaborators, it would have been impossible for almost anyone in the country to claim ignorance of what was happening.
“Mass killing was taking place in the streets,” the professor said. Researchers found bills of sale charging city officials for the sand municipal workers needed to cover the blood on sidewalks.
“When you say that blood was running in the streets, it’s not a metaphor, it’s just a description of what really happened,” he said.
In some ghettos, as many as half the Jewish population was killed on the day of the action, with massive participation from Polish society.
“One area more, one area less,” he said. “Usually between 10 and 20% of Jews were slaughtered simply in order to frighten the remaining 80% to go to the trains, to be herded to the trains,” said Grabowski.
In Poland’s smaller communities, centuries of Jewish and Polish social, commercial and civic interactions did not result in camaraderie – on the contrary.
“The deadliest places of all [were] small shtetls, small towns, where anonymity was not available when the authorities were not far away,” he said. In one instance, a Jew in hiding heard his neighbour assure the Nazis he would return with a hatchet to help them break into the hiding place seconds before the door was axed down.
In another example, Grabowski described in minute detail the atrocities committed by Germans, Poles and Ukrainian recruits in Węgrów, a town in eastern central Poland with a Jewish population of about “10,000 starving Jews who have been terrorized for nearly three years and now the final moment has come.”
Rumours of liquidation swirled for months, as Jews fleeing neighbouring communities brought narratives of destruction. In the day or two before the liquidation, wives of Polish military and other officials rushed to their Jewish tailors, shoemakers and others craftspeople to obtain the items they knew would soon become unavailable.
“With mounting panic, people started to prepare themselves for a siege,” said Grabowski. “They built hideouts to survive the initial German fury, they started to seek out contacts on the Aryan side of the city, looking for help from former neighbours, sometimes friends and former business partners.”
On the eve of Yom Kippur in 1942, Polish officials in the town were instructed to assemble horses, wagons and volunteers. A cordon of Nazis and collaborators surrounded the city at intervals of no more than 100 metres.
The mayor of the town wrote: “Jews who woke up to the terrible news ran like mad around the city, half-naked, looking for shelter.” The same leader noted that, when the Germans demanded he produce volunteers to help with the task of rounding up their Jewish neighbours, he feared he would not be able to meet their needs.
“Before I was able to leave my office, in order to assess the situation and issue orders for the removal of the bodies,” the mayor testified, “removal of the bodies had already started. There were carts and people ready. They volunteered for the job without any pressure.”
For Jews, the Germans were to be feared, but their Polish neighbours were also a threat.
“The greatest danger was not associated with the Germans, but with the Poles,” said Grabowski. “Unlike the former, the latter could easily tell a Jew from a non-Jew by their accent, customs and physical appearance.”
Poles were rewarded with a quarter-kilo of sugar for every Jew they turned in.
“The searches were conducted with extreme brutality and violence … the streets were soon filled with crowds of Jews being driven toward the market square, which the Germans had transformed into a holding pen for thousands of ghetto inmates,” he said.
On the streets, “the cries of Jews mixed with the shouts of the Germans and the laughter of the Poles,” according to an eyewitness.
“All of this was done in a small town where everybody knows each other,” said Grabowski. “It’s not only the question of geographic proximity, it’s social proximity. These people knew each other.”
People were taking clothes, jewelry and other possessions from the dead bodies. A husband would toss a body in the air while the wife pulled off articles of clothing until what was left was a pile of naked cadavers.
“They even pulled out golden teeth with pliers,” said Grabowski. A court clerk responded defensively to accusations that the gold he was trying to sell was soaked in human blood. “I personally washed the stuff,” he protested.
The prevalence in the Polish imagination of a Jewish association with gold partly accounted for the actions.
“This betrayal, due to widespread antisemitism and hatred of the Jews, was combined with the seemingly universal conviction that Jewish gold was just waiting to be transferred to new owners,” Grabowski said. “The myth of Jewish gold was so popular and so deeply rooted among Poles that it sealed the fate of [many Jews].”
The historical records indicate many Poles saw no need to cover their collaborationist tracks. Police and others who took it upon themselves to aid the Nazis without pressure defended their actions.
One policeman, after the war, depicted the killing of Jews as a patriotic act, one that saved Polish villagers from the wrath of the Nazis, who would have learned sooner or later about Jews in hiding and who then, he claimed, would have burned down the entire village.
As efficient as the Nazi killing machine was, Grabowski contends it could not have been as effective without the enthusiastic complicity of so many in Poland and other occupied countries.
“It was their participation that, in a variety of ways, made the German system of murder as efficient as it was,” he said.
With trepidation, Grabowski and his fellow researchers followed the documents and met with people in the towns. They would review documents from a 1947 trial, for instance, then go to the village in question.
The entire village would be conscious of its war-era history, he said. And the people who are, decades later, ostracized by their neighbours are not those who collaborated in the murder of Jews.
“The person that is ostracized is the family who tried to rescue the Jews, because they broke a certain social taboo and it still visible 75 or 76 years after the fact,” he said.
“Every time I present a speech to a Polish audience, the question of Polish righteous is presented as if it is a fig leaf behind which everyone else can hide.”
In the question-and-answer session, Grabowski shut down a persistent audience member who identified as Polish and who took exception with Grabowski’s research, arguing that Poland has more Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem than any other country.
“Every time I present a speech to a Polish audience, the question of Polish righteous is presented as if it is a fig leaf behind which everyone else can hide,” said Grabowski, who was born and educated in Warsaw. “The thing is, do you know how many Jews needed to be rescued? Poland had the largest Jewish community and using today Polish righteous as a universal and, let’s say, fig leaf behind which situations like I described here can be hidden is absolutely unconscionable. I protest against any attempt to overshadow the tragedy of Jewish people [with] the sacrifice of very, very few Poles.”
While Poland’s far-right government removed the mandated jail sentence for anyone found guilty of “slandering” Poland or Poles with complicity in Nazi war crimes, acknowledging the participation of Polish collaborators in the Holocaust remains a civil offence and Holocaust scholars in the country – and in Canada – face death threats and intimidation.
In introducing Grabowski, Richard Menkis, associate professor in the department of history at UBC, paid tribute to Rudolf Vrba, a Slovakian Jew who escaped Auschwitz and brought to the world inside information about the death camp, its operations and physical layout. Vrba, with fellow escapee Albert Wetzler, warned in 1944 that Hungarian Jews were about to face mass transport to the death camps. The news is credited with saving as many as 200,000 lives.
Vrba migrated to Canada and became a professor of pharmacology at UBC. He died in 2006.
The Vrba lecture alternates annually between an issue relevant to the Holocaust and an issue chosen by the pharmacology department in the faculty of medicine.
At risk of universalizing a book with a particular theme, The Aging of Aquarius: Igniting Passion and Purpose as an Elder is valuable not just for those who are retired or pondering it – though it has plenty of age-specific content for that demographic. At root, it is a book about living well, and that makes it a valuable volume for people of any age.
Author Helen Wilkes, a Vancouverite and member of the Or Shalom community, has penned an optimistic, uplifting book. But let that not deceive the reader, she warns early on, into misjudging who she is.
“Lest you think I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth or that I am one of those insufferably cheerful people,” she writes in the preface, “permit me to introduce myself.”
She talks about being born to Jewish shopkeepers in a village in the Sudetenland, part of Czechoslovakia that was among the first places occupied by the Nazis in advance of the Second World War.
“Our village fell to Hitler when I was still in diapers and, as a consequence, I have spent a lifetime with fear and negativity as my constant companions,” she writes.
Her childhood was lonely and her parents uncommunicative. Her marriage ended when her daughters were 3 and 4 years old.
“Divorce at the time was still so shameful that it took my mother several years to accept what she and her friends labeled as my ‘failure as a woman.’”
Yet Wilkes pivots to optimism.
“If, despite a childhood in the shadow of the Holocaust, and if, despite a lifetime of experiencing myself as an outsider with little sense of self-worth, I have found cause to hold my head high and to face the future with optimism in my retirement years, there is reason for others to hope,” she writes.
This is not a handbook on aging so much as an illustration by example of how to do it right. She does acknowledge, though, that a person has to make the effort to age well. Each section of her book ends with ideas and actions that might help on the path to success.
“Everywhere, there are opportunities to meet new people, yet surveys indicate that social isolation is a major problem despite the fact that simply joining a club is as good for your health as quitting smoking, exercising or losing weight,” writes Wilkes, who has a PhD in French literature. “The Vancouver Foundation reports ‘a precipitous decline’ in how many people made use of libraries, community or recreation centres in 2017, that only about one in four people took part in any kind of community or neighbourhood project.… And that, in a city as diverse as ours, only about one in four people attended an ethnic or cultural event put on by an ethnic or cultural group different than their own.”
Finding joy in the simple things – again, good advice for people of any age – is one of her key findings.
“Aging has made me a connoisseur of life,” she writes. “It has taught me to savour not what is rare or high-priced, but what is ordinary. The small moments that sometimes overwhelm me with heart-stopping joy. An incredible blue-sky day. The first sip of my morning coffee. The laughter of family and friends. Whenever I am walking in the woods with a boisterous dog, whenever I sit on a log at the beach while the sun dips slowly below the horizon and paints the sky with hues no artist could capture, whenever I stroll through a harvest market where farm-fresh produce overwhelms with its rich ripeness, whenever my grandchildren burst through the doorway to give me a hug, or whenever I am engaged in any number of absorbing activities, I so often have an overwhelming sense of not wanting to be anywhere in the world except exactly where I am at this moment.”
While she challenges the conceptions some people have of retirement as a time to sit in a hammock with a fancy drink, she does also acknowledge that, as Danny Kaye said, “to travel is to take a journey into yourself.”
She talks about an eye-opening trip to China, where she went as a chaperone to her 10-year-old twin grandsons. Having heard of the panoply of human rights abuses in China, she was shocked to see an English-language newspaper with a headline asking “How dare they?” above an article cataloguing racism and human rights abuses in the United States and other “free world” countries. Having heard about China’s reputation as a major contributor to global warming, she was pleased to see solar panels and wind turbines throughout the country. The rapid transit system they used to get everywhere contrasted with what she is familiar with in Vancouver.
“China held up a mirror that led me to reexamine the history I had been taught in high school and university,” she writes. “Day by day, it became more difficult to view the West as having brought enlightenment to backward Asians.”
Wilkes acknowledges that not everyone can travel to foreign countries and says there are ways to experience some of that diversity without getting on a plane.
“Next week, I anticipate attending a Hindu baby-naming ceremony to which I’ve been invited. Last week, I was invited for dinner at the home of a Muslim family from Pakistan. Being at their table, sharing our limited knowledge of one another’s culture, these to me are opportunities for much more than just personal enjoyment or emotional enrichment. They are occasions where it is possible to create a gram of kindness in a world where political and regional and religious differences tend to divide rather than link. I never fail to feel uplifted by experiencing our common humanity writ large. When I can no longer travel, I hope I will still reach out to people from other lands as graciously as people elsewhere have reached out to me,” she writes.
She speaks about another trip – this one to Berlin, for the launch of the German translation of her previous book, Letters from the Lost: A Memoir of Discovery, which explored her survivor’s guilt as she discovered, in adulthood, a cache of letters from family left behind in Czechoslovakia after she and her parents fled just after Nazi occupation of the Sudetenland.
“In Berlin, forgetting is impossible,” she reflects. “Over the years, Germany has made remembering an art as well as an official policy. Germany tells the world that it is only by remembering the past that we have any likelihood of avoiding similar mistakes in the future. The reminders are unavoidable. In Berlin, history is omnipresent. Even the sidewalks are studded with Stolpersteine, raised stumbling blocks inscribed with the names of Jews who once lived in the adjacent buildings.”
Since so many people’s identities are entwined with their profession, she writes, moving into retirement, for many people, can demand a complete reinvention of self. She proceeds to ask a litany of questions about what identity means, and even, as a member of a particular culture, what culture means.
“Such questions and many more continue to haunt me as I age,” she writes.
And, while she turns to books for answers, the process of asking questions may be an end in itself when addressing the existential issues the book confronts.
Among everything else it is, The Aging of Aquarius is also a very Jewish memoir. Both in her personal history and in the theological exploration she discusses near the end of it, her Jewish identity and experiences play central roles in the story.
At a book launch at Or Shalom on Nov. 4, Wilkes said she approaches the later years of life with many unanswered questions. But, as difficult as finding answers may be, she suggested responding affirmatively.
“I know it’s not easy, but if the answer to how is yes,” she said in conclusion, “let us all say yes to life. Yes to aging. L’chaim.”
