memoirs

Survivor reflects on identity

Marie Doduck speaks with a guest at the launch of her book A Childhood Unspoken on Jan. 22. (photo by Josias Tschanz)

“We survived.” These are the words that adult Marie Doduck would tell her childhood self, Mariette, who survived the Holocaust being moved from hiding place to hiding place over a period of five years.

Doduck was answering a question during a book launch laden with emotion – deeply sad as well as celebratory and with moments of laughter – Jan. 22 at a packed Rothstein Theatre. Her book, A Childhood Unspoken, was just released by the Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program.

In a conversation with Jody Spiegel, director of the memoirs program, Doduck spoke of how she is two people – the European Jewish child, Mariette Rozen, who never grew up, and the Canadian adult, Marie, who she had to create to suit her new surroundings after arriving in Vancouver with three orphaned siblings in 1947.

“Mariette will never grow old,” she said. “The child Mariette will always be the child inside and that’s what survivors live. We left the child that was in Europe, we created a wonderful life here in Canada, but when I speak and when I leave this room Mariette stays in this room and I become Marie again.”

Doduck explained her long hesitancy in sharing her story, not only because of the vulnerability it requires, but because the experiences of survivors like her had been dismissed and diminished in the past.

“As a child survivor,” she said, “we were told that we didn’t have a story.”

For decades after the end of the Holocaust, the term “survivor” was largely reserved for those who had been in concentration camps or subjected to forced labour. Child survivors who had been hidden or otherwise managed to escape capture and murder were deemed not to have suffered like older survivors.

This silent or quietly conveyed message was underscored by the way child survivors were treated after the war, even by well-intentioned adults like the families who fostered some of the 1,123 orphans, including Doduck, who came to Canada under the auspices of Canadian Jewish Congress from 1947 to 1949.

“We were from outer space,” she said of the reactions she and fellow child refugees received from Canadians. “We saw things that children should never have seen.”

Placed in homes with new families, with little or no assistance in addressing what they had experienced, many children did not do well.

“Of the 40 children who came to Vancouver, my brother Jacques and myself, I think, were the only two lucky children who stayed with the same family,” Doduck said. “My sister [Esther] didn’t stay with her first family, she became an au pair. Henri jumped from family to family.”

In some cases, said Doduck, the children were told they would die by the time they were 30 “because we were not normal in the Canadian eyes.”

Doduck wrote the book with Dr. Lauren Faulkner Rossi, assistant professor of history at Simon Fraser University. Speaking at the event and addressing Doduck directly, Faulkner Rossi acknowledged that the process was difficult.

“You would have to become the child Mariette many times,” she said, noting that Doduck was forced to plumb memories she has tried to forget. Faulkner Rossi said Doduck had to trust her, though Doduck’s “inclination is to trust no one – a crucial Holocaust childhood lesson that is never quite unlearned.”

“It’s a hard process for any child survivor to write their story,” Doduck said, not only because of the emotional toll but also because of the imperfections of childhood memories. “Did we hear it from adults? Did we live it? I wanted the truth.”

Doduck pressed Faulkner Rossi wherever possible to substantiate her recollections with historical evidence. During the process, Doduck recalled things she thought had been lost. “Sometimes one memory triggers another that you thought you had forgotten,” she said.

Doduck is a founding member of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, through which she has shared her history with tens of thousands of students and others. She is also a philanthropist and community leader, volunteering and leading events, including co-chairing, with fellow VHEC co-founder Dr. Robert Krell, the 2019 conference of the World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Descendants, in Vancouver.

Before Doduck’s presentation, VHEC executive director Nina Krieger described Doduck as “a force … a formidable and sought-after champion for many community organizations. She is also a mentor and a friend to so many, including me, and has inspired more than a generation of community leaders, especially young women, with her vision, passion, tenacity and work ethic, not to mention good humour and grace.”

The book launch event was presented by the VHEC and the Azrieli Foundation. Doduck’s daughters Cathy Golden and Bernice Carmeli read from the book. Arielle Berger, managing editor of the Azrieli Foundation, noted that, since 2005, the foundation has published more than 150 memoirs of Canadian survivors of the Holocaust. The foundation provides the books for free to schools and universities and also provides teaching resources and training to educators. This was the first in-person book launch since the pandemic.

The full theatre was still during an emotional moment when Doduck addressed her family in the front rows.

“I don’t say it often and I want to say it publicly to my children, my family sitting here, thank you for accepting who I am,” said Doduck, now a great-grandmother, before acknowledging the lack of experience with which she approached parenting. “When I was blessed with my children, my husband had to teach me how to go to the library and get a book,” she said. “I never knew a story to tell the kids.”

As a child, she said, Mariette was never hugged, never put to bed, was never kissed, never had a toy and never had a bedtime story.

“My first toy, I was 36 years old, I was the guest speaker in Winnipeg at a fundraiser,” she said, “and they gave me my first doll. I still have it. The only doll I ever had in my whole life.”

As a founding member of the local group of child survivors who meet regularly, Doduck tried to explain the uniqueness of child survivors to their own children.

“We all passed something to them that we didn’t realize we were doing, a burden that we gave to our children, our firstborn,” she said. “I apologize to all the firstborn. We didn’t mean to put a burden on you.”

She takes pride and sees a sense of progress in the different ways her three daughters have viewed her.

“My middle daughter, Bernice, always accepted me. That’s the way mom is,” she said. “That’s the middle child of all the survivors’ children. And my youngest daughter, Cheryl, may she rest in peace, only thought of me as a Canadian. So, I progressed. I fulfilled my duty in becoming Marie, the Canadian.”

Unique testimony on stage

Kalman Bar-On, left, and Leopold Lowy at their reunion in 2002. (photo from Richard Lowy)

An SS guard walked down the line of prisoners gathered for roll call at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944 and randomly picked two boys out of the line. Kalman Braun and Leopold Lowy would spend the next six-and-a-half months together working as servants in a guard shack, giving them a unique viewpoint on what was happening in that place during some of the final months of the Second World War.

The boys, who each had twin sisters and were, therefore, of interest to the infamous Nazi doctor, Josef Mengele, would survive the Holocaust, as would their sisters. Lowy moved to Canada and settled in Vancouver, Braun moved to Israel and became Kalman Bar-On – the two would not see each other again for more than half a century.

Their story was shared at the Rothstein Theatre Jan. 26, the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the 78th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Richard Lowy, son of the late Leopold (or Leo) Lowy, presented an immersive experience that included first-person testimony, with Richard Lowy speaking the words, variously, of Bar-On, Leo Lowy and himself, as the son of Canada’s last surviving “Mengele twin,” who passed away in 2002, just a few months after he reconnected with Bar-On. Next year, Lowy intends to release a book based on hours of interviews he did with Bar-On.

The testimony, which Lowy presented last year in a similar format in Tel Aviv, is extremely rare, he contends, because of the unique vantage point his father and Bar-On had on concentration camp operations for half a year.

“This is these two Jewish kids, 15 years old,” Lowy told the Independent before the presentation, “cleaning the [SS] barrack, staring over the shoulders of the SS guards, at the front window looking out into the camp and watching the things that are going on, the selections, the liquidation of the Gypsy camp, the uprising of Crematorium IV, which is about 100 yards away from them. They can hear the fire pit and the people screaming.”

The reunion of Lowy and Bar-On, 57 years after liberation, almost didn’t happen. Richard Lowy had produced a documentary on his father’s Holocaust experiences, called Leo’s Journey. (This film and a shorter one about the reunion are available at leosjourney.ca.) The program aired on the National Geographic Channel in Israel and Bar-On happened to see it. He didn’t recognize the older Lowy, who he knew only as “Lippa,” but when a photo of the younger Leopold flashed across the screen, Bar-On was astounded.

“He’s looking at the screen and saying, ‘It’s my Lippa, it’s my Lippa,’” Richard Lowy said. Bar-On, who credited Leo Lowy for helping him survive the Holocaust, made a few calls and, before long, the telephone rang in the Lowy condo in Richmond. By this time, Leo was experiencing some dementia and it took time for him to realize who he was speaking with.

A reunion was quickly planned and Bar-On flew to Vancouver, where TV cameras captured the emotional meeting. As Bar-On shared his recollections, Lowy’s memories were also sparked. Subsequently, the younger Lowy recorded hours of testimony at Bar-On’s home in Tel Aviv.

“Kalman has a crystal clear memory of dates, times, places,” said Lowy. “By the month, by the week, by the day, by the hour, by the minute of things that were going on.… The guards treated them like mice.”

The teenagers witnessed and overheard things that they then shared with others in their barracks, where they returned at night from the comparative comfort of the heated guard shack.

“It put them in a very unique situation, but still dangerous,” said Lowy. “Think about it. You’re in a guard shack with SS guards. You do something they don’t like, they beat the crap out of you. But they do it in such a way that they are not going to break your arm, they are not going to kill you, because you are a ‘Mengele twin.’”

The building where the boys were assigned was particularly central.

“Leopold and Kalman’s guard shack was right at the top of the camp, outside of the hospital, right beside Kanada [where valuables stolen from prisoners were stored], right beside Crematorium Number IV, and you are able to see and hear all the different comings and goings,” he said. “Kalman gives us an overview of an area of the camp, the hospital camp, that I have never really read before.”

Leopold protected Kalman by, for instance, covering for his friend at work when Kalman could not move an arm after being injected with an experimental substance.

Bar-On has provided videotaped testimony to Yad Vashem, said Lowy, but it is about 35 minutes long, like many other survivor testimonies.

“I have about 14 hours of testimony,” said Lowy, “which basically takes me back to the time he was born, what his family was like, what it was like going to the yeshivah.”

Organizations like Yad Vashem that collect survivor testimonies do not have the resources to go into the depth with each individual that Lowy did with Bar-On, he said.

“I’m not interviewing thousands of people,” he said. “I don’t see how it would be possible to get 14 hours of interviews from every single survivor. I think that would just be an incredibly difficult challenge.”

Individual stories, though, are critical to understanding the Holocaust experience, said Lowy, noting monographs written by people like Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, the more than 100,000 hours of testimony assembled by the USC Shoah Foundation, which was founded by Steven Spielberg, and films such as Sophie’s Choice, The Pianist and Schindler’s List.

At the event last month, projected images and video footage illustrated the narrative, while Lowy spoke, accompanied by violinist Cameron Wilson and cellist Finn Manniche.

The event was presented by Ward McAllister and Michelle Kirkegaard of the development firm Ledingham McAllister, who are friends of Lowy’s and funded the production. Volunteers from Na’amat Canada helped with the logistics.

An intense, urgent read

A formula for survival for a child in the Holocaust: “Don’t trust anyone; never speak unless spoken to; never give your real last name; if you see your brothers and sisters, don’t run to them: cross over to the other side of the street. Don’t cry and don’t get sick; just survive.”

This is how the character of Mariette Rozen of Brussels, Belgium, aka Marie Doduck of Vancouver, Canada, was fashioned during her formative years between the ages of 6 and 11 during the Holocaust, beginning in 1940. Those words of caution from her older brother Jean, painfully scoured from the mists of Marie’s memory, have become a kind of coat that one takes off in polite company, but it is a mantle that never left her, even in her 80s, as Marie looks back in her memoir on her two lives: a child Holocaust survivor and a Canadian with a lifetime of achievement in the arts, family life, business and service to her community.

Entitled A Childhood Unspoken, this book of only 138 pages is a powerhouse! Co-authored and researched by Simon Fraser University history professor Lauren Faulkner Rossi, the memoir is written in two authentic voices: Marie Doduck the Canadian citizen, 86-year-old mother, grandmother and great-grandmother who, while recollecting her past, slips back into Mariette Rozen, being hunted or hiding in Belgium in the 1940s or transitioning to a new life in Vancouver in the 1950s. I began reading the first chapter silently. Then, the urgency and honesty of the voices behind the prose came alive. I wound up reading the entire book aloud to my partner Ruth, who grew up with Marie and shares high school memories with her.

It was an intense experience. There is in the book an urgency to at last speak the unspoken repressed memories of her traumatic childhood, to unearth and – most importantly – to verify the truth of Marie’s memory about where Mariette had been, with whom and where she lived as she was bounced from one location in Belgium to another while running from the Nazis. Marie wondered: did Mariette really see her mother and brother snatched from a Brussels street by the Nazis or did that happen in a dream? Did she have grandparents? This and much more was verified through Faulkner Rossi’s research. Marie’s memory grew clearer, however, when she described the frustration of Mariette the teenaged refugee whose lack of English drove her to draw pictures in order to communicate with her Vancouver foster parents, the Satanoves.

But Mariette desperately wanted to catch up on her education, to fit into the Kerrisdale schools of Vancouver. To become a Canadian. Very quickly, and to the amazement of other children, she not only learned English but even seized leading singing roles in school operettas. As a married woman, the same talent, grit, brains and determination guided Marie to leadership roles in her children’s schools, in her synagogue, in Jewish charities and in business with her husband, Sidney Doduck. She gained such a wide reputation as a Holocaust witness and survivor that she was invited to address the German parliament, which she refused.

Several of the Shoah episodes retold by the Doduck-Rossi team bear repeating here. In a Belgian orphanage where Mariette’s Jewish origins had been carefully guarded, one of the nuns told the Nazis about her but then confessed it to the Mother Superior, who quickly opened a sewer for Mariette and banged the metal plate closed over her. Mariette waited for hours, terrified in the black sewer while rats crawled over her and the boots of Nazi soldiers clanged on the metal plate above. The Nazis left empty-handed.

Chased by Nazis, Mariette took shelter in a Belgian barn but knew that she couldn’t hide in a loose haystack because they would be probing them with pitchforks, so she chose a tightly-bound bale, dug a hole for herself, crawled in and pulled the hay in behind her. Sure enough, a Nazi came and began probing the loose stacks with a pitchfork. As he left, he stuck the fork into Mariette’s bale and pierced her hand. When the farm housewife came to rescue her, she found blood all over and took the child into the kitchen for repairs. “Who is doing all the screaming?” Mariette wondered out loud. “It’s you,” said the woman as she disinfected and bandaged the wound.

Although Mariette saw much brutality and death, there were some good people. Among her many saviours was a “good” German soldier. Mariette had been swept up on a Brussels street along with many other Jews and non-Jews, packed into a cattle car and transported to a concentration camp overnight. When the doors slid open at the camp, a Nazi soldier screamed in German, “What is my sister doing on this train?” Without hesitation, Mariette began screaming back the few German words she knew and the Nazi soldier took her off the train, put her into a motorcycle sidecar, drove her to the outskirts of town and dropped her off.

I was inspired by Marie’s Judaism. There is also much to be admired about her lack of hate and her anti-hate philosophy, her lack of self-pity and the life force that drove her to accomplish so much and to give back so much. Yet this book is also a tribute to Marie’s brothers and sisters and to all of those approximately 1,200 traumatized Jewish children who were brought to Canada after the war and strove to fit in and to make themselves a new life. It’s a memoir that Marie’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren can proudly cherish as a history of their ancestor who is one of this country’s great Jewish Canadians.

Stan Goldman is a retired English teacher who lives in Richmond.

Lives shaped by war

Heroism and survival took on new meaning for me after reading George Halpern’s From School to Sky: Joseph’s Tale of War and Gina Roitman’s Don’t Ask. The first is a biography of a certain time in Halpern’s father’s life, the latter is a fictional work that centres around a daughter’s search for her mother’s history during that same time period, the Second World War. Both books are featured at this year’s Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival.

Halpern takes part in the Feb. 12, 10 a.m., by-donation event A Literary Quickie, in which he and seven other authors each have five minutes to pitch their books. Roitman appears with Lynda Cohen Loigman (The Matchmaker’s Gift: A Novel) in A Day to Celebrate Human Closeness, which takes place at 2 p.m., on Feb. 14 ($18).

Halpern’s pitch to me included only some of the actions that make his father, Joseph Halpern, a hero. In reading the book, which is based on months’ worth of interviews George did with his dad, who died in 2011, I discovered several more reasons. Joseph was a fighter pilot for the Russian Air Force (Joseph’s town, Vladimir Volynsky, was in the part of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union weeks after the war started). He was a Soviet prisoner for a spell, then trained as a special forces commando. He was captured by Nazis on a mission, but escaped. Following the war, he defected (to the Americans in Berlin), taking his Russian plane with him, but then returned to Russia to fulfil a promise he made to someone who had saved his life. He founded an orphanage, helped create the Israeli Air Force, etc., etc.

The most compelling part to me of Joseph Halpern’s story, however, is his honest appraisal of himself, his humility and his humanity, even though he wasn’t always humane. He admits his “fearless attitude would be combined with special training – including brainwashing – and I would truly believe that I was invincible.” He is open about wanting to have killed more Nazis than he did, and that he personally killed someone in an act of revenge. His complexities include the life he had to build after immigrating to Canada, caring for his kids through his wife’s struggle with mental illness, obtaining two doctorates, working with NASA, finding love again and more.

Similarly, though in a fictional setting, Roitman’s novel deals with multi-layered human beings, some of whom survive because they committed acts of which they are not proud – and they carry the guilt for the rest of their lives. As Joseph’s trauma travels beyond his own self and is passed on in some degree to his children, so does the character Rokhl’s carry over to her daughter Hannah.

Rokhl doesn’t talk much, and certainly not about her experiences during the Holocaust, in contrast to her husband, who has already passed away when the novel begins – what little Hannah knows of her heritage has come from her father. Hannah only receives her mother’s wisdom through notes that Rokhl leaves her, the last of which Hannah finds in her mom’s purse after Rokhl dies, apparently by suicide: “I am not her,” it says.

Don’t Ask traces Hannah’s attempt to figure out the mystery of that note and deal with the grief of her mother’s death, while also brokering a real estate deal between a German buyer and a Holocaust survivor who lives in Quebec and owns a tract of land in the Laurentians. Hannah’s parents immigrated to Montreal after the war; Hannah, their only child, was born in a DP camp in Germany, which they had called home. Since the Holocaust, “Her father could not say the word ‘German’ without spitting” and, in her last encounter with her mother, in which Hannah shared the news that she was traveling to Germany, her mother had threatened, “If you go, it will be over my dead body, do you hear me?”

In the guise of a budding romance between Hannah and Max, her counterpart in Germany, Roitman addresses many challenging questions about the intergenerational nature of culpability and forgiveness, of duty to one’s parents and the responsibility for building one’s own life, of nursing hatred or risking love. She does so in a fashion that sometimes pushes belief – for example, Hannah and Max are not young, yet they lack much understanding of what attraction is, and Hannah, despite her professed curiosity about her mother’s past doesn’t explore until the end of the book four boxes of her mother’s notes, which have sat in her closet for an undisclosed amount of time prior to her mother’s death. Yet, Roitman also writes in a way that makes you care about the characters and what happens to them. The story of Rokhl’s Holocaust experiences and that of Hannah’s budding relationship (and the weight of history that it and the real estate deal unearth) are enthralling and Don’t Ask is a hard book to put down until you finish it.

Reading expands experience

Letters that highlight friendship, writing that facilitates healing, stories that dissect societal mores – the books reviewed by the Jewish Independent this week represent only a small fraction of those featured at the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival this year.

While the official festival runs Feb. 11-16, opening with Dr. Gabor Maté in conversation with Marsha Lederman about his latest book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture, there are a couple of pre-festival events this month: German writer Max Czollek launches the English version of his book De-Integrate! A Jewish Survival Guide for the 21st Century on Jan. 19 and American-Israeli photographer Jason Langer presents his book Berlin: A Jewish Ode to the Metropolis on Jan. 26. As well, there is a post-festival event, on Feb. 28, which sees former federal cabinet minister and senator Jack Austin launching his memoir, Unlikely Insider: A West Coast Advocate in Ottawa.

If the books reviewed by the Independent are any indication, attendees of the festival can expect to have their views challenged and their perspectives broadened; they will be moved, disturbed and amused, sometimes all at once.

Intimate portraits

Two years ago, the JCC Jewish Book Festival featured the book Memories of Jewish Poland: The 1932 Photographs of Nachum Tim Gidal (jewishindependent.ca/gidals-photos-speak-volumes). It was the fulfilment of a dying request that Israeli photographer Tim Gidal made in 1996 to Vancouver scholar, writer and philanthropist Yosef Wosk. The book was released at the same time that an exhibit of its photos was mounted at the Zack Gallery (jewishindependent.ca/jewish-poland-in-1932).

The friendship between Wosk and Gidal was evident in that book and in the exhibit. How the two men – separated in age by some 40 years and in geography by almost 11,000 kilometres – became such good friends is the subject of Gidal: The Unusual Friendship of Yosef Wosk and Tim Gidal, written by Wosk (and, technically, Gidal) and edited by another of Wosk’s good friends, Alan Twigg.

photo - Alan Twigg — Alan Twigg *(PR photo)*

The bulk of Gidal is letters that Gidal and Wosk wrote to each other from 1993, soon after they met, through to Gidal’s death in 1996. The postscript is a letter from Wosk to Gidal’s wife, Pia, mourning Gidal’s death and hoping that “his work and vision continue to inspire others.” Twigg has masterfully edited the multi-year correspondence, which comprised hundreds of letters, into an engaging narrative that offers insight into the core of these undeniably brilliant men, their work, ideas, loves, frustrations, sadnesses and more. Their vulnerability makes this a brave publication for Wosk to have created, and a meaningful one.

The other main component of Gidal is, of course, Gidal’s photographs, which, Wosk writes in the afterword, “serve as background to the letters.” As he did with Memories of Jewish Poland, Wosk mostly lets the photographs speak for themselves. Each photo section has a theme but each image within the section is simply captioned, placed and dated, without commentary.

There is a short chapter on Gidal and one on his and Wosk’s friendship and how this book came about. Gidal is creatively and esthetically put together. Each letter is headed by a key quote from the missive and the date it was sent. Images are included of some of the actual letters, most of which were sent by fax. It is interesting to contemplate whether this fount of communication would exist if it had been made via email.

Wosk and Twigg will talk about Gidal on Feb. 14, 7 p.m., at the book festival. The event is free of charge.

Therapeutic memoirs

Paired together for a presentation are Margot Fedoruk and Tamar Glouberman. The program categorizes them as “modern-day women” who will be presenting their “offbeat memoirs,” summarized by the question, “How B.C. is that?” Indeed, both Fedoruk and Glouberman tell coming-of-age stories of a sort, Fedoruk’s beginning in her 20s and Glouberman’s in her 30s. And they both lead outdoorsy, independent lives that could be described as the B.C. ideal, yet both have also faced many challenges and darker sides of that ideal.

Fedoruk is the author of Cooking Tips for Desperate Fishwives, in which she openly shares her anxieties of being married to a West Coast sea urchin diver – she is lonely without him, must raise their two daughters mostly without him and is worried that an accident may result in her having to live without him. Yet, she loves Rick, even though she does try (unsuccessfully) to convince him to take up another profession and stay closer to home. The pair moves around a lot, and Fedoruk herself takes up many different jobs over the years to make ends meet. But they stick together, getting married after their daughters are all grown up and have left home.

As dysfunctional as their relationship appears at times, Fedoruk had a more challenging life before she met Rick. Her father is a horrible man, her mother dies of cancer and she and her sister lose the family home to her mother’s second husband, also a horrible man. And there’s more. It is no wonder she leaves Winnipeg, eventually settling in British Columbia, though settling may be too strong a word, as she and her family do live in several different places on the coast, with some time in Calgary.

What makes Fedoruk’s memoir unique is the inclusion of a recipe in almost every chapter that reflects the mood or subject matter of the chapter, like the Killer Lasagne in the introduction, which begins, “The night I ran over Rick with my car, I was over four months pregnant with our first daughter.” Other recipes include Easy Curried Chickpeas With Rice, which appears as an affordable comfort food in a chapter about her being exhausted, on her own, caring for her two then-young daughters; and Wild-crafted Stinging Nettle Pesto, which comes after one of her descriptions of the soaps she makes – her business is Starfish Soap Company.

Near the end of her memoir, Fedoruk mentions that she has started therapy. I would have liked her to have written this book further into that process. As honest as she is about her feelings and circumstances, the memoir would have been more layered and impactful had she been further along in understanding how her traumatic childhood experiences, her genes and other factors affect how she moves through the world.

Glouberman has a less tragic background but a similarly transient life – and also loves something that gives her both great joy and great anxiety, the latter of which eventually takes over. In Chasing Rivers: A Whitewater Life, she shares her emotional journey of trying to make a life as a whitewater rafting guide.

One of the few women to guide tours, Glouberman does face sexism, her skills often underestimated by clients, but her male bosses and colleagues all seem to appreciate her abilities – certainly more than she does. She is constantly worried about making a mistake that will kill her or someone else and, while this is rational, given her job and its risks, the feeling becomes overwhelming. With an accident on the road – there is a lot of travel required to get to places like Chilko River, Williams Lake and further afield, outside the province – and her worst nightmare coming true on a rafting trip, Glouberman’s fears have very real incidents on which to grow.

Glouberman tries other types of work, but is always drawn back to the water. She struggles with depression and has a few other harsh experiences that add to her self-doubt. She tries various forms of therapy, some of which make her feel worse. Her family is supportive, though, and her sister’s home in Whistler is a refuge. She is only beginning her journey to healing when the memoir ends, and part of that has to do with getting into a master’s writing program. Both she and Fedoruk, who also went back to university for a writing degree, thank several people for their memoirs coming to fruition.

Glouberman and Fedoruk present at the book festival Feb. 12, 2 p.m. (tickets are $18). They also speak at Congregation Har El that day, at 11 a.m.

The price of victory

The harm inflicted on a society by war culture is front and centre in Israeli writer Yishai Sarid’s book Victorious. The main character, Abigail, is a military psychologist who, basically, tries to make soldiers into better killers, both “helping” them through trauma after they’ve experienced it and teaching them ways to be immune to trauma so that they can “beat the enemy.” Her father, who strongly disapproves of her work with the army, is a renowned clinical psychologist. On more than one occasion, he tries to talk her out of working for the military, but does not succeed. That the character of the father is dying of cancer is not coincidental.

Abigail blurs professional lines everywhere, working for the married man who fathered her son, the man who is now the army’s chief of staff; sleeping with a patient/friend; trying to become close friends with a former patient; and having a sexual relationship with one of the young soldiers whose unit she’s evaluating. The lessons she teaches are chilling, as is her abandonment of a patient who becomes too difficult for her to handle and some of her other actions.

She believes her job is her patriotic duty, even as her own son, Shauli, enters military service, in the paratroopers no less, and her fears for him fight with her pride in his choice. Though, with both his father and mother being staunch militarists, it could be argued that Shauli doesn’t really have a choice.

Victorious is a sparingly written novel that readers will not only ponder but feel well after they put it down. Translator Yardenne Greenspan must be given credit for making Sarid’s words as impactful in English as they are in Hebrew.

Sarid’s book festival event is Feb. 12, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $18.

For the full author lineup and to purchase festival tickets or passes, visit jccgv.com/jewish-book-festival or call 604-257-5111.

Controversy welcome

Soldiers of Tomorrow, about Itai Erdal’s experiences in the Israeli army, is at the Roundhouse Feb. 3-5. (photo from the Elbow Theatre)

“I know that this play will piss off a lot of people on both sides of the conflict, but I welcome the controversy. I am taking some strong stances and talking about some explosive subject matters (pun intended) so, if it wasn’t going to piss people off, then I probably didn’t do my job properly,” Itai Erdal told the Independent. “I think it’s good to challenge people and I welcome the discussion that this play will generate.”

Erdal was talking about Soldiers of Tomorrow, which he wrote with Colleen Murphy. The play is part of this year’s PuSh International Performing Arts Festival, and sees its world première Feb. 3-5 at Roundhouse Performance Centre.

Presented by the Elbow Theatre and PuSh, Soldiers of Tomorrow is directed by Anita Rochon and performed by Erdal with Syrian musician Emad Armoush.

“When I was a kid growing up in Israel, peace seemed inevitable – it was just a matter of time, there were countless songs about the day peace will arrive. The adults would always say, ‘By the time you grow up, we won’t need an army anymore.’ No one says that today,” writes Erdal on his website. “Most Israelis accept that their children will be soldiers. One day, when my nephew was 8, he came home from school with an empty box to fill with stuff to send to soldiers on the front line. Inside the box his teacher had written: ‘To the soldiers of today from the soldiers of tomorrow.’”

This experience inspired the play. While fictional, it is about real events that happened to Erdal during his time in the Israel Defence Forces in the early 1990s.

“I served in the army for three years and as a combatant soldier,” said Erdal. “I would have had to be in the reserves until the age of 45, which I didn’t want to do. I was in Jerusalem during all the suicide bombings in the ’90s and my reluctance to continue to be a soldier and my exhaustion of the political situation definitely contributed to my decision to immigrate to Vancouver.”

Erdal has made his mark here in many ways, including as an award-winning playwright, performer and lighting designer. He created the Elbow Theatre in 2012 “to confront urgent social and political issues.” Soldiers of Tomorrow is its sixth production. The PR blurb notes that, in it, Erdal “relates his actions in the army, exploring his personal culpability in the face of complex geopolitical forces in his former country – a place that he loves ‘with a broken heart.’”

“I pitched the idea for this play to Colleen Murphy in 2018 when we were working together in Stratford,” Erdal told the Independent. “We met a few times that year, but it really took off when the pandemic started. For almost two years, Colleen and I would meet on Zoom every Monday and Thursday for two hours. It was really great to have a project during the lockdown, it kept me sane.”

Although it is a one-man play, Armoush will also be on stage with Erdal, performing the music live. As to how he connected with Armoush, Erdal said, “I was looking for a Palestinian musician but there aren’t many of them in Vancouver and Emad was highly recommended by my Israeli musician friends.”

About the timing, Erdal explained, “During my lifetime, the situation for Palestinians has only gotten worse, it never gets better. Israel recently formed the most extreme right-wing government in its history, with several openly racist and homophobic ministers. Many Israelis and Palestinians are bracing themselves for the worst. Unfortunately, this play is more relevant than ever.”

He is not concerned about how Jews in general or Israelis specifically will be perceived by non-Jewish people who see the play.

“I am a very proud Jew and, even though I criticize the state of Israel, I do so because I love it, and I think that love is clear in the play,” said Erdal, who shared the following quote from the play: “I am aware that this is a topic that intimidates many Canadians. I’ve seen the glazed look in your eyes. I’ve had many people ask me to explain the conflict to them and, after one minute, they are searching for the exit. I’ve also seen many people twist themselves into pretzels in order not to take sides because they were concerned about appearing antisemitic. I hope by the time you leave here, you’ll be able to criticize Israel without worrying about appearing antisemitic.”

Soldiers of Tomorrow is at the Roundhouse Feb. 3-4, 7:30 p.m., and Feb. 5, 2 p.m., with a post-show talkback after the Feb. 4 performance. The show is 75 minutes long, with no intermission. Tickets ($34) can be purchased at pushfestival.ca.

The PuSh International Performing Arts Festival runs Jan. 19-Feb. 5. It features 20 original works – theatre, dance, music, multimedia and circus – from 12 countries and includes six world premières, one North American debut, six Canadian and two Western Canadian openings and one Vancouver première. Single tickets start at $34 in-person, $25 online, plus there are pay-what-you-can and free events; passes, which offer a discount and other perks, are available for both in-person and digital shows. Visit pushfestival.ca or call 604-449-6000.

Recollecting Auschwitz

Recollections of day-to-day details at Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp by survivor Kalman Bar-on are being made public for the first time in Canada at an International Holocaust Remembrance Day presentation in Vancouver on Jan. 26 at the Rothstein Theatre.

The Story of Kalman & Leopold features previously unseen testimony, providing a unique glimpse at the Nazi atrocities committed at the extermination camp, given from the vantage point of a Jewish witness posted in a camp guard shack. The presentation takes place on the eve of the 78th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The testimony of “Mengele twin” Kalman Bar-on will be revealed by Richard K. Lowy, a Jewish Canadian and the son of Holocaust survivor Leopold Lowy – another twin who was subjected to SS doctor Josef Mengele’s gruesome human experiments at Birkenau’s hospital camp during the Holocaust.

Richard Lowy was on a decade-long mission to preserve his father’s recollections as Canada’s last surviving “Mengele twin” when his efforts yielded an unforeseen link to Bar-on in Israel.

“I will try to paint this map of fear,” begins Bar-on’s testimony, “pointing out the difference between fear from the paws and boot of SS Guard Sgt. Fritsche Fritz, the palpable fear for our lives when witnessing a delivery of the next batch of walking skeletons to the crematorium, the ice-cold grab in my chest when I am lying on the stone table during the periodic medical checks of Mengele, and the ever-present knowledge that no one, but no one, will survive and emerge from Birkenau.”

“We produced Leo’s Journey (leosjourney.ca) in 2000,” writes Lowy. “The documentary was presented in Canada, part of Europe and in Israel.”

When the film played on the National Geographic Channel in Israel on Oct. 31, 2001, an astonishing thing happened, Lowy said. “Precisely 21 minutes and 17 seconds into the film, a picture of my father, Leo Lowy, was shown as a young boy. [A] man dropped his dinner and started yelling at the screen: ‘It’s my Lippa!’ Kalman Bar-On had been looking for his ‘Lippa’ for 56 years. Lippa was his hero in Auschwitz-Birkenau and saved Kalman from beating in the hospital camp’s SS guard shack.”

For (free) tickets to the Jan. 26 presentation, which starts at 6:30 p.m., visit eventbrite.com.