Writing life stories in whatever words, images they offer

Opinion In the early days of knowing my husband Mendel, he told me fragments of his story. One day, we were sitting on the hillside at a large university campus, just before our first year of study came to a close. We had been together since the outset of what was then called Frosh Week. On Day 1 of that week, I found Mendel playing hearts in the cafeteria of the science building. (He played hearts every day thereafter, rarely attending classes or opening textbooks. He was, some might say, a card shark, a maverick, a bit of a rogue.) He saw me, I saw him. That can happen. A love at first sight, or, at the very least, a flash of recognition that is like none other. When I married him four years later, I married into a family that had survived the Holocaust, albeit in tragically diminished form. His parents had had partners and children murdered in the war. Mendel was born in 1948 in Poland, where virulent antisemitism made life dangerous. In 1958, during what has been called a “liberalizing thaw,” he and his family were able to escape to Canada, a country rich with its own discriminatory, antisemitic immigration policies. From 1933 to 1948, those policies were guided by the sentiment held by a senior government official who, when asked how many Jews seeking refuge should be admitted to Canada, responded with “None is too many.” My husband may not have known that policy as a child, but he watched his mother barter frantically for their flight out of Poland. As a person who treasured his freedom within this country, Mendel remained haunted by a past determined by the implications of sanctioned and often celebrated discriminatory and genocidal practices that imperiled his survival and the survival of his people. Of my people. This was a past Mendel expressed in one or two brief stories shared with me on that spring afternoon I spent with him, and with his two sons when they were older: steel-toed boots his father fashioned for him so he could defend […]

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