Yiddishlands: A Memoir

17. The Soir

102 Many were the professional writers who urged her to do it. “Masha, far vos shraybt ir nit,” they would ask, “Masha, why on earth don’t you record your memoirs?” Not just Melekh Ravitch (pen name of Zekharye Bergner), who showed the way by publishing On Long Winter Nights, the autobiography of his mother, Hinde Bergner, with generous financial support from my mother, money he then declined to use in full, but even Chaim Grade. You should have seen Grade’s reaction when, in the course of innocent conversation— as if anything she said could be innocent—Mother fed him the following aphorism: “Before she died, Fradl, my saintly mother said, ‘Ale érevs zenen sheyn, all the eves in life are beautiful: the eve of the Sabbath, of the festivals, the eve of an engagement. Nor der erev toyt iz biter, the eve of one’s death—that alone is dreadful.’” Grade,Mothermusthaveknown,waspartialtomaternalwisdom,forhe jumpedupfromthelivingroomcouchandproclaimed:“Masha,ifyoudon’t commit this to writing, I will—in my very next novel!” Well, he never did. And neither did my mother, whose answer to these and other exhortations was always the same: I’m too busy. 17 The Soirée Busy with what? With becoming a patroness of the Yiddish arts such as Montreal had never seen. According to legend, it was I. J. Segal, our most venerated poet, who put her up to it. “Ver, oyb nit Masha?” she quoted him as saying. “Who else but Masha could mobilize the troops?” When Ravitch went around collecting money to buy Yiddish typewriters for the Holocaust survivors overseas, Mother gave the first donation. Thanks to Chayele Grober, the Montreal Yiddish theater came back to life, and Mother lent a helping hand. No one sold more tickets to the opening production of Peretz’s Between Two Mountains than she did, and through YITÉG, the Yiddish Theater Society, Mother befriended David Ellen and other young hopefuls beginning their careers on the stage, and met the painter Alexander Bercovitch, whom she commissioned to do an oil painting of my late grandfather, the one that now hangs to the left of my computer . Through Bercovitch she met the other painters, and bought from Gitta Caiserman a huge portrait of Chayele Grober to hang above the grand piano. By the time she rescued us from snobbish, self-hating, Englishspeaking , Westmount and relocated the family to an attached duplex on Pratt Avenue where we were surrounded by ámkho, our kind of Jews, who spoke Yiddish, everything was in place—poets, musicians, actors, painters—and Mother was ready to heed the call: Ver, oyb nit Masha? My brother Ben’s homemade records bear scratchy witness to some of those early gatherings, with Avrom Reisen and Vladimir Grossman, and my sister Ruth distinctly remembers sitting in the kitchen on Pratt Avenue with the poet Itzik Manger. This I find hard to believe, because already back in Czernowitz Manger had become a persona non grata to my parents. Manger, the native son who made good and was all the rage in Warsaw, was supposed to be feted at my parents’ home in Czernowitz when Dr. Wischnitzer came running to tell Mother what had happened the night before in Manger’s hotel room where Wischnitzer had spent an hour bandaging the head wounds of Rokhl Auerbach, Manger’s common-law wife, whom he had beaten black and blue. Such a monster could not be received in civilized society. And in Montreal, hadn’t Segal, who adored Manger, severed all ties with him on account of his crazy behavior? One thing I know for sure because I was there when it happened; Manger called Mother a fete yidene, a fat cow, over the telephone, and that cost him the last literary evening he might have had in our home. I met him at the Jewish Public Library instead, The Soirée 103 at a special meeting with Dora Wasserman’s Montreal Yiddish Youth Theater , where he made fun of my anglicized accent in Yiddish. I bet it wasn’t until we moved to our thirteen-room house on Pagnuelo Avenue that Mother’s soirées really took off. Remember her saying, “Yidish muz geyn sheyn ongeton, Yiddish must be properly attired”? Well, our new home on the hill was elegant by any standard. Just after you walked in, another set of French doors opened onto our carpeted living room that...