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Memories of YIDDISH MONTREAL Eva Raby Jewish Public Library of Montreal M y memories of Yiddish Montreal are totally intertwined with my mother, my wonderfully complex, overwhelming, and fascinating mother — the most gifted storyteller I ever met — who bound up my Yiddish Montreal with her YiddishVilna. Looking back, for me, they are one and the same. I was the first of my parents' children to be born in Canada. They arrived in October 1940, having escaped with their two children — nine-year-old Ben and four-year-old Ruth — from Romania, where they had been living for six years. Their flight took them through the Balkans, by ship from Greece to Portugal, where they boarded a Greek ship to take them to Ellis Island. My mother escaped with her chamber pots and her down comforter,but in her rush to leave Czernowitz she left behind her father's portrait and the autographed copy of Mordechai Gebirtig's songs, which he had dedicated to my mother — a renowned interpreter of his works. I was my mother's third daughter — their first daughter,Ada, who had never been sick a day in her life, died at age three, burned up by fever, six weeks after their move from Krosno, Poland to Czernowitz, where my father moved the family to build one factory after having successfully run afirst.My sister Ruth was born a year or so later in Czernowitz and Ben never really knew what happened to his first sunny blond sibling. Although I wasmy mother's third daughter, I was the one to whom she gave the name of her beloved mother Fradl Matz. It was a daunting responsibility to bear the name of this fascinating woman who at age 15, in Minsk, was married off to a forty-five-year-old widower from Vilna by her stepmother who wassteeped in debt from gambling.According to Mother, Fradl spent the first three days of her marriageweeping bitterly at her fate. But when her bewildered older spouse offered to release her from this marriage and to send her home, she realizedthat there wasno home to return to and made the best of her fate bybecoming a devoted and fruitful wife and partner, bearing her husband nine living children, and helping him run the second most successful Jewish publishing house in Vilna. Family lore, the portrait of my grandmother that hung above my parents' bed,and independent corroboration from an ancient bookseller in Tel Aviv to my sister decades later, dictated that Fradl Matz was the most beautiful woman in Vilna. Indeed, the indomitable Fradl, widowed in her mid-thirties, attracted the attention of a handsome married bookseller from Galicia. When IsraelWelczer learned that Fradl wasa widow,he returned home, divorced his wife and four children, and presented himself to Fradl as a widower. They were married, and my mother was their only child. Fradl's grown children were Russified Jews.True, they ran a publishing house that published s/on'm1 and Yiddishpenny novels. But at home they spoke Russian. It was my grandfather, the intruder, who was the Yiddish speaker. Mother knew that the only wayshe could be a true sibling to Fradl's first family wasto treat her own father as though he were her stepfather, and this she did, alwaysreferring to him in the formal way: ir, or vous. But later, Mother rebelled in her own way. She insisted on going to the Yiddish schools and learned Yiddish as a second language. With her friends and all through her life, although she spoke seven languages fluently, Yiddish became her beloved first language, her purpose in life. She spoke it exquisitely, sang the songs of her people in it, corresponded with the great writers of Yiddish literature in it, told her story and the story of her colourful Vilna life in it, and kept a generation of Yiddish writers, actors, teachers, and social workers alive for decades after their annihilation, through vivid images and poetic turns of phrases. Her mother died when she was fifteen, her father when she was nineteen, and mother was left to create her own life. She married Leibl from Bialystok,who romanced and befriended her inYiddish, and wasbedazzled by her liveliness and the lively life she led amongst the Yiddish intelligentsia, artists, writers,and actors. My second name isFradl. My first isEva. I was born two years after my mother started her new life in Canada. I was the beginning. I was Eve. So when...

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