Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen (8 page)

David is calling to me in English from across the street—“Marie, see you tomorrow”—as my mother hurries ahead. I wave and then run after her to the car parked at an outrageous angle in the cul-de-sac.

Outside the Royal Ontario Museum, there are vending carts covered in pink and silver balloons, inflated toy animals, and striped pinwheels. Beneath this gaudy and bobbing array, the cart is anchored by a glass case of yellow popcorn at the front and includes a bicycle seat and double wheels to propel the whole contraption from the back. In the middle, there is a brazier, tended by a withered little Mediterranean man who roasts European chestnuts over his coals. On a November day, the smell of bitter smoke and sweet pulp wafts on the chill breeze and a fifteen-year-old girl breathes in and remembers a childhood in Paris.

R
ACHEL
P
LOT TURNED FROM
the cabbage borscht she was stirring, wiped her hands on the wide expanse of her floral apron, and took the mail from Sarah’s hands.

“There will not be any more letters.”

She said the words gently but with certainty, stating a fact rather than a prohibition.

Every day since Sarah had started school that fall, she had stopped on the Plots’ front porch on her way back into the house at four o’clock and checked the battered red-tin mailbox that hung underneath the number plate. Today, she had come into the kitchen clutching the Canadian Tire catalogue, the electricity bill, and a postcard of Quebec City sent by Rachel’s flighty Montreal cousin Leah who had just spent a weekend there with her husband.

At first, when the Plots had noticed Sarah’s anxious stops at the mailbox, the couple had merely caught each other’s eye and then looked away, saying nothing. In October, they had briefly discussed the matter, and after that Rachel made sure she cleared the box herself after the postman’s afternoon rounds. But it was now December, and she had dropped this practice, soon tiring of Sarah’s shy but resolute daily question: “Were there any letters for me?”

There had been a letter for her once—just once. It had arrived in September when she had been staying with the Plots for two months. Smuggled out of Paris by means the Plots could only guess at, the letter bore a Spanish postmark and was addressed to Sarah Bensimon, c/o the Jewish Immigrant Aid Society, 4145 Boulevard Saint-Laurent, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It did not arrive in the red-tin mailbox—Rabbi Cohn brought it himself after Sarah had left for school one morning, and Rachel had presented it to her that afternoon, hovering by her to hear what it contained.

For all the circuitous and improbable route their missive had taken to reach Sarah, her parents had little to say. They were well, they hoped she was well. Papa was still finding some work in M. Richelieu’s office, and they would stay in Paris for the time being. Oncle Henri sent his love, as did they, knowing she would study hard and keep healthy until they could be reunited. With their kindest regards to her Canadian hosts, they ended their one-page letter.

Sarah kept it carefully folded inside its original envelope in a cigar box at the back of her underwear drawer, along with a few French francs and the pearls her mother had hung around her neck the day before she left. In years to come, she was to pull it out from its envelope so often the paper eventually disintegrated. She would read its sentences until she knew them like a prayer, but most of all she would simply stare at the words, “Your loving parents,” as tangible proof that Philippe and Sophie Bensimon had existed. Indeed, it was her proof that she herself had existed before the day, four months before her twelfth birthday, when she arrived in Canada and became Sarah Simon, the prefix of her last name lopped off by a Halifax immigration officer who just wanted to make her adjustment—and his paperwork—that much easier.

In Paris, where her family practised little of their distant ancestors’ religion but knew which neighbours were Jews and which were Christians as part of an unspoken hierarchy they seldom pondered, Sarah Bensimon’s name instantly—and dangerously, as things were to turn out—identified her race. In Toronto, where Rachel and Sam Plot lit the Shabbat candles with affectionate pride every Friday night just as their parents had done in the Russian and Polish villages from which they had emigrated, Sarah Simon bore a name that allowed her to pass as part of the Anglo-Saxon majority. She had always spoken English well, for Sophie had been vigilant in her supervision of Sarah’s schooling. Within a year in Canada, the girl’s accent had all but disappeared and Sarah, with her light-brown hair and small features, had become invisible.

Rachel sometimes wondered, when Sarah first arrived in their home or later, after the war had ended, with what sort of foresight the Bensimons had been blessed. While their neighbours debated whether they should comply with the orders to register with the French police, some arguing it would all blow over if one just laid low, others believing it was safest to comply with the letter of the new law, were the Bensimons somehow immune to the optimism to which lesser souls still clung? Did they know from what fate exactly they had rescued Sarah? How could they not know, Rachel wondered, for what mother would send her child across the ocean to a family she had never met unless she believed it was the one way to save her life.

If Rachel pondered the situation, trying to imagine what Sarah’s mother felt, it was because, while she could never know for certain what had moved Sophie to give up her daughter, she suspected exactly why she, Rachel, had been
chosen to receive the girl. She had been chosen by Rabbi Cohn because he pitied her. She was certain of it and felt ashamed. Well, perhaps he respected her too, she might hope, believing that she would provide for the girl a good Jewish home—even if she and Sam did seem a bit isolated, all the way out here in the west end of town. But mainly she saw that he felt sorry for her and, giving precedence to the wrong needs, thought that the young Sarah would provide for Rachel.

Rabbi Cohn had met Rachel two years before Sarah arrived, in 1940, or rather he had met Sam, at a meeting of the Workers’ Benevolent Association in a hall down on Spadina. Since he himself had arrived in Toronto from Cleveland in ’38 to lead a small Conservative congregation on Berkeley Street, the rabbi had never set foot in such a place, but tonight he needed the members of the Workers’ Benevolent Association. He was there to talk about events in Europe and to ask the men to volunteer their homes: Canada had agreed to accept five hundred European orphans who were to arrive from France in less than a month’s time. Committees in Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg had been established to find the families who would board them. Uptown, at Holy Blossom, his Reform colleagues were beating the drum, making speeches and raising money, but maybe they hadn’t found so many people who really wanted a stranger’s child underfoot. At any rate, they were looking downtown now, and had called him. His congregation, in turn, was puzzled that the children were being sent to Canada not Palestine, and, finding few volunteers there, he had agreed to help further by speaking at a meeting called by the Benevolent Association. At the end of the evening, the Zionists were still protesting that greater efforts were not
being made to settle the orphans in Palestine, while others said the matter would require further debate. Only one person had come forward to volunteer.

“I’m Sam Plot. I will talk to my wife and call you.”

And, after one long, agonizing week of talking to Rachel, he did call. They had discussed it for hours, the wrongs and the rights of it, had finally agreed this would not solve their problem, that they must not even hope it could solve their problem, but yes, they would be happy to provide a home for an orphan. “We will take a child,” Sam told the rabbi.

As Ottawa dragged its heels on issuing visas and debated what numbers could be accommodated, Rabbi Cohn found he had plenty of time to visit the homes that would receive the children, and Sam got off the phone again one evening to tell Rachel to expect a caller.

“A rabbi? What’s he going to think of us?” she wanted to know. “I had better start cleaning.”

But when he entered the house on Gladstone Avenue, Rabbi Cohn did not sense Rachel’s nervousness that her house and housekeeping were about to be judged. Instead, he saw the quiet, uncomplaining facade she presented to the world, appreciated its gentleness, and quickly guessed at the greater sorrow that lay beneath. When he asked, Rachel revealed she was thirty-five. There were no children in the house.

The Toronto committee, not to be outdone by Winnipeg’s eager response, eventually found its quota of Jewish homes, but in the end the five hundred orphans never came. There was this problem, there was that problem. Rabbi Cohn lost track of them all, and sent out a form letter to most of the volunteers, but he went to tell Rachel the news himself.

“So you wouldn’t need us after all?” “No.”

“Well, perhaps this too is God’s will…”

She sound gracious rather than defeated.

The rabbi, on the other hand, did not accept God’s will with the equanimity that one perhaps might expect of a religious man. He was righteous and, by 1941, he was furiously angry. He did not think Rachel Plot deserved to be barren, he did not think one could stand idly by while the Nazis in occupied Europe sent Jewish parents off to work camps and then declared their children orphans, and he did not think it was necessary to be polite to the bureaucrats. In guilty moments, he gave into this wrath and designed horrible tortures or imagined just fates for the intractable Mr. Blair, director of the immigration branch in Ottawa. His contacts at the Jewish Immigrant Aid Society, who had once accepted his help eagerly, no longer permitted him to attend their increasingly desperate meetings, still believing that gentle words would sway Canadian officials where the rabbi urged threats and demonstrations. In fact, he had not heard from the society in almost a year, when an official called to say that a dozen refugees on special permits had somehow made it to Halifax and they needed a home for one child. He called Rachel that afternoon. Since 1935, from the hundreds of thousands of Jews who had applied to leave Europe for resettlement in North or South America, Canada had accepted 3,273. Sarah Bensimon was one of the lucky ones.

But Sarah did not feel very lucky. Rather she felt small. On the red streetcar that clanged along Bloor Street, leading her from the Plots’ home on Gladstone Avenue east to the shops
and lights of Yonge Street, she would catch herself staring at strangers, trying to fathom their Canadian lives. Where were they all hurrying to? What did their parcels and bags contain? Did they like it here? Perhaps they did since they knew nowhere else. Once a man got angry with her, and barked out, “Have I got something on my nose, then?” She flushed and looked at her shoes, belatedly reminded that other people could actually see her.

At Yonge Street, Sarah would change cars to head south, towards the vast lake that lies at the bottom of the city. In winter, it was cold and barren, abandoned by all but a few rugged ferry boats, still crossing to and from the Toronto Islands. By June, its beaches were filled with pale-skinned people drunken on the strong sunlight of the brief Canadian summer. Sam Plot had taken Sarah there, to go swimming, a week after she arrived. The day was sweltering, the kind of heat that hits you like a wall when you walk out of the darkened house, but Sarah found the huge lake surprisingly cold and stayed only a few minutes in the water.

By fall, as fierce winds blew off the lake and the city shrank northwards towards its brick houses and small parks, Sarah stopped venturing this far south any more, but knew to get off the Yonge car at Queen Street. There she would trip up the steps to the cavernous Eaton’s department store to explore the wonders that lay inside its marble halls. Hats, scarves, bangles, lipsticks, Sarah pondered them all.

Rachel had introduced her to the delights of Eaton’s in October, when the first cold snap came and the air acquired an edge Sarah had never felt before. She had survived thus far on the few clothes she had brought from France, and the many donations of the Immigrant Aid Society, but Rachel pronounced that her good wool school coat, navy blue with
a velveteen collar, would not do. So, she and Sarah took the streetcar to Eaton’s, and spent a full hour discussing with a massively fat saleslady the competing merits of two coats—one powder blue with something the lady called a princess skirt that flared out in a way that Sarah worried might look babyish, the other dark green with straight lines that Rachel called sensible and Sarah considered dull. Both were made of solid, tightly woven wool and, to Sarah’s eye, looked much like the coat she already wore. When she tried them on, however, she felt the difference. They weighed on her shoulders as heavily as any bookbag, and she wondered whether she would not exhaust herself walking under such a garment. The saleslady expertly flipped up the hem and showed Rachel the heavy felt lining. “That’s what will keep you warm, Sarah,” Rachel said, and in the end they agreed the green was more grown-up.

It was important to look grown-up, for if Sarah had yet to parse the fashion code of her Canadian classmates, had yet to fully grasp their subtle distinctions between types of pleated skirts or wool knee socks, she had quickly understood that to be babyish was to be instantly dismissed. Shoes with a strap and buckle rather than laces were babyish; two pigtails were babyish while a single braid was permissible; hopscotch was babyish, although skipping was still possible, especially if one were able to jump two ropes at once, what the girls called double dutch.

Sarah learned these things slowly, in the schoolyard between classes, watching and listening to the others, although not yet invited to participate in their games. On the first day at school, they had surrounded the new girl and asked her questions. Where had she come from? Why did she speak funny? What did her parents do? Well, if her parents
weren’t here, who was looking after her, then? But after a day or two, they left the French girl, as they called her, well alone, and Sarah sat on the school steps and watched and listened.