A Book of Great Worth Read online

  “Yukon,” my father said with interest. He was fond of the novels and stories of Jack London, and could even recite a line or two from the poems of Robert Service.

  “My dear cousin Bertie,” the letter began, and at this point my father interrupted, “Cousin? Bertie, you have a cousin Henrietta? In Canada? I had a cousin who went to live there, as you know, but you? I didn’t know that.”

  My mother had already read the letter once, to herself, and now was attempting to read it aloud to us all, at the dinner table, the meal having been completed and my sisters having finished clearing away the dishes and serving the coffee. “Let me read this, Harry,” she said with mild exasperation.

  “Who’s stopping you?” my father protested.

  My mother cleared her throat. “My dear cousin Bertie, We have never met, indeed you have probably never heard my name or known of my existence...”

  “She’s right so far,” my father interrupted.

  My mother glared at him over her glasses and went on. “I take the liberty of writing to you, though I am in fact a cousin of your husband...”

  “My cousin!?”

  “...because I understand that it is you who take responsibility for maintaining ties within the family.”

  Here my father kept silent, listening intently, but nodding his head gravely. The disasters he had seemed to predict hadn’t materialized, but his ambivalent feelings about my mother’s efforts with the family circle had persisted – he appreciated what she did, was grateful, but not entirely in favour.

  My mother took the opportunity of my father’s silence to clear her throat. Then she continued reading: “My mother was Glicka Larocque, who was a first cousin of your husband’s, their respective fathers having been brothers. My mother and your husband played together as children. Indeed, she had the warmest regard for your husband.”

  Here, I should say, the dynamics of the table shifted, the mood changing palpably. My father leaned forward, his listening obviously growing more intense. My mother, on the other hand, frowned, as if there were an unpleasant taste in her mouth. She paused to take a sip of coffee, then read on.

  “This I know not directly from my mother’s lips, as she died in bringing me into this world, and I have had the bitter task of growing up as a motherless child...”

  “So it’s true,” my father murmured, aloud but really to himself.

  “...but from her hand, as I have acquired, after a long struggle with my brother – the less said about that the better – my mother’s diary. It is from this remarkable volume that I have learned much about my mother’s family and the world from which she sprang, the world which you, dear Berte, are now the self-appointed guardian of, the world to which I now aspire to belong to.”

  “Dangling prepositions,” my sister Judy remarked at this point, setting off a brief argument between her and my sister Esther about the appropriateness of grammar in a family letter. Esther, the eldest and already in Brooklyn College, leaned towards the informal; Judy, still in her last year at New Utricht High School but the editor of the school newspaper, was a stickler for the rules. I myself was still in the “better seen than heard” stage of my childhood and had no views at all on grammar.

  After my mother re-established order, we quickly learned the facts of our cousin Henrietta’s life. My father’s cousin Glicka had indeed fallen in love with a Canadian, just as family lore had always said. He was a fur trader, a former trapper, whom she had met during one of his trips to New York. His name was Armand Larocque, a Canadian mixed-blood of French and Indian stock, a people known as Metis, and, although that seemed unlikely, he claimed to be Jewish on his mother’s side, believing her to be descended from one of the Lost Tribes of Israel – my father inexplicably guffawed when he heard that. Glicka had accompanied this man to a city far to the west and north called Edmonton, where they established a small but comfortable home. Her husband was often away on business, either further north acquiring furs, or in the south cultivating markets, and it was during one of these absences that, having already produced two healthy children, Glicka had a delivery with complications that resulted in the birth of Henrietta and her own death. Armand Larocque came home from the north to find himself a widower and the father of three orphans. The infant was named after his own mother, with Glicka as her middle name.

  According to Henrietta’s detailed account, which my mother continued to read, Larocque remained in Edmonton less than a year before moving further north, to the frontier community of Labeche, where he would be closer to his suppliers. To deal with the children, he took a new wife, an Eskimo woman he called Rose of Sharon. This woman, Henrietta wrote, was kind and thoughtful, but absent-minded and restless “and no true substitute for a real mother.”

  “My poor girl,” my father said, receiving a skeptical glance from my mother in return.

  To make matters worse, Henrietta and her brother, Abram, were always at odds – “he blamed me for our mother’s death,” she wrote – and the unpleasantness between them, along with their father’s frequent absences and their stepmother’s frequent indifference, made for an unhappy childhood. (Oddly, there was no further mention of the third sibling.) To escape the squalid life at Lebeche, Henrietta married young, to a special constable of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Marcus Dumont, a fine man who, like her, was partially of native blood. Her life with Dumont proved to be an eventful one, as he was posted to a number of different northern locales during his brief career, which had recently come to a surprising, tragic end during an encounter with a polar bear. The details, she wrote, were too painful to go into. At any rate, she now found herself a widow, the mother of two small children, living in respectable but extremely modest means on a small government pension in an isolated outpost. “Besides myself and my children, and a kind gentleman named Dr. Isadore Birkowitz, a dentist who has befriended us, there are no Jews here in Whitehorse,” she wrote. Having recently acquired her mother’s diary, after the previously mentioned legal battle with her brother, she was now filled with longing to establish contact with her family and the larger world of Jewry. “My children deserve this,” she wrote, a statement which, in its simple eloquence, touched us all, even me.

  There was a long discussion at the table about the events and personalities depicted in the letter. Grammar aside, Judy thought many of the letter’s elements were romantic; Esther tended to be more cynical. It was my father who wondered how Henrietta had learned of the family circle and my mother’s leading role in it, no less our address – none of this, obviously, would have been in her mother’s diary. A thorough rereading of the letter confirmed the absence of any such mention. But all that aside, we all agreed that Henrietta’s letter was gripping and could not be ignored.

  Ironically, though, the plight of my father’s cousin galvanized not my father but my mother. With my father’s encouragement, she began an immediate correspondence with cousin Henrietta. She prepared a newsletter that repeated the salient points of Henrietta’s story and circulated it among not only the members of the established family circle but tracked down and made contact with that darker side of the family, the descendants of my father’s Uncle Abe, with whom there had been little communication for years. At the next family gathering, which, as it happened, came just a month or two following the arrival of Henrietta’s first letter, places were set for this absent cousin and her children, just as, at the seders of many religious Jews, a place is set for the absent prophet Elijah. My mother prepared cards, on which she wrote the names “Henrietta,” “Uglik” and “Toogl” – the children apparently had been given Eskimo names – and placed them on the empty plates, as a reminder to all. Most significant of all, she put a bowl next to Henrietta’s empty plate, into which, she made it clear, donations were to be placed. It wasn’t clear what exactly the donations were for, since the distance between New York and Whitehorse seemed enormous, but a travel fund of some sort was mentioned.

  My mother, who had only recently emer
ged from a life dominated by caring for her children to return to work, having obtained a two-thirds-time secretarial position at a public school nearby, was much caught up in, as my father termed it, “this Canadian cousin business.” I couldn’t recall ever having seen her so energized.

  My father, who, as a newspaper reporter, was skeptical, even cynical, by inclination, was, as ever with matters of family, ambivalent. He was enthusiastic about making contact with this new-found cousin, but raised suspicions. “What do we really know about this woman, Bertie?” he asked. And it was true. There did appear to be discrepancies and puzzles in her story, particularly her knowledge of the family circle.

  “Perhaps her husband tracked us down,” my sister Judy offered, and it did seem reasonable that her connection to the police world might give her access to otherwise private information, but my father remained skeptical, pointing out that Henrietta’s written chronology left unclear which came first, the acquiring of her mother’s diary or her husband’s untimely death.

  “Perhaps the dentist, Dr...?” my mother suggested.

  “Birko-something.”

  “Maybe he has connections in New York...” Her voice trailed off.

  My father shrugged. “Is this yearning for family going to cost money?” he asked.

  “Harry,” my mother replied crossly. “This is your cousin, daughter of your darling Glicka. Remember?”

  “She was a good woman, Glicka,” my father conceded, his eyes taking on a faraway cast.

  My mother’s crusade – such were its dimensions as it developed – soon became clear: to bring Henrietta and her children to New York, where they could take their rightful places within their immediate and larger families. This would be a monumental task – “This is crazy, Bertie!” my father cried when he first heard it – as the moving expenses would be prohibitive and it was questionable whether Henrietta’s pension, meagre as it was, would be able to follow her to another country.

  “Who knows if her children can even speak English,” my father complained, seeking and finding objections. “Probably they speak Eskimo. They eat raw fish.”

  My mother laughed with a combination of exasperation and humour. “You spoke no English when you came here,” she sweetly reminded him. “And isn’t pickled herring your favourite forshpeiz?”

  My father didn’t like to be corrected when he was wrong, especially by my mother, from whom he had higher expectations. He sulked. But he was a reasonable man, a fair man, and gradually he came around. Although labour was his regular beat, he had a nose for a good human interest story, and he wrote an article for The Day about this distant cousin – “this adventuress at the furthest outpost of Jewry,” as he described her, dubbing Whitehorse the “north-westernmost neighbourhood of the Lower East Side” – and soon Henrietta was a cause célèbre in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. The New York Times picked up the story, offering a short item. Letters to the editor in the Yiddish press championed Henrietta’s case, and my father enlisted the services of his brother Henry, the attorney, to look into the legal aspects of her immigration.

  As a side issue, a spirited debate ignited in the letters to the editor column of The Day about the validity of the Lost Tribes of Israel theory. One distinguished rabbi, a professor at the theological seminary, wrote an article arguing that the Indians of the American and Canadian West and North were indeed Jews. This was clear from their physical appearance, their languages and many of their customs. Another rabbi, equally distinguished, responded with a blistering letter dismembering his colleague’s thesis and strongly implying that the first rabbi was in league with the devil, the fascists or both. “At the very least, this hare-brained theory offers dangerous succour to the anti-Semites,” he wrote. Others wrote letters arguing pro and con whether the government of Canada was allied with the Soviet Union; whether the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, with their famous red serge jackets, were an offshoot of the Red Army; whether cousin Henrietta and her two small children were likely or not to be Communists and, if so, Trotskyites.

  At the next gathering of the family circle, many of the previously estranged cousins – the children and grandchildren of Abe, second and third cousins I had heard of but never met – were present, noisily and amiably, embracing their more discreet cousins, the descendents of Joseph. This gathering took place at Uncle Henry’s cottage, it now being summer, and a good thing too, my father said, because no one’s home in the city would have been nearly big enough. “We’ll have to rent Madison Square Garden when she finally gets here,” he predicted sourly.

  The mention of Madison Square Garden, the home of numerous sporting events, perked up the ears of cousin-in-law Lou, the bookmaker, and soon he was offering odds on when Henrietta would be returned to the bosom of her long-lost family. It had come that far – when, no longer if. The donations bowl, marked with a handwritten card, “The Henrietta Fund,” overflowed.

  “At our next family party, cousin Henrietta will be the honoured guest,” my mother announced, and this repeated piece of news rippled through the large crowd like a mantra of the dimensions of the age-old Jewish prediction, part plea, part boast, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

  Contributions poured in as well from complete strangers, newspaper readers who were touched by Henrietta’s plight. Her story appealed to widows, orphans, star-crossed lovers and people with distant beloved relatives. “And who does that leave out?” my father wondered.

  During the preparation of his newspaper story, my father had done simple research and learned some salient facts that had again aroused his suspicions: Whitehorse, rather than being a tiny outpost on the edge of an ice floe, was a thriving small city of some ten thousand people, the capital and administrative centre of the territory, with many urban amenities, even a daily newspaper of its own, the Star. My father telephoned a reporter there, resulting in a story in that paper as well. One thing he learned was that, despite cousin Henrietta’s claim that she, her children and the friendly dentist were the only Jews there, Whitehorse had a small but cohesive Jewish community, made up of teachers, doctors and merchants. “Staten Island could be worse,” my father mused.

  In Henrietta’s defence, my mother pointed out that the far-flung cousin lived not in Whitehorse itself, but the tiny village of Princess Anne Island, a daylong dogsled mush from the capital. It was there that her late husband, Constable Dumont, had been posted, there that he died, there that the widowed Henrietta remained.

  “She could maybe move to Whitehorse,” my father half suggested, but my mother had her sights and heart set on restoring the woman to the family fold, on closing the circle.

  “What about cousin Florence?” my father asked, only half jokingly. That was a low blow, Florence being the former wife of the child molester, who had disappeared into the jungles of Florida. She was just as far-flung, just as alienated from her family, just as deserving as Henrietta, wasn’t that so? “And, in all likelihood, an innocent bystander.”

  True, my mother admitted, but Florence had absented herself from the family on her own accord. “Henrietta is a victim of circumstances.”

  And what, my father teased, about Henrietta’s nasty brother, Abram, and her sister, who had never been named to us and was hardly mentioned? Weren’t they also victims of circumstances? Didn’t they too deserve to be saved?

  “No,” my mother pronounced, making it clear there was no doubt in her mind. “They haven’t reached out.”

  “But shouldn’t we reach out to them?” my father insisted. He was playing with fire and probably knew it, but he had a reckless streak.

  My mother wouldn’t be baited, though. “You may be right, Harry. Maybe later. We’ll see what happens.”

  Who could argue with that?

  Eventually, all the details were worked out, my mother being terrifyingly efficient. Passports and visas were obtained – it turned out that Henrietta, through her mother, was still a U.S. citizen, as were her children. Travel arrangements were made – a c
ombination of bush plane and railroad. Temporary lodging was secured – my mother would have liked to offer our hospitality, but our cramped apartment on Eastern Parkway barely contained us, and certainly had no room for extended visitors. Instead, distant cousin Barney, the real-estate salesman who now had his own agency, had offered the mother-in-law suite in his Bronx brownstone row house, his own mother-in-law having recently remarried. It was assumed that Henrietta and her children could live there, rent free, until she was settled and found a place of her own. One of the children was already of school age, and enrolment at the nearest public school had also been arranged. Even more importantly, distant cousin Ben had opened up a job for Henrietta in the office of his used car lot, Honest Abe’s, named in honour of his father. Henrietta had told us in one of her letters that, serving at her husband’s side in remote outports, she had handled the paperwork for the detachment, looking after supplies and records, and had developed decent secretarial skills, although “maybe not by civilized standards,” she had joked.

  “So who said Honest Abe’s car lot is civilized?” my father rejoined.

  Finally, all was in place and the day for Henrietta’s arrival in New York drew near. It was winter again, Thanksgiving and the holiday season both having passed, and the bleakness of January and February stretched ahead. The far-flung cousins’ arrival would certainly do a lot to brighten those drab months, for my mother, at the very least. More than two years had passed since we’d first heard from Henrietta, and she and my mother had exchanged numerous letters. It was as if they two were cousins, close cousins.

  Madison Square Garden was apparently beyond our reach, but through the good offices of Lou, the bookmaker in-law, a union hall on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx had been made available, at no cost. My mother had been able, with minimal effort, to twist the arms of a long list of female cousins who would be cooking and baking their specialties. Distant cousin Murray, who had kept up his distillery connections though he was now, by all accounts, a legitimate businessman, would be providing the wine. The party would be, it appeared, the family reunion to end all family reunions. Everyone would be there, even distant cousin Meyer, who had recently been released from Sing Sing on parole. Rumour had it that even cousin Florence from Florida might be making an appearance, the first time in the dozen years since she’d begun her self-exile. If she did appear, my father pointed out, there would be a certain justice to it.