National Security by S. Nadja Zajdman, Green Mountain coffee

 It was late September.  A friend and I set out on a cross-border outing.  The day was intended as an excursion into what the Americans call “leaf peeping,” a pleasurable jaunt into the mountains, riding through the riotous colours of autumn foliage at its peak.

At least, it started that way.  The French name of the U.S. state which translates as “Green Mountain” was anything but green.  Vermont’s peaks were a panorama of cold fire.  My companion was a superb driver who skillfully navigated narrow mountain passes.  Her sharp reflexes saved the life of a deer who, without warning, decided to leap off a cliff in order to cross the street.     

In September we see a few hours of summer in the afternoons, but dusk descends early.   We weren’t out of The Green Mountains when darkness fell and a storm began to brew.  Soon the rain turned torrential, thunder clapped and lightning struck.  Mist enveloped the mountains, and its roads.  Visibility was reduced to zero.

My companion gripped the steering wheel.  Her shoulders hiked and her eyes bulged as she struggled to steer the car through curtains of rain.  In the passenger seat, I fell asleep and stayed asleep until being bumped awake.  It was a feeling I was familiar with.  My companion’s car was hitting potholes.  Roads in the U.S. are smooth and well-maintained.  Quebec’s roads are notorious for their potholes.  Groggy, it dawned on me that, like Dorothy, we might not be in Kansas anymore.

            I gazed at my companion.  “What country are we in?”

            Sheepishly she responded, “I don’t know.”

            “Did we miss the border?”  

            “It looks that way.”

            The terrain flattened.  The mist lifted.  Neon signs illuminated the darkness.  These signs were in French. 

            The fog in my brain cleared quickly.  “Should we backtrack and look for the border?”

            The downpour was still heavy.  The rough-hewn, pot-holed ridden roads were wet and treacherous.  Upon deliberation, my friend and I decided it would be safest to forge ahead and return home. 

            “Well,” I was surprisingly sanguine.  I was also tired.  “If we don’t find them, they are going to find us.”  My words would prove prophetic.

            The next morning, feeling uneasy, I called the U.S. border patrol and related the circumstances of the previous evening.  The American officer sounded confused. 

            “Lady, where are you?!”  He seemed to be under the impression that I was lost in the mists of the Green Mountains.

            “I’m home.  Am I in trouble?”

            “Not with us!”

A few days later, my friend called.  She was in tears.   She had just received a call from an officer attached to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.  Either a camera or a censor had captured an image of her license plate, and she was traced that way.  The officer threatened to slap her with a five-thousand dollar fine for bypassing the border.  My friend was east European, and frightened of authority figures.  In response, she gave the officer my phone number.

Moments later, the call came.  I drew on my powers of description to paint a vivid portrait of a sinister and menacing black and stormy night.

            “But there was a sign!”  The officer insisted.

            “We couldn’t see the sign!”  I might’ve been speaking not only for myself and my companion, but also for my compatriots.  “We couldn’t see anything!  And besides,” I embellished, “my mother called the car and yelled at us to get out of there and come home!”

            This was a bit of fiction.  On the evening in question, Mum was not only unaware of our dilemma, but also of the physical danger we were in.  Fortunately.  I am not George Washington, and under interrogation I am capable of telling a lie.

            The mention of Mum resonated with the officer. Besides being an officer, I suspect he was also a parent.  His tone softened.  “I was on duty that night.”  He conceded.  “I remember how severe the storm was.  It really was bad.”

            Discerning that I wasn’t a threat to national security, the RCMP officer let me off with a warning. 

                 

This happened fifteen years ago.  The times, they are a-changin’.  These days, we brace for another form of storm.  Those who can afford to take a break from winter incur cancellation fees and revise their travel plans in order to avoid setting foot in the U.S.  Those stuck in the deep freeze are doing their part by avoiding the purchase of U.S. goods.  In this latest version of a fascist takeover, Canada has become the canary in the mine.   No one knows how long this will last, nor how far this will spread.  Whatever the outcome, the damage has been done.  Trust has been shattered, and it will take the American people more than four years to earn it back.  If they want to.  If they can. 

About the author

 S. Nadja Zajdman is a Canadian author. In 2022 she published the story collection The Memory Keeper as well as the memoir I Want You To Be Free. In 2023 she followed up with a second memoir, Daddy's Remains. In 2024 Bridge House brought out Zajdman's essay collection, Between Worlds.

 

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The Lady Who Loved Books by S. Nadja Zajdman, coffee strong and black

In the nightmare world of the Warsaw Ghetto there was a half-starved orphan so in love with literature that when the German occupiers banned the act of reading, she became a courier in a clandestine network calling itself a walking library.  Risking her life, Renata delivered books to readers.  Sometimes she received a tip in the form of a piece of bread, but her payment was that she had access to the books.  Literature, always loved, became her weapon against despair.  In the ghetto, eerily, Renata read Franz Werfel’s Forty Days of Musa Dagh, his account of the Armenian genocide.  Crouched in a corner of the room she shared with a myriad of relatives, Renata began to read Emile Zola’s Nana; the story of a French prostitute who is the ruin of every man who pursues her.  Her older brother pulled the novel out of her hands.  “You’re too young to read that.  You can read it when you’re eighteen.”  Matter-of-factly the hollow-eyed youngster replied, “I won’t live to be eighteen.”

          Surprising herself, the Jewish girl with the name meaning ‘reborn,” survived.  In time she married, and then became a mother.  Mine.  When I was a little girl, my mother encouraged and guided my reading, gladly feeding my appetite for books.  It was with great solemnity that one frosty afternoon after school, my mother presented me with Anne of Green Gables.  “When I was your age, I read this book in translation.  This book introduced me to Canada.  My vision of Canada then was of a faraway, peaceful land filled with snow.  I could never have dreamed that one day my very own daughter would be Canadian-born and I would be giving her this book in the original English.”  The entire Anne series had been on my mother’s walking library list.  Anne of Green Gables was her gift to both of us.

         My brother’s eldest daughter surmounted a learning disability, and became a passionate reader.  She would prop up her novels at the lunch table, read by flashlight in bed, hide with her books in corners of a large family home, and evade visitors in order to escape into the pages of her latest literary voyage.

          The evening after my mother turned eighty, we attended my (now) eighteen-year-old niece’s high school commencement.  Sitting in a gymnasium, witnessing the celebration of carefree teenagers in the serene land of Anne-with-an-E, tears streamed down the cheeks of my niece’s “Nana.”

          Familiar with the interior of my mother’s apartment, the concierge of the building in which she lived dubbed her “The Lady Who Loves Books.”  The cancer my mother lived with slowed her down, so she didn’t get to the libraries as often as she would have liked. When I moved into my mother’s neighbourhood in order to be quickly accessible to her, and for her, I became my mother’s walking library.

Mum would e-mail to me lists of books she wanted to read, I would fill the orders at our neighbourhood library and deliver them to her apartment.  No matter how treacherous the weather, I always delivered. 

My mother clung tenaciously to life because she didn’t want to leave me, but cancer finally killed her.  I have her glass-encased bookcase now, which holds a blend of her personal library, and mine.  Zola’s Nana leans against Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward.  The Lady Who Loved Books never read it, to the end.  

 

About the author

S. Nadja Zajdman is a Canadian author. In 2022 she published the story collection The Memory Keeper (Bridgehouse Publishing, Manchester) as well as the memoir I Want You To Be Free (Hobart Books, Oxford) In 2023 Zajdman published a second memoir, Daddy's Remains (MacKenzie Publishing, Nova Scotia, Canada) 

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Caught Between Worlds by S. Nadja Zajdman, schnaps

 I first became aware of him during a war crimes trial.  He was capital M masculine; dark, brooding, and intense.  He defended the indefensible.  He seemed to have sprung from the wrong side of history, and he had me from the instant the camera zoomed in on his chiselled features, as if compelled to do so by his command.  I couldn’t keep my eyes off him.  I would keep an eye on him and the other eye out for him to the end of his life, and beyond.   

Born into the sound of music, raised in Heidi-Land and acclaimed in Hollywood, Maximilian Schell returned to the clamour and ferment of Western Europe’s mid-twentieth century cultural life to reinvent himself as a stage and film director and director of operas, and as a pianist professional enough to perform with Leonard Bernstein.  All the while he continued waging the last necessary war over and over again in film, both in the character of Nazis, as well as in the characters of their Jewish victims, as if he felt guilty for having spent the period of the actual war in neutral Switzerland, or as if he couldn’t make up his mind. 

Ultimately Schell lived with, and in the last months of his life, he married a decades-younger opera singer who looked like Heidi.  Schell had returned to his roots, to his mother’s family estate in the Austrian Alps, and there he would die and be buried, like Heidi’s grandfather, in the pastoral splendour of The Alm.   

          The image and influence of Maximilian Schell ran current and counterpoint to my fifteen-minute career as an actress, along with my inheritance of the Holocaust, which I received through my mother.  Because of this heritage and out of deference to my mother’s sensibilities I kept hidden my affinity for Mittel Europa, which may have been an Ernst Lubitsch fantasy even while it existed.  Yet my maternal grandfather studied in Zurich during the First World War and my maternal grandmother studied opera in Vienna, so why should I not feel the pull of an alternate world I might’ve been born into, if that world hadn’t rejected my grandparents?  Why did I consider such an attraction aberrant?

          I had an extended and intricate—albeit one sided—relationship with Maximilian Schell.  I followed his first directorial efforts in little cinema venues, where they would run for a week.  My mother was amused by my fascination with “that aging German,” yet indulgent.  She even accompanied me to the screenings, letting her guard down, and confessing, “Kid, ya got good taste.”

          Still, my mother withheld full approval. In the years before we both matured, in my mother’s mind, any German of her generation was suspect until proven innocent.  Paradoxically Schell’s older sister Maria, a shooting star of the 1950s, enchanted Mum.  Though her younger brother’s career would soon leave Maria’s in the dust, the lovely Teutonic maiden who smiled winsomely through tears was firmly entrenched in my mother’s melancholy heart. 

          The other part Schell was born to play was the schizophrenic, or self-destructive character of a Jewish Holocaust survivor who takes on the identity of a Nazi war criminal so that Israeli hunters will find him, try him, and supposedly execute him—or was the character really the said Nazi hiding in the open as a Jewish Holocaust survivor?  Originally a stage play, The Man in the Glass Booth, patterned on Eichmann and his trial, was so controversial that in Montreal, when a production was scheduled at The Saidye Bronfman Center Theatre (known today as The Segal Center Theatre), thugs from the Jewish Defence League planted portions of the script, out of context, in the mailboxes of Jewish homes, and threatened to bomb the theatre if it went forward with its plans.  The theatre’s artistic director, a French Jew born to Polish parents and, like my mother, a survivor of wartime Warsaw, had dropped his last name and used the French version of his middle name.  Thus, in the local theatre milieu, he was known by the stage name of Marion Andre.  This time under threat of physical violence from Jews, Marion Andre resigned in disgust and left for the brighter lights and keener minds of Toronto.

Several years later the American Film Theatre Institute, as part of its mandate to film and preserve great plays with great actors, produced a filmed version of The Man in the Glass Booth.  Who to cast in the lead role was a no-brainer.  Everything Schell had done and stood for led to this moment and this part.  In movie palaces across North America, audiences flocked to see the mind-bending Man in the Glass Booth.

          In Montreal, at the now-defunct Van Horne Theatre, the film was presented as a special event.   As in live theatre, printed programs were prepared.  The audience for this one-night-only screening consisted of the same people who, several years earlier, were provoked into raising a stink putrid enough to shut down a theatrical production and drive its director out of the province.  There seemed to be collective amnesia surrounding the hysteria of several years past. 

On this breezy spring evening Our Crowd came out to socialize, to hail the play, to laud the performance of the international star Schell, and to ask themselves, and each other, “Is he Jewish?”  Some were questioning the identity of the character Schell played.  Some were questioning Schell’s credentials.

In those days, long before the advent of the Internet, there was no way of prying into the private life of a public person unless he was popular enough to be of interest to movie magazines, or notorious enough to be of interest to the tabloids.  In North America, Schell was neither, so there was a blackout on information that might reveal the private man.  In the theatre-style program that was provided for the filmed event, I picked up the first clues to Schell’s origins, and his sympathies.  “Born in Vienna, 1930…in 1938 he moved to Switzerland…”  Since Schell was eight years old at the time of this “move,” one assumed that his parents moved with him.

          “See Ma!”  I exulted, pointing to the biography in the program.  “He isn’t German, he’s SWISS German!”  My sceptical mother perused the program.  The nuances embedded in the truncated biography were even more obvious to her than they were to me.

          “Alright.”  My mother allowed herself a smile.  “He’s kosher.”

          What a relief.  I plopped in my seat.  Now that Mama had accepted him, the path was clear.  Maximilian could marry me when I grew up--or when I came of age, at least.   

 

When I was thirty, I dreamt a riotous dream.  I was in a brilliantly lit ballroom.  I was elegantly gowned.  I was standing next to an equally elegant, tuxedoed Maximilian Schell but I was the center of attention, because I was his bride-to-be. 

          The greats of the German-speaking film and theatre world were in attendance, both the living and the dead, along with a couple of outsiders.  There was a monocled Fritz Lang, who puffed smoke from a gold-tipped cigarette inserted in a long-stemmed holder, into the pixie-like visage of a sour-looking Peter Lorre.   There was a shimmering Marlena Dietrich, who had no eyebrows, but was sporting a top hat, white tie and tails.  There was a scruffy Bertholt Brecht, who had refused to don a tie, but was welcomed anyway.  After a cursory greeting, Brecht makes a beeline for the heavily laden buffet, and stuffs bread rolls into his over-sized pockets.  Dietrich sidles up to Hedy Lamarr, while Anton Walbrook drools discreetly over my Max whom, I realize with a start, I will have to, forever after, call Max, because Maximilian takes too long to say. 

           At the far end of the ballroom, on a love seat, lounges a bearded Sigmund Freud.  The doctor of the subconscious smiles knowingly at Schell while, in an opposite corner of the vast reception hall, Freud’s protégé and rival Carl Jung smiles knowingly at me.

Above it all, an ebullient Ernst Lubitsch swings on a blazing crystal chandelier.  He has taken it upon himself to stage this phantasmagoria.  All the while I wonder; if we are in the German-speaking world, why is everyone addressing me, and each other, in English? 

“Liebchen,” explains my Max.  “We’re in your dream.  You have to be able to understand it.”

Surreptitiously, like a conscience, through a hidden entrance Theodore Bikel sneaks into the hall.  He is wearing a white shirt open at the collar, casual slacks, and sandals.  He has a guitar strapped to his back.  The teddy-bear-like Bikel shifts his guitar to the front of his burly torso and, standing next to a set of French windows, presses his back against the wall.  Positioning his guitar, he strums and hums, “I kiss your hand, Madam, wishing it were more…”  Bikel lifts his guitar pick, glares at me, and abruptly stops.  “Don’t do it.”  Bikel’s glance shoots darts at me.  “Maidele, please don’t do it.”

From his perch atop the chandelier, Lubitsch spies Bikel and tries to shoo him out of the picture and out of my dream.  At that moment Conrad Veidt and his last and Jewish spouse stroll arm-in-arm into my vision and viewpoint.

 “It can work, liebchen,” Veidt encourages me, and dismisses Bikel.  “Look at us.”  He beams beatifically at his beloved Lily.  “It can work.”

          I say nothing, but think to myself, “Your marriage worked because you gave the finger to Goebbels and fled to England in ’33.  Then you gave away your life savings to support the British war effort, and crossed the ocean to Hollywood only to end up playing Nazis.  Your marriage worked because you lived Here, and not There.”  Except that I am now disoriented, and can no longer distinguish between Here and There.  In the literal world, I am alone and asleep in my bed in Montreal.  In my dream, I am in a ballroom in Munich because, in the 1980s, Munich has become the center of the German-speaking film world.  Max must be here for his work. 

          I avert my eyes from Veidt and raise them towards Max.

           “We won’t be living here all the time.  We can live some of the time in Switzerland.  You promised.”  Though I am over the moon to have bagged Max, I feel guilty about the prospect of living on the continent that hounded my mother out of it.

          I receive no clear answer from my dream-state inamorata.  Instead, I wake up. 

         

A few weeks after experiencing this dream, my mother called, gleefully needling me.

           “I’ve got news for you!”  Mum trumpeted, and she didn’t break it gently. “I read in the newspaper that Maximilian Schell just got married to a Russian actress twenty-five years younger than he is!  Too bad, sweetheart!  Hee hee!”  This marriage was the actress’ second marriage.  Surprisingly, or maybe not, at the age of fifty-five, it was Schell’s first.

          “Oh leave me alone!”  I moaned into the receiver.  I was stung by the loss of my fantasy.  I was also flabbergasted at learning that, on the other side of the world, an exact contemporary had realized my dream.

 

It would not be until fourteen months after Schell’s sudden death that I stumbled onto news of it.   I was at the bottom of a well of bereavement.  I had recently lost my mother.

          Certainly I didn’t grieve for Maximilian the way I grieved for my mother, but the news of his death was the first piece of news to pierce the placenta of anguish that separated me from the living world.  If my mother had outlived him, we would’ve commiserated over his passing.  If Mum had heard about it first then, this piece of news, she would’ve broken to me gently.     

          On my own, almost obsessively, I entered into the virtual world of the Internet.  I discovered the details of Schell’s back-story, and was able to follow the events that unfolded in the aftermath of his death.  His funeral appeared to be a state funeral.  His Russian ex-wife did not attend, though Schell’s stepson, the offspring of her first marriage, delivered the eulogy. 

          The sombre funeral procession through a pristine Alpine village might’ve been staged by Schell.   It was the dead of winter.  The fresh snow was piled high.  The bleakness of the landscape and the mourners’ black attire were juxtaposed in stark contrast to a whited-out world. 

            Then came the aftermath.  Astonishingly, a man in his eighties, with a very young wife and an even younger daughter, left no legal testament.

Surfing the net, I weaved in and out of the distant past and recent past, watching Schell, at the height of his power and beauty, receive his one and only Oscar from the hands of a middle-aged Joan Crawford; watching Schell, in old age, in his Alpine retreat, flip sadly through a family album, revisiting his dead parents and his sisters. 

          I delved into Schell’s romantic history, which proved densely populated.  His taste in women remained consistent.  No matter how old he got, Schell preferred his partners to be around the age of thirty.  No matter how old he got the women Schell preferred, responded. 

          Schell’s marriage to the Russian actress did not last, but it produced a daughter who was born when he was close to sixty.  His last love was an opera singer who is German, whose birthday is one day away from Hitler’s birthday, whose name isn’t Heidi, yet I came to think of her that way. 

          The couple kept an apartment in Vienna, and retreated regularly to the family estate on The Alm.  The magical technology of this century allowed me to visit Maximilian on his private alpine meadow.  I entered the upscale, well-equipped, and immaculate living area that was referred to, ingenuously, as a “hut.”  At the far end I could glimpse the kitchen where Schell cooked potato dishes and prepared his favourite repast, which was wiener schnitzel, no less, serving dinner to the young woman who drove up the perilous mountain pass to be with him, after a period of stage work in Vienna.  Like a good director, Schell left her notes. 

Schell had slowed; he had mellowed.   He achieved more than most artists can hope to accomplish in a lifetime, and now he mentored the young woman he had drawn in and made part of what was left of his life.

A baby grand piano served as the living room’s centrepiece.  In clement weather the windows were open so that when “Heidi” played, the sound of music mingled with the sounds of nature.  It was the sound of music that brought “Heidi” and the elderly Schell together.

Having inherited, or claimed, the Alpine retreat, after Schell’s death “Heidi” still kept its windows open and still played its piano while breezes lifted and carried the sound of music to the nearby family burial plot. 

As I continued to research, my fascination with Schell shifted to his young widow.  She must have had more than prettiness and youth to hold such a man.  I intrude upon her virtual person.  “Heidi” had a burgeoning career, when she first met Schell.  Now, on her own, she continues to work.  Financially, she needs to work.  Emotionally, she needs to work even more. 

  During the course of their unconventional relationship, which most people considered an inappropriate one, it was “Heidi” who bore the brunt of the public’s scurrilous curiosity. 

“Has being the girlfriend (sic) of the great Maximilian Schell opened doors for you?” A female interviewer snidely inquires.

          “It has opened some doors.”  Heidi admits.  “It has also closed others.”  Ah.  I begin to admire this by-no-means dumb blonde.  

          Schell’s widow was widely criticized for auctioning off his art collection.  She was pilloried for selling a portrait of Maria Schell.  Rightfully so.  Hadn’t my mother stripped her walls when I first moved into my present apartment in order to live in close proximity to her, installing the portraits of the ancestors onto my walls?  I promised I would keep the ancestors safe, and I do.  How dare this rotznase part with the portrait of the mythic Maria!  I grew impatient when I read this.   As far as I was concerned, Maria Schell should’ve been kept in the family.

 I lost patience with the dead Maximilian, too.   Why didn’t you make a will, I berate him, in my mind, as if he could hear me, as if my opinion mattered.  You old fool.  I hear my mother chastise.  Did you think you were going to live forever?  You should’ve known better than to leave a mess!

Periodically I would check in on Heidi to see how she was coping.  She told interviewers who monitored her progress, and as time went on, there were less of them, that she was crying less.  Heidi began to spend less time in retreat on The Alm.

Within three years of Schell’s death, his widow gave birth to a daughter who was sired by a young relative of Schell’s.  She will always be tied to the Schell family now.  She will never be alone again, 

 

My mother and Maximilian Schell were born two years apart and died two months apart.   In the decade since they’ve been gone, I’ve come to realize that the Aryan actor with the weltschmerz and the war orphan who transcended her war were flip sides of the same coin that came together in me. 

 

About the author

S. Nadja Zajdman in a Canadian author. In 2022 she published the story collection The Memory Keeper (Bridgehouse Publishing, Manchester), as well as the memoir I Want You To Be Free (Hobart Books, Oxford). In 2023 Zajdman published a second memoir, Daddy's Remains (MacKenzie Publishing, Canada) 

Did you enjoy the story? Would you like to shout us a coffee? Half of what you pay goes to the writers and half towards supporting the project (web site maintenance, preparing the next Best of book etc.)

A Portrait in Time by S. Nadja Zajdman, chai served in a tall glass with a twist of lemon

 As a little girl, I was fascinated by a portrait on our living room wall. The elegant woman in the portrait seemed out of place in our shabby apartment.  I loved to look at this portrait which, I later learnt, was an enlargement of a photograph my mother’s sister hid in her underwear during the course of the Second World War.  It contained the profile of a regal-looking lady whose long thick hair was swept back, revealing a swan-shaped neck and bare alabaster shoulders.  The lady had high, wide cheekbones, and a strong, confident jaw.  Pearls hung from her ears, as if in suspended animation, and her almond-shaped eyes stared vacantly into a future she wouldn’t live to see.  While I studied the portrait my mother studied me.        

              “Who is she, Mummy?”

          My mother answered sadly.  “She’s your grandmother.”

          I was shocked.  “She can’t be my grandmother!  Grandmothers are old!”

          The pain in Mummy’s sigh was palpable.  “My mother never got a chance to get old.”  Together we gazed at the portrait, in contemplation.  “Her name was Natalia.  She was my mother.  That makes her your grandmother.”

          “But she doesn’t look like you.”

          Under the spell of her mother’s image my mother’s smile was sudden, and sweet.  “No.  She looks like you.”

          I searched the portrait for a resemblance to my innocent face, and couldn’t find any.  “I don’t look like her!  She’s beautiful, and I’m ugly!”

          “What?!”  Now it was my mother’s turn to be shocked.  “Where did you get such an idea?”

          “Well, when you look at my face you get sad, so I figured it has to be because I’m ugly.”

          “Slodka, sweetheart, you can see that when I look at your face, I feel sad?”

          I nodded.  Mummy snapped into alert.  “Slodka!”  She insisted  “My mother was beautiful, and so are you.  You are beautiful in the same way she was, and when I look at your face I see her beauty in it.  That’s why I feel sad.”

          I forced myself to face my mother’s pain.  “You get sad because you miss her, right?”

          “That’s right.”

          “Then you don’t think I’m ugly?”

          “No no.  Of course not.”

          “But how can I look like your mother when she was a lady, and I’m just a little girl?”

          “Slodka,” my mother was adamant.  “My mother is who you are going to look like.”

 

          In Warsaw on the morning of September 1, 1939, my mother was setting the kitchen table for a celebratory breakfast.  It was Natalia’s forty-sixth birthday.  She had been widowed six months before.  On a wonderfully sunny morning, without a cloud in sight, my mother heard what sounded like a loud storm.  The skies darkened suddenly.  Within an hour the windows of Natalia’s luxury apartment on Krolewska Street were shattered, and she was huddling against a bedroom wall with her two daughters curled under her arms.  The bombardment of Warsaw had begun.  So had the Second World War.  

          September 1, 1939 would prove to be Natalia’s last birthday.  Within a month, Natalia and her children were homeless. Before the end of the year, they would be refugees.  Natalia fell victim to the war’s first epidemic of typhus and, with my mother beside her, died in a Russian-run hospital, at the dawn of 1940, on the evening of New Year’s Day.

 

          The year I was thirteen, my mother took me to a photography studio to have my picture taken.  Mum put me through this ritual every few years.  Shortly after she made her first trip to Israel, where she discovered relatives on her mother’s side, they presented her with a photograph she hadn’t known existed.  It was a picture of a younger Natalia, as Mum had never known her.  She is facing the camera, with her head tilted to one side.  Her hip-length hair hangs loose.  She wears no jewellery.  Her hands are folded demurely over her crossed knees.  Her mouth is closed, with a mere hint of a smile.  There is a wistful expression in her eyes, which do not look directly into the camera, but look shyly away.

          When Mum came home, she brought this faded and scratched photograph to the same photographer who had recently taken my picture.  He gasped.  The picture of Natalia looked like a painting of the picture the photographer had taken of me.

          The photographer restored and enlarged this picture, though he was unable to remove one large scratch.  It was framed and hung prominently in my parents’ living room, along with the cameo-like portrait of the older Natalia.

          After my mother was widowed and she moved to a smaller apartment, the younger Natalia still claimed a wall in the living room, while the older Natalia-in-profile was positioned over the headboard of my mother’s bed, seeming to gaze down on her sleeping child.  She kept vigil on my mother’s bedroom wall to the end of my mother’s life, and beyond.  My mother did get a chance to get old.  When terminal cancer came for her she met it at home, in her bed, with me beside her.  On the evening of the first snowfall in 2013 the spirits of three women came together; the grandmother who was dead, the mother who was dying, and their memory keeper, who was being left behind.

 

Today the two portraits of Natalia perch on my walls, along with portraits of my mother and the photograph taken of me when I was thirteen.  When guests come to my apartment the first item they notice is the large portrait of the younger Natalia, which is prominently displayed. 

Invariably they ask, “When was that picture of you taken?” 

 “Shortly after the First World War,” I deadpan, with a mere hint of a smile.   

About the author

 S. Nadja Zajdman is a Canadian author. In 2022 she published the story collection The Memory Keeper (Bridge House Publishing) as well as the memoir I Want You To Be Free. In 2023 Zajdman published a second memoir, Daddy's Remains (MacKenzie Publishing). 

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The Man in the Raincoat by S. Nadja Zajdman, Winter Pimm's

I must be one of the few North Americans lucky enough to have seen Alan Bates perform on stage twice in a lifetime.  The last time was in February of 1996, in Toronto, during a visit to celebrate my nephew’s first birthday.  (I would later discover that my nephew and Sir Alan shared the same birthday.)  Bates was playing the master builder in Ibsen’s play of the same name.  In a Montreal newspaper I’d read a review of the production at The Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto.  Excitedly I called my brother, who resided there.

 “Please get me a ticket.”

Over the phone line, I could envisage my brother’s crooked grin as he responded dryly, “I’ve already got two.”

 The first time I saw Alan Bates was in New York, on Broadway, in the Simon Gray play Butley.  It was Christmas Time of 1972.  My birthday is in early December.  In my native Montreal, the date generally heralds winter’s first blizzard.  My dad would quip that I took the world by storm.  It was cold comfort.  I could never hold a party because no one would come.

 Once they could afford to, my parents transformed disappointment into joy.  A new tradition began.  As a teenager, my birthday present became an excursion to New York during the Christmas holidays to catch the British imports on Broadway. I grew up pining over the posters in BOAC display windows, and going to New York to see the British productions was as close as I could get to the London theatre, at the time.  For my seventeenth birthday, I chose to see Alan Bates in Butley. 

During the Christmas season of 1972, my mother and I went together to New York.  We saw the play.  A few days later--it must’ve been a Wednesday, because the matinee performances were letting out—we were returning to our room at the Piccadilly Hotel on 45^th St., lugging sacks of hard-cover volumes we’d bought at the book shop Brentano.  We passed a cluster of fans crowded around Paula Prentiss and Richard Benjamin, who were backed against the stage door of the theatre they were performing in, cheerfully signing autographs.  Under the light of the stage door at the Morosco, next to the hotel we were staying in, HE was standing, draped in the same raincoat his character wore onstage.  The atmosphere was damp.  There was a drizzle.  Bates was in conversation with two men.  They weren’t fans.  They spoke with English accents, and were either friends or colleagues.  The matinee crowds continued to pour out of adjacent theatres.  Everyone ignored the man in the raincoat.  If someone did stop to ask for an autograph, it would be for the Benjamins.

Nervously I nudged my mother.  “Oh Ma!  Ma!!  Look!”  She looked.  “No!  Don’t look!  Oh Mummy!”  

Mummy grinned.  “Wanna meet him?”

  “Well yeah!  But I can’t!  I couldn’t!  I don’t know how!  Maaa!”  How do you ask a god for his autograph?

 My mother knew how.  She strode up to the man in the raincoat and demanded, “Mr. Bates, I want your autograph!”  The man in the raincoat seemed annoyed.  Cowering at the edge of the wide sidewalk, loaded down with books, I wanted nothing more than for a manhole to open and swallow me up.

The man in the raincoat asked my mother for a pen.  My mother didn’t have a pen. 

“Don’t YOU have a pen?”  she challenged. 

The man in the raincoat seemed to be growing more annoyed.  The nerve of this woman interrupting my conversation to demand an autograph and not even supplying her own pen.  One of the men fished in his pockets, and found a pen.  I recall rain rolling down my cheeks, in lieu of tears.  There was thunder in my head, and lightning in my heart.

Slit-eyed, the man in the raincoat peered at my mother.

 “Now what would you like me to write on?”

 It was at this moment that my mother deliberately turned downstage towards the street and declared, ‘SHARON!”  Be still, my heart.  “Give me something to write on!”

 Alan Bates blinked and looked past my mother, at me.  This was the Alan Bates of Georgy Girl and The Fixer and Far From the Madding Crowd.  This was the impeccable English actor who’d gone to the top London drama school I dreamt of getting into; this was the emerald-eyed British film star with the shaggy mane of raven hair, and at this instant, he was looking at me.  Suddenly calm, I bent down and selected Volume II of Shaw’s Collected Letters (1898-1910) from one of the two Brentano bags filled with books.  My mother moved towards me, I moved towards her, and we met in the middle of the wide sidewalk.  I handed the book to her and retreated to my post beside the bag.  Alan Bates was gazing pensively.  At me.  I was a very young, shy, and wholesome seventeen.  Hmmm…Bates’ gaze shifted back to my mother, and his irritated expression melted away.  At the corner of one side of his mouth, a camera lens might’ve picked up a hint of the beginning of a smile.

My mother handed him the book.  His gorgeous green eyes dilated and he protested, loud enough for me to hear.  “Shaaaw?!  I cawn’t write on Shaaaw!”   

My mother insisted.  “Well it’s all I’ve got!”

 Reverently the actor turned the front and back pages of the volume, searching for a blank space where his signature wouldn’t interfere with the prose of a writer he seemed to consider a god.  He found it; he signed and handed the book back to my mother.  Then Alan Bates again shifted his gaze and smiled fully, affectionately, kindly and warmly—at me.

 

Twenty years ago, two days after Christmas in 2003, I heard the news of his death.  Sadly I pulled the Shaw volume off a bookshelf and studied a back, almost blank page which says nothing more than Best Wishes, Alan Bates.  I put the book away.  Then I went downtown, to visit a museum.  Perusing the exhibits, I fell into conversation with a teacher from the United States who was visiting with her young son.  They were spending the holidays museum-hopping in Montreal.

When I left the building, it was drizzling.  I opened an umbrella, turned down to a main street and meandered past the festive display windows.  The mother and son I’d met at the museum, the light rain and the holiday shoppers frantically spending and frenziedly lugging along the wide sidewalks sacks filled with purchases evoked a ghost of Christmas past.  Wistfully I recalled the Christmas season of 1972, once more encountering a god-like actor who was now dead, and not yet seventy.   

 

In 2001, excitedly my mother called me.  At her neighbourhood cinema she had just seen the recently released film Gosford Park. 

“Oh Sharon!  I saw a movie!  It’s for you!  It’s just for you!  All that British stuff that you love!  Oh sweetheart!  How can I tell you?!”  Meaning, how can I describe what I just saw.  “What can I tell you?!”  Succinctly, Mum summed up.  “I can tell you only two words—Alan Bates and Maggie Smith!”

These two words I understood completely.  These were two magic words.  “Alan Bates and Maggie Smith?  I’m on my way!  I’m in!”

Mum took me to see the movie she had seen only days before.  As I watched the film, Mum watched me.  A moment came when Alan Bates, as a stiff, prim and proper butler, allows himself to crack a smile.  With pleasure, in recognition, Mum and I smiled at each other.  In that moment, seeing that smile, twenty-nine years later, we remembered.   

About the author

 S. Nadja Zajdman is a Canadian author. In 2022 she published a story collection, The Memory Keeper (Bridgehouse Publishing, Manchester) as well as the memoir I Want You To Be Free (Hobart Books, Oxford). In 2023 Zajdman published a second memoir, Daddy's Remains. (MacKenzie Publishing, Nova Scotia, Canada) 

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UPSETTING SANTA by S. Nadja Zajdman, mulled apple cider

When I was a child, the largest parade in North America was the Eaton’s Santa Claus parade.  Eaton’s was a department store of legend, akin to Harrod’s in London and Macy’s in New York, except that Eaton’s had branches across Canada.   Children applied to march in the parade, sometimes waiting years until they were chosen and in danger of not being considered children anymore.

            Held in late November, first in Toronto, always on a Saturday morning, the floats and costumes were then transported by train to Montreal, where the parade resumed the following Saturday morning.  The spectacle was televised on both the English and French networks, and CBC radio dramas broadcast Santa’s perilous flight from the North Pole.  In later years imitators would turn up in markets and malls, but everybody knew that the REAL Santa Claus was the Santa Claus who was hosted by Eaton’s. 

            After the parade, Santa was installed on a red velvet throne that matched his red velvet suit, in a private room set aside especially for such a grand personage.   The arms and frame of his throne were painted Fool’s Gold.  

 A leafless, silver-branched tree studded with winking white lights twinkled beside him.  A court photographer hovered in the background.   Santa’s Helpers stood sentinel, armed with multi-coloured lollipops.  These helpers wore mossy green tights, green suede tunics, and on their heads perched floppy green caps topped by white pompoms.  We were told these creatures were elves, yet they bore a marked resemblance to teenagers from local high schools moonlighting on a Saturday morning.

            When the stage was set and the fantasy characters in position, a rope serving as a partition was lifted, and a swarm of exhilarated children raced into the enclosure.  Me and my little brother were two of them.  Like most of the mob we came with, we were accompanied by a parent.  In our case, it was our dad. 

            Excitedly, we stood in line with our peers.  We knew that when the time came to address Santa, we were expected to ask him for a Christmas gift.  What could we ask for?  We were Jewish, and didn’t keep a Christmas tree.  There was no chimney, let alone a fireplace installed in our small apartment.  How could Santa reach us?  Where would he make his delivery?    

 

           

            The children who stood in line with us were casually attired, but my brother and I were dressed up and immaculately groomed for what we considered a major event.  I wore a blue dress with a blue and white bordered collar and  patterned stripe down the middle.  A black band held thick chestnut-coloured hair off my high forehead, and my softly-textured, snow-white cardigan was spangled with golden butterfly appliques.   But it was my little brother Michael who rivaled Santa in the colour and originality of his outfit.  Michael was resplendent in scarlet red leggings, a matching red, white and blue hockey sweater with the logo of the Montreal Canadiens proudly emblazoned and promoted on his little chest, and to top off the ensemble, he sported a red, white and blue cap on his golden, crew-cut head.  Go, Habs, Go!  As we drew closer to the front of the line, nervously Little Michael turned to Dad.  “What do I do when I get to Santa?  What should I say?”

            Instantly, Dad deadpanned, “Tell the guy you want cold cash.”

            I frowned.  My big brown eyes narrowed as I peered at Dad.  I wasn’t sure this was a good idea, but Little Michael took Daddy at his word.

            As a teen-aged elf removed a rope, handed us fistfulls of lollipops—which Michael handed over to me to hold—confidently he approached Santa’s throne and greeted him.  “Hello!”  Michael beamed.

            “Hello, little boy.”  Santa’s returned Michael’s greeting.  “How are you?”

            “I’m fine.  How are you?” 

            It was hard to tell under his rug of beard and bushy white eyebrows, but Santa seemed taken aback.

            “Ahh, what would you like for Christmas, little boy.” 

            Guilelessly, Michael grinned and carried out Daddy’s instructions.  “I want cold cash!”

            Pouf!  A hot white light flashed and popped.  The photographer hired by Eaton’s was taking a picture of us with Santa, a copy of which Dad would have to pay for with cold cash. 

            Santa spluttered.  He was speechless.  He looked to our dad.  As sweetly as his son, but not so guileless, Daddy smirked.  “Ho ho ho!”  He winked at the discombobulated dispenser of gifts.    Meeeerry Christmas!”

 

About the author 

S. Nadja Zajdman is a Canadian author. In 2022 she published the story collection The Memory Keeper (Bridgehouse Publishing, Manchester) as well as the memoir I Want You To Be Free (Hobart Books, Oxford). In 2023 Zajdman published a second memoir, Daddy's Remains (MacKenzie Publishing in Canada) 

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BLOOMING WHERE WE’RE PLANTED by S. Nadja Zajdman, iced mint tea

 We were a busload of older women off on a jaunt on a hot day in July. Departing from a Montreal seniors’ center, we rode off to Mirabel, located in the Lower Laurentian Hills.  In less than an hour we arrived at Routes des Gerbes d”Angelica, a collection of fourteen themed gardens which are the creation of twenty retirees who have invested their money and the rest of their lives, it seems, into creating and sustaining a sanctuary of natural beauty.  Most of the money earned from this project (from parking fees and the food concession) is reinvested into this labour of love.  The rest is donated to help support needy children, both here in Canada and in Indonesia.     

 The co-owners of this oasis have thought of everything; insect repellent is on hand in both spray and cream form.  Large green (of course) parasols serve as added protection from the searing summer sun.  As we passed through the gates of the various gardens, invisible sprinklers sprayed us with mist.  In these dream gardens, it isn’t only the flowers that are watered.  Visitors are cooled off, too.    

          Our guides are women who won’t see seventy again.  Their bodies are tanned, fit and firm from work in the gardens.  Their faces glow with the passion of spirits living life “on purpose.”  The work they’re doing now with outlive them, and they know it.  What a lovely gift they leave to posterity.  

          As we strolled languidly along garden paths, the scent of dahlias commingled with the humidity, distilling a singular tropic-like perfume.

          “Why are the descriptions in French only?”  A member of our group challenged the Francophone guide.

          “Originally we had bilingual descriptions, but the writing was of equal size.  Someone complained, et le gouvernment told us we had to remove the English. (sic)  We couldn’t afford to redo the descriptions, making the French writing bigger.”  Quebec’s latest language laws decree that French signs and typeface must be larger than corresponding English signs.

          As we continued along the garden paths, I noticed one small bilingual descriptive plaque.  It seems the language police are myopic.    

         

At lunchtime I withdrew from the group huddled in the food concession under ceiling fans, and took myself to an outdoor table sheltered by an umbrella.  There was one woman sitting at the table.  She was not a member of our group.  A video camera stood next to a chair.  She was guarding it.

          “May I sit here?”  I asked, hoping to share the shade.

          “Mais bien sur.”

          I laid out my lunch on the table.  “Is that your camera?”

          “It belongs to my husband.  He’ll be here soon.”

          On cue, the lady’s husband arrived and took a seat.  “Why are there no men in your group?”  The man at the table noticed.

          “They can’t take the heat!”  I riposted.  “The only man with us is the chauffeur, and he’s hiding on the air-conditioned bus!”  That broke the ice, which would’ve melted in this weather, anyway.

          My lunch companions were retirees who had come to take pictures and film of the gardens.  “Usually we go to Ontario because the roads there are good, but we came here today because it isn’t far.”  My lunch companions live in Pierrefonds, on the edge of Montreal’s West Island.   

The gentleman sitting opposite me began his professional life fifty years ago as a drummer with a rhythm and blues band.  The band was known by various names, beginning with the moniker Iron Bag.

 “It was serious fun!  For five years we played all over and the others wanted to continue, but without a good manager to take us across Canada, we weren’t going anywhere.  Only one of us continues to make music.  Dmitri.  Jimmy.  He was Greek.  He makes music, but he doesn’t make money.”  At this point, the gardener/guides surprised us with samplings of freeze-dried berries and cups of complimentary iced tea.

In 1975 my male lunch companion married Chantal, who was seated between us, and went to work for the federal government.  They started a family and settled in Outremont.  Thirty years ago they moved to The West Island.

“And what is your name?”

“I was Pierre, but I changed it, because the English called me Pee Uuurr.  I will show you.”  The septuagenarian half-ran to the food concession, and returned with a brochure and a pen.  On the brochure he proudly signed his autograph:  PiAIRE.  “So the English will know how to pronounce it!” 

I smiled.  “ ‘Pierre’ was good enough for Trudeau, but not for you?”

“You see!  Pierre is banaaal!  Everybody was Pierre!”  Pierre/Piaire from Pierrefonds had a point.  “But the Americans love Chantal!”  Pierre/Piaire from Pierrefonds beamed at his bride of forty-four years.  “They love to say ‘Chantaaaal!’”

“For the Americans, c’est exotique.  Do you go often to The States?”

“Well, I hate winter!  We go to Floride.  We go—Pierre/Piaire waved his hand as if he were sailing the high seas—sur les croisieres.”

“Alors, votre pays n’est pas l’hiver.”  I was referring to the song that, for some, is Quebec’s second national anthem.  For some, Mon Pays, C’est L’Hiver is Quebec’s only national anthem.

“Non.”  Pierre/Piaire from Pierrefonds has taken his video camera around the world.  His photographs and films are posted on YouTube.  It appears that the federal government has been very good to Pierre/Piaire.

 

After lunch Pierre/Piaire picked up his camera and accompanied by Chantal, set off to film the gardens.  Delicate flower that I am, I was wilting in the heat, so I climbed aboard a club car, alongside Nicole, one of the gardens’ guardians who was serving as chauffeur.   Nicole’s sweet, mature face turned radiant as she pointed out the collective’s creations.  At the far end of the gardens there was a deer sanctuary, which fronted a vista of expansive meadows and rolling hills.  The bus that brought us from Montreal stood at the edge of the meadows, shimmering in the heat.

On the way back to the accueil, under the protective roof of the club car, Nicole indicated a different kind of garden.  Its archways led into a dark, shaded glade.  Everyone still on their feet were heading for what seemed like a fairytale forest.  “Would you like to go inside?”  Nicole was ready to stop the club car and let me off.  I would’ve accepted her offer, but our bus was pulling up to the accueil.  “The woods are lovely, dark and deep but…” 

          “It looks like we’re going to leave.”

          “You must come back in winter.  In winter this place is magic.  There are thousands of lights strung up in the woods, and a fantasy village.  Last year, during the week of Christmas, we had fifteen thousand visitors.”

          As our bus rolled out of Eden, Nicole and another guide stood by the side of the road, waving and shouting, “Come back!  You must come back!  Come back at Christmas!”

 

About the author

 S. Nadja Zajdman is a Canadian author. In 2022 she published the memoir I Want You To Be Free (Hobart Books, Oxford) as well as the story collection The Memory Keeper (Bridgehouse Publishing, Manchester). 

 

Did you enjoy the story? Would you like to shout us a coffee? Half of what you pay goes to the writers and half towards supporting the project (web site maintenance, preparing the next Best of book etc.)