We’re on the road again, Katherine and I, visiting family and friends in northern Saskatchewan and Manitoba, so a shorter post this week.

We were driving north on Highway 106, the Hanson Lake Road, so-called because the lake is one of many encountered on the way to Creighton, where I grew up, and Flin Flon, the town next door where I was born.

Kilometre after kilometre, burned trees —conifers, poplars, birch — stood denuded. Their green was turned to death black and bone white. The lakes could not save them. Last year wildfires roared in from all directions on my hometowns and led to the evacuation every one of their 6,000 inhabitants. They were displaced for weeks. Dozens of homes were lost on outlying lakes. We were returning to the scene of the crime: the payback for all that has been done to the planet we’ve been given.

A lowering sky began to spit fat drops of rain on the windscreen as we drove the patched up highway. These turned into a violent splatter. But it lasted only a few minutes. Then a welcoming rainbow appeared ahead of us.

The next day, Prime Minister Carney announced Canada was done with trade negotiations with the US. I thought of those trees, the rainstorm and the rainbow.

It wasn’t Watergate, nor did I uncover Jimmy Hoffa hiding out in a laundromat, but I recall feeling a frisson of excitement when I thought I was about to score a minor scoop. It’s every newspaper person’s fantasy.

While editing the Montreal Gazette’s Entertainment section in August 1997, I got word that Pete Best and his band would be performing that evening in the cozy confines of le Pub Saint-Paul in Old Montreal. THAT Pete Best – the drummer who got drummed out of the Beatles in 1962 on the eve of the Fab Four’s global breakthrough. What a coup it would be, I thought, to get the Fifth Beatle to talk about major-headline disappointment, resilience and his life now, 35 years after being jettisoned for (take your pick):

1. being an inferior drummer;

2. lacking camaraderie; or

3. being too damn good-looking.

My thoughts flashed back to Feb. 9, 1964, when my sister Liz and I – and almost all of North America, it seemed – were spellbound by the Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. I recalled how scandalized Dad was by the screaming girls and mop-top hairstyles, and how we razzed him for decades about his prediction that night: “In two weeks, no one will remember these guys.”

Was Best still bitter about being left earth-bound while his former Liverpudlian bandmates skyrocketed from relative obscurity to becoming the greatest rock ’n’ roll band in history? That would be a must-ask question.

On such short notice, I didn’t have time to round up a reporter to do the story. The natural choice would have been editor Dave Bist who, as a rock ’n’ roll columnist in 1969, managed to hang out with John Lennon and Yoko Ono during their legendary Bed-in for Peace at Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth Hotel. I liked the sound of Bist on Best.

It was now or never, so I decided to steal an hour or two away from the newsroom and put my rusty reporting skills to use. With notebook in hand and ace Gazette photographer Gordon Beck in tow, I strode to the nearby pub. It was near-dead and there was no sign of Best, even though his booking agent and the bar owner had assured me I could get an interview in the late afternoon or early evening.

“Where he is?” Beck kept asking. He was unhappy about working after his shift had ended, so I bought him a beer to keep him from bolting. Finally, well into the evening, long past when I should have been back at my desk, Best and his young bandmates appeared on the cramped stage. I approached him behind his drum kit and asked if he had time for a quickie interview. He didn’t. At 55, with a tidy moustache and sad eyes, he looked weary. Maybe, I thought, I’m not really breaking ground in my quest to get Best to answer the question yet again: How does it feel?

Had I had enough time to do a little research, I would have known that he had tried to commit suicide in 1965 while battling depression. After being a member of a few failed rock bands, Best put the sticks down and then toiled for two decades as a civil servant at an unemployment office, when he wasn’t doing shift work loading bread into delivery vans. On the positive side, he and his longtime wife, Kathy, had two daughters (and later four grandchildren), and he got back into the music business when he and stepbrother Roag formed The Pete Best Band in 1988. Also, Best became a millionaire in 1995 on royalties when – finally! – the surviving Beatles released Anthology 1, with 10 early tracks featuring Best as drummer.

Perched behind another set of drums, Roag jotted down my phone number. Twenty years younger than Pete, he was clearly well-practiced in running interference. He shook my hand and made it sound like a phone interview could be arranged the following day. Even I wasn’t naïve enough to believe that.

Photographer Beck and I stayed a while as the Pete Best Band played early Beatles hits in this modest little watering hole, competing with the Weather Channel on a TV above them and the crack of pool balls as yet another game began at the other end of the room. If only the Beatles had had two drummers like this band, I thought, Best and Ringo Starr could have shared the fame and fortune and avoided all that nastiness.

Scoopless, I raced back to the newsroom following my close encounter with Beatle manqué Pete Best. I had an Entertainment section to put to bed and deadlines loomed. There was no point in dwelling on what might have been.

(Best is now 84. A year ago, after decades of tirelessly touring, he suddenly officially retired from live music and public appearances “due to personal circumstances.”)

A new contributor, Jennifer DeLeskie, joins Life Sentences today. She explains how archaeology led her to write a future-focussed novel set in Canada’s Arctic.

On a sunlit night in July 1992, I sat on a cliff overlooking the Arctic Ocean with my new friends, Olleetua and Jamesie, listening to a herd of walruses on the beach below grunting and moaning. We couldn’t see them from our vantage point, but I could imagine them jostling their enormous bodies into place among all the others, seeking a comfortable spot to lock in for the night.

I’d been on Baffin Island for about a month by then, part of a team of archaeologists studying European contact with the Dorset and Thule of Outer Frobisher Bay, far from Iqaluit or any permanent human settlement.

The first few weeks had been disorienting. My eyes kept searching for buildings, highways, evidence of human alteration; sometimes even inserting them into the landscape—an iceberg becoming a ship, a crack in a far-off ridge becoming a road. I was trying to make the unfamiliar familiar.

I was probably doing so then, staring out at the horizon, looking for a contrail, when Olleetua tapped my elbow and pointed down. A pod of belugas had gathered near shore, adults and calves breaching the almost tropical blue water playfully, as if they too were amused by the noises the walruses made.

When I returned to my tent that night—a Eureka one-man kitted out with a leaky inflatable mattress and the warmest sleeping bag commercially available in 1992—the back of my jacket was covered in clothespins.

Olleetua and Jamesie pranked me like this most days, silently sneaking up from behind while I was bent over my excavation unit inside a semi-subterranean sod house. By day’s end, I’d often have twenty or thirty clothespins attached to me. They’d almost certainly added a few more up on that cliff while I watched the belugas.

Their ease and fluency in that place stayed with me. They made me feel welcome while reminding me that I was a guest—by turning me into a human hedgehog.

And yet there I was, digging up traces of a past that wasn’t mine, literally weighing and measuring it. How much could I really have to say about their ancestors’ relationship with European whalers in the late 19th century? And for whom would this information be relevant? When I excavated an almost perfectly intact harmonica one day, I remembered the old woman at the Legion hall in Iqaluit who had told me that her ancestors liked the whalers because they brought good things to trade. She hadn’t needed to dig anything up to know this.

That sense of unease followed me throughout my short career in archaeology, eventually ending it. I did fieldwork in France and Belize, and spent two seasons at the Hunter’s Point site on Ontario’s Saugeen Peninsula, where once again I was offered hospitality by people whose relationship to the land ran deeper than mine. Mia and Vanessa, young crewmates, invited me onto Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation (Neyaashiinigmiing)—Cape Croker, then—to dances in the high school gym where the entire community would turn up—grandmothers and toddlers and teenagers doin’ the Humpty Hump and slow dancing to Whitney Houston. We’d drive around the rez in Vanessa’s truck and talk to boys, and I was usually reminded in various ways—often jokingly, always kindly—that I wasn’t from around there.

I didn’t have language for my discomfort with the work I was doing until years later, when I read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. Kimmerer, a botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, writes about forms of knowing rooted in relationship—to land, to community, to lived experience. Her writing gave me a way to understand something I had felt but never been able to articulate: that knowledge extracted from a place is not the same as knowledge formed in relationship with it.

I’d gotten into archaeology because I wanted to feel more at home in the world. I wanted a sense of continuity with the past and with the land beneath my feet. But I gradually realized that archaeology couldn’t give me the kind of knowledge I was seeking. I could spend four months on Baffin Island dropping test pits and working the stadia rod, or a summer weighing rocks on the Saugeen Peninsula (let nobody tell you that archaeology isn’t glamorous), but I couldn’t excavate my way into belonging.

Both Olleetua and Jamesie died tragically not long after that field season, drowning in separate boating accidents. They were young, handsome, funny, and alive. I had crushes on both of them.

After a detour into law, I found my way to writing. I thought I’d left those questions—about belonging and ways of knowing—behind, only to discover they were still there, just in a different form. What stories can I tell truthfully? Whose stories?

With Everclear, my debut novel, I don’t answer those questions so much as place a character inside them. Its sixteen-year-old protagonist, Kai Mendelsohn, arrives in Eeyou Istchee, land of the James Bay Cree, one hundred years in the future, looking for answers. Like me, she arrives looking for the wrong things.

She has to learn that understanding begins not with answers but with attention and—crucially—with relationships, and that some forms of knowledge can’t be excavated, measured, or possessed.

By the end of the book, Kai Mendelsohn is beginning to understand what it means to be a good guest.

And she gets to see belugas.

Everclear is dedicated to the memory of Olleetua and Jamesie. It will be released on August 25, by Flame Arrow Publishing.

Affair with China

By Gabriel Safdie

John Aylen Books, 380 pages

China is such a big and dynamic country—culturally, politically and in most other ways. It’s hard to imagine a single book taking in all that has happened there in past half century. A daunting challenge for sure, but not too much for Gabriel Safdie.

Safdie has had the advantage of being a businessman who is steeped in the arts, in which he has a Ph.D. He might have preferred to stay in a life of letters but was recruited by his father to accompany him on business excursions to China beginning in the early 1980s. When Safdie’s father, Leon, died in 1986, it fell to the son to take up the reins of the family business, importing textiles from China to sell in Canada. Since then, Safdie has mixed commerce with exploration in what became a lifelong passion for China. His business contacts provided a unique vantage point from which to witness the transition of what was a still nearly medieval society as it crawled out from under the desolation years of Mao Zedong to becoming the superpower it is today.

If the Safdie name sounds familiar, it is because Gabriel is a sibling in an energetic family that includes his brother, the architect Moshe Safdie of Habitat fame, and artist sister, Sylvia. Gabriel Safdie was born in Jerusalem, before the creation of Israel, and his father’s branch of the family immigrated to Montreal in 1953.

As for the mixing of business and pleasure in China, Gabriel Safdie does it with alacrity. There seems to be no part of the country he hasn’t visited and whose sights—historical, cultural and natural wonders—he hasn’t been awed by. Great Wall, terra cotta warriors, countless Buddhist sanctuaries and Muslim mosques, ancient villages, mountains, grottoes and caves: it’s all one grand Chinese banquet, and like those ritual events it at times threatens to overwhelm.

Safdie trips lightly over the business side of his travels, but he offers interesting insight into how China came to be a dominant force in global markets. Face-to-face contact between buyers and sellers plays a big part. And for him, all that travelling paid a bonus. The many guides, fixers and business counterparts he encounters gave him access to rarely seen corners of the Middle Kingdom.

He does not shy away from mentioning the upheavals that have roiled Chinese society, and in the face of the repression they produced Safdie offers succinct if muted criticism. His access to a wide range of voices belies the notion of China being a conformist society. On the eve of the Tiananmen Square massacre he meets a Communist Party official who tells him, “We may yet be fated to a future of more dynasties. … For the people, it is hope against hope right now.” Prophetic words indeed.

Such forthrightness has since been largely silenced by the all-seeing eyes and ears of the surveillance state. Who knows when these ideas might be again voiced, even to a travelling businessman?

The Three Gorges desecration, the exiling of the dissident artist Ai Weiwei, the jailing of Canada’s two Michaels and of freedom-of-speech advocate Jimmy Lai—all receive notice in Safdie’s compendium. On Taiwan, however, he is silent. He never took up business there.

Affair with China is the product of what is sometimes called assisted publishing. That is, the author pays the freight to edit and print the book, and he is responsible for its distribution and promotion. These days, with the book publishing industry ever more constrained by rising costs and falling readership, it’s a route people are more inclined to take—if they have the capital to do so.

In turning to Montreal publisher John Aylen Books, Safdie has been well served. Affair with China may be described as lavish (full disclosure: John Aylen is a friend). It is handsomely designed with colour photos throughout.

That said, the weakness inherent in giving the author the whip hand is evident. At almost 400 pages, the book is longer than it needs to be. It might better have been served with a thematic rather than chronological approach. And while there are many lovely photos, not all are worthy of inclusion.

It might be said that the book is an illustration of the benefits of having a publisher who is independent of the author’s wishes. Such a publisher is a mediator between writer and audience, attempting to best serve the reader while giving the writer his or her due.

Affair with China is probably not a book that the masses will pick up, but for readers who do, it has its rewards. Because it is such a comprehensive survey of China in the past half a century, it would be an ideal addition to a reading list in a university course—although one of the book’s lacks is an index which would have been helpful.

In the end, Safdie has published the book he wanted to write, and the reader’s understanding of China is enhanced because he did.

Summertime and the living is … well, not exactly easy. The weather has been good where I’ve spent the past few weeks—Quebec and eastern Ontario—but a pall settles over my sense of well-being. Maybe it’s the smoke hanging over half the continent, reminding us that Nature does not take kindly to being plundered.

There’s a lot more going on in the world, much of it worth fretting over, but if your personal life hasn’t been upended, there’s cause for thanks.

But the constant static remains. It makes me think of other times and places, good and bad. This is the product of living a long time, enough to have wisps of the past come back unbidden. An example: Hermann Gruenwald showed up the other day.

Hermann died in 2020 after a life well rewarded. He was a Holocaust survivor, so it might be said that everything was gravy after that experience.

I got to know Hermann well because I wrote an as-told-to memoir about his life. In After Auschwitz: One Man’s Story, he recorded the good and the bad of his days, and there was plenty of both. Among the good, raising a family and crafting a successful life in business. He loved his chrome green Jaguar, a car he could take for granted, although he never forgot the number on his arm: A-12483. Among the bad: being given the number when he was dumped in Auschwitz, age 19, and learned of his parents’ deaths there. But the concentration camp was only the beginning of the evil that befell Hermann.

Auschwitz was evacuated in January 1945 as the Soviet army approached. Thousands of prisoners were marched westward over a frozen landscape, Hermann among them. Some 15,000 from the camp died on the road. As men weakened, they fell back to the end of the column. When they couldn’t keep up, a guard might ask, “So you don’t want to march any more? Okay, lie down.” A double tap was applied, two shots, to ensure a quick death. It was the Nazi version of a mercy killing.

Eventually, Hermann reached his column’s destination: Mauthausen, another camp which at that late stage of the war would prove worse than Auschwitz. It was a scene there at the outset that has stuck with me. Groups of men stripped and were herded into a shower room. As Hermann stared up at a shower head, he wondered, what would it be: gas or water?

By then prisoners were aware poison gas was used to kill them, if not exactly how it was applied. No one came back to explain. Until that moment, they had had a smattering of agency. Even on a death march, the will to live might keep a person alive for one more day. In that moment, naked, staring up at the shower heads, there was nothing left, only fate.

Water poured out and life went on.

In most cases, no matter how dire the circumstance—a diagnosis of a fatal illness, the loss of a loved one, the rumblings of war and destruction approaching ever closer—there is usually a way forward if only to gain inches or days. But as I look up into the sky this summer, I wonder if our ability to change what is happening and the time to do so are running out.

What will it be? Gas or water?

I’m a paperback rider.

On trains, planes, buses and subway cars, books are as vital to me as a supply of air is to deep-sea divers. I’m of the generation that considers bookshelves essential furniture. In a world increasingly distracted by short-form videos and scrolling, I cherish quiet, solitary hours reading books.

In 2012, while engaged in another of my favourite activities—the solo road trip between where I live (Montreal) and where I grew up (Ontario’s cottage country)—I discovered a book goldmine in an unlikely spot.

Between the Ottawa Valley and Georgian Bay, just east of the village of Kinmount, I passed a HOLLYWOOD-like sign. It read:

“SELF SERVE BOOK SHOP 3.00 OPEN 24 HRS.”

One day, when I could no longer pick up Moose Radio’s staticky golden oldies—you can only sing Gord Lightfoot’s “Carefree Highway” so many times—I pulled over. I parked next to a rustic wood-burned sign inviting me to enter the World’s Smallest Bookshop.

It was a repurposed, shingle-clad henhouse, smaller than three metres by three metres, yet more spacious inside than it appeared from outside. I found myself with three other people perusing an eclectic display of books—mostly hardcovers —on floor-to-ceiling shelves labelled fiction, biography, cooking, etc., and by author. Every book cost $3, and all transactions were based on the honour system. You deposited your money in the slot of a wooden box. The room was festooned with notes on which people from as far away as New Zealand and Germany had left messages saying how delighted they were to have chanced upon this middle-of-nowhere “gem” or “oasis.”

One of the wooden signs outside directed customers to check out more titles at the garage-like “warehouse” a few steps away, down a grassy slope, past a rusting farm implement and a headless wooden soldier.

There were, indeed, many more books for sale, plus eggs and, on a wall, wood-burned signs bearing aphorisms like:

THE DIFFICULT AGE HAS COME and LIT

TOO TIRED TO WORK, TOO POOR TO QUIT.

Again, the price was $3—for books, vintage magazines dating back to the 1930s, wooden plaques and fresh eggs (by the dozen) in a fridge. The eggs were produced by the inhabitants of an adjoining chicken coop, next to a goat in a pen.

Proprietor Gord Daniels was there with his dog Dash. I told him I was a retired newspaperman and—once a reporter, always a reporter—I would like to write a story about his innovative, staffless store.

Gord was 74, and had two artificial hips plus a “patched-up heart.”

Born and raised in the Kawartha Lakes area just to the south, he grew up on a farm outside Lindsay, Ont.

“We didn’t have TV (until the family moved to Toronto in 1956 when Gord was 17), so I got into the habit of reading for my entertainment. I read all of the Zane Grey western novels when I was a kid.” He moved on to Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Leacock, Mordecai Richler and Mark Twain.

As an adult, Gord worked as a milkman and in the dry-cleaning business. His passions, though, were reading and woodworking, and in 1977, when Toronto became “too hectic,” he bought the property near Kinmount. A year later, Gord opened a workshop, turning out wooden plaques and whirligigs—wings and arms spun madly in the breeze—to sell in local retail stores. In 2007, widower Gord married widow June, a longtime local librarian, whom he’d met through a pen-pal club. The same year he hatched the idea of turning his chicken coop into a bookstore.

“I’ve been accumulating books all my life, and started to get into books seriously when I slowed down the woodworking business. I always wanted a bookstore, not to make a lot of money, but just to encourage people to come in and look around. It’s a great satisfaction, a comfort, a psychological thing to know you’re surrounded by all those words and knowledge.

“June and I get a lot of our books from library sales, garage and yard sales, and from people bringing them in. We don’t travel far, usually day trips, though occasionally we’ll go to libraries in Toronto, which I phone periodically to see if there’s a sale.”

Like the old-timers we were, we lamented how the new millennium was becoming increasingly post-literate as electronic media usurp the printed word. We tried to reassure each other that, like an adolescent outgrowing a diet of Twinkies, society might someday see the need for more substance and read books again.

When I asked Gord if his bookstore really was the world’s smallest—it certainly wasn’t if you included the contents of the larger building—he didn’t know.

“We needed a name.”

Six months later, despite running hours behind schedule on a visit with family, I stopped by after sunset. A pair of industrious spiders were busy constructing webs in the converted henhouse, which was illuminated by only a single light bulb. After buying a book, I made my way in the darkness to the larger building. Dash barked and Gord appeared like an apparition before me, wearing a tuque and using a rollator to get around.

We talked about the story I planned to write about him, and picked up where we’d left off on the subject of literature. Gord was no fan of Jack Kerouac, much preferring Henry Miller’s work. I couldn’t imagine this feeble, old man appreciating Miller’s sometimes raw, sexually explicit prose, but I took that as a reminder to never judge a book reader by his/her appearance.

“With the honour system, and charging only three loonies a book,” I said, “I don’t know how you make any money.”

“Oh, we don’t,” Gord said with a faint smile.

I didn’t know it, but it would be the last time I’d see him.

***

The following years I kept returning and adding to my home library. It became an automatic pit stop as I drove these roads less-travelled, past the overgrown remnants of log barns, perched on Precambrian bedrock, evoking the homesteading life of a century ago.

Usually there was no sign of life, except maybe a rooster crowing.

Then in September 2025, on another Montreal-Georgian Bay run, I noticed something amiss as I approached the little bookstore. It was still there, under the familiar shady tree, but the big sign wasn’t. I stopped and found the henhouse locked. I debated immediately hitting the road, but then noticed the door to the “warehouse” was open. There, I was relieved to find there were still books for sale at one side of the building, but at the other end I could see the legs of someone working under a jacked-up car. Hip-hop blared. A nearby toolbox was emblazoned with a decal of a silhouetted buxom female and a slogan proclaiming the glories of bounteous breasts. Clearly, the place was under new management. I wondered if Gord was still kicking. I hadn’t, after all, seen him in a dozen years, and he wasn’t the picture of health then.

Resisting the urge to bother the guy under the car, I strode toward my vehicle. A man, maybe in his 40s, approached from where it looked like Gord’s house was being demolished. I asked him about Gord.

“Gord?”

The owner of the property wasn’t Gord, he said. It was Jerry, “and he died this summer.”

Later, based on what he told me and what I discovered through internet research, I was able to piece together the story. Because of his declining health, Gord and June sold the property eight years earlier and moved to Bancroft. A 2017 ad in the Kinmount community newspaper reassured readers that new owners, Jerry and Mary Jane, being “avid readers,” would keep Gord’s bookshop open. But then Jerry died in July 2025, in his 75^th year. Next I found Gord’s obituary. He died in 2019 in his 81^st year.

This spring, on my way back to Montreal, I again stopped at the bookstore and was pleased to find the henhouse-bookstore door unlocked. With the HOLLYWOOD-like sign gone, I wondered, who but former customers would even know of the shop’s existence?

While scrutinizing books in the bigger building, I noticed a round-faced man with a brush cut loading something into the back of a pickup truck just outside the door. I told him about being a regular customer, and that I had even interviewed the original owner for a story I never wrote. The man said the place was now owned by his grandmother, and she intended to keep it open “as long as we’ve still got books.”

That could be a while, he said, because people keep dropping them off.

“The money helps; it pays grandma’s property taxes.”

Back on the road, with my latest purchases sitting on the front passenger seat, I thought about how writers can achieve a form of immortality when their words outlive them, sometimes for centuries, adding to humanity’s collective memory. In a more modest way, Gord’s one-of-a-kind idea lives on without him.

For now, at least.

Usually the What I’m Reading feature on Life Sentences offers reviews of new or recently published books. But occasionally we will go back to books worth a second look.

The Cello Suites

J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece

By Eric Siblin

The House of Anansi, 320 pages

Apparently classical music is enjoying a renaissance. A recent study by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in the UK indicates that young people are more likely to listen to classical music than their parents. Mind you, the sponsor of that study may have been looking for that result, but it’s a hopeful sign. I’m a lover of classical music myself, spending some of my children’s inheritance on tickets for concerts.

I am also re-reading a book by a Montreal journalist that succeeded spectacularly when it was published in 2009, winning several prizes. It is The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casals, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece. When Eric Siblin wrote it, he had just left his post as a Montreal Gazette rock critic. He was staying in a Toronto hotel and out of idle curiosity attended a concert at the nearby Royal Conservatory of Music. He knew nothing about what he was hearing, but the music and the bulky instrument on which it was played were arresting.

“I hear barnstorming peasant tunes and postmodern minimalism, spiritual lamentations and heavy metal riffs, medieval jigs and spy movie soundtracks,” he writes, remembering his reaction. He spent the next nine years doing extraordinary research and writing this clever book about what he heard and how it came about.

Siblin makes J.S. Bach a real person. This Bach is a husband and father, a hustling, ambitious professional musician trying to carve out his career in an age of fawning patronage and miserable road trips. The most familiar portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) shows him as an old man, and his music has has a whiff of pedantry about it, all mathematical intervals and stripped-down instrumentation. That’s the fault of 19th-century critics, who liked their music lush, dramatic and sentimental. But in the middle of the 20th century musical fashions changed and there was a revival of interest in Bach as pianist Glenn Gould recorded The Goldberg Variations and became an international celebrity.

Pablo Casals did the same. Casals (1876-1973), a musical prodigy, raised the profile of the cello as a solo instrument, paving the way for Mstislav Rostropovich and Yo-Yo Ma. He was also a deeply committed political animal. Casals was from Catalonia, a region that has always had a complex relationship with the rest of Spain. He supported the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, and when Franco’s fascists won, he boycotted Spain. Considered a leftist by conservatives and a royalist by left-wingers, he spoke out defiantly and lived just across the French border, as close as he could get without re-entering his homeland.

What the juries and critics especially valued about this book was the way Siblin describes the effect of the six cello suites on the listener. Music, of all the arts, is surely the most abstract. Describing a piece of music is like trying to pin down a fragrance. You have to reach for similes and metaphors, and Siblin has a mellifluous way with an adjective. He even took some cello lessons himself to get inside the music, as it were.

He courageously tackles the technical side of composition as well. For example, how did Bach, a master of polyphony in his choral music, achieve the illusion of harmony on an unaccompanied cello? On a string instrument like a cello or a violin, only one note is played at a time, apart from occasional flourishes when the bow is applied to two strings to create a chord. Siblin’s explanation is that Bach somehow suggests harmony, implies it.

I was certainly aware of the revival of this composition. A few years ago I bought a transcription of the score for the violin, and practised much of it. I even took the score to a summer concert by Brian Manker, the chief cellist of the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

Manker, perhaps unwisely, played all six suites in one concert. He had to change his shirt at intermission because it was soaked in perspiration. Following my violin score as he played was an odd experience, because I could tell when he was making a

mistake, and he made a lot of them, but I admired his nerve. Now I admire it even more, after reading what Casals went through to re-introduce this work to the world—really, to present it for the first time as a masterpiece, because it wasn’t appreciated in the 18th century. It was ahead of its time.

Eric Siblin has written a novel, and I’m waiting for a local bookshop to tell me it’s ready to be picked up. It’s called The Fatal Scroll: A Herculaneum Mystery, published last year. I have been to Herculaneum, the lesser-known, better-endowed cousin of that earthquake-devastated city, Pompeii, and I can’t wait to see what master researcher Siblin has done with it.

Today a new voice joins Life Sentences. Emira Tufo is a Montreal writer who left Bosnia in the 1990s and is currently writing a book about her experience of the siege of Sarajevo. Here she describes what Montreal means to her.

I arrived in Montreal on a sunny August afternoon in 2009. I dropped my luggage off in the studio I’d rented on Rue Cherrier and stepped outside. I asked a woman for the time. She had long red nails, a long yellow sundress, and long grey hair blowing in the breeze. She said v’nez avec moi. I had just arrived, I had nothing better to do. She took me to see Shakespeare in the Park, which was just around the corner. Yellow angel Suzy. I did not speak Shakespeare, or French. Je m’appelle, I said. They were the words I knew.

“Why Canada?” people always ask, as if there were an infinite number of places to go. There aren’t, but you only know that by force of circumstance, if you are propelled out into the world and looking for a place to land: if you are fleeing famine, war, runaway inflation, or persecution for who you are.

Forget America. There’s the lottery system: you can’t just apply. And more importantly, there are the infinite highways and wastelands studded with Walmarts and gas stations and other buildings made of straw. I’d seen L.A. and it wasn’t there. I drove around looking for a city, and all I found were strips of mall and habitat scattered here and there, and then more cars and more highways breaking apart the soul.

Australia, then? I’d considered this option. Some of my people had gone to Australia during the Bosnian war and sent good word: the beach in Brisbane, the flora and fauna, the weather. Sometimes, you do just want to get away from it all, but maybe not go so far that you can’t come back when the feeling moves you. Because it will. You cannot run away from the feeling. It comes in waves, like grief.

Forget Europe. You can never become a Swede or an Italian. If not your accent, then your name will give you away as an impostor, or the colour of your skin, or your headgear. When you are looking for a place to drop your dangling little roots, you don’t want to be defined against someone else’s bloodline.

The first time that I was asked “Voulez-vous un sac?” at a Montreal supermarket, I stared in blank incomprehension. Then, the cashier asked if I wanted a bag. “Oui,” I cautiously replied. Later, I learned the language and could both ask for a bag and refuse one. I could argue with contractors. Over time, I graduated to the “pis” and the “t’se” and the “la,” and especially the “la-la!” – the slang and sounds you intuitively insert between, or append to, your words: the familiar language of belonging. They’re not words you can say with an accent, but at least they show the depth of your understanding. Now, at last, you can make small talk.

Whenever the feeling moves me, I get on a plane and head to Sarajevo. The stopover is usually in Munich or Frankfurt or Vienna, where many of my people settled during our war. We are officially known as the Diaspora and referred to with mixed feelings. The Diaspora comes back in the summer, gorges on the food of its childhood and youth, gets dental crowns and implants at a fraction of the cost, and refreshes its wardrobe, thus injecting life into the local economy. The Diaspora believes that it belongs, and if it can cloak itself in that skirt and sweater from Sarajevo, it will know itself as Bosnian in London, Boston, and Toronto.

Already at the gate, in Munich or Frankfurt or Vienna, I begin to feel a strange resistance to the sound of my mother tongue: you can speak the words and still not be understood. I recognize the language before I grasp what is being said. It’s in its intonation, in the way that it moves. I move away. I wish I could connect through Shanghai or Timbuktu. I sit at the neighbouring gate. This one is usually going to Prishtina or Tirana. But if it’s going to Podgorica or Belgrade, there is no escape: we, who were once at war, speak the same language, just call it by different names. This language, in its various accents, carries the sound of the things I fled. And yet, a short connecting flight later, I become a part of its river, and I go with the flow. I am in my homeland.

While in the homeland, I listen to Ici Radio-Canada so as to stay in touch with my home and its north star: the illuminated cross that sits on top of Mont-Royal. I am not even a Christian, but that cross: it’s like a figure with open arms. V’nez avec moi.

Two weeks later, the return, suitcases bursting with memorabilia. As if I could ever forget. The same airports, different gates. As I walk toward mine, the language begins to change. These are the gates to North America: New York, Chicago, Vancouver, Montreal. I begin to hear the learned words of my unmother tongues. And, oddly, I begin to relax.

At Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport – YUL! – I take a cab and give my accented address to the driver. He might be from Shanghai or Timbuktu. But no one here has ever said that they didn’t understand me. And that’s why. That’s why Canada, I mean.

Wayne paused and stared at me as though I’d just teleported in from Saturn.

“Whaaaat?”

He didn’t need to say more; I had my answer. In Wayne’s world I’d suddenly become a weirdo – not what I was aiming for at 13, or whatever age I was.

Out of the blue, I’d asked him, “Do you see numbers as colours?”

Given his reaction, I changed the subject. Other people, I quickly concluded, must not be like me and visualize numbers as having distinct hues. Not only that, for me at least, so did the letters of the alphabet, days of the week and months of the year. In my mind’s eye, for instance, the number 7 was always fire-engine red, the letter B navy blue, Wednesday washed-out orange and October white.

As the decades whipped by, I rarely thought about the colour thing. Then, well into middle age, I learned about synesthesia, a neurological phenomenon in which different regions of the brain cross-activate. One sensory area triggers another. In some cases – not mine – people “hear” or “taste” colours. Famous synesthetes include Duke Ellington, Lady Gaga, Vladimir Nabokov, Beyoncé, Nikola Tesla, Marilyn Monroe and author Daniel Tammet, a British-born autistic savant.

I first heard of Tammet shortly after his best-selling memoir Born on a Blue Day came out in 2006. (Tammet was born on a Wednesday, a day he “sees” as blue, and hence the title.)

In addition to his synesthesia, Tammet speaks at least 10 languages and can perform jaw-dropping mathematical calculations in his head. The award-winning British documentary film The Boy With the Incredible Brain – in which he is shown reciting pi (π) from memory to 22,514 places – helped land Tammet appearances on TV shows like 60 Minutes, where host Morley Safer called him “the Rosetta Stone of autism.”

Indeed, for two decades – through international speaking engagements and writing (poetry, fiction and essays) – Tammet has challenged stereotypes while doing his part to enhance understanding of the neurodiverse experience, and how people on the autism spectrum perceive the world in different, but equally authentic ways from everyone else. Increasingly, thanks in part to his contributions, autism is viewed less in terms of a disorder and more as a natural cognitive difference from that of most people.

Born on a Blue Day recounts Tammet’s self-absorbed, isolated childhood and adolescence in working-class London, with his obsessive need for order and routine, and not knowing how to make friends. We learn that, through persistence, Tammet was able to overcome the traits that so often hinder people with autism, such as a lack of social instincts. This achievement was evident by the time I first met him a dozen years ago. (I got to know and befriend him thanks his French photographer husband, Jérôme, who is a nephew of a longtime pal of mine.)

Tammet, now 47 and living in Paris, captivated a packed room of anglophone and francophone readers in April at Montreal’s Blue Met literary festival, where he spoke about Nine Minds: Inner Lives on the Spectrum, his latest book.

Maybe it was simply because they both have the same number of stories and a somewhat similar front cover, but when I picked up Tammet’s book, I couldn’t help thinking of J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories. The 1953 short story collection is a masterful work of fiction. The characters in the self-contained narratives of Nine Minds are also engrossing, but lyrically drawn from real-life people and are the product of creative non-fiction.

Unlike Born on a Blue Day, which is centred on Tammet’s life, Nine Minds is about other neurodivergent individuals of various ages, backgrounds and nationalities. While they share characteristics that set them apart from the general population – challenges and strengths associated with autism – they are also at different places on the spectrum, and each story has a life of its own.

Over the five years he worked on the project, Tammet conducted extensive research, hours of conversations, email exchanges and video calls, and what he describes as his “writer’s intuition to set scenes, articulate thoughts and reconstruct dialogue.” His subjects entrusted him to run with their life stories, exploring the richness of their inner lives, fears, dreams, motivations, struggles and triumphs. They include a retired police detective, a pioneering hand-and-wrist surgeon, a bestselling novelist, and a politician-mathematician.

Ottawa-born actor Dan Aykroyd was the one subject who didn’t agree to an interview, so Tammet instead spoke with a cousin, friends, neighbours, classmates and colleagues who knew him going back to his formative years. Tammet’s research included a 2004 NPR interview with Terry Gross in which Aykroyd, despite a history of keeping his private life private, revealed that when he was a child he was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome (a term that’s falling into disuse but meant that he had a mild, high-functioning form of autism). We learn that a psychologist, dealing with the young Aykroyd’s tics and anxiety, prescribed acting, and that his autism eventually proved to be a creative asset:

“He didn’t listen to his partners on stage as the others did; he fixed on specific words in a sketch, either written in advance or just that moment improvised, and on the flood of associations they set off inside him.”

The most compelling and poignant story for me isn’t about those with outstanding success. It’s about a mother’s undying love for her misdiagnosed son, who loses his ability to speak at the age of two, and her tireless efforts to help him communicate and make the most of his non-verbal life through the next 30 years.

***

At a recent poker game, the night’s big winner said to the night’s big loser (me): “This isn’t going to look great on your spreadsheet.” It was a reference to my habit of keeping a meticulous tally of all sorts of personal things, including wins and losses at cards. This prompted another player to quip, “When did you realize you were on the spectrum?” It was a jesting one-two punch, causing me later to wonder if I do indeed have characteristics common to those with autism, such as my often feeling awkward in large social gatherings, my apparent need to keep tabs of unimportant things, and my synesthesia, which occurs more frequently in neurodivergent people.

Don’t know. Whatever I am, I found Nine Minds to be an inspiring celebration of what a beautiful thing it is that we don’t all experience the world in the same way.

Nine Minds: Inner Lives on the Spectrum

By Daniel Tammet

First published in North America by The Experiment, LLC, 268 pp.

Sometimes a story needs to be told a few times before it finds its moral. Here’s what I’m talking about:

In 2001, my brother Sterling and I were in Ukraine, the place our family came from, generations before. The country had achieved independence a decade earlier, breaking off from the carcass of the defunct Soviet Union. A revival was underway: of culture and religion, of entrepreneurship, of hope itself that Ukraine might one day be a normal country, like its neighbours to the west.

Not that there weren’t all sorts of problems. The disparity in means was large between those who found ways to make money in the new economy and those who didn’t, and because wages were low and the price of everything was increasingly high, everyone was looking for a side hustle.

For some reason, hotels were exceedingly expensive. But no problem. You could stay in someone’s home for far fewer hryvni (the Ukrainian currency). In the cultured old city of Lviv, Sterling and I stayed in the home of relatives of my Montreal dentist. Space was tight but cozy in the apartment of my dentist’s brother-in-law. The residual Ukrainian of my childhood improved a lot during an evening of vodka drinking that followed a long day of touring the countryside with our host’s son and the son’s fiancée as guides. We were “nash,” the Ukrainian word meaning “ours,” that is, part of the family.

In Kyiv there were no relatives, but a travel agency in Montreal specializing in Ukraine had placed us in the hands of a couple of business-oriented young men. They would be our fixers. The boss of the pair (let’s call him Oleh) spoke fluent English and directed his partner (Dmitro) to take on required tasks. Oleh had arranged for us to stay in an apartment close to the centre of Kyiv. As was customary with this early version of Airbnb, the apartment’s occupant vacated the place to spend time elsewhere – his dacha, we were told.

Our home for the next few days was a Soviet-era block of about seven storeys on a major street. It was a cut above the usual dreary slabs of Communist times. Its street side, in fact, featured glassed-in balconies on each floor. Our place was five flights up. Notable about the apartment was the entrance. It featured a blank white concrete wall into which had been set a black iron door that looked medieval in vintage. Must be a problem with break-ins, I thought. The key to the door was an equally olden piece of iron about eight inches long.

I have a fear of door locks and keys, dating from when I was a child after having locked myself in the bathroom of my grandparents’ home, setting off, for a four-year-old, a not unreasonable panic. That skeleton key made me uneasy.

Not to worry, said Sterling. I’ll deal with it. And indeed, in his hands the key turned easily. The door swung open. The apartment was bright and well-appointed, the balcony looking down on the broad avenue.

We spent the next few days enjoying the attractions of an as-yet-not-much-touristed Kyiv. We saw a lot of churches and monuments, and the house where one of my favourite writers, Mikhail Bulgakov, once lived. We were on our own except for the day our minders took us to Chernihiv, a city of churches near the Russian border, Dmitry driving.

On the last evening before we were due to catch an early-morning train to Budapest, we splurged on a high-end meal. Feeling contented, we returned to our apartment. The key would not open the door. No amount of twisting and turning on Sterling’s part worked. The blank wall and the iron door stood before us unmoved. All of our stuff, our train tickets, etc., lay on the other side. We had to get in.

Those were the days before cell phones, so we couldn’t call the minders. Even if we could have found a pay phone, if such a thing existed, how many kopecks would it take? Did we have the phone number with us? I don’t remember.

“Maybe I can climb the outside of the building to the balcony,” I said.

“No! No! You’ll kill yourself,” my brother said.

I wasn’t seriously considering turning into Spiderman. I was just throwing out ideas where there seemed none.

“I’ll look around the building. Maybe I can find someone who can help.”

I left Sterling struggling with the door and I wandered the halls. One floor down I saw an unimposing-looking man, early middle age, ambling along the corridor. I explained our problem as best I could.

“Yes,” he said. “I can help. You’ll have to break down the wall. Wait here.” At least that’s what it sounded like he said, my lack of fluency in Ukrainian contributing a note of confusion.

It seemed a drastic solution, but I couldn’t think of another. He returned with a toolbox and we went to find Sterling who was still struggling with the door, his knuckles now reddened in desperation.

“This man says he can help,” I told him. “He says we have to break down the wall.”

“Break down the wall?! No way! We can’t do that! We’ll be arrested! We’ll never get out of here!”

While this conversation went on, the man took a chisel and mallet from his toolbox. Near the doorknob, he began hammering on the concrete. It turned out it was as soft as chalk, Soviet-era chalk.

Chook, chook, chook, went the hammer and chisel. In a few minutes, there was a fist-sized hole. Six inches in, our saviour broke through the wall, reached in, and unlatched the door from the inside.

The rest was anti-climactic. “The problem with the locks happens all the time,” the man said. “This is how we fix it.” We called Oleh and explained. He groaned, but said, “Okay, we’ll be there in the morning.” And they were, the junior partner carrying a spatula and box of quick-set cement.

We made it to the train, where another adventure ensued, but I’ll save that for another time.

I’ve dined out on this tale often over the years, but it is only recently, as I suggested at the beginning, that the moral of the story came into view.

In recent weeks, for the first time in a long while, there is optimism in Ukraine as thanks to ingenuity and a drone airforce, it pummels Russian energy infrastructure. There is hope once more, hope that one day Ukrainians will break through the wall keeping them from the good stuff on the other side.

Chook, chook, chook.

Last week’s post touched on the war in Ukraine and several visits I’ve made to the land of my ancestors. I was going to follow up with something lighter about one of those trips. But then, earlier this week, another swarm of drones and missiles rained on Kyiv and elsewhere in the country. One of the strikes was at the Pechersk Lavra, a complex of churches and monasteries near the centre of the Ukrainian capital. The Dormition Cathedral, the main church there, was struck and severely damaged.

The foreign minister of France, Jean-Noël Barrot, described the attack as the equivalent of bombing Notre-Dame de Paris or Saint-Denis. In the context of Montreal, my city, I think of our own Notre Dame Basilica, or Mary Queen of the World Cathedral.

The Dormition Cathedral, whose earliest structure dates to the 11^th century, has been damaged and restored many times in its history. It will again be rebuilt. What cannot be restored are the lives of the eleven people who died across the country that night during the bombing. They and tens of thousands of others have paid to preserve their culture and faith. It is the price of freedom.

You can hardly go down a street in a Ukrainian city, town, or village without running into a church, many of them magnificent. They are part of the country’s national and ethnic fabric, that which Vladimir Putin is trying to destroy.

In 2001 and 2019 I visited Ukraine with my brother, Sterling. He had adopted the Ukrainian Orthodox faith, so our travels took us to many churches. Our family has been on both sides of the Orthodox-Ukrainian Catholic divide. I have fallen away from observance, but I couldn’t help but admire the artistry and devotion that has gone into the creation of these structures. We attended masses in various churches. Each followed a familiar ritual that was both performance and an act of faith. They recalled, from childhood memory, the call-and-response between priest and congregation:

Priest: “In peace, let us pray to the Lord.”

Congregants: “Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy.”

There is no peace in Ukraine and Russia shows no mercy. But maybe one day soon peace will come, and the rebuilding can begin.

Here is a sampling of what has been lost, damaged or remains as yet untouched.

A view Pechersk Lavra with the Dormition Cathedral at right. A left the Great Lavra Bell Tower. Flames engulfed most of the cathedral’s interior. Nineteen other structures in the monastery complex were damaged.

Churches in eastern Ukraine, where most of the fighting has been, have taken the brunt of the Russian assault. Shelling in 2022 completely destroyed the All Saints church, part of the Sviatohirsk Lavra (monastery complex) in Donetsk. Despite its venerable appearance, lent by its 17 domes and composition in wood, the church was in fact built in 2009. It was part of the reconstruction of the lavra after its total destruction in the Soviet era. That the church and complex were rebuilt illustrates the living nature of faith in Ukraine.

Holy Ascension, near Kyiv, a rare wooden church from the 19^th century, was obliterated by tank fire during early battles of the war around the capital. Ukrainian government agencies and UNESCO estimate that more than 200 churches and places of worship have been entirely destroyed. Hundreds more have been severely damaged.

In 2001, Sterling and I visited Chernihiv, in northern Ukraine, a city of ancient churches. Unfortunately, it is close to the Russian border. The city was besieged in the early days of the war, but it remains in Ukrainian hands. The Transfiguration Cathedral (left), the oldest building in Chernihiv, survived the Mongol sacking of the city in the 13^th century, but was not so lucky in 2022, suffering extensive damage from artillery fire and air raids. The 18^th-century St. Catherine Church, a masterpiece of the Ukrainian Baroque, was also caught in the shelling, with blast waves tearing at the façade.

In the Black Sea port of Odesa, a missile crashed through the roof of the Transfiguration Cathedral (top photo), destroying its interior and causing major structural damage. So far, the exuberant domes of the nearby St. Panteleimon Monastery have escaped a similar fate.

Western Ukraine is farther from the fighting, and its churches have fared better. In Lviv, a drone struck the city centre this year, injuring dozens and damaging a 17^th-century monastery. Nearby St. Nicholas Church, made of wood in tripartite style representing the Trinity, survives at the Lviv Museum of Folk Architecture and Culture.

In Chernivtsi, a city in the southwest of Ukraine, another church called St. Nicholas is tucked away at an outdoor folk museum. Its iconostasis and other icons were crafted by local artisans who built the 18^th-century church. Faith is made meaningful by the work of hands as well as words.

One day in spring 2022, I was at the garage where my wife and I get our car serviced. We were changing our winter tires for summer ones. An oil change was part of the seasonal ritual.

It was sunny afternoon with a promise of the summer to come, and lively music filled the garage manager’s cluttered office. I waited for him to retrieve our car keys. On the desk lay a poster of an eastern-looking Jesus with an auto-parts box next to it. “MOOG THE PROBLEM SOLVER,” it said.

“Russian?” I asked the manager, whose name was Alex, about the music when he returned. “Yes,” he said, and we briefly discussed how a satellite transmission brought it into the office from somewhere in Russia.

We bantered a bit during my visits. He must have deduced from my name my heritage was probably Polish or Ukrainian, but this was not a subject we entered into. It was enough that we trusted each other and could conduct the business at hand.

Still, I felt a certain unease. Weeks earlier there had been a massacre in Bucha, Ukraine. At about that time I had begun to hate Russia, and Russians, too. Russian soldiers had gunned down men and women in the streets. Civilians were summarily executed in basements. What was wrong with these people, I wondered, who seemed, generation after generation, so unable to pull themselves from the primeval sludge, who would follow a cruel despot they cynically knew in their hearts to be damaged goods? Maybe it was because they were too.

My animus came from a particular place. My family was from Ukraine before it was called Ukraine. The part they lived in at the turn of the 20^th century was a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Being under the political domination of a stronger power was something Ukrainians knew well. It made them guard their faith, their culture and language, and the people who immigrated to Canada brought these with them. Three generations later in my family there are only shards left of who we were, but they shine bright with remembrance.

I’ve been to Ukraine three times over the years, first in 1989, when it was just beginning to pull itself out from under the dead hand of Soviet communism. A revival of religion was an early sign of a breaking away from Russia. In 2001, Kyiv was bustling with entrepreneurial energy. So many people out to make a buck. It felt like an outburst of hope.

In 2019, with the loss of Crimea, the atmosphere was more subdued. The reality had set in that Ukraine was a poor country rife with corruption, living next to an unfriendly giant next door. In counterpoint, everywhere there were flags and tributes to those who died in the Maidan massacre of 2014. The uprising in Kyiv’s main square was a final turning away from the Russian past. It signaled that Ukrainians, despite their problems, were free at last and could turn to the West for help with those problems.

During those visits I felt a kinship with people I met, especially those in the countryside, who were so much like the people I grew up with.

This background sets up where what I felt for the invaders came from. Most people express anger at what Russia is doing in Ukraine (and for what other countries are doing elsewhere to their neighbours or even their own people). But for me, the feeling was more visceral. It was the call of blood to blood, a revulsion bred in the bone.

A recently published book reminded me why such kneejerk hatred is an unworthy. Anglo-Dutch writer Ian Buruma in Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-45, describes the deaths and displacement of half the population of German capital during the final battle for that city. There is satisfaction in seeing retribution levied on the heart of an abhorrent regime and on people who perpetrated so many crimes against humanity.

But while Buruma gives full accounting of this payback – justice it might be called – he writes in some detail about how the innocent suffered with the guilty: people who despised the Nazis and worked against them, who hid Jews in their homes at great risk, indeed the few thousand Jews who were still in the city – all were swept up in the maelstrom. Surely the same is true in dozens of places where bombs are falling today, in Tehran, the Middle East and elsewhere. They fall upon the guilty and innocent alike, breeding new cycles of hate so that new atrocities will occur, and more bombs will fall.

Back to Alex at the garage. I don’t know his version of the Ukraine war, and he doesn’t know mine. I do know that he is a good guy, friendly, honest and reliable. I try to keep that mind, and I am grateful to live in a place we can do business together.

There are some problems Moog cannot solve. But to remember the humanity of others is a way to preserve your own.

I hesitate to descend into commentary on the present state of the world, because there’s always so much of it going around. But the larder was bare this week, so here we are.

It’s 411 ^AD, and you’re living in Rome. The Visigoths plundered your hometown a few months ago, leaving it an awful mess. The place was already going to ruin after a few centuries of civil strife, one incompetent self-serving emperor toppling another. Rome is not even the capital of the empire, or what’s left of it. That’s moved to Ravenna. Oh, the price of bread since barbarians took North Africa, and the circuses, well, they aren’t what they used to be. The Visigoths made off with your possessions, but at least your family, minus a few slaves, has come through. You could hardly be blamed for feeling gloomy.

How does that compare today with someone living in Washington, D.C.? The barbarians are within the gates. They and their tech bros allies are running the country, plundering away with grift and slush funds. The price of groceries and gas is heading in only one direction – up – since the nincompoop in the White House decided he had to distract from his troubles at home by starting a war on the empire’s Middle Eastern frontier. As for circuses, how about a cage-fighting arena on the White House lawn, and a bombastic ballroom next door.

Here in Canada, trying to disentangle from client state status, we watch nervously as a rank south wind gusts northward, shaking the foundations of our confederation. Alberexit, anyone?

At least we don’t have missiles and bombs raining down on us as in some parts of the world. No famine, no ghastly epidemics like Ebola (okay, the aftereffects of Covid live on). A drug epidemic and thousands of people living on the streets will do.

So, decline and fall? Early 20th-century philosopher-historian Oswald Spengler said so. In The Decline of the West, his masterwork, he concluded that civilizations, like biological entities, have lifespans, and ours was due to age out starting around 2000. A couple of centuries of reversion to rule by despots would follow before the final collapse of western civ. Hmm.

When I first encountered Spengler a lifetime ago, at university back in the 1970s, I recall that he was dismissed as something of a crank, a dystopian counterbalance to the utopia promised by the high-riding New Left Marxists who then held sway in the academy. But that Spenglerian timeline.

Elders among us will remember 1968 with its riots, burning cities, uprisings in Europe, assassinations, the war in Vietnam, the Cultural Revolution in China, etc. We got over it and sailed on. It seemed still a hopeful time. The Boomers held sway; they were young, and they knew they would change the world. It was naïve hope, but hope, nonetheless.

Today, in the face of climate change and AI, it feels like the young must climb a much steeper mountain. Maybe they will at least inherit some Boomer wealth when that bulge moves on.

So, while there’s reason for despondency, it’s too soon to give up hope. The Romans eventually became Italians. And in bad times there are everywhere good people. This I know because I live among them, and so do you. So, take your spouse out dancing. Teach your kid something new.

There are bad trips – we’ve all had them – where the place visited rises up to repudiate why we would ever want to leave home. And then there is Evelyn Dolman’s soul-crushing experience in Venice. And what fun it is to be there with him, witnessing his comeuppance.

Dolman is the invention of I…

Read more

Friend and colleague Mark Abley describes how he came to write Numb, a book for our times. It’s one of many works of non-fiction and poetry he has published over the years.

“Imagine there’s no countries – it isn’t hard to do.” I was in my last weeks of high school when John Lennon recorded his most famous and beautiful song. “Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.” In 1971 the Vietnam War continued to rage; India and Pakistan stood poised on the threshold of conflict; the Troubles were bubbling over in Northern Ireland. Yet I don’t think anyone in my Saskatoon school felt overwhelmed by world events. “No need for greed or hunger: a brotherhood of man.” “Imagine” was a song of hope.

Later that year the principal of the University of Saskatchewan cancelled classes for a day. Why? So that students, staff and faculty could protest the U.S. decision to explode a massive nuclear bomb below a wildlife sanctuary off the coast of southwestern Alaska. Amchitka Island is three time zones away from Saskatoon, yet distance seemed irrelevant as I and hundreds of other young people marched through the city’s dust-grey streets, singing with both hope and anger. I don’t suppose any of us asked whether there was a hog’s chance in hell that the Nixon administration would heed the voices of Canadian students.

Those long-ago moments were on my mind last summer, many months before the United States launched a war on Iran, but nearly two years into the destruction of Gaza, more than three years after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and who knows how many years after the collapse of Haiti and Congo and Sudan. Last summer, for our own sanity, many of us were limiting our exposure to the news. Gradually – or perhaps suddenly – lots of people were becoming aware of the horrific risks of AI. We already knew, but preferred to ignore, the massive impacts of climate change. Hope was a word that smacked of nostalgia.

Then, out of the blue, I received an email.

The email came from Leila Marshy, a writer who shoulders many of the editorial duties at a Montreal publisher named Baraka Books. The press, she told me, would soon be launching a series of short works on topical issues. Would I like to join their list? I proposed a topic, and after talking to Robin Philpot, Baraka’s founder and publisher, Leila agreed. Which is why, unexpectedly, I found myself with a deadline.

The topic I suggested is not a happy one. But it’s one, I suspect, that might resonate with many people: numbness. The feeling of being overwhelmed by public events. The urge to hide from information. The sense that the world is spinning out of control, economic pressures being heightened by political decisions, ecological devastation being worsened by military actions, psychological tensions being brought to a head by technological changes that are usually described as “advances.” Has there been a single newscast in the last year without a threat or a boast or an insane blurt from the US president? Hope can seem a noun from the previous century. Faced with all of this, how can we flourish – indeed, how can we cope?

That’s what I’ve tried to write about in Numb: The Politics of Overwhelm. It’s not a self-help book; in it, I try to explore what feels like a veiling of the soul. Sure, I’ve outlined a few practices that can stave off helplessness and lessen despair: sharing laughter and stories with other people, avoiding social media, forging a more intimate relationship with the natural world, and so on. None of this will reduce the evil in the White House or anywhere else. But it can change what goes on inside our heads. It can give us the strength to resist.

The writing of Numb gave me a personal lesson. Leila’s email arrived at a moment when it seemed I had nothing much to do in life except watch Netflix, read books, tend my garden, and potter around the little town where I moved in 2024. Now, suddenly, I had a goal. In order to write even a short book, I needed to call on both my imagination and my intellect. And the writing restored me. It gave me a private incentive to resist the evils of the public sphere. It showed me that numbness can grow not just from feeling overwhelmed but also from feeling purposeless.

“Imagine all the people, sharing all the world.” Do you also write? Perhaps you paint, or act, or make music. No matter your age, you’re someone with the gift of imagination and the power of resistance. “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.” I don’t believe it’s ever too late to create, to resist, to imagine.

The streets are waiting for our songs, old and new. This is no time to abandon hope.

Mark Abley’s new book Numb: The Politics of Overwhelm will be launched at Librairie Pulp Books and Café at 3952 Wellington Street in Verdun, on May 28 at 7 pm. On June 4, Mark will appear at the Atwater Library’s Lunchtime Series in conversation with Bryan Demchinsky, 12:30 to 1 p.m. To register and get the Zoom link, click here.

In my youth, the novels of Sinclair Lewis from the 1920s – Babbitt, Arrowsmith, and others – impressed me as searing social portraits, at a time when I stood in the shallow end of the experiential knowledge pool. His writing from that decade clearly impressed the Nobel committee as well, since he became the first American to win the prize for literature in 1930.

Earlier this year, an op-ed in the Globe and Mail by Robyn Urback made reference to Lewis’s later novel It Can’t Happen Here – written in 1935. I had never heard of it. Now I am telling everyone to read it as an extraordinarily prescient work of fiction that feels much like our current reality.

It’s the tale, set in 1936, of a democratically elected populist president of the United States who essentially advocates for making America great again, who reveres its past, and who promises his voters thousands of dollars each if elected. He defeats Roosevelt, and once in power becomes an authoritarian leader, leaving Congress and the Supreme Court as impotent bystanders.

He develops a domestic militia not unlike ICE in their brutality, romantically calling them the Minute Men as a tribute to America’s past. Their job is to focus on rounding up dissidents and minorities, herding them into – in Lewis’s own 1935 words – concentration camps. Justice in the courts becomes a sham. There is a particularly chilling scene where Jews at prayer are massacred.

There is opposition to this quasi-dictator, and it involves a new underground railroad to Canada for dissidents, as has been the case from the time of slavery in the US to the present where academics and health professionals are migrating north. A crusty Vermont newspaper editor is the protagonist for the liberal opposition, and most of the women in the novel are involved in the resistance to authoritarianism.

I was gobsmacked reading this novel, which feels so germane to our times. I admired Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, which also involves Roosevelt losing an election (in 1940) to a right-wing Charles Lindbergh, but Roth had the advantage of writing about an imagined past rather than an imagined immediate future. Roth may be the better prose stylist, but Lewis was the better seer.

The backstory of Lewis writing this novel intrigued me. He was married at that time to Dorothy Thompson, a distinguished journalist who interviewed Hitler in 1931. She was the first American journalist to be expelled from Germany in 1934, the same year she published this description of him in Harper’s magazine: “He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill poised and insecure. He is the very prototype of the little man.” It seems some leaders are thin-skinned when it comes to how they are described in the media.

For any of us who take on the task of writing for consumption by others, it is daunting to learn that Lewis wrote this long novel in about 5 months. There was only one month (!) from completion of the manuscript to publication, and it sold hundreds of thousands of copies. For most of us, the bigger number is the months to years of writing and the smaller quantum is the number of copies sold. Okay, perhaps being a Nobel laureate in literature helps with both the skill and the expectant audience.

Before the book was even published, it was optioned by MGM as a film. An all-star cast (Lionel Barrymore, Basil Rathbone) and director were selected. But the studio got cold feet and it was rumoured they were worried about offending Germany.

Lewis was outraged and found a collaborator to create a stage version. Then something uplifting happened. In 1936, 21 stage productions were mounted across the United States, sponsored by the Federal Theatre Project, part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), an initiative created by Roosevelt as part of the New Deal during the Depression. There were versions in Spanish and Yiddish as well as English. For those who performed and those who attended, this was surely their version of a No Kings Day.

The story within the novel and the story of the novel were in equal measure compelling for me. Sinclair Lewis wielded his pen as his sword, much as in his earlier works. As for the plot of the novel – sadly, it can happen here.

It Can’t Happen Here

By Sinclair Lewis

Random House Canada, 400 pages (paper)

September 1941. Bombs are no longer falling on London as the Luftwaffe turns its attention eastward. Amid the rubble and the threat of invasion, people have warily begun to put their lives back together. They go to pubs, concerts and the cinema, making do with shortages and curfews. And, as in any big city, there is its underside, the usual skulduggery that never goes away.

Such is the scene that John Delacourt offers in The Innocent Canadian, a suspense novel set in a beleaguered London. The focal point is Canada House on Trafalgar Square, then and still this country’s diplomatic presence in the British capital.

The innocent Canadian of the title is William Davenant, a junior diplomat – mainly a speechwriter – whose bosses are Mike (Lester) Pearson and the head of mission, Vincent Massey. Davenant might be naïve in a quaintly Canadian way, but he’s no fool (though sometimes taken for one), and he’s soon deep into a complicated intrigue involving German or maybe Russian spies, fascist Brit nobility and disreputable Americans trying to keep their country out of the war. Along the way, Davenant falls in love with an Irish-born writer named Colette Cluny. She and an American ballet dancer Davenant had taken up with earlier add some erotic fizz to the proceedings, in a demure Canadian way.

One of the pleasures of the novel is seeing historical figures, some Canadians, in well-wrought fictional guise. Along with Pearson and Massey, the Davenant and Cluny characters are based on real people, loosely impersonating the Nova Scotia-born diplomat Charles Ritchie, and the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen. Ritchie’s diaries and Victoria Glendinning’s Love’s Civil War: Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie provided Delacourt useful source material.

He also brings his own experience to bear. Delacourt lives in Ottawa where he has spent many years in the federal bureaucracy or in work adjacent to it. “The day job informs a lot of my understanding of the complex dynamics, the choreography of power,” he said when we spoke by phone this week.

“I’m fascinated by the way Ottawa works, by how transactional decision-making occurs. So much of it is freighted with really important decision-making and you realize, people come to these decisions with all the frailties, all the vanities.”

This understanding is transposed to wartime London. A scene in the novel illustrates. Vincent Massey, for whom creature comforts and a tipple were not unknown, gives Davenant a dressing down for hanging out with “bohemians” in the city’s demimonde where he’s been drawn in pursuit of a murderer. Massey’s concern is to uphold the propriety of Canada House, but he recognizes in his protégé his talent and a bit of himself. The exchange between the two men is pointed, but it has the subtlety of lived experience.

“How to dramatize that, make it vivid and evocative, how to make a plot work from that – those were the challenges,” Delacourt said he faced.

Which leads to another observation. This is a well-crafted novel, constructed from details wittingly assembled. In one scene Davenant notes the satchel carried by a spy he is interviewing in a bombed-out church: “The satchel looked like it had seen better days. Probably weathered from field trips abroad … fond memories no doubt. The vanished Europe, his cathedral of nostalgia.”

This speaks to an audience that knows some history and can appreciate its nuances. The Innocent Canadian reminds me of a Kate Atkinson novel, not quite there, but on the same playing field.

Given his experience in government, I had to ask Delacourt whether he has something planned that is set in Ottawa. He does. He’s just completed a novel involving a murder in Rockcliffe. That should set tongues there wagging.

The Innocent Canadian

By John Delacourt

Now or Never Publishing, 300 pp

A family walks along the sidewalk of a city street: mother, father, daughter and son. It is a summer day and they are happy, dressed for the season, all smiling except for Papa. Maybe something he saw in the newspaper that morning was on his mind.

There were things to worry about. A few years later, the city – Warsaw – would be in ruins, and the parents would be dead.

Tracing what happened to the sunny family became a quest for Alice Switocz Goldbloom, who was to be the daughter of the young man in the photo. For many years her mother, Maria, and father, Edward, left unspoken what had happened when they were growing up in Poland and confronted with the cataclysm that was World War II.

Her parents’ silence was a way of protecting the three Switocz sisters. Raised in Sarnia, Ont., Alice Switocz’s concern was to fit in with other young people who led ordinary Canadian lives, in fact, to distance herself from the accents and foreign ways of her parents and their fervent Catholicism.

She was smart, energetic and ambitious, eager to break away from home. University was an escape route. Good jobs followed. She was assistant to a Liberal cabinet minister in Ottawa, and she started her own communications business in Montreal. She hired a man she would later marry, Jonathan Goldbloom, son of Victor Goldbloom, patriarch of the prominent Montreal Jewish family. Unable to have children of their own, they adopted two from Poland, the homeland her parents had fled.

All was going as Switocz Goldbloom wished. But the past, even a hidden one, has a habit of creeping out in unexpected ways. Her mother died in 2005, taking her memories with her, but in his final years, what her father recalled began spilling into Switocz Goldbloom’s consciousness.

Edward Switocz was by then an old man living in a Toronto care home where his daughter went often to visit. One day, to escape the tedium of the place, she asked him, “Do you remember the day the Germans bombed Warsaw?” “You should have asked me when my memory was sharper,” he replied.

But age does not dim such memories. Over the next months all that happened came tumbling out: the bombing of Warsaw in 1939, which left 10,000 dead, the uprising and subsequent liquidation of the Jewish ghetto, its population hauled off to death camps, life for Poles as “untermenschen” – sub-humans – under Nazi rule. Edward Switocz joined the Polish Home Army, which in 1944 rose up in resistance to the occupiers. Outgunned, it was defeated as the Soviet Red Army stood by across the Vistula River, waiting for the bid for freedom to be dashed. Two hundred thousand Poles died in the Warsaw Uprising.

Switocz became a prisoner of the Germans while his parents were sent to concentration camps, where they perished (his sister escaped to the countryside). As the Red Army rolled across Poland, the camps were evacuated – Jews, Roma, PoWs and other prisoners sent westward in tens of thousands on death marches. Switocz watched as most of the men he was with died while they trudged more than 800 kilometres into Germany, of fatigue and cold, shot by their captors when they could no longer walk. He had one keepsake with him, the picture of his family on that summer day in Warsaw.

After her father died, Switocz Goldbloom looked for her mother’s story. It was more of a sleuthing job. In archives and other sources, she traced Maria’s wartime days as a forced labourer, sent to Germany where she endured inhuman conditions, some particular to women that that would mark them for life. Her parents met in the Netherlands after the war, following stays in Displaced Persons camps in Germany, and they immigrated to Canada in 1951. Small wonder that in this country, they would want to shield their children from what they knew.

What Alice Switocz Goldbloom has learned about her parents compelled her to record their lives in the just-published book Family Secrets. The stories it contains are both revelatory and timely.

While the drama of the war and its trauma draw the reader’s attention, the book is also the story a woman’s journey, about how finding the missing pieces of a life were critical to the author’s understanding of herself.

Even as her parents kept the past from her, so too was occluded part of the story of what happened in Poland during the war. The massacre of the Jewish community has been recorded and is well-known, but the suffering of Polish Christians – 2.7 million died during Nazi rule – is a story that has been pushed into the shadows. This was the result of Poland’s new overlords, the Russians, supressing it. Moscow left no room for mention of what happened to Poles during the years a free nation was turned into a German slave state or, for that matter, one dominated by the Soviet Union.

There was also the controversial tag of antisemitism and complicity borne by Poles for what happened to the country’s Jewish citizens. Only in recent years has this wound begun to heal in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

Canada, too, has fostered healing. That Alice Switocz married into a Jewish family is central to the story. Having had to navigate between competing narratives of the past has led her to the kind of reconciliation between communities this country can offer.

Full disclosure: Alice and I became friends when she introduced me to Substack a couple of years ago. Earlier this week, I asked her what becoming a Goldbloom meant in the writing of Family Secrets. “I couldn’t have written the book without that happening,” she said.

The book’s timeliness comes from the understanding that we are once more in a moment when grievance and the hatred it promotes have infected societies that seemed immune from them. The price of immunity is commitment to the tolerance that protects the happiness of families like the one in the picture at the top of this post.

Family Secrets

By Alice Switocz Goldbloom

Pottersfield Press, 164 pp

Montreal author David Homel has just had a book of personal essays published. At 91 pages, I Made a Promise I Could Not Keep is skinny enough, he says, to slide under a door.

“You achieve a sense of completion or satisfaction in a shorter period of time with a skinny book and that’s why people do it,” he says.

That’s a writer’s point of view. From a publisher’s perspective, there are other reasons for going short, enough that the small book has become a trend among Canadian publishers, including a couple here in Montreal.

Leila Marshy is the editor at Baraka Books of a series called Traction. The books are about a hundred pages long and they focus on the hot-button issues of the moment: the challenge Canada faces in dealing with the threat from south of the border (Last Call for Canada, by Peter McFarlane) and a prescription for dealing with the anxiety that comes from living in our media-saturated times (Numb, by Mark Abley).

The books in Traction are actually a revival of how publishing worked in the past. During revolutionary times, 250 years ago, when the printing press was still young, engaged writers published tracts, writing that could be printed and distributed quickly. “You would go to the printer with a few pages that contained manifestos and warnings, ways for people to understand the injustices around them,” Marshy says.

Indeed, Quebec became a centre of this ferment during the American Revolution when the Swiss-born printer Fleury Mesplet hauled his press up Lake Champlain and the Richelieu River to Montreal to agitate in favour of joining the American uprising. His press went on to print what became The Montreal Gazette.

“I’ve always liked the idea of tracts, and I’ve seen social media functioning in that manner,” Marshy says.

Linda Leith, founder of Linda Leith Publishing, is also a believer in small books. In fact, she says she inspired the idea in Canada when she began the press in 2011. (She’s recently passed ownership of the company to co-publisher Felicia Mihali.) “At the time … there was nothing like that. But I had seen it from an Irish publisher, and I thought it was a great idea.” Within a year there were at least two other publishers who were offering very short non-fiction.

“I think it’s the perfect form,” Leith says. “The writer has enough room to make a good case on whatever the subject may be without all the padding you get in a 300 to 400-page book of non-fiction. It’s like the long-form essay. You can take it on a train ride, on a plane, a bus, and you come out a better-informed person.”

And it works in fiction as well, Leith says, which she has published in the short-book format. “I love the novella length in fiction. A short novel is wonderful.”

Of course, the economics of publishing are part of the motivation for going short. There are fewer magazines offering long-form essays – at least in Canada. It gave book publishers an opening to compete in this area.

There are also the costs of publishing bigger books. “The production cycle of a book is very long. It takes rounds of editing and then you are printing it. This takes a year and half,” Marshy says. We wanted a shorter production cycle – a really tight topic written by someone who knows that topic and won’t take a long time to write it. We can print it quicker, get it into the stores and people’s hands faster.”

The books are cheaper too. “The prices are from several years ago,” Marshy says. “You can acquire significant info and understanding in a digestible format.”

Small also means smaller format, the cost of paper being a factor. Baraka’s small books are typically are 4½” x 7”; Linda Leith Publishing’s are 5”x 8”. It means the books are at disadvantage when it comes to competing with larger editions on a bookstore shelf, especially if the spines all that face the outward. But Leith says, they’re usually grouped with books of a similar topic, and the discerning buyer will find what they are looking for.

A book begins and ends with the writer, so the last word goes to Homel, whose book of essays is on Linda Leith Publishing’s list: “One thing I do not go along with is the idea people have short attention spans and they’re always on their phones and you have to give them something fast and digestible … I think it’s a decision that the writer makes to use that format and I think if you have something to say and you can say it quicker, that’s better.”

Linda Leith Publishing is holding a group launch of its books at the Blue Metropolis festival on Sunday in Suite 10 of the Hôtel 10 on Sherbrooke Street. The festival is on now at the hotel and continues through the weekend.

Peter McFarlane’s and Mark Abley’s books will be launched at Librairie Pulp Books and Café at 3952 Wellington Street in Verdun, on May 28 at 7 pm.

Tributes for Montreal photographer Gabor Szilasi have been pouring in all week following his death last Friday. They are a mark of his stature as an artist and of the affection he inspired in Quebec’s arts community and among the many lives he touched.

It could not be otherwise. Gabor was a people person. People gave his photographs the pungency of life itself. This he acknowledged when he said, “The subject contains everything, including a poetic or symbolic aspect … it is simply a matter of finding a subject.”

He was speaking to David Harris, a long-time friend who profiled Gabor in The Eloquence of the Everyday, a 2009 book that comprises a retrospective of the photographer’s work.

Like David, I’ve had the privilege of having been friends with Gabor, by virtue of common interests, and in my case by being his next-door neighbour. We met more than twenty years ago, and my wife Katherine and I were very quickly drawn into the Szilasi family circle.

It came as no surprise to me that a man who focussed so closely on people would himself have a knack for providing a good photo for others. In appreciation, I’m presenting a few pictures of the photographer photographed, by family and friends, and by me.

The photo at the top of the article is a favourite of mine. It is from 2020 when Katherine and I took Gabor and his wife Doreen Lindsay to Lac Bouchette, a Laurentian lake near Morin-Heights that was a favourite place for the four of us. We took turns renting a century-old cottage there. With the advance of their years, it became no longer possible for Doreen and Gabor to make the journey to Lac Bouchette on their own, so it was our pleasure to offer them one last afternoon at this retreat. Gabor’s smile says all that needs to be said of the occasion.

Here is the Szilasi family in 2019: with Gabor and Doreen are daughter Andrea, her husband, Michael Merrill, and their son Lucas. The photo was taken at Andrea and Michael’s home. They are artists, and so is Doreen. Creativity runs in the family.

Gabor and Lucas shared a birthday on February 3. Every year, they had a joint birthday party. A picture indicating the difference in their ages – eighty years apart – was part of the ritual. Here they are last year, when Gabor turned 97 and Lucas 17.

The gift of a long life is bestowed in large part because of the way you live it. Well into his nineties, Gabor made a daily trek from his home on Grosvenor Avenue, down the hill to Sherbrooke Street for a round of shopping. I accompanied him once during a snow squall when by then it had become necessary for him to use a walker. Holding his arm as we descended, I was far more anxious than he was about a tumble. The photo here is from a shopping expedition during early days of the pandemic, as indicated by the mask. He was fearless.

Cooking was one of Gabor’s passions, and he was expert in making the dishes of his native Hungary. Doreen fashioned a cookbook with his favourite recipes, illustrated with photos, of course. In this one, Gabor is stirring the batter for galushka, the dumplings that accompany goulash and paprikash dishes. When he made what turned out to be his final chicken paprikash last year, Katherine and I were at his and Doreen’s table.

As I mentioned, Doreen is a talent in her own right. In addition to the many photographs she has taken, she made this sketch of Gabor, which hung in their kitchen.

In this photo, Gabor is beside himself. In 2021, the filmmaker Joannie Lafrenière accompanied him on a return visit to Budapest as part of the film she made titled Gabor. They stopped at a shop that made statuettes, and she later presented him with the one seen here.

It was never in doubt that Gabor would live out his days at home. One reason for this was so that he and Doreen could continue to be together. And so they were until the end. Here she is in their kitchen a few months ago, helping him take his medication.

That they were inseparable was another part of a good life well lived.