My mother was emotionally close to her older sister, Rose. Rose lived with her husband Nathan in Hamilton, Ontario, where he was a furrier. Older than my mother, Rose had two boys long before I was born, my mother's first child. I was, in fact, born in Hamilton; my mother was visiting with her sister around the time of my expected delivery, looking to her sister for comfort, undergoing a natural process which seemed to instill fear in her. At every opportunity my mother would want to visit with her sister; those opportunities and the need inspired by them becoming less available to her as my siblings followed, three others over a succeeding period of thirteen years.

When my uncle Nathan and his wife Rose decided to move to the United States, my parents decided to do the same. Surprising, in retrospect, since my father was as devoted to his landsmen, forming the Mezricher Society, as my mother was to her sister. He was orphaned at age twelve, in Mezrich, Poland, ran away from the town's poorhouse where he was placed for care by the Jewish welfare society at the time, to Warsaw, to look for his brother who had gone there years earlier. He never succeeded in finding his brother, and lived on the streets as a homeless boy, among other homeless boys until a Jewish philanthropic society gathered them up and shipped them to Canada as indentured farm workers until they paid off their passage. I can recall my mother paying off her own passage from the Pale of Settlement, Russia, to wealthy relatives living in Atlanta, when I was in my early teens. And it was the presence of those relatives, all that were left of an expanded family, and the prospect of reuniting, that I believe drew my Aunt Rose to Atlanta.

My parents, who belonged to the United Jewish Peoples' Order in Toronto, had sent me to a parochial school (after regular school hours) when I was old enough to find my way through Toronto's inner city blocks to the school operated as part of the UJPO; the Morris Winchevsky School. I remember an impressive wood-panelled library with various types of books in the building; my father was a library volunteer, as a self-educated 'intellectual'. Cultural events with musical recitals and academic-style lectures were featured as evening presentations there. In the basement there was a small cafe in a large room with tables and chairs where members could gather to engage in social conversations.

The orientation of the UJPO was ideologically to the left; a socialist movement of broad proportions; broad enough to be sympathetic to Communist Russia. And it was without doubt this association that led the U.S. government to deny immigration to my parents. I never could understand to begin with, apart from nostalgia for family ties, why my parents would want to leave Canada for the United States, since it was instilled in me from an early age how racist America was, citing in large part the dreadful historical plight of Black Americans that continued unabated to my teen years and beyond.

Yesterday, an email landed in my inbox, no subject line, but the sender well known to me. One of my Aunt Rose's children, her youngest son, younger than me by a year (she always said my birth inspired her to have another child, ten years after her second-born) had sent a somewhat terse note that his oldest brother, my cousin Maurice, had died of a brain tumour he had been struggling with over the past several months. He was 86. We hadn't heard anything from those 'distant' cousins for decades. Isn't that always the way?