The older one becomes the more the tendency to look back on early years, to the formation of values, of character -- when memories crowd in that have long lived in the dim recesses of early exposures and experiences. My 82nd birthday is next month, a milestone preceded by a vast store of memories and sometimes they get dredged up and insist on being recalled.

This was occasioned by our grandchild prodding me for some of my early memories. One of her university courses required her to write about one of her family members who had been an immigrant or refugee who migrated to Canada. She chose, among those we offered her, my mother. So I filled her in on the information she wanted and she put it together, using some scholarly research to tie the era in to my mother's experiences.

My mother came from the Pale of Settlement at a time when Tsarist Russia was becoming the Soviet Union. Since Tsarist Russia more or less exiled its Jewish inhabitants as undesirables, to live in a northern area encountering hardships in their lives resulting from that isolation and rampant anti-Semitism, her older brother became a revolutionary. Which led White Russian sympathizers to bomb her parents' home killing her father and her brother and wounding my mother and one of her sisters.

Aunt Munya left, my mother right

When my mother arrived with another of her sisters in Canada, her passage funded on loan by an uncle living in the United States, she made contact with other secular Jews whose experience was similar to her own and was 'socialist' in character, in support of the Soviet Union. They became members of a movement called the United Jewish People's Order, a group dedicated to equality, freedom and peace.

As a child I began attending an after-hours parochial school, part of the UJPO, the Morris Winchevsky School; I was still attending it when I met my husband and before I 'graduated', he used to wait outside the school for me, after classes. That was when the UJPO building was located across from Christie Pitts. As 14-year-olds, we used to go for walks in the park, taking along my-then-year-old brother in his stroller.

My parents, me, my younger sister in front of Manning Street Public School

The UJPO operated a communal summer camp, Camp Naivelt (New World), and the swimming pool there represented the most wonderful summer experience I'd ever had. On Friday nights there would be a big campfire and the singing group The Travellers would lead sing-alongs.

As for the Christie Street building, it had a library as well as classrooms and as well a performance hall and a stage. Downstairs in the basement there was a snack bar and small tables where people sat around and men played cards or dominoes. The UJPO invited various guests to be honoured, among them the great American baritone Paul Robeson, and when I saw him walking the halls I was overawed since I'd also seen him on the big screen in films.

Claire Culhane was another honoured guest, admired for her prison-rights and freedom and world peace struggles. There was a People's Choir always practising, there were plays put on, there were all manner of cultural events; piano recitals, sopranos, an overall introduction to the spirit-elevating things in life.

Eventually I wrote for a newspaper/journal produced by the UJPO, for a period of several years. The Canadian Jewish Outlook. I was brought onto the editorial staff at one point. I had written articles, had poetry and short stories published in the paper. And at their behest attended, as an accredited reporter, a conference held in Ottawa on the Holocaust. I wrote and they published my impressions of that signal event.