My Dad’s 100th Birthday
Wed. Aug.5th 2020, would have been my dad’s hundredth birthday. This gives me pause to reflect on his century and the massive change he had seen in his lifetime.
His favourite uncle had fought in WWI so he heard all the stories of that terrible war. He grew up in Frankfurt in a wealthy Jewish family. They had a nanny and housekeeper who was like his second mother. His father was a cellist who played chamber music with several ensembles. He also liked to smoke cigars. He was one of ten children. His mother was a formidable figure who kept an orderly home and socialized with the other women in their circle.They lived in a massive house in the Jewish quarter and his maternal grandparents lived two streets over. His paternal grandfather’s house was an office building that took up an entire city block. His grandfather lived on one of the floors. His grandparents were international importers of hops and lawyers and most of his cousins were bankers. They rode trams through the city and didn't have a radio until he was ten.
My dad got out of Germany just before WWII, when the writing was on the wall. He was fifteen, sponsored by a family friend in England, and went to boarding school, until they rounded up all the German young men and sent them by ship to an internment camp in Australia for a year. He said this was the greatest time of his life because all the men were intellectual Jews who shared social events every night such as concerts, readings, and debates. The Brits then decided that these men should be given name changes and enlisted to the army. Dad became part of the Normandy landing at D-Day +17 as a supply engineer, but later lost his knee cap and was furloughed.
His little sister, my beloved Auntie Tilley, was sent to England at age eleven, right before the war, on one of the last kindertransport trains. She was fostered by a lovely family. Their parents were killed during the holocaust when Dad was seventeen, dragged out of their home in the middle of the night, loaded onto a cattle car bound for Riga, shot and then most likely dumped into a mass grave. They lost all their worldly possessions and homes. Dad and his sister tried to hide their language and history from everyone they met.
He met my mother at Sheffield University. Mum was the only woman in the law faculty that year. She finished her degree, but never went on to practice law. She worked in administrative offices all her life. Dad was one credit short of graduating, but failed the last course because he got into a row with his professor about his horrible handwriting being illegible at exam time. He was not allowed to use his typewriter, so he was failed.
Jobs in those days were obtained by word of mouth and introduction. His cousin, who hid in an attic through the war, recommended him to his firm, an import-export company producing leather goods, such as hand-bags, gloves, belts etc. He travelled through the Low Countries doing trade and later switched to a different company wholesaling fine china and decorative housewares that sent him to Japan. My mum was working in an insurance firm office.
In 1954 they emigrated to Toronto, Canada by ship on the Cunard Line and then rail. Dad joined Simpson Sears and they rented rooms in an elderly couple’s house to start out. They travelled by car down the east coast of the USA for holidays, first encountering the racism and segregation of that time. In 1958 my big sister was born and then five years later, mum went back to England to visit her mother, where I was born. Dad set out for Vancouver and got settled with a rental house and a job working for Eaton’s in the furniture department. He began studying interior design and would furnish many lavish homes in Shaughnessy and the British Properties. Mum joined him again the following year with me in tow. She became a school secretary.
So Dad’s life went from war to peacetime, love to loss, wealth to poverty, wooden toys to robots, horses to cars, trams to high speed bullet trains, radio to internet, Germany to Canada. The changes he saw were traumatic and mind-boggling. Happy birthday Dad, wherever you are. I wonder what changes we will see in the next few decades that I’m alive?
