The freedom to create can be a balm for the soul

My mother-in-law, Malka, came to Toronto in 1958 from postwar Poland. She came with unbearable losses authored by the Third Reich fascist fantasies that had destroyed her world.

She suffered the murder of her husband and second child, a newborn. She endured a hatred of her very being that defies reason and reckoning, yet she came, nonetheless, with profound wits about her and a courage groomed by the black market in Siberia where she somehow kept her first-born toddler alive by placing her in an unlit closet where the child would be safe while Malka bartered for food.

After the war, she married a survivor whose wife and children and been exterminated. Together, they had a son; I married that son, his story and the longest hatred it embodied.

Even given the profound and forbidding ugliness of the world Malka fled, she somehow created, in her third act, a single piece of art she found beautiful.

I will explain.

Malka was not an easy woman, but I did not understand the difficult in her. I had learned very little of my people’s experience under Nazism. I lived in a northern Ontario city with a small group of Jewish parents who protected us from truths they could hardly name.

Malka came with these lived truths, with Polish and Yiddish, and with a smattering of other languages picked up along the way of her diaspora. She absorbed English by listening to the radio and watching TV. Hers was not a broken English, however, though I know that would have been the term applied, as it so often is to those who come with other languages and acquire English over time as a third, fourth or fifth tongue. Malka’s English was fuelled by her past, her pragmatism, her anxiety and her desperation.

When I first met her, she was not convinced I was Jewish. I did not “look Jewish,” but my father’s picture in a Canadian Jewish newspaper offset her fears — in part.

She would serve me her Friday Night dinner when I arrived by plane to visit her son. After dinner, she began to tell me things. I remained at the table. Her son disappeared. Her husband, who rarely spoke, disappeared. I learned to listen. Sometimes her voice rose. Sometimes she whispered. Often, she repeated herself, but it was not really a repetition, it was an excavation into an underworld that demanded details be restated so I would remember.

When Mendel and I brought our four-year-old first-born with us to visit, he sat with her in the afternoons. He loved “her” soap operas, the treats offered and his Bubbie’s involvement in the daily lives of characters who seemed real to her and thus real to him. She could easily explain their motivations, the twists and turns of the inconstancies and betrayals she tracked as a detective might.

These were worlds easily comprehended, safely contained within her television set, so different from wartime worlds she had endured and the often daunting unknowns in her Toronto life.

While so brave in bribing officials to get her family out of Poland, so ingenious in the strategies she used to achieve their liberation, Malka increasingly unravelled in Canada. I use unravelled because she found no peace — she worried furiously about everything, haunted by a hypervigilance that isolated her and the stories few wanted to hear.

I think that if you carry stories denied, hidden or unspoken, you can lose your mind. Trauma does that.

Malka collapsed. Her grown daughter, the toddler who had survived, the most gentle and caring daughter one could ever imagine, took her to a psychiatrist who worked with survivors. He gave her medication and suggested a facility where Malka might find further treatment. There, she was introduced to art therapy. She created a latch hook rug with a bit of a floral design, the size of a placemat. Malka had never done anything like that before. Her entire life had been toil and terror. The art project tended her soul.

When her son and I arrived after she returned home, she held her rug aloft. She was proud.

Her art.

In all of her adult life, my brave, ingenious, and “difficult” mother-in-law had not experienced creativity for its own sake, for her sake — as an expression of her identity, as a moment of well-being. At the time, her son and I did not begin to grasp why this meant so much to her, but, having never seen her satisfied, we enthused over her creation without restraint.

I don’t know where the rug went. I do not have it. But I remember it vividly, just as I remember the stories she told me. I know that art, nurtured in a freedom far from daily grinds of heartbreak and yearning, demands every attention we can give.

arts@freepress.mb.ca