Notes
1. Katz, H. (1993). “Knitting Isn’t My Passion – Social Causes Are.” The Gazette, 2 Dec. 1993, p. 5.
2. Like many people who use the terms great-niece or great-nephew interchangeably, I have always referred to Auntie Léa as my great-aunt, and myself as her great-niece. However, Ancestry.com tells us that “grand” means two generations apart, “great” means three generations apart, and “great-great” means four generations apart. So according to Ancestry.com, Auntie Léa is my grand-aunt, and I am her grand-niece.
3. Fascism can be defined as a set of far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideas and beliefs. It is opposed to other political ideologies (political ideas and beliefs) such as democracy, pluralism, egalitarianism, liberalism, socialism, and Marxism.
5. For an example of this research and the way I have shared my archival research in the form of a verbatim playscript please see The Love Booth and Six Companion Plays (Goldstein, 2023), which is a set of seven short verbatim plays about queer and trans activism in the United States between the 1940s and the1980s. To read the script and hear the plays on the Gailey Road website, go to: https://gaileyroad.com/the-love-booth-companion-plays/.
7. A bar mitzvah is a Jewish ceremony held to celebrate a boy reaching the age of 13. A bat mitzvah celebrates a girl turning 12. After their bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah, young people are responsible for their own actions and can decide for themselves how they would like to practice Judaism. Recently, to celebrate transgender and nonbinary young people, some synagogues and Jewish communities have adopted “they mitzvahs”, “b’nai mitzvahs”, or “b mitzvahs”.
8. Cisheternormative activist histories are histories that centre the activism of cisgender and heterosexual people. Cisgender people are those whose gender identity corresponds with the sex registered for them at birth. Transgender people are those whose gender identity does not correspond with the sex registered for them at birth. The “plus” in LGBTQIA2S+ signifies additional identity terms not already included in the acronym.
9. Bénesty-Sroka, G. (1996). Entrevue avec Léa Roback: Une femme engagée. Canadian Woman Studies/Les cahiers de la femme, 16(4), p. 81.
10. The Torah is made up of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The Talmud describes and explains Jewish religious laws and Jewish theology.
11. Moishe and Harry walked eight and a half kilometres to their synagogue in Quebec City on Saturdays because religious Jews don’t drive on the Sabbath, the Jewish day of rest.
12. To read more about Canada’s refusal to admit European Jewish refugees into the country between 1933 and 1948, please see the 40th anniversary edition of None Is Too Many by Irving Abella and Harold Troper published in 2023.
13. To read more about the political work of Jewish Voice for Peace, see: https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/. For recommended readings on the conflict, please see the section called “Further Reading” at the end of the biography.
14. The patterned black and white keffiyeh is a symbol of Palestinian nationalism and resistance and dates back to the 1936–1939 revolt in Palestine.
15. Des lumières dans la grande noirceur, 1991.
16. Communism is a sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology (a set of ideas and beliefs) as well as an economic system (a way of creating and sharing wealth). In a communist system, individual people do not own land, factories, or machinery (the means of production). Instead, the government or the whole community owns the means of production.
17. German artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) was known for her etching and sculpture work, and later for lithography and woodcuts. Her work centred on women, the working class, and people in need (Mahler, 2016).
18. I have written about Kristallnacht in my novel Home of Her Heart, which was published by Gailey Road Productions in 2023. An audio recording of the novel is available on the Gailey Road website at: https://gaileyroad.com/publications-2018-2027/
19. Before the Hidden Book Shop and Modern Bookshop opened, Hirsch Hershman, a Jewish immigrant from Romania who worked in a women’s clothing shop, opened a Jewish bookstore in 1902. It was intended to make socialist newspapers, published in Yiddish in New York, available to readers in Montreal. The bookstore also sold Yiddish translations of books by Russian writer Leo Tolstoy and French writers Émile Zola and Paul Lafargue. The bookstore became a gathering place for Jewish immigrant intellectuals in Montreal (Anctil and Woodsworth, 2021, p.84).
20. Bénesty-Sroka, G. (1996). Entrevue avec Léa Roback: Une femme engagée. Canadian Woman Studies/Les cahiers de la femme, 16(4), p. 82.
21. Calamity Jane (Martha Jane Burke) was an American who lived in the second half of the 19th century and was famous for her skill at riding horses and shooting guns. She dressed in men’s clothing and was known for saying that she would bring calamity and harm to anyone who made her angry.
22. French Canadian writer Gabrielle Roy’s (1909–1983) novel Bonheur d’occasion, published in 1945, portrayed the lives of families living in St. Henri between the 1940s and 1960s. The novel was published in 1947 in English as The Tin Flute.
23. The language which Auntie Léa was speaking to the security guard was French. In French, there are two ways to address someone – formally with respect by using vous and informally with familiarity by using tu. The security guard addressed Auntie Léa informally with familiarity even though she had addressed him formally with respect. Her demand that the security guard address her using vous was a demand for respect.
24. An Activist in Search of Employment (1950s and 1960s), 2023.
26. Idola Saint-Jean founded the Alliance, and after Thérèse Casgrain, is considered the second most important figure in the history of Quebec’s suffrage movement. Carrie Derrick and Anna Marks Lyman also worked with these groups, and Carrie Derrick was the founder of the Montreal Suffrage Association.
27. After women won the right to vote and run for office, both Casgrain and Saint-Jean ran as candidates at the federal level. Saint-Jean ran as an independent Liberal in the riding of Saint-Denis in 1930, becoming the first French-speaking woman in Québec to run as a candidate. She came in third. Casgrain stood for election in 1942 also as an independent Liberal. While Casgrain was defeated nine times in provincial and federal elections between 1942 and 1962, she did become the first woman to lead a Québec political party. In 1951, Casgrain was elected to head the provincial wing of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), which is now the New Democratic Party (NDP) in Canada. See Chapter 3 for another story about the NDP.
28. Women who participated in the suffrage movement in Canada were known as both “suffragists”, those who campaigned using peaceful methods such as lobbying, and “suffragettes”, those who believed in more militant strategies to win the right to vote. The women who were part of the Ligue des droits de la femme were generally known as suffragists, not suffragettes, even though Casgrain uses the word “suffragettes” here.
30. Abortion access widely varies across Canada. – Joan Bryden. The Ottawa Citizen. 30 Jan. 1988. pg. B.6
31. By the time the Court ruled on Daigle’s case, Daigle had already had a late second-term abortion in the United States. While the case had been fast-tracked, the progress was so slow that Daigle would have been in the third trimester had she waited for the ruling to be handed down.
34. The acronym LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans) is used here instead of the contemporary acronym LGBTQ+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer, Plus) because it was the acronym used at the time.
35. A copy of the script and an audio-recording of the play we recorded are both available on the Gailey Road website.
Léa Roback
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