DOI: 10.3726/9781917503327.003.0002
Mama, who spoke good French like my father, always told us, “When they shout ‘Damned Jews!’ at you, respond, ‘Why do you say that? Do we call you damned French Canadians?’” People didn’t know what to retort and would leave.
***
My great-great-grandparents Isaac and Libby Roback immigrated to Canada from Poland around 1889. In the film Des lumières dans la grande noirceur, Auntie Léa tells Sophie Bissonnette the story of how the family came to Canada.
In Poland my [paternal] grandparents had a shop, my grandmother ran it. Grandpa worked the farm. There was a Mr. Kleinberg. And he … made a living recruiting pedlars... immigrants. One day he was watching my grandpa work. He said, “Wouldn’t you like to get out of farming? We’ll take you to Quebec, to Canada (Des lumières dans la grande noirceur, 1991).
Isaac and Libby’s immigration story is an illustration of a particular political and economic moment in Canada. They were invited to immigrate to Canada under John A. MacDonald’s National Policy, which encouraged immigration from Eastern Europe. As Canadian historian Pierre Anctil explains:
With a territory that was oversized in relation to its population of four million (in 1880), Canada could not afford to wait decades for natural population growth to meet its pressing manpower needs. In order to create a genuine domestic market and increase the number of taxpayers, MacDonald had no other option than to bring in a large number of people from elsewhere who could make a substantial contribution to the progress of the country (Anctil and Woodsworth, 2021, p. 64).
Like many other Eastern European Jewish immigrants at the time, Isaac and Libby Roback settled in Montreal which was the largest city in the country and the city in which industrialization was most advanced. In Montreal, there were a large number of opportunities for unskilled workers (Anctil and Woodsworth, 2021, p. 62). Isaac became a cutter in the men’s clothing industry. His son Moses – Moishe – was apprenticing to become a cutter as well. But those plans changed after he married Fanny Steinhouse.
The marriage between my great-grandparents Moishe Roback and Fanny Steinhouse was arranged by a matchmaker when Fanny was only 16 years old. Auntie Léa explains:
Mama was so pretty that my grandmother, Libby, was afraid she might be sexually assaulted, so she wanted to find her a husband very quickly. Mama was married at 16, furious because she did not want to be tied down so soon. When I asked her why she didn’t protest, she replied, “But those were not things we said to our parents!” My father was 13 years older than her. This was common at that time (Bénesty-Sroka, 1996, p. 81).
Auntie Léa’s maternal grandparents, Berel and Sarah Steinhouse, had a different immigration story from that of Isaac and Libby Roback. Berel Steinhouse decided to leave Poland after getting into trouble because he refused to take off his hat in front of a portrait of Tsar Nicholas in a post office near Warsaw. Although Sarah understood political oppression and violence against Jews were increasing in Poland, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to follow Berel to North America and asked their rabbi what to do. The rabbi told her to put a nail in water for a certain number of days, and if the water turned brown, it meant she should go. Of course, the nail rusted, and the water turned brown, so Sarah left with Berel to start a life in Canada.
Fanny and Moishe began their married life in Montreal on Guilbault Street, near Saint Laurent Boulevard in the heart of what was then Jewish Montreal, but moved to the rural town of Beauport when Auntie Léa was very small. The move to Beauport was financed by Fanny’s parents, who borrowed money from the parish in Montmorency, Quebec, to provide Fanny and Moishe the money they needed to run a small general store in Beauport. Auntie Léa was the second of nine children. Harry was the first, Annie was the third, and my grandmother Rose was the fourth. Following my grandmother were Lottie, Rebecca, Joe, Michael, and Leo. Their house “wasn’t big, not even the kitchen,” she told journalist Susan Schwartz. “Two of us slept in one bed in one room, and a third and fourth in the other bed. The living room was also a bedroom” (Schwartz and Roback, 1996/1997, p. 3).
Moishe Roback was religious. Although he spent his days running the family’s general store, what he enjoyed most was spending time studying the Torah and the Talmud.10 Beauport didn’t have a synagogue or an established Jewish community, so Moishe, who wanted his children to learn about their Jewish heritage and traditions, brought a rabbi into their home to teach Auntie Léa and her brothers and sisters about the Jewish holidays. On Saturdays, Moishe would walk eight and a half kilometres from his home in Beauport to the synagogue in Quebec City with his eldest son, Harry, Auntie Léa’s older brother.11 For major Jewish holidays, Fanny and the rest of the children would also go to Quebec City and spend the night somewhere near the synagogue so they didn’t have to walk back and forth between Beauport and Quebec City each day.
Moishe not only loved reading Torah, he loved reading in general. Auntie Léa told us that when Fanny sent him to Quebec City to buy kosher meat, he often forgot to bring back what she had asked for. But he always returned with a book in his pocket. For Moishe, buying books was more important than buying meat for dinner. Both Moishe and Fanny wanted their children to know how to read and write Yiddish. Moishe would read Yiddish stories to them – stories by Jewish writers like Sholem Aleichem, whose tale Tevye the Dairyman and His Daughters about Jewish life in Russia was used to write the book for the 1964 Broadway musical A Fiddler on the Roof.
Fanny and Moishe raised their children to understand the importance of helping others and taught them to live by the saying, “We must do something!” In an interview with Sophie Bissonnette, Auntie Léa told her:
The saying’s still used all the time. “We must do something.” That’s it. Passed from father to son all the way along. Still today (Des lumières dans la grande noirceur, 1991).
When Bissonnette asked Auntie Léa if the saying “We must do something” inspired her politically, Auntie Léa answered:
Sure, it did. Of course. It was the way we were brought up. It inspired me. For me charity wasn’t... write a check, finished. At home it wasn’t like that, you must do something (Des lumières dans la grande noirceur, 1991).
Caring for the sick and supporting people who were hungry or needed shelter was simply what you did in Auntie Léa’s family. “That’s my religion,” she explained to the curator who interviewed her in 1996 for an exhibit on immigrants that was about to open at the Musée de la civilisation in Quebec City. “Knowing how to live, not only for yourself but also for others, who need help” (Schwartz and Roback, 1996/1997, p. 5).
Auntie Léa and her siblings were the only Jewish family living in Beauport. Dealing with antisemitism and people who made antisemitic remarks was part of their everyday life. For example, the local priest, who had never met any Jews before the Robacks arrived in Beauport, told his parishioners, “You should not buy from Jews, but rather support Mr. Roy, who is a Catholic, a French Canadian” (Bénesty-Sroka, 1996, p. 81).
In her film, Sophie Bissonnette illustrated this moment when she read aloud a newspaper article from a Montreal Yiddish daily newspaper that had been published at the time. The article from the Keneder Aldler/The Jewish Daily Eagle stated:
In Beauport, there’s a Jewish shopkeeper [Moishe Roback] respected by the villagers. It’s shocking that a priest could use his influence to try to chase him from his home for 4 years. During a mass at the church the priest strictly forbad anyone to sell a store to a Jew (Des lumières dans la grande noirceur, 1991).
Auntie Léa herself discussed the moment in the following way:
When they came, Dad... He was marvelous. He held his ground. He said, “I have as much right as you. And I’m making an honest living. People here support us.” Mom and Dad gave credit. Half the time it wasn’t paid back. Dad would say, “What can I take? The kids? We have enough already.” That was that (Des lumières dans la grande noirceur, 1991).
Pierre Anctil explains that the antisemitism the Roback family faced in the early 1900s was brought to Canada and Quebec from Europe. It first emerged in Germany in the late nineteenth century and was then taken up in France and Great Britain, countries that were close to Canada, economically and politically. Antisemitism, which can be defined as prejudice against Jews or the hatred of Jews, circulated in English-language Protestant communities differently than it circulated in French-language Catholic communities. In French-speaking communities, antisemitism circulated through the teachings of the Catholic Church, in local parishes, by local priests, like the priest in Beauport who told his parishioners not to buy goods from Jews.
Before the Vatican Council of the 60s [1960s], the Catholic Church was the main vehicle for hostility to Jews. French Canadians went to mass. They absorbed antisemitism in the liturgy, in the teachings, in the preaching. And often we find, um, that when Jews would say, well, this, sorry, this is antisemitic. And the French Canadians would answer, no, it’s not. We’re not antisemites, we just repeat what the priests say. We just repeat what our masters or our forebears say.
If the church says it, it can’t be wrong. See, that was the problem. The objections of the church were doctrinal. In other words, a Jewish person is someone that rejected Christ and is not likely to be a good citizen, a good person, to be welcomed in the Catholic environment.
The British said something else. They said, for racial reasons, we should reject [Jews]. This is more the German version [of antisemitism]. For racial reasons, we should reject Jews because they contaminate our people. French Canadians didn’t say this because the notion of the Church is that all humanity can be converted to Catholicism, and these racial barriers are more superficial (Jewish Public Library, 2024, recollections, Episode 1).
Anctil further explains that the British believed in assimilation: the quicker Eastern European Jews could learn English and become good Protestants, the better it would be for them and for the Jewish community altogether. This was the reason why the English-language Protestant school boards in Montreal and Quebec City accepted Jewish children like the Roback children into their schools, and why Auntie Léa and her siblings took the train to Quebec City to attend a Protestant school.
As the opening quote to this chapter reveals, Fanny Roback taught her children to respond to their neighbours’ antisemitic slurs – slurs like “damned Jew” – with a question: “Why do you say that? Do we call you damned French Canadians?” Gradually people in Beauport stopped calling the Roback children names, and they were able to make friends with the other children who lived nearby (Bénesty-Sroka, 1996, p. 81). These friendships were an early example of the way Auntie Léa crossed linguistic and religious borders to connect with her Catholic French-Canadian neighbours. Her mother Fanny connected with their neighbours by raising a large family. “You’re Jewish,” Auntie Léa recalled them saying. “But you’re all right, Mrs. Roback. You have a baby every year, just like us” (Schwartz and Roback, 1996/1997, p. 6).
Auntie Léa never internalized the antisemitism she experienced as a child or adult. She always felt proud to be Jewish. When she was asked by French Canadian interviewers if she was Polish, Auntie Léa would always respond, “No, I am Jewish and my parents came from Poland” (Harris and Roback, 1988). She wanted to set the record straight. It was important for Auntie Léa that French Canadian journalists know she was Jewish. If they thought her work was important enough to write about, then they needed to know that they were writing about the work of a Jewish activist.
When journalist Ghila Bénesty-Sroka asked Auntie Léa if she had ever faced antisemitic remarks or ideas within the Quebec feminist movement, Auntie Léa answered, “People don’t like Jews.” When asked if she meant people in Quebec, Auntie Léa clarified, “Everywhere!” Then she explained:
It will take more than you, more than me to make up for lost time, to get the prejudices that have been instilled in people’s heads out. Some of my Francophone friends are very nice, but they still have a lot of prejudices against Jews ... It’s long and difficult to eliminate the effects of this poison that has been distilled for decades in schools, by religion (Bénesty-Sroka, 1996, p. 85).
In her lifelong fight against antisemitism (in addition to her fights for workers’ and women’s rights and against racism), Auntie Léa developed strategies to deal with the antisemitic remarks she heard. She’d respond, “The God you pray to in your Catholic religion was a Jew!” Antisemitic remarks always made Auntie Léa angry, but she learned that there was an art to expressing her anger. “Mama always said if you get angry with a smile, people understand more quickly” (Bénesty-Sroka, 1996, p. 82).
Like historian Pierre Anctil, writer and activist Naomi Klein has also researched the history of antisemitism. Writing about responses to antisemitism in the first decades of the twentieth century, Klein reports that Jewish intellectual life in both Europe and North America “roared with drag-down debates over what was then euphemistically called ‘the Jewish Question’” (Klein, 2023, p. 290). Debates about the Jewish Question included discussions about how to challenge antisemitism in both Europe and North America, the role cultural assimilation might play in challenging antisemitism, and the possibilities and dangers of Zionism. Klein writes:
Should Jews strive for full equality in Christian societies – voting rights, access to all industries (the position of the Social Democrats)? Or should the goal be revolutionary transformation of those societies accompanied by full Jewish assimilation into the liberated proletariat since religion would be less necessary as a source of solace (“Religion is the sight of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of the soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people,” Marx wrote … )? Was Judaism a prison from which the revolution would offer liberation (as the Bolsheviks claimed, though many conceded that there was a need to protect the right to religious practice in private life)? Or was Jewish assimilation, even in a socialist society, a trap eliding the need for European Jews’ distinct culture and language to be protected within a multiethnic, multinational workers’ society (the Bund’s “hereness” position)? Or was Jew-hatred simply too deep on the continent, too primal, for any of this to work, so that Jewish liberation could be found only in the working-class movements of the amnesiac Americas (the position held by many of my family members as they crossed the Atlantic)? Or was even that mere fantasy, especially under the harsh, overtly racist, and anti-Semitic immigration laws introduced by the United States and Canada in the 1920s and ’30s, making the only hope for Jewish safety a nation-state of their own, where wandering would end and socialism could become a reality (the view of the Labour Zionists) (Klein, 2023, p. 291).
Simply put, archivist Eddie Paul from the Jewish Public Library in Montreal says this: While the Bundists believed in the idea of “hereness” – building a home wherever Jews lived – the Zionists believed in “thereness” – building a home in Palestine where all Jews would live once a Jewish state was created (Jewish Public Library, 2024b, recollections, Episode 2). Unlike the Zionists, Bundists believed Jews would only be free when everyone was free, and not in building, as Klein puts it, “a militarized ghetto on Palestinian land” (Klein, 2023, p. 291).
In her interview with Auntie Léa, Nicole Lacelle asked if the Roback family had been interested in Zionism. Auntie Léa responded no. She remembered that her father was once approached about becoming a Zionist in 1913, but her father wasn’t interested. “In our family,” she said, “it just didn’t resonate.” When Lacelle asked her why, Auntie Léa said:
Maybe partly because Herzl’s idea, the founder’s notion, that Jews needed a country to be respected, didn’t align with our experience. In Beauport, when I was little, we were the only Jewish family, and we were respected—well, after we made them understand that we were human beings like them and had the same rights … There are good people everywhere and scoundrels everywhere. Zionism just wasn’t part of our way of life … However, I want to emphasize that we were very proud of our culture. We didn’t allow anyone to say “damn Jew” or claim that Jews were like this or that, in any language (Lacelle and Roback, 2005, pp. 168–169).
The debate over the Jewish Question ended in the 1930s and 1940s, when the Nazis began to annihilate Jews in the European countries they gained control of, and the United States and Canada refused to accept European Jewish refugees into their countries.12 As Klein puts it, “the whole terrain on which the debate was happening was crushed by terror, betrayal and abandonment” (Klein, 2023, p. 292).
Known today as the Holocaust, the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by the Nazi German regime and its allies and collaborators was an evolving process that took place throughout Europe between 1933 and 1945 (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2021). The Nazi regime also persecuted and murdered millions of other victims, including Black people in Germany; civilians (non-Jewish) accused of disobedience, resistance or partisan activity; gay men, bisexual men, or men accused of homosexuality in Germany; Jehovah’s Witnesses; people with disabilities; Poles; political opponents and dissenters in Germany; Roma people; social outsiders in Germany derogatorily labelled as “asocials” and “professional criminals”; and Soviet prisoners of war.
The Nazi persecution of Jews became increasingly radical between 1933 and 1945 and culminated in a plan that was called “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” The “Final Solution” was the organized and systematic mass murder of European Jews. The Nazi German regime implemented this genocide between 1941 and 1945 (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2021). After the Holocaust Klein argues, there was only one answer to the Jewish Question that asserted itself with any great confidence: Zionism (Klein, 2023, p. 295).
The Holocaust was fuelled by antisemitism which was a basic tenet of Nazi ideology. While the Nazis promoted and practiced a particularly virulent form of antisemitism, the Nazis did not invent antisemitism; it is an old and widespread prejudice that has taken many forms throughout European history. In the Middle Ages (500–1400) prejudices against Jews were primarily based in early Christian myths that Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus Christ. Religious prejudices continued in early modern Europe (1400–1800), when Jews were excluded from most aspects of economic, social, and political life. This exclusion contributed to stereotypes of Jews as outsiders. As Europe became more secular, many legal restrictions on Jews were lifted, but new forms of antisemitism established themselves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: economic, nationalist, and racial antisemitism. Jews were believed to be responsible for a variety of social and political crises in European industrial societies. New theories of race, eugenics, and Social Darwinism falsely justified these beliefs. Nazi ideology drew upon all of these forms of antisemitism, but especially racial antisemitism, and the idea that Jews were a separate and inferior race that needed to be removed from German society (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2022b).
Reflecting on her research into the history of Jewish hatred, Klein writes that she is struck by how contradictory stereotypes and conspiracy theories about Jews have been over the centuries, and in particular in Nazi Germany:
Are Jews greedy bankers scheming to get Christian property so we can pocket the money? Or are we rabble-rousing communists scheming to do away with capitalism altogether? A widely-circulated Nazi caricature depicts the “eternal Jew” – a hunched man with gold coins in one hand and a map of Germany with a hammer and sickle on it in the other, somehow managing to be an arch capitalist and a revolutionary Marxist at the same time. Conspiracy theories don’t require internal consistency to find traction … Still it’s striking that the two most tenacious lines of attack that Jews have faced over the generations – the scheming Jewish bankers and the scheming Jewish Marxists – are perennially on a logical collision course with each other (Klein, 2023, p. 288).
It’s been more than 100 years since the local priest in Beauport told his parishioners not to buy goods from the Roback family so they could not “pocket the money” at the expense of Catholic French Canadians. And it’s been several decades since Auntie Léa told Ghila Bénesty-Sroka it would take a long time to eliminate the poison of antisemitism. Auntie Léa was right. Jewish communities in North America continue to be targeted by antisemitic violence: In 2018, eleven congregants were murdered at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. In 2019, there were shootings at a Chabad synagogue in Poway, California. And on 6 January 2021, at the United States Capitol insurrection in Washington, D.C., there were displays of Nazi symbols. In Canada, during the summer of 2024, antisemitic graffiti was painted on the walls of Canadian Jewish synagogues, and bomb threats were made to Jewish congregations across the country (Logan, 2024).
In response to ongoing antisemitic violence in the United States and Canada, the organization Jewish Voice for Peace believes that antisemitism needs to be fought “within, and as part of, other struggles against oppression and for collective liberation.” Echoing the Bundists’ belief in “hereness” they write, “Our safety is bound together with the safety of all people, and none of us is free if we aren’t all free” (Jewish Voice for Peace, 2023).
Currently, Jewish Voice for Peace is involved in responding to the ongoing military and political conflict between Israel and Palestine and issues around land and self-determination for the Palestinian people (Jewish Voice for Peace, 2024). Key aspects of the conflict include the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israeli settlements, borders, security, water rights, the permit regime, Palestinian freedom of movement, and the Palestinian right of return.13 This work aligns with Auntie Léa’s own thinking about justice for Palestinians. For example, when asked by Ghila Bénesty-Sroka about her position on “the Palestinian question,” Auntie Léa answered:
I try to put myself a little in the place of the Palestinians. If someone told me that I can’t live in such and such a place, I would say damn it and go live where I have the means to do so. If I were Palestinian, I would fight for my rights and I would have the right to do so, just as the Israelis also have their rights (Bénesty-Sroka, 1996, p. 84).
Like other contemporary activists, both Jewish and non-Jewish, Auntie Léa wore a keffiyeh to demonstrate her support for the struggle of the Palestinian people.14 As an anti-war activist, she would have been horrified by the current violence in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon – violence perpetrated by Hamas, Hezbollah and the Israeli government. At the same time, Auntie Léa would have been disturbed and angry at the silence of leftist activists about current antisemitic violence committed against Jews in Europe and North America, such as the attacks on Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam in November 2024 (Reuters, 2024). Further discussion of Auntie Léa’s anti-war activism appears in Chapter 5.
Auntie Léa’s life in Beauport came to an end in 1919 when the Roback family returned to Montreal. Finding a place for a large Jewish family to live wasn’t easy.
... when you moved with a big family, it was hard. That and being Jewish. That was tough. He [our landlord] was a francophone, [and] didn’t want a Jewish family. Didn’t want children. But we got it. Mama convinced him. I think she told him a little white lie, that she only had three or four kids. Once we moved in [with nine children], well ... (Des lumières dans la grande noirceur, 1991).
Around the same time Auntie Léa and her family moved back to Montreal, her grandparents, Berel and Sarah Steinhouse, were part of a movement to establish a Jewish home for the elderly. The first home was built in 1910, and the second was built in 1923. In honour of the work undertaken by the Steinhouse family and their financial contributions, the second home was named the B. & S. Steinhouse Old People’s Home. In one of her interviews with Sophie Bissonnette, Auntie Léa tells the story of her grandparents’ involvement like this:
… my maternal grandparents, owned a furniture store. They lived comfortably. And my grandmother had heard that a Jewish family ... that the old mother was sleeping on the balcony in November [when temperatures go as low as 0 degrees Celsius]. “My God, that’s not possible! It’s inhumane!” So grandmother said, “Bring her to my house.” My grandmother lived on Jeanne-Mance Street. And she let the woman sleep at her place until we could find her a family. And then my grandmother said to my grandfather (in Yiddish), “Bero, besaf hobn a heim für die jüdische Älter [Bero, we need a home for Jewish seniors!]” And my grandfather said, “But that would cost a fortune!” And she said, “Too bad!” [Inaudible.] She had a little bag [for the money she could save], and each time she put a little more money aside, my mother made her a slightly bigger bag to put [her money in] . . . and one day she said to my grandfather (in Yiddish), “Bero, ikh hob die Geld [Bero, I have the money!]” (A Jewish Seniors’ Residence Founded by Her Grandmother, 2023).
As she had been taught, and then as she taught her own children, Sarah Steinhouse was moved to “do something” to support the well-being of the elderly. It was an act of activism and care, and an example of the role Jewish women in Montreal have had in building up social service and health institutions for their communities. Over the decades, the B. & S. Steinhouse Old People’s Home moved north and west to the Jewish suburb of Côte Saint-Luc and was renamed the Maimonides Hospital and Home for the Aged. The name was chosen to honour Rabbi Moshe Bar Maimon, who was also known as Maimonides. Maimonides was an important rabbi, philosopher, and doctor in Jewish history. When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, my grandmother, Rose Roback Goldstein, carried on the Steinhouse family commitment to the hospital and home by volunteering at the Maimonides Gift Shop. Rose was much loved by the staff of Maimonides and by visitors who came to the gift shop, and I have vivid memories of visiting her there and listening to her chat with everyone who walked in.
In the late sixties, when I was in grade 6, the cleaning staff at Maimonides went on strike. The strike was still going on during my Easter holiday break from school, and my grandmother asked me if I would volunteer to help the staff who were not on strike keep their wards clean. Knowing that Auntie Léa would not approve of me crossing the picket line, I told my grandmother I was worried that Auntie Léa would call me a “scab” (a strike-breaker). My grandmother told me that Auntie Léa would never call me a scab, and I shouldn’t let that stand in the way of volunteering when my help was needed. Like Auntie Léa and my grandmother, I had been raised to live by the saying “We must do something!” so I spent some of my Easter holiday break cleaning toilets at Maimonides with my best friend Sandy Zakuta. Although I don’t remember my Auntie Léa and my grandmother fighting about us crossing the picket line during the strike at Maimonides (at least not in front of me), I know that at times their politics were not always compatible. I do, however, remember feeling very uncomfortable crossing the picket lines at Maimonides, and ever since then I’ve made it a point not to cross one.
As discussed in Chapter 1, Auntie Léa’s first job in Montreal was working as a receptionist at British American Dyeworks. In 1922, she left the job and began working as a cashier in the box office at His Majesty’s Theatre. She found the job through a customer who brought something in to be cleaned.
One day this tiny woman came in. I’ll never forget her, Miss Taft. She brought something in for cleaning. She worked as a cashier at the theatre. A theatre, not a movie house. She watched me working and said, “Why work with rich people’s laundry? Come work at the theatre.” Me, who adored the theatre. My God. I’d have done anything to go. And I did go! So, I worked at His Majesty’s [Theatre] (Des lumières dans la grande noirceur, 1991).
Auntie Léa met all kinds of people while working at His Majesty’s Theatre. One of them was fashion designer Lucien Lacouture who designed clothes for affluent, “high society” women in Montreal during the 1920s and early 1930s (McCord Stewart Museum, 2019). Lacouture was born in Sorel, Quebec, in 1895, and studied at the Fashion Academy in New York. He returned to Montreal in 1926, where he opened his own atelier and lived as an out gay man at a time when homosexuality was illegal (McCord Stewart Museum, 2019). Lacouture befriended Auntie Léa and invited her to his home where she met other gay men and artists. “We’d visit, discuss books,” Auntie Léa told Sophie Bissonnette. “They read a lot. They had wonderful records. The best music. The three “B”s [Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms], Schubert and all. We’d sip a good glass of wine. They were great cooks, knew how to sew.” Auntie Léa loved spending time with Lacouture and his friends and could have “lived that life forever” (Des lumières dans la grande noirceur, 1991).
Influenced by the time she spent with Lucien Lacouture, Auntie Léa always appreciated well-made, beautifully designed clothes, and when she had the opportunity, she wore beautiful clothes herself. For example, in a photo taken in the 1920s, Auntie Léa is wearing a stylish sweater and skirt set with a fashionable cloche hat on her head and a fur stole around her shoulders. When I started looking for images of the kinds of clothing Lucien Lacouture designed for his wealthy clientele, I came upon an image of a cherry-red wool coat topped with a fur stole that is very similar to the kind of stole Auntie Léa had around her shoulders in the photograph. Wearing lovely clothes was another way Auntie Léa lived as a political free spirit, breaking stereotypes about how activists should dress and behave. Sometimes this worked against her, however. For example, when Auntie Léa wanted to join the Communist Party in Berlin, they were suspicious of her because of the clothes she was wearing. In an interview with Sophie Bissonnette, Auntie Léa explains:
They wore suits, leather or faux leather jacket, red, the beret, and flat-heeled shoes ... And me, Léa Roback, they didn’t accept me like that, pronto! Oh no. Why? I had a coat, fur, real fur, beige fox. I had a boyish hat that was worn at that time, I had short hair. I had high-heeled shoes. The first time I arrived, I will never forget it. Never, never, never! Because either I was an informant or I was a loose woman … But in the end, they accepted me. They knew it was because I wanted to, because I wanted to get involved. And then, I got along very well with these comrades (Joining The Communist Party in Berlin (1932), 2023).
Lucien Lacouture and his friends were part of a community which later became known as Bohemian Montreal. Lesbian writer and poet Elsa Gidlow who lived in Montreal before Auntie Léa returned to the city, was also friendly with Lacouture. In her 1986 autobiography I Come With My Songs , Gidlow writes that she was able to find her people in Bohemian Montreal – people, she could “enjoy, converse with, learn from, and perhaps love” (Gidlow, 1986, p. 72). She formed a close, lifelong friendship with writer Rosewell Mills, who, like Lucien Lacouture, was living his life as an openly gay man.
In an act of queer care, Mills took Gidlow under his wing and nicknamed her Sappho because she was a strong and independent poet like Sappho (Gidlow, 1986, pp. 72–75). While Gidlow kept the nickname in Montreal, when she moved to New York she asked Lucien Lacouture (who had also moved to New York to study at the Fashion Academy) not to call her Sappho anymore as the name belonged to her Montreal life (Gidlow, 1986, p. 131). In Montreal, Gidlow worked as a secretary at a shipping company, which didn’t pay much. Mills bought Gidlow clothes and took her to plays and operas she couldn’t afford on her salary. He also taught Gidlow about alternative cultures and queer history and introduced her to writers like Oscar Wilde and Charles Baudelaire whose “glamorous sinfulness and metaphysical retreat from middle-class living” impressed her and provided a way for her to think about how she might create her own life as a lesbian writer and poet (Gidlow, 1986, p. 71).
In 1917, Gidlow and Mills started a newspaper called Les Mouches Fantastiques, which contemporary Montreal researcher and writer Lucy Uprichard (2019) has described as a mixed anti-war and cultural criticism magazine. It featured editorials, poetry, and the writing of people Gidlow and Mills admired. Les Mouches Fantastiques ran for five issues and became what Uprichard believes to be the first ever explicitly queer publication in North America. The final issue of Les Mouches Fantastiques was published in early 1920, a few months before Gidlow moved to New York, where she would write and publish On A Grey Thread , her first full-length collection and the very first book of lesbian poetry in North America (Uprichard, 2019). Elsa Gidlow lived a life as a lesbian feminist writer and poet decades before homosexuality was decriminalized and feminism had become part of public thinking. As Uprichard writes, “It took guts to be a woman like Elsa Gidlow” (Uprichard, 2019). Of course, the same can be said about Rosewell Mills and Lucien Lacouture.
Auntie Léa’s friendship with Lucien Lacouture was important to her – so important that she almost lost her job as a youth worker at the Young Women’s Hebrew Association (YWHA) over it. One of the wealthy women who bought clothes designed by Lacouture was on the Board of Directors running the YWHA. When the board member found out that Auntie Léa was friends with Lacouture, she was upset. Reflecting the homophobia of the era, she didn’t think Auntie Léa should be friends with a gay man. As Auntie Léa explains:
One fine day, [she] stopped by Lacouture’s; he asked if she knew me, telling her I was a very good friend. So, she came to see me at the office, all upset despite her furs and her very elegant little hat [even her furs and hat didn’t prevent her from being upset]: “Do you know Lucien Lacouture?” “Of course, he’s one of my friends.” “Do you know who he is?” I pretended not to understand, and said, “Well, he’s a tailor.” That’s not what I mean. Do you know what he is?” “No, tell me.” “He’s not… like a man.” “Really… it’s true that he’s very kind, cooks well, and loves beautiful music…” And she told me that as long as I worked there, I shouldn’t associate with him (Lacelle and Roback, 2005, p. 132).
Auntie Léa had no intention of ending her friendship with Lacouture. She decided to speak to two women who volunteered in the Jewish community and ask them to speak to the board member who was upset. They agreed to do so and reminded the board member that Auntie Léa had been hired based on her abilities, not on who she associated with. The matter was dropped, but the story reveals the kind of discrimination gay men living in Montreal in the 1930s faced. When Lucien Lacouture died at the young age of 39, the evenings full of talk about books, music and wine that Auntie Léa loved so much came to an end. They did not last forever, as Auntie Léa had wished, but they did last for many years.
Another person Auntie Léa met while working at His Majesty’s Theatre was an actor named Madame Dax. She was part of a touring French troupe from Paris and would end up playing an important role in Auntie Léa’s life.
While she was working at the box office, Auntie Léa always had a book on hand to read when she wasn’t busy. She particularly enjoyed reading French literature – Zola, or Proust, Anatole France, and all of the authors who were on the “Index” books that had been blacklisted or censored by the Church. Madame Dax would see Auntie Léa in the box office and ask her about the books she was reading. One day, when Auntie Léa was visiting Madame Dax in her dressing room, she asked Auntie Léa, “Why don’t you go study in France? It’s cheaper than here. In Grenoble, there’s a very good Chair in literature” (Lacelle and Roback, 2005, pp. 114–115). Auntie Léa loved the idea and began saving for a one-way boat ticket to France and enough money to live on for a year.
When Auntie Léa left Montreal to study at the Université de Grenoble she knew she would need to find work once she arrived in France but wasn’t worried about how this would happen. On the boat, she became friendly with three women. One was a woman from Spain who was travelling with a young American woman Auntie Léa’s age, 22 years-old. The third woman was an older aunt, the tia, who was chaperoning them. These new acquaintances would end up changing how Auntie Léa began her first trip to Europe. As she told Nicole Lacelle:
Maria had an American, English-speaking boyfriend who wanted to marry her, but at that time, marriage with a gringo was out of the question. So, they needed to get her out of that environment and go to Spain, where they had family. We were on the De Grace , I’ll always remember it. What fun we had on that boat! Once we arrived in Paris, the aunt asked me if I wanted to translate for her; she needed to buy a silver table service from a jeweller on Rue Rochechouart. She had the address and the name; I looked at the name and thought, “They must be Jews!” … So, we get to the shop, I start looking around, and then I drop a comment in Yiddish (Lacelle and Roback, 2005, p. 115).
Auntie Léa’s (border-crossing) use of Yiddish piqued the jeweller’s interest, and he asked her where she was from. When Auntie Léa told him she was from Canada, the jeweller couldn’t believe she spoke Yiddish. Auntie Léa told him she came from a Jewish family that spoke Yiddish at home and established a connection with the jeweller based on their shared Jewishness. When Tia made her selection – some cutlery and a platter – the jeweller sold it to her at a very good price. Tia was so happy that she invited Auntie Léa to join them in Spain. Her classes in Grenoble didn’t start until February, so Auntie Léa took the train with Tia and her family and went to Spain. She had a wonderful time.
My goodness, I lived it, my dear; I lived it so deeply, I will never forget it, never. First, we went up Mount Tibidabo, in the mountains, to a small guesthouse … Then we went down to Barcelona. For me, it was the first time, Lea Roback, from Beauport, was entering a house of “the super-rich.” The wallpaper wasn’t paper; it was brocade. Oh! It was marvelous, marvelous! The furniture, all carved, it was extraordinarily luxurious. But Maria, no matter what, refused to marry a Spaniard. So, they went back to America. Poor Tia , she cried so much; but the silverware calmed her down a bit—she always had her silverware. Maria, later on, ended up marrying her American, but I lost touch with her; I stayed in Grenoble. Then, in 1926, the franc dropped to two and a half cents! (Lacelle and Roback, 2005, pp. 116–117).
When Auntie Léa had calculated how much money she’d need to stay in Grenoble, she didn’t expect the franc to drop as much as it did. She didn’t have enough money to finish the degree she was enrolled in, so she went down to Nice to work. There she met two middle-class women from England who tried to speak French with Auntie Léa. When Auntie Léa decided to put them at ease by speaking to them in English, they asked her where she was from. When she said Canada, they exclaimed, “Oh, she belongs to us!” This shocked and angered Auntie Léa so much that from that moment on, she always told British tourists she was American. She hated the idea that the British thought Canada “belonged” to Britain. When Lacelle asked Auntie Léa if she was politically active in Grenoble, she said:
No. There wasn’t even a decent union; the glovemakers worked from home, in small shops. There was felt and fabric production, but the large manufacturers—brocade, wool—were in Lyon. It was very conservative, even royalist; there were royalists in Grenoble, three families. The main industry was tourism: skiing, the valley, and the beautiful mountains. No, I wasn’t politically active at all there; I was studying (Lacelle and Roback, 2005, pp. 116–117).
When Auntie Léa discovered she didn’t have enough money to finish her studies in Grenoble, she wrote to her grandfather Berel Steinhouse who sent her money to take a ship back to Montreal. Arriving back in Montreal was disappointing. Because of the censorship practices in Quebec, which were the result of the strong influence and control exerted by the Catholic church in partnership with the provincial government, there was no theatre, and all of the books Auntie Léa wanted to read were blacklisted. The Catholic church had created a list of books that it considered dangerous to the faith and morals of their parishioners and published the titles in a document entitled Index Librorum Prohibitorum, Index of Prohibited Books, often simply referred to as “the Index.” Feeling limited by life under censorship, Auntie Léa left Montreal and went to New York, where she worked at a variety of jobs. In her interview with Nicole Lacelle, Auntie Léa talked about two of them. The first was a job as a salesperson in a women’s clothing store. The second was a receptionist job at a law firm. She lost both those jobs, which didn’t upset her at all as it gave her more free time to read.
I lost [the first] job because I told a woman, “That’s not a dress for you, it makes you look big. You need stripes, madam!” The manager overheard me and said, “You don’t have to tell her how to dress, she wants a dress, sell it to her.” We got into an argument, and she told me to take $4 from the cash register and never come back. I took my $4, I was happy, and I went to the library on the corner of 42nd Street and 5th Avenue. I had a fantastic afternoon.
After that, I got a job at a law firm, near Wall Street. I was a receptionist; one day, the switchboard operator was out, and the lawyers asked me to take over. It was an old switchboard with dozens of cords! I had never done that in my life, so I said, “It’s impossible, I’ve never done this.” “Ah!” they explained, “you pull this and plug that, watch the red light, the green light, it’s surely not complicated.” So, I gave it a try. Unplugged everything, but one poor lawyer—I cut off his call; he came down and yelled at me. I told him, “I told you I had never done this,” but he gave me $15 and fired me. I was happy, I had my afternoon free, and I thought, “Hey, I’ll write to Henri [Harry, her older brother]” (Lacelle and Roback, 2005, pp. 117–118).
It must have been a sad letter, Auntie Léa later told Sophie Bissonnette, because when Uncle Harry wrote back, he invited Auntie Léa to join him and his wife Betty in Berlin. Uncle Harry, who was called Harry in English and Henri in French, was studying medicine there and working in hospitals at night to pay the bills. Uncle Harry had decided to go to Berlin to study because the courses were very rigorous, and it was less expensive than attending medical school in Montreal or New York. “In Germany,” Auntie Léa told Nicole Lacelle, “he could complete his entire medical degree for what it would have cost him for just one year at Columbia” (Lacelle and Roback, 2005, pp. 118). As well, there was a quota of Jewish students accepted into McGill University in Montreal, making admission to medical school difficult for Harry (Bénesty-Sroka, 1996, pp. 83).
In his letter to Auntie Léa, Uncle Harry said, “Find yourself $90, take the boat and come. I’ve got a room with a very kind lady in the old quarter of Berlin; we’ll put a curtain between two small beds, we’ll manage” (Lacelle and Roback, 2005, pp. 118).
Auntie Léa was thrilled to receive Uncle Harry’s invitation. She asked her grandfather for enough money for a third-class ticket and got on a ship to Berlin. Her plans were to finish her university degree in Germany. It was 1929, and Auntie Léa was about to witness the impact of the Great Depression and the rise of Nazism in Berlin. It would deepen her early understanding of the antisemitism she experienced growing up in Beauport and Montreal, and it would be the beginning of a political education that would inform the direction her life would take for the next 30 years.
Léa Roback
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