Cartoonist specialized in the gentle lampoon
Rusins Kaufmanis survived war wounds, time in a prisoner of war camp and a battle with tuberculosis to emerge as a perceptive political artist with a gentle touch and an ability to render the most complex issues understandable. And funny.
Kaufmanis, editorial cartoonist for the Ottawa Citizen from 1963 to 1986, died last month in Victoria. He was 94.
In his obituary, his family described Kaufmanis as “an artist, a soldier, a philosopher, an author, a scavenger, a sculptor, a loving husband, father, and grandfather.”
Kaufmanis was born in 1925 in Riga, Latvia. While he was a teenager in the Second World War, the country was invaded first by the Soviet army, then by the Germans in 1941, when Kaufmanis was taken from high school and assigned to a Latvian army unit under German command.
He was shot and seriously wounded on Christmas Eve 1944 and spent months in a field hospital that was seized by United States troops in 1945. Kaufmanis spent 11 months in the POW camp before being released in the summer of 1946. Given a choice of returning to Soviet-occupied Latvia or to remain in Germany, he chose to stay in Germany, working for a war relief office.
He immigrated to Canada in 1947, first finding working on Ontario Hydro crews before contracting tuberculosis, which landed him in a Hamilton sanatorium for two years. Upon release in 1952, he returned to Ontario Hydro in Toronto, where he also began to take up drawing, which had been a pastime in his youth.
He sold his first sketch to the
Globe and Mail in 1960.
In Toronto, he met a fellow Latvian, the former Gundega Kravis, a dental student, and the two were married. He delighted in telling acquaintances that the Latvian name “Gundega” can be translated as “Buttercup.” Dr. Gundega Kaufmanis had a long career as a dentist in Ottawa.
Rusins joined the Citizen in 1963, telling people jokingly that he was hired because of his “slightly brutal” method of portraying colourful former mayor Charlotte Whitton.
During his 26-year career, Rusins produced thousands of cartoons, mostly gentle lampoons of the powerful and the usual suspects in the nation’s capital, but he avoided the mean-spirited or declarative styles adopted by some contemporaries.
Colleague Terry Mosher, the legendary political cartoonist who operated under the pen name “Aislin,” remembered he used to jokingly call Kaufmanis the “shady Latvian.”
“He once said to me, ‘I tend to see things in shades as opposed to straight black and white,’ ” Mosher recalled. “He was very amused by (the moniker).”
Former Citizen publisher Russell Mills recalled Kaufmanis was not a proponent of the “biting, satirical” style of cartooning.
“It was more of a thoughtful style, a witty way of looking at things.”
Upon his retirement, Kaufmanis told former Citizen columnist Dave Brown he was leaving to “make a vacancy for someone in need of work,” while he was going to step up his amateur field naturalist hobby and try to solve the puzzle as to “why there are no magpies in Eastern Canada.”
His family noted Kaufmanis never lost his sense of humour.
“He remained interested in politics, people, and especially humour to the very end. In his last week, when initially told by a doctor that they would be able to perform surgery on his broken hip, he looked up from his hospital bed with a wide-eyed and puzzled look and asked, “Are you sure that is a good use of taxpayers’ money?”
He is survived by Gundega, his wife of 64 years, by his son Eric Kaufmanis and wife Lisa, by his daughter Anna Edels and husband Chris, and by granddaughters Sophie, Rayna, and Juliana.