Dora and Irving — a love story
The objects of romance were a staple of my parents’ 50-year marriage, but it was the mutual care and support that deepened their bond
“Do you want me to tell you how I met your mother?” my father, Irving, asked me with touching eagerness. My mother had died a few months earlier and now, at regular intervals, he would ask me that same question. By now, I knew the story basics, but he always brought in new details. I loved to hear it, and he loved to tell it — both of us appreciating that this was his way of being with my mother again.
I teased him about being such a romantic, but he was. From the moment he first saw my mother walking on College St. with several girlfriends, he knew she was the one. “See that girl over there,” my father said to his friends. “I’m going to marry that girl.” His friends hooted, telling him Dora Ber was already en- gaged. My father didn’t say another word, but just watched Dora until she disappeared from sight. Sooner or later, he would likely see her again given that most of Eastern European Jewish immigrant survivors lived in Toronto’s
Kensington Market neighbourhood. Maybe then, with any luck, her engagement would be off.
The law of averages was more in my father’s favour than he dreamed. My mother had a history of breaking engagements for reasons she could articulate — the man already had wandering eyes or was stingy — and reasons she couldn’t — they were just not meant to be together.
Several months later, he learned that her engagement was off. He was on Centre Island and saw my mother kicking a soccer ball with four young men — her brothers — he was thankful to hear from his friend. And so this skinny man with wavy brown hair and a confident swagger made his way to this vivacious young woman with classic movie star good looks, and asked if he and his friend could borrow the ball for a short time.
They chatted, and my mother impulsively invited him to her birthday party the following week. He arrived with a small bottle of Chanel No. 5, and they began to date, discovering they had much in common beyond their similar background. Both were extroverted, social, adventurous, lively and had a strong sense of humour.
On a bench in Queen’s Park, my father asked her to be his girl and they were married on Oct. 19, 1952. It was a large wedding with several bridesmaids, groomsmen and flower girls. The only sad note for my father was that his beloved parents and sister were not there, for only he and his older brother Jack had survived the Holocaust, unlike my mother whose whole family had.
To save money for their own home, my father worked overtime as a spring assembler in a mattress factory and my mother as a button finisher in a children’s clothing factory.
By the time they saved enough for a down payment, my mother was pregnant with me. By her sixth month, she was too ill to keep working. She was diagnosed with toxemia, hospitalized immediately and remained there for five weeks un- til a scheduled caesarean.
My father moved into their new home alone.
On the day before the caesarean, one of the doctors handed my father a permission form on which he had to designate whose life to save — my mother’s or the baby’s — if the surgery went sour. My mother wanted him to choose the baby, but he couldn’t, unable to bear the prospect of losing my mother.
The surgery seemingly went fine. My mother was conscious, only given an epidural. “A princess,” one nurse said. My mother was relieved. But relief turned quickly to distress as she began to hemorrhage.
After surgery again and three blood transfusions, she woke up in her room and spotted my father and his brother Jack sitting on metal chairs beside her bed. “Where are your parents?” she asked as she looked around the room.
They stared at her, stunned. “Your parents, you mean?” my father stuttered out. “No!” she said. “Your parents were just here.” She told them she saw their parents sitting on a wooden bench and described them. Their father, Pinchas, had brown hair, a small moustache and wore a dark suit. Their mother, Surah, was plump with short red curly hair and was wearing a print dress. “Don’t worry,” Surah told her in Yiddish. “You have a healthy baby girl and you will get well.”
Suddenly, my mother remembered that my father’s parents were dead, and went silent. My father was still too shocked to say a word. My mother had described how his parents looked and dressed. But how? She had never seen a picture of them.
My father didn’t know what to think. Had she seen their ghosts? Or was this a hallucination? In any case, it was a good omen, and the kind of blessing my father had longed for from his parents at the time of his marriage. My parents named me after my grandmother. A few months later, my father received a photo of his family taken when he was only a few months old from his aunt in Argentina. His parents’ appearance was exactly as my mother had pictured them.
A week later, my mother was discharged from the hospital, but I remained in an incubator. “Every mother goes home with her baby, but not me!” she said, dismayed.
Two weeks passed and I still didn’t gain weight and my parents implored the doctor to al- low them to take me to their new home. The doctor relented. There, they proudly said, I was double my weight in a few weeks. My mother already knew how romantic my father was, but her love for him intensified as he helped out with me and the household — unlike, she said, the husbands of her friends. After a long day at work, he came home, sterilized the bottles for my formula, fed me and handwashed my dirty diapers.
The paraphernalia of romance is nice — the flowers, gifts, wining and dining on birthdays and anniversaries — and that remained a staple of their 50-year marriage, but their mutual loving care and support was what deepened their bond.
My mother savoured the traditional role of staying home raising a family and being a baleboste — Yiddish — for a good homemaker. She and my father had their childhoods cut short by the Second World War, losing the comforts and security of home life, at times questioning if they would even survive to have that themselves. When they did, they appreciated every moment of it.
In the last months of my mother’s life, when she knew she was dying, even though it was excruciating for her to stand for more than a few minutes because of the lack of the circulation to her legs due to peripheral artery disease, she still insisted on making my father’s favourite dishes.
Her heart was enlarged from rheumatic fever she’d had as a child and she developed congestive heart failure in her mid-40s, followed by the peripheral artery disease.
My mother died at the age of 72 and my father was lost and lonely without her. He yearned for her and their shared life.
In his later years, as his Alzheimer’s advanced, he no longer remembered that she had died, repeatedly asking, “Where is Dora? When is she coming back?” and calling out her name in his sleep. He couldn’t identify his aging face in pictures or in the mirror. But he still could identify himself and my mother in their wedding picture. “That’s me,” he would happily say, pointing to himself, “and that’s Dora. That’s us.”
In the last months of my mother’s life, even though it was excruciating for her to stand, she still insisted on making my father’s favourite dishes and desserts