Irving Abella: a colossus who never left his roots

Three years ago, I attended the funeral of a friend with Irving Abella and his wife, Rosie. As we approached the synagogue on a sunsplashed summer afternoon, Itchie, as he was known, stopped, lingered and studied the murmuring throng.

“My people,” he said softly. “My people.” Itchie wasn't delivering a sermon. He was acknowledging, in his way, the faith at the heart of his busy, consequential life, which ended on July 3 when that fierce heart gave out.

Irving Martin Abella was many things: historian, educator, advocate. Member of the Order of Canada and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Father and husband to his gifted partner, who served 17 years on the Supreme Court of Canada, retiring to grateful applause last year.

Itchie was a Jew. More cultural than devout, he wore his identity as comfortably as his woollen pullover. None is Too Many, his groundbreaking book (with Harold Troper), revealed how Canada blithely refused to admit Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. A Coat of Many Colours was a lively history of Canadian Jewry.

He was president of the Canadian Jewish Congress, whose purpose he celebrated and whose end he resented. He pursued Nazi war criminals, supported liberal immigration, developed labour history, and pioneered Canadian Jewish studies. “He was the pre-eminent Canadian Jewish leader,” says Bernie Farber, his esteemed colleague.

Of Abella's scholarship you will read in obituaries. What you won't read is how his Jewishness shaped him. It was in his bones. It was in his stout support of Israel. He had a keen — sometimes comical — instinct for garden-variety anti-semites, whom he found behind every tree.

In discussion, he never invoked the Holocaust to win an argument. Disagreements were not personal.

Like many Jews of his generation, he refused to visit Germany, until he did, escorted sensitively through Jewish Berlin by Peter Boehm, then Canada's ambassador.

If there was one touchstone of his Jewishness, though, it was food. Neither he nor Rosie cooked. They ate out or carried in, favouring blintzes, schnitzel, chopped liver and challah. They boycotted vegetables and outlawed leftovers.

Itchie fondly recalled Abella's Lunch, the family's popular dairy restaurant on Spadina Avenue in Toronto. His father worked behind the counter, his mother in the kitchen. He washed dishes and waited tables. They served Jewish garment workers. “The food was terrific,” he said, “and the menu constant.” He recalled pea soup and potato latkes (Tuesdays), vegetable soup and salmon patties (Thursdays), cream of mushroom soup and gefilte fish “maybe to attract some Catholics” (Fridays).

For Itchie, food was identity; it was also humour. When I argued Montreal bagels were best, he scoffed: “The Cohens may be our high priests (of Judaism), but they are not high priests of cuisine.”

There were heated discussions over smoked meat. Among us it became the subject of Talmudic interpretation. Lean or fatty? Machinesliced or carved?

This existential discussion reached its zenith — or its nadir — at a “smoked meat summit” hosted by David Jacobson, the congenial U.S. ambassador to Canada. In pursuit of cross-border comity, he invited us to bring our own variation to his residence — pastrami, corned beef or some regional facsimile. Of course, the only choice was smoked meat from Schwartz's in Montreal.

Over the years, Abella served big helpings of wisdom. “Let's eat our way out of depression,” he said after Donald Trump was elected. “That's the Jewish way.”

He was annoyed when Canada banned fabled Hebrew National hotdogs from ballparks because their contents were suspect. “I enjoyed the dogs far better than the game,” he said. (Baseball was a passion.) Asked how he was celebrating “Hot Pastrami Day,” he moaned: “Sadly I'm back in Ottawa. Will mark the day at Tim Hortons.”

Itchie Abella was a joy: owlish, modest, self-effacing, unfailingly kind, a Jewish colossus who never left his roots.

Oh, what a pleasure it was to dine at his groaning table. The feast, intellectual or otherwise, was memorable. And laughter and love were always on the menu.