Alon again, naturally
In a candid new memoir, Alon Ozery documents his big midlife change. Emily Waugh breaks bread with the star baker turned podcaster and author
It was so exhausting behaving like you think other people want you to behave.
ALON OZERY
“Alon, are you gay?” No one had ever asked this before of Alon Ozery, then a 43-year-old husband and father of three, but his therapist had stunned him for several moments by doing just that. “I don’t know,” replied the co-owner of the popular Ozery Family Bakery brand and Parallel restaurant.
What Ozery did know was that there was an unsettling disconnect between who he felt he was and who he felt the world wanted him to be. Growing up shy and anxious in Israel before moving to Canada at 16, Ozery struggled under the weight of perceived expectations, trying to appease the grownups in his life by being the responsible eldest son and a good student.
Being “well behaved,” he says, often meant navigating the differences between his father’s less-structured Yemeni Jewish culture and his Protestant mother’s Victorian “children should be seen and not heard” approach. He remembers his father and two younger brothers, Guy and Aharon, laughing as everyone else tore into the shared kubaneh bread while Alon, the “British brother,” ate it with a knife and fork.
As for Ozery’s sexual identity, “I knew it, but I didn’t know it,” he says. “I buried it.” Instead, he pushed through life feeling increasingly trapped within the narrow scope of the hetero-normative messages he had always tried to listen to. At the time, he credited the persistent knot in his stomach to the stresses of running the business and having three children in four years.
“It was so exhausting behaving like you think other people want you to behave,” says Ozery, who ended up living in the basement pretending everything was fine, while his wife slept upstairs. “Eventually I thought, I can’t do this anymore.”
Soon after Ozery was confronted by his therapist in 2013, he had his first sexual experience with a man and began the process of coming out to his wife and family. Now 52, he has finally found the freedom that comes with being comfortable in one’s own skin. He doesn’t feel he has to explain why he does things now; he just does them. “It’s a very freeing place to be,” he says.
Buoyed by his new outlook, Ozery continues to expand his comfort zone, doing things he didn’t think were possible. Most recently he stepped back from the day-to-day operations of the bakery and restaurant to start a podcast called “Upfront Toronto” and to write a candid memoir, “Even the Sidewalk Could Tell: How I Came Out to My Wife, My Three Children, and the World,” which chronicles his evolution from disconnected child to balanced, authentic man.
Ozery’s son’s first response to finding out his parents were separating because his father was gay was, “Will we still have family dinners on Friday?” which makes sense since one constant along Ozery’s journey has been the stable presence of family and food. With two kids now at university and one still at home, Ozery remains close with his ex-wife, who still joins him and the kids at the weekly dinners with the Ozery brothers, their partners and kids and “saba” (Hebrew for grandfather). Saturday morning, the brothers meet again for coffee in the east end, where all three now live less than five kilometres apart. The other nights he is cooking at home or dining out with his partner, Sam.
And, of course, there is always bread, which Ozery first learned to make with his Yemeni aunt and grandmother and is the foundation of the family’s successful business. “Having fresh bread brings people together,” he says. “I cannot imagine not having it in my life.”
What’s next for Ozery who, by his own admission, can only stay put for a day before finding something new to get involved with? “I don’t know,” he replies, though he does want to put his energy and mental capacity toward bettering society in some way, which is why he’s donating 50 per cent of the book proceeds to the Toronto LGBTQ youth organization Friends of Ruby.
“My answer is, I don’t know,” he says. And he’s OK with that.