was then fifteen years old. It was one of my first times in New York, and I was smitten by its unlimited possibilities. I had come with my friend, Rhoda Pomp, and while we were exploring the Village, feeling like characters in an adventure story, we came across a poster saying that Woody Guthrie was giving a Benefit performance that night. I was thrilled. Woody Guthrie was one of my favourite singers, a folk hero. I had read his autobiography Bound For Glory and his hard travelling was my inspiration. I had to hear him. But alas, when we got to the hall we discovered we didn’t have enough money for tickets; we hadn’t even noticed the price. As I retreated down the street, bitterly disappointed, I couldn’t believe my eyes. There was Woody Guthrie himself walking toward us. I recognised him from the poster. On an impulse we turned and followed him. He went up a staircase at the back of the hall and disappeared behind the stage door. I stood there dissolved in bliss, intoxicated by a rush of excitement, by the magic of New York. I couldn’t bring myself to leave that door. Rhoda Pomp and I sat on the metal steps, hoping for a miracle. About half an hour later Woody came out onto the landing to smoke a cigarette. We held our breaths. Suddenly he saw us.
“What you girls doing down there; come on up here and say hello.” Feeling like we were climbing the stairway to paradise, we clattered up the steps. I explained that we didn’t have enough money for tickets. “I’ll fix that,” he said, “you just come with me.” He led us through the door and to our surprise, right onto the stage. Putting an arm around each of us he introduced us as “Woody Guthrie and his Bobby Sox Brigade.” I don’t know how we survived the joy. He got us chairs and we sat in a corner of the stage feeling blessed. Later he took us for “eats,” “Gotta keep my Brigade in eats,” he said. The story was a winner.
The last time I saw Bob Dylan in New York was at Gerde’s Folk City, where I had first seen him. Shimon and I were there to check out performers for The Finjan. The word quickly got around that someone was booking for a club. Bob Dylan was talking to us when several musicians approached Shimon, eager to have a word with him. “Your husband sure is famous,” he said, impressed.
If for me The Finjan was a substitute for travel; for Ronit it was fertile soil for her responses to life to take root. If for me the musicians had a special magic, for her they were just people who slept in the bed opposite her bed and sat beside her at the kitchen table. When they began to appear on mega stages celebrated by mega audiences she deduced that everything was accessible. Having observed them so closely took the mystique out of their success. She had watched them picking up their guitars like this, playing them like that, it was all in the realm of possibility. No one fazed her, no achievement intimidated her. Soon she was singing on stage with Shimon. She had a pretty voice and could sing in harmony. Then she was asking for her own guitar. But here she ran into difficulty. Neither Shimon nor I were eager to teach her skills. Shimon believed that if she wanted to learn anything badly enough she would do it on her own, just as he had. I didn’t adhere to his philosophy but was simply otherwise engaged. She developed a quiet resolve, an extension of the determination she had first exhibited as a foetus, surviving the jungles of Africa and the storms of the Atlantic. Life outside the womb was comparatively easy.
During the first year of The Finjan she asked me to teach her to read. I refused, telling her that if she learned to read at four, she’d be bored when she had to learn at six. She devised her own plan. She asked my friend Dorothy, who was a primary school teacher, to lend her some first grade reading books. Dorothy was happy to oblige. Dorothy visited often and Ronit would wait patiently for the opportunity to ask her what different words meant. Soon she was asking anyone who showed an interest. Defeated by her determination, Irelented and helped her.
It was the same some years later when she made the sudden decision to learn pottery. I strewed her path with obstacles, telling her I knew no one who did ceramics, had no idea where she could be taught and doubted if such a place existed. Undaunted, she consulted the telephone book. Under “Ceramics” she found several pages of listings, probably factories and shops making and selling dishes. “Do you teach nine year old girls ceramics?” she asked each one in turn. Most of them had no idea what she wanted, many were French and didn’t understand English, but she persisted. Finally at the end of the list she found “Victoria Ceramics.” Yes, they taught nine year old girls ceramics but she would have to come early Saturday mornings to the other end of town. I hated the idea of getting up early, especially on Saturdays, but I had to acknowledge such perseverance. Each Saturday morning I struggled out of bed, took Ronit to her ceramics class, waited for her, and brought her home. My sacrifices were rewarded years later, in London, when Ronit made almost all our dishes, including jugs, ash trays and even casseroles.
Shimon eventually bought her a guitar but, in accordance with his principles, resisted teaching her how to play it. Although I didn’t think so at the time, perhaps he was right because through her own resolution she learned to play the guitar, the recorder and the flute and to read and write music. She discovered that if you want to do something all you have to do is do it. The Finjan years were at the heart of that discovery.
Four
The Healing of Leonard Cohen
When Ronit was eleven, I scraped together enough money to spend several weeks in Ireland. By then I had completed a Masters thesis on the well-known Irish poet and dramatist, W.B. Yeats, and had begun a doctorate. I decided to attend the Yeats Summer School in Sligo and travel in Ireland with research as my excuse. I had been growing increasingly restless. The Finjan was no longer, and I was straining at the bit, yearning for travel. Whereas Shimon thrived on predictability, I withered. He needed home. I needed travel. Without rancour or bitterness we had been steadily growing in different directions.
The trip to Ireland heightened my longing for the road. I returned to Montreal even more restless, unprepared for what awaited me there. Without warning Shimon had left me and was living with someone else. Although I understood his motivations, I was devastated. Trapped, bereft, penniless, I spent the next six months chained to circumstances I was powerless to alter, my travel dreams shattered by unrelenting reality. Then suddenly everything changed. I received a three year Canada Council award, plus travel grant, to complete my doctorate at the university of my choice. My ticket to ride was magically reissued. I packed one bag for myself, one for Ronit and, leaving Shimon with whatever worldly possessions I had, Ronit and I took off for England.
The only material thing I regretted leaving behind was my kitchen with its “wall of fame.” When Ronit was two we had moved into a larger flat where she and I remained until leaving for England. The flat had a remarkable kitchen. It had a special energy, a special ambience, a well-being where things flowed, things happened. It was spacious, yet snug, with a wall of windows overlooking a wild field, a tract of unspoiled land prohibited to builders, a rare event in the bosom of a city. In summer the field was filled with flowers, birds and sunshine, making one feel expansive, extending the kitchen into a macrocosm of possibilities. In winter it was blanketed with snow, long shadows and cold stars, the kitchen withdrawing into an interior landscape, a secret refuge, cosy, warm, intimate. The skies were never still, moving from serene to angry, blue or grey or pink in the day, black with soft moons or streaks of Northern Lights at night. It was a vista conducive to discoveries, revelations, creations. The kitchen table was its heart, generating life, providing a continuous feast. It was around the kitchen table, folded into black velvet skies, drawn by a circle of candle light into compelling universes, that I fell in love with music, with musicians, with poetry, with friends; it was here that I dreamed my dreams of travel; that I prepared long loving dinners; that I did my work, planning choreography, reading and revising for university exams, toiling into the night on overdue term papers. I remember Ronit waking late one night to find me at the kitchen table immersed in books, notes and typewriter, my eyes strained with the effort of completing a paper due next day. “Papers, papers, papers,” she wailed, “I’m never going to university!” But the kitchen gave me energy, stamina, strength to persevere. It was my perfect place.
Late one morning,
