Lilian: Lilian

By Giveon Cornfield

Interesting books are populated by exceptional people. Drama begins when social, political and psychological conditions are out of the ordinary. Nature was in no mood for understatement when she created Lilian Kert Cornfield, whose eventful and near century-long voyage through life would be hard to find between the covers of any novel. Most women want to be loved for what they are, while men seek recognition for what they accomplish. Lilian came to Jerusalem soon after the end of Ottoman rule, where she met and married her sabra husband Gaalya. She broke the mold as a career woman long before that became fashionable. She was a progressive nutritionist, ever innovative, always seeking out what was best in the other person. She refused to take no for an answer: no position she applied for was denied her, and when she decided to learn to drive at age sixty, doggedly repeated the test six times until her license was granted (perhaps it should not have been).

Lilian was too busy all her life to pay attention to the clock. Well into her eighties, she swam in the ocean daily, summer and winter. She observed the aging and deaths of her contemporaries with clinical detachment, as if she herself was exempt. She participated actively in the rebuilding of modern Israel, served as a dietician in UNRRA during WWII, and was wounded in an aerial attack on the IDF base where she was working as a volunteer during the War of Independence.

Teacher, journalist, author of a dozen best-selling cookbooks, this larger-than-life personality, hailed as Israels First Lady of Cuisine, has left a lasting legacy.

Cover drawing by L. Shertok, Giv at Brenner, 1948
Cover design by Marion Cornfield

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781479728633

Giveon Cornfield

GIVEON CORNFIELD, PH.D. came to Israel (then Palestine) as a child in 1933 and was educated there. He was a member of the Hagana before WWII, during which he served in the Royal Air Force in North Africa. After the war, he rejoined Hagana, which was incorporated into the Israel Defence Forces in 1948, and served in the IDF. In 1952 he moved with his family to Canada, where he worked in the automotive and broadcasting fields. He founded BAROQUE RECORDS in Montreal, later incorporated into ORION MASTER RECORDINGS* following his move to the USA. He has produced over 1,000 albums of classical music on his own and other labels. In addition to hundreds of articles, recordings and concert reviews, Cornfield’s books include LILIAN - ISRAEL’S FIRST LADY OF CUISINE and NOTE-PERFECT (Thirty years in classical music recordings), also available from XLIBRIS. * WWW.NAXOSMUSIC LIBRARY.COM/ORION WWW.CLASSICSONLINE.COM/ORION

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2

GRANDMA BERTHA

E ven in her eighties, Bertha Kert had a regal presence. The occasion that evokes this memory was the wedding of her youngest son, Richard. At the age of fifty, and with a lifetime of dissipation behind him, Richard the Chicken-Hearted had finally broken down and decided to ‘get respectable’ by tying the knot. There was nothing unusual about this, since Richard was merely following precedent: His older brothers had married at forty and fifty, respectively. In the latter case, Laddie Kert had cohabited with his Edythe for two decades before making an honest woman of her. The Kerts were never young men in a hurry, not by any stretch. The very formal affair was held in the ballroom of the Sheraton Mount Royal Hotel in downtown Montreal. It took place three-quarters of a century—chronologically—though in effect light-years after Bertha had come to Canada as a young girl in the late nineteenth century, to be married at the age of sixteen.

Richard and Myrna’s wedding it may have been, but the star of the event was unquestionably the grand old lady. In a long light-pink gown and with only a slight tremor of her still handsome head held high, she proceeded in stately manner down the line of monkey-suited, top-hatted ushers. Her grandson Giveon, one of the ushers and not all that much younger than the bridegroom, recalled this as the first and last time he had ever donned formal wear.

All seven of Bertha’s children, four daughters and three sons, were present, as were most but not all grandchildren, having scattered, wandering-Jew fashion, to the four corners of the earth. It was a splendid occasion indeed for the old matriarch; the absence of her late husband Bernard who had sired the tribe was hardly noticed. Not that it would have made much difference if he were still alive: ‘B.D.’, as Bernard was known, was remembered by most of those present as a shadowy figure.

He was a Litvak, a Jew from Kovno in Lithuania. This town, for those interested in the history of modern anarchy, has entered the history books by virtue of it also being the birthplace of notorious anarchist Emma Goldman, who was deported in 1919 from the United States for unpatriotic activities. By some strange coincidence, both these Litvaks ended their days in Canada. Immigration laws in that country, which had traditionally been population-poor, were more relaxed than those of its neighbor to the south.

There were famous Jewish centers of learning in Riga and Vilnius, the capitals of Latvia and neighboring Lithuania. Formerly adjacent provinces of the Russian empire, these were little countries which had enjoyed brief independence between the two world wars, only to be swallowed up again by the Soviet empire. Bernard, however, was not a scholarly type, and thus grew up without a traditional Jewish education. Having learned to read and write, he acquired rudimentary arithmetic, enough to calculate simple commercial transactions, and considered his education complete. Like so many of their generation, Bernard’s parents Yossl and Rivka were anxious to leave Russia for a better life in America, but they had only enough money to take them and their older son Nathan as far as England. Bernard, black sheep of the family, was left behind with a vague promise to help him join the family when circumstances permitted. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, the great push west was in full swing in the New World. Of the United States and Canada, the latter was more amenable to taking in immigrants, whose shaky command of English was overlooked. Since they had no real preference in the matter, Yossl and Rivka became new Canadians.

It was a few years before Bernard was able to scrape together enough money for passage and joined his older brother Nathan in Glasgow. Nathan was doing reasonably well, and kept putting off moving to Canada, where his parents had gone. After Bernard moved in with him, things began to change. It is unlikely that the name Kert with its conveniently Celtic ring was the one with which the brothers were born; if anyone knew what it had been before, they kept it to themselves. The younger brother, who until then went by the name of Berl, became Bernard David Kert. Thus equipped, they sailed for Canada.

What could a middle-aged Jew and his wife, barely able to speak the language of their newly adopted country, do for a living? At first Yossl tried the age-old trade of peddling clothes and trinkets to the natives of small towns in western Canada. But he soon realized there was no future and much humiliation in that trade, and he got into logging. Yossl was a stocky, powerfully-built man. Chopping down trees in the crisp, bracing air was more to his liking. It also provided an outlet for his immense physical energy, undiminished for the then advanced age of forty-four. He was a down-to-earth man with a jolly disposition, who would never turn down an offer of a drink or two. An accomplished accordion player, he occasionally hired out as a one-man klezmer band at weddings and other festivities.

With a resigned shrug, Yossl accepted being called Joe Kert, following his sons’ example, ‘for the sake of conveyance’, as he used to say. He had heard that the rail companies were open to bids for purchasing railroad ties and other lumber products. Rather than continuing to work as a mere woodcutter, he hired some men and started a contracting business. In time the enterprise grew and he prospered. He was able to send money to his poorer relatives in Kovno, and had helped his two sons to come to Canada. Nathan joined his father’s business, but Bernard moved to Montreal. Soon after their arrival, Yossl-Joe, a firm believer in hands-on management, was crushed by a falling tree in one of his logging camps. What became of his widow Rivka is shrouded in the mists of Kert family lore.

*     *     *

Kasriel Raffaelovitch, also from Kovno, had had a nodding acquaintance with Yossl. He and his wife Itta and two young daughters Lily and Bertha arrived in Montreal around 1880. Kasriel was an impatient man with a violent temper, a man who could love no one and who as long as he lived, unhappy and tormented (for he had to know that his behavior was not normal), tortured and inspired terror among all those near him, and seemed to provoke the enmity of almost anyone he met. He was not tarred and feathered, although richly deserving of the treatment, but unable to make a living in Montreal, he drifted to the countryside. He ended up as an apple grower somewhere in the eastern townships. One had to assume that he treated his apple trees well: They may have had an inkling of what fate awaited them unless they gave him of their bounty.

Even by standards of the day, Kasriel and his family lived in deplorable conditions. They dwelt in a one-room hut built of mud bricks with a thatched roof, and slept on straw mats. There was a chimney in the corner of the room, where Itta cooked and the family ate. During the long winters, a pall of smoke hung permanently under the low ceiling.

Bernard Kert did not fare much better. Like his father Joe, he was of medium height and stockily built, had a toothbrush mustache and wore a permanent scowl. He had dark beady eyes, which went well with the nickname ‘B.D.’ that he acquired. During his wanderings he had picked up some bad habits, including gambling, and was always losing whatever little money he had earned. Possessed of no outstanding talents, he ended up peddling housewares, shoes and whatever else he could carry, to French-Canadian housewives in east Montreal and the surrounding communities.

Itta had borne Kasriel several more children, of which two boys, Moses (Moe) and David, survived. Lily, then almost eighteen, had moved to New York, where she was training as a nurse. Itta had great respect for doctors and medicine, not surprising in one who had seldom enjoyed their benefits. Both boys, when they grew up, went on to become successful physicians. Moe became an ear, nose and throat specialist who began every consultation with his exclusively French-Canadian clientele by ordering a tonsillectomy. Cardiologist David, fortunately for his patients, did not follow such Aztec sacrificial customs. They shortened the family name to Raff.

One day, Bernard arrived at the Raffaelovitch home with his pack of wares. No doubt it was the sight of the blushing Bertha that made him linger, for he was now in his twenties, and anxious to have a proper home life, the better with a wife. How Bertha reacted at the time is unknown, but they were soon wed, and Kasriel grudgingly gave the young couple the mud-brick hut as dowry. Kasriel, Itta and the boys moved to Saint-Sophie in the Laurentian mountains north of Montreal, where he had bought a small farm and another apple orchard.

Apples were harvested in the fall and stored in the basements of farmers’ homes, where they were kept cool yet did not freeze. Their aroma permeated the entire house. (Until recent times, it was standard practice in many parts of Quebec for a French-Canadian bride to have all her teeth, sometimes perfectly healthy ones, yanked out and replaced with a set of choppers, as part of her dowry. However, individuals thus equipped were in trouble when it came to munching apples.) Besides serving as doctor-deterring jawbreakers, apples were used for making cider, which could be quite potent if left long enough to ferment. The remaining fruit was sold in the spring. There is no record concerning Kasriel’s drinking habits, but one has to wonder. Once, during a visit to her grandparents, Millie, one of the four girls born to Bertha and Bernard, remembers she had helped herself to an apple from the basement. For this transgression, Kasriel almost threw her out into the cold winter night. Legend has it that the old codger met a picturesque end: He fell asleep while smoking, setting fire to his bed.

The first children born to Bertha and Bernard during the mud-hut era were Mae and Samuel. When he first saw the boy, B.D. is said to have remarked: Now there’s a fine-looking laddie! The name stuck: Samuel was relegated to mere initials status, and was known as S. Laddie Kert throughout his long life. The other five offspring were all born in Montreal.

No one remembers exactly when the family moved there. At first, B.D. and Bertha opened a shoe store in the poorer eastern section of Montreal, catering to an almost exclusively French-Canadian clientele. Business was slow, and as Bernard grew restless, he began taking increasingly longer ‘sales trips’. Bertha found herself tending the store, rushing back and forth between it and the living quarters in the back to soothe crying babies with a rag dipped in sugar-water.

Food was far from abundant in the growing family. With all the Kerts, it became a near-obsession: during the lean years, there was hardly enough to go around. When there is not enough to satisfy ravenous young appetites, this could easily turn into a permanent hunger and insecurity. The tendency to take more than one could eat remained with them all their lives. Fortunately, they were all endowed with rugged constitutions and were able, when times improved and they—Laddie especially—could afford the indulgence, to consume enormous amounts of rich food without serious ill-effects.

Seven children survived: Mae, Samuel-Laddie, Lilian, Malka-Mildred, Max, Richard and the ‘baby’, Violet. The store-cum-apartment moved several times over the years, always farther west to a slightly better location. Bertha’s sister Lily had a successful nursing career in New York, but that was eclipsed by her matrimonial coup when she married Ralph Saffran, a wealthy entrepreneur. This made a profound impression on the family, so when Bertha’s third child was born, she was named Lilian, primarily to honor her aunt, but with a hopeful nod at Mammon. Laddie, as oldest son of the dynasty, was destined to become the family don. Mae, a year older than Laddie, was from the age of five responsible for looking after her siblings, and as soon as she was able, also after the store.

Laddie, too, got his early training watching over his younger siblings and the store. In time, the overburdened Bertha was happy to relinquish control, and Laddie assumed CEO status before he had turned twenty. He had good native intelligence, was well-spoken, had an engaging manner, and a good head for business. Until one got to know him better, he was easy to like. What people outside the family circle did not know, however, was that from about the age of twelve, he had become the family bully, terrorizing the younger children, and making poor Mae the target of a cruel hatred that never ceased. Psychiatrists would have had a field-day analyzing the grotesque twists of Laddie’s sado-masochistic, schizophrenic mind. He was extremely devoted to his mother, and had a soft spot for Millie—who had been badly burned as a toddler when her dress caught fire—and for the hapless, dependent Violet.

He and Mae were the only two who did not have—indeed could not have had—much of an education. But Laddie was a shrewd operator, and very soon discovered a basic rule of business that no college taught: He never paid for merchandise that was not already ordered or sold. The shoe manufacturers and distributors who supplied him were accustomed to having to wait for payment longer than the standard thirty days; sixty was in fact the accepted norm. But Laddie dragged out his payments for so long that his creditors felt lucky if they were paid after four months. If some decided they no longer cared to do business with him, there were always others who did, because times were hard and competition keen. In effect, he was getting merchandise on consignment, and working with capital other than his own, which he preferred to invest in the stock market and land speculation. In those areas as well, brokers and real-estate agents did not have a picnic with this tough but steady client.

On the surface, life went on unchanged, while time did its work relentlessly: The children grew up and were attending or about to enter high school, and Bertha was beginning to enjoy a taste of leisure for the first time in her life. During the short Canadian summer, renting a cabin in the country was affordable even for people of modest means. Wives and children would spend the summer in the country, the men joining their families on weekends. Popular resorts of the time were Sainte Adele (restricted to non-Jews) and Sainte Agathe in the Laurentian mountains, about an hour’s drive north of Montreal. For Montrealers, this was the New-Yorkers’ equivalent of the Catskills upstate. Winter recreation was another matter: Before skiing became popular, it was fashionable for Montrealers to escape the harsh winter months to Florida for a few weeks in the sun. Bertha and Mae were the first to go. When Bernard showed up—unannounced as was his wont—he could not believe his ears: Florida, you say? Where, Miami? What’s the simcha? Laddie was noncomittal. Modern women, Bernard muttered resignedly. What’s the world coming to? And Laddie could hear himself thinking: Look who’s talking!

Bernard would show up and only stay long enough to get Bertha in the family way, an almost annual event, then wander off again. In desperation, Bertha resorted to self-inflicted abortions, which she performed, miraculously without disastrous results, with the aid of a knitting needle. By the time her seventh child was born, she had had enough. B.D. was ordered to stay away: No more Bertha, no more money from the till; it was unheard of in those days, but it amounted to a separation. It must have been hard on the children: Papa was absent so often it made their hearts grow fonder. As is so often the case, B.D. was kind to them and they loved him, and was generally well-liked by most people who did not know him that well. But Bertha had the tacit support, of the older children at any rate, and B.D. went to live in a rented room on Park Avenue.

For all the hardship she had endured, Bertha was still an attractive, mature woman with a lot of appeal. Was she harboring any thoughts of romance? That is a secret she took to her grave, for even after B.D. passed away, she never had anything more than casual, innocent relations with other men, so far as anyone knew. For Mae, however, the time in Florida passed all too quickly. When the two weeks were up, she left with a heavy heart, yet secure in the knowledge that she would be back. She had met several witty and handsome admirers, who without exception told her—or gave the impression—that they were rich. Money was all that really mattered to those young men, and they assumed that that was what impressed the ladies too.

As the family’s fortunes continued to improve, so did their living conditions. The Kerts vacated the living quarters in the back of the store, and used the space as a mini-warehouse, as Laddie had opened a branch store on Sainte Catherine Street. It was the ambition of every Jew in Montreal to move westward: Anywhere near Park Avenue was good, Outremont even better. For the more ambitious, there were the developing Notre Dame de Grace and Snowdon areas, ‘way out west and close to Westmount, where one had to be very rich or influential to buy a house. Hampstead and the Town of Mount Royal had until quite recent times laws which permitted only gentiles to own property there. The Kerts moved first to Outremont, and when they moved again, it was to Queen Mary Road in Snowdon.

They were on the whole a handsome lot. Although Laddie was of only average height, his younger brothers Max and Richard were strapping lads close to six feet tall by their mid-teens. All three had regular, manly features. Laddie had grown a mustache, was a sharp dresser (he got all the family clothes wholesale), took up golf, and became quite the man-about-town. To cover up for his lack of formal education, he expressed conflicting opinions on every subject that came up, and defended all of them with equal vehemence. To his credit, he tried to read a lot, and more than just detective novels. But it was the girls who were the clan’s crowning glory. They all developed early into saucy, full-bosomed lasses. The telephone, once they had one installed, never stopped ringing, and a procession of young men came and went in a constant stream. Mae was a beautiful girl who needed little help. Although she corresponded with several of her Floridian admirers, and one or two even came to visit her in Montreal, she eventually married another Montrealer, real-estate salesman Jack Sigman. They had two daughters, Louise (Bertha called her Looveeze), and Joan. Mae’s marriage with Jack lasted almost a dozen years, but a mutual display of verbal virtues which were not put into practice was not enough to sustain it, and they separated. After Joan had married and settled in Florida, Mae also followed the sun. She lived in a Miami retirement hotel, never remarried, and died at the ripe old age of ninety-four.

Back in Montreal, the other sisters were busy turning young mens’ heads. Lilian and Millie, about the same height and build, were quite different in temperament and appearance. Lilian had raven-black hair and large green eyes, with little flecks of brown. As a child, she was egotistical as all children in large families must be to survive. B.D. coined the nickname of Greely for her: Greedy Lily. She had always thought well of herself and did not understand why everybody else should not do likewise. She grew up in a circle of envy and spite, of unacknowledged desires and of malicious expectation such as always surround people with exceptional gifts. Nothing makes a woman more attractive than an awareness of her charms. The proud movement of Lil’s body, in the ripeness of young adulthood, and the twinkle in her beautiful green eyes said a lot more than words. She was like a young goddess, with her circle of admirers clinging to her like a bunch of grapes. Millie, although naturally envious, offered little resistance to being drawn into that circle. She too had a youthful freshness about her, and was by no means a wallflower.

Lilian was a born leader, who simply refused to take no for an answer. Her nerves lay dangerously close to the surface: volatile, constantly excited, she was ever on the move. She had an insatiable curiosity and was always seeking new avenues of diversion. Although religion played no important part in her life, she was acutely aware of her Jewish heritage, and eagerly attended, first as a girl scout, later as a volunteer, numerous Jewish and Zionist functions, and made an attempt to learn Hebrew. Her influence over Millie was enormous, and the younger sister copied her actions and attitudes almost automatically.

Zionism had captivated Lilian. It appealed to the romantic in her nature. When it suited her, she could be quite idealistic. She joined the Montreal chapter of Young Judea, and was thrilled to meet Goldie Myerson, who had come from Milwaukee to deliver a keynote address at a Zionist function. The speaker, who later changed her name to Golda Me’ir, stressed the importance of preparing for Aliya, the ascent to Zion. Herself a teacher, Golda emphasized the need for educators. This prompted Lilian to register for a teachers’ training course at McDonald College in nearby Beaconsfield. Millie followed suit, although she chose a commercial course, which would give her secretarial skills. A year later, Lilian joined a group leaving from New York, with its destination Palestine.

3

SABA ARYEH

O ther boys his age seldom knew their birth dates. But his was on the first day of the year, their year 1853, so it was easy to remember. He was born Leib, and sometimes went by the diminutive of Leibusch, later by the more formal Leon. A pen-name he often used as a young man was Ben-Mordechai, and later still, when he moved to Israel—which was then the Ottoman province of Palestine—he adopted his rightful Hebrew name, Aryeh.

For as long as anyone cared to remember, the Jews of eastern Europe, especially those who lived in small towns and rural areas, were divided into plain folk, or amcha in the Hebrew-Yiddish vernacular, and scholars. That some of these ordinary people were wealthier mattered little: They were viewed by the scholarly elite as lesser men because they did not devote their lives to sacred studies. In Aryeh’s town, or shtetl, really little more than a village, there were men like Reb Shmuel, the firewood merchant who owned a team of horses and a wagon, and who employed several goyim as woodcutters. Reb Shmuel had three daughters of marriageable age, but no sons. There was also Reb Yitzchak the grocer, who owned the only two-story house in the center of town. His wife (it’s always the woman’s fault) bore him no children. Yet in spite of all efforts by local matchmakers, he refused to divorce her and remarry. Shmuel, Yitzchak and other people of means were addressed as ‘Reb’ because their relative wealth commanded respect.

Jews and gentiles had existed more or less harmoniously in Poland and in other parts of eastern Europe for countless generations. This harmony was barely disrupted by antisemitic incidents that predictably erupted at Christmas and Easter. Ever since the Romans had driven Israel into exile, Christians who were not necessarily followers of Christ had found it necessary to persecute Jews. For there is nothing the ordinary Christian so dislikes to remember as the awkward historical fact that Jesus was born a Jew. No, they were not bad people, those who made the lives of their Jewish neighbors miserable. They had enough religion in them to make them hate, but not quite enough to make them love the Jews. And they hated them not because Jews were in any way evil. Rather, they sought evil qualities for them, because they did not care to understand, and therefore hated them.

The Jewish passion for scholarship was a custom which mystified the goyim. Scholars, young men who married at about eighteen years of age the daughters of well-to-do people, became entirely dependent on their fathers-in-law for support. They devoted their lives, these young (and sometimes not so young) unproductive members of society, to religious studies. In the course of such scholarly pursuit, once in a while a lad would rise above his peers, drawing the attention of his rabbi. Circumstances permitting, such an Iluy, or near-genius, would be sent to the big city to further his studies and eventually graduate from a Yeshiva, the Jewish equivalent of a theological seminary.

Aryeh’s father, Reb Mordechai, was one of these chosen few. He had been a brilliant student, and after attending several yeshivas, was ordained as a rabbi. Instead of finding himself a congregation to serve and settling down, he attached himself as a deacon in the entourage of his mentor and father-in-law, Rabbi Chaim Halberstamm of Nowy Sonis in western Galicia. Prominent rabbis lived well, as did their relatives. Rabbi Halberstamm lived in a compound that was in effect a miniature court, and it was up to the deacon—Reb Mordechai in this case—to decide who got to see the rabbi. His son Leib was thus raised in very favorable circumstances. He attended Cheder with a select group of children, the sons of the rabbi’s favorite adherents. But he was a restless child, and of an independent and curious frame of mind. The confines of the cheder oppressed him, and he longed to explore, and to be outdoors playing like other children. As he grew older, questions arose in his mind, for which he was unable or afraid to seek answers.

His parent’s marriage, like most such arranged affairs, was not the stuff of which fairy tales are made. In fact, it was a wretched union, patiently endured by both partners. The family saw little of him, since Reb Mordechai was often on the road, raising funds for the yeshiva. When home, he would spend most of his time at the synagogue, swaying back and forth over densely printed