Mama Dida: My Road to Canada

By Leonida Teohari

Leo Teohari was born in Constanta, Romania. Leo holds both a law degree and a degree in international economics.

Leo defected from Communist Romania in 1980, and settled with his family in Toronto, Canada, where he became a businessman. Today he writes about his experiences and runs an international food trade business.

In 2004 he published his first book, Hawala, based on a true story about a government cover-up and diversion related to the Romanian revolution in 1989.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: May 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9780228889649

Book preview

Prologue

This book is based on a true story and follows true historical events, as written by Ekaterina Teohari, and edited for publication by Leonida Teohari.

Toronto, Canada

February 3rd, 1982. I have decided to tell my life story, which I’ve postponed for a long time. Today, when visiting, my son Puiu told me that it was time for me to see our family doctor. I was not feeling well, and I do not know the reason. For some time, I’ve tried to hide it, however Puiu has been watching me like a hawk, so back to the doctors I go, only this time, they are Canadian doctors. Fortunately, my family doctor in Canada was of Romanian descent, and still spoke excellent Romanian.

Chapter One

Romania

I was born in Romania on February 26th, 1928, in the beautiful city of Braila, located by the Danube River. The days and years ahead were without luck for me.

Like many women of my generation, I was not offered education. I had to educate myself by reading a lot—everything from Alexander Dumas, Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, Sholokhov, and Tolstoy.

Later when I came to Canada, watching television programs, adjusting to my new life and travelling helped me diversify my education. My self-education was a lifelong project.

When I said I was born without luck it is not because I feel pity for myself. Looking back at my life I remember things that made me ask God several times why a human being must endure so much.

God has never given me an answer.

When I was four years old, our parents decided to divorce. My sister, Lena, was ten years old, and our brother Costy was thirteen years old. Our mother took all of us from Braila, where we lived at the time, and moved to Constanta, located by the beautiful Black Sea.

My Mother Voica was a very energetic, hard-working and proud woman. She left Braila—where she was born and raised—to make sure that her divorce would not shame her father.

Stefan, my father, became an orphan from the age of ten. He was a good-looking man and very hard working. As was common among members of our family, he was extremely prideful.

When my mother married him, she inherited his life as well, and so besides becoming a wife, Mother Voica also became a mother to six more children. It reminds me of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, a famous American movie which I repeatedly watched in an attempt to understand the life of a wife who has a husband and six children to take care of.

My father Stefan was a rich and very well-known man in Braila, where he and his brothers owned lots of real estate and restaurant business. He also owned warehouses in the port.

We had everything, including servants, but a marriage without love and respect does not bring happiness.

Mother Voica always said that a whip made from shit will never crack. This was my father’s weakness – to surround himself with weak and dishonest people; and when he drank, he’d listen to their adulations. He would also become violent, and this was worse.

Our apartment in Constanta was located at 25 Scarlat Varnav Street, just across the wine depot. In 1907, when the communists took power after the war, the street name changed to Farmers Revolution. Mother Voica arrived here with us when she was thirty years old, and without any skills. She went straight to a tailor who was looking for an administrative assistant, and was hired straight away.

Mother Voica had to start from the bottom, cleaning up after twelve other workers day and night until she learnt how to sew and become a tailor. She was working nonstop in order to make ends meet.

A year later my father came to Constanta and took me back to Braila. He threatened my mother that if she did not come back with him, she would not see me anymore. Mother Voica loaded up a truck with all the furniture and clothes she got after the divorce and went to Braila and negotiated a deal with my father. She left the truck and everything in it to my father, and she got me back.

Because of his violent nature, my father was legally stopped from visiting us.

Back in Constanta, Mother Voica realised that she was alone with three kids, without relatives or friends. We were on our own save for God above us.

For three weeks we were living in an empty apartment. We slept on the floors covered with newspapers and to cover us Mother Voica used her winter coat.

One day, Mr. Vasilis, the workshop owner, introduced my mother to a client of his who was a private lender. He lent Mother Voica money to buy furniture so that she was able to furnish our apartment, and she bought a Singer sewing machine so she could work from home.

In these times being a single woman with three children was extremely hard.

Mother Voica was not only courageous but incredibly ambitious. Any time she had to visit her clients, according to our Romanian customs she was served with cookies, small sandwiches and Turkish coffee.

Mother Voica used to accept the coffee and packed the cookies or sandwiches and brought them home for us. Once a month she bought a chicken and cooked it with veggies.

We ate the chicken broth and vegetables as a soup; she used the chicken as a second dish. I remember that she was always the last one to eat, first making sure that we were fed.

When her shoes were worn out, she would stuff them with newspaper. Everything was for us – this is how much she loved us.

Chapter Two

Vasile Roaita Sanatorium

When I was nine years old, I got bone tuberculosis and was hospitalised at Vasile Roaita Sanatorium, closer to Constanta.

I was lucky to be assigned to Dr. Climescu, known as one of the best bone tuberculosis specialists in the country.

While in hospital, I missed my family every day, and at the same time I was suffering for the other children around me, seeing how much they also missed their families. It’s incredible how much sick children support each other in their suffering.

During my stay, they brought in a group of children whose parents were members of the Romanian national party. The doctor in charge with the group was also a member of the national party. I was too young to understand politics, but later I learned that they were in fact Romanian nationalists; the legionaries.

The newly arrived group doctor was an old gentleman who was extremely kind to all the children in our section. Every night in the hospital garden they would light a campfire, and everybody sat around the fire and sang national songs. This was nightly entertainment for the rest of us, looking from our windows to the garden and listening to their songs.

After one and a half years in hospital, I knew by heart most of the national songs I used to hear every night.

During one of my procedures, for almost an entire year I had to wear a kind of a special casting box, mounted around my waist all the way to the knee, with weights up to 5 kg. It was hell. Every night I would cry until the nurse decided to get this box off my knee so I could sleep for a few hours. Even now, while I write and remember how much pain I went through, I can hardly control my tears. Before Christmas, I was operated on by Dr. Climescu.

On Christmas day my Mother Voica rented a cab from Constanta and came to Vasile Roaita Sanatorium where she walked through a mountain of snow to see me. She was our Santa Klaus, so all the children in my room shared candies and cookies and celebrated Christmas.

I do not know what helped me survive through this ordeal, and why I bore so much pain as a child who’d done nothing wrong in my short life. I had no answer then, and have no answer today when I write.

After surgery, for three and a half years I was in a cast from my waist all the way to my right knee. I had to fight a horrible achiness everyday.

One day my brother Costy cut a thick wire so I could use it behind the cast to enable me to scratch. This made me happy, though my happiness was short lived. Shortly after the cast was taken away, I was sent for an MRI so the doctor could assess how well my feet healed. Then Dr. Climescu decided to use an orthopedic cast specialist to design a mechanical waking support system to be attached to my leg. I was 12 years old when I started to learn how to walk again. Imagine keeping that orthopedic machine with almost 5 kg weight on all the time and taking it off only when I took a bath. During the night, in order to avoid any scratches, I used to bundle it with an old towel.

I carried this orthopedic machine for almost a year and a half. I felt like Jesus Christ carrying the cross.

Walking started with a small four-wheeled buggy, as used by old people when going to do groceries. From the buggy I went to crutches, and from crutches I went to a cane. And this is how I spent my childhood – learning how to walk.

When I was finally released from the sanatorium and went home to my mother, sister and brother, and I was able to walk like a normal young girl, I thought I’d reached heaven.

Though this heavenly dream was cut short as the Second World War had started.

Chapter Three

Second World War

When Constanta first got bombed, we had to rush to take cover in a trench made by a neighbour of ours behind our building. After this first bombing experience, Mother Voica packed her savings in a bag, took my sister Helen and me, and fled to Ovidiu, a nearby village. This was not before a heated discussion between my brother Costy and Mother Voica. Costy convinced Mother Voica that he should stay home to watch for the apartment and the furniture. This was all we owned, and my brother would rather risk getting bombed than lose it to the looters.

So, we