My parents met over a dissected frog.
Both of them were studying at McGill University in Montreal. My father Melville Schachter was attending the Faculty of Medicine. My mother was studying biology and zoology.
My father had to achieve higher marks than non-Jews. My mother Ruth Nisse, whose grades were higher than his, was refused entry to McGill’s medical school because she was Jewish and a woman.
Anti-semitism in Quebec was rife in 1920 and 1930s and the academic standards for Jews entering McGill were higher than their non-Jewish counterparts. By this means, the administration reduced the number of immigrant Jewish students, especially in medicine.
The late Canadian Jewish historian Irving Abella, co-author of the must-read book “None is too Many,” describes Canada during this period “a benighted xenophobic, anti-Semitic country” in which “Jews were excluded from almost every sector of Canadian society.”
As a result, my father was an angry young man. He was also handsome and brilliant.

His paternal family were rural gangsters, uneducated and poverty-stricken from a village near Odessa, Krivoye Ozero – translated as Crooked Lake. In my mother’s words, “The rabbi from that village couldn’t read.” In the early 1900s, the brothers immigrated to Canada. They couldn’t read and had never seen a map. They thought they were going to England. In Montreal, Mel’s uncles opened a failed burlesque house on Rue Ste Catherine. His uncles were petty thieves, garment workers and general ne’er-do-wells.
His maternal family, was respectable. My grandmother Becky Simon was bright but left school at 11 years old to start working in a cigar factory. My father was reputed to be illegitimate. His older brother Sidney had black hair, was swarthy and tall. Mel, with his blonde ringlets, didn’t look like his brother and didn’t look like his father. He was called “the momser” – a Yiddish word for bastard.
My father was named Wolf Wallace Schachter – my grandmother was a fan of Wallace Beery, a popular movie star at that time. The family lived in the working-class, immigrant Jewish ghetto on St. Urbain, Bagg and Esplanade. People in the neighbourhood called him “Velvel” – a Yiddish dimunitive of Wolf. Thus he became Melville, also called Mel.
He went to Fairmount elementary and the iconic high school Baron Byng. He was between Mordecai Richler and Irving Layton. Mel was friends with Ted Allan, the writer of “Lies my Father Told me,” a compelling film about their neighbourhood.
My brother Eric asked our father why he became a doctor. Mel said: “It was the best racket going.” Mel worked through medical school as a bellhop and a short-order cook. He named himself to his employers as Bernard Shaw. He had a bittersweet, sardonic sense of humour.

Mel died in May, 2000. I wrote a tribute to him in the Toronto Star in 2007 on Father’s Day.
Back to the frog. Mel entered Ruth’s lab intending to dispose of the dissected frog. He noticed her and asked her for a date.
My mother was – excuse the alliteration – beautiful, blonde, blue-eyed, buxom, brainy and a bookworm. She accepted the date and my father walked her home carrying Ruth’s microscope.
My mother died at her home in Primrose Hill, northwest London, U.K. in April, 2018. I wrote a blog post in tribute to her.
A holocaust refugee who once told me to watch Vittorio De Sica’s magnificent, heart-wrenching film “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” to best understand her past, grew up in a wealthy, educated Jewish family in Riga, Latvia. In addition, she encouraged, ever the bookworm, to read “Badenheim 1939” by Aharon Appelfeld. She never spoke about the Holocaust – I sensed it was a terrible taboo.
Through the veil of survivor guilt, she recalled a “golden childhood” that suddenly ended in 1939.
That was the year my mother’s elder sister suddenly died at age 19. One month later, her parents and younger sister left for North America, spending 18 months en route that included a trek on the Trans-Siberian Railway, stays in Sweden, Japan and New York. The family sailed across the Pacific on a Japanese liner called Heian Maru and was imprisoned in Seattle because they didn’t have the right visas. A relative, who was a U.S. lawyer Paul Martinson, sprung them from jail.
They arrived in Montreal with the heroic help of the CP officer stationed in the Baltic States, Mark Sorensen.

The hope of my oil tycoon grandfather Aaron Nisse was to help the many relatives still in Latvia escape. Tragically, the Nazis murdered them – adults and children – on the outskirts of Riga at the Rumbula Massacre in 1941.
Aaron prospered from humble beginnings in rural Latvia. He was tall, good-looking and had blue twinkling eyes. I remember him wearing a pale beige suit and a straw hat waiting with his tall, white-haired business partner for a chauffeur-driven black Lincoln outside his house in Montreal.
My mother said, “He had the Midas touch.” He co-owned Lat-Rus, an oil company. He started Elite with Jewish partners in the mid-1930s specializing in chocolate. Strauss Group, formerly known as Strauss-Elite, is now among the largest food manufacturers in Israel.

Talking of the Midas touch, “Ronya” – as our family affectionately called him – was punished for renovating black-marketed Soviet tanks and sold them to the Turks after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. He wound up before a firing squad – a capitalist in a communist camp – only to be reprieved at the last moment by the intervention of a fortuitous friend.
My maternal grandmother Agnes (Berner) Nisse was a doctor – one of the very first women doctors in Russia. She was the head of a clinic for poor Jews in Riga. And she served on the Russian front in the World War One. She told a story to me, after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, many of soldiers deserted. They didn’t want to be part of the war. She was not permitted to practice medicine in Canada.

My mother’s memories of life at the family’s 10-room, art nouveau apartment on elegant Elizabetes St. in downtown Riga and at their nearby seaside summer house – the dacha – border on idyllic. She didn’t speak about the Holocaust. I sensed something was a taboo, a secret. (See my blog post about my mother and food.)
Born in Montreal, I spent my formative years – from age four to 19 – living in the quiet North London suburb of Finchley amid a complicated family. We were secular Jews. Both my parents had funny accents. We had an odd last name – Schachter. We ate strange European food. We had funny things in our house. Example: My dad, who was a doctor, stored a full skeleton – he used to teach anatomy to medical students at University College – in our dining room cupboard.
I once asked my dad – apropos of fitting into my white bread, white collar neighbourhood – if I could go to Sunday school with friends. He said: “You can’t. You’re not Christian.” I replied with the obvious existential question: “What am I?” He gave the anti-nationalist response: “You are nothing but, if you were anything, you’d be Jewish.” This contributed to my ongoing anxiety.
Another thing compounded it. My refined mother was incredibly accomplished. She was a bookworm and a culture vulture. She spoke five languages fluently and maybe six or seven if you count Latvian and Swedish. She had a legion of friends and fans. She was an unattainable role model. Happily, I made peace with her a few years before she died.
Demons that haunted me all my life were really the ghosts of murdered family – the loved ones I never met. I’m healing now from transgenerational trauma. See “Mum and Me” multi-media page on my website.
It was a lot for me to live up to as her eldest child and her only daughter. I expressed that emotion after my mother died in April, 2018. I spoke at a heartwarming celebration of her life in her sunny living room packed with friends, neighbours, her bank manager, my dad’s former colleagues and my two brothers. They sipped wine, told stories and munched on snacks.
People talked about Ruth’s political activism. She once ran for Labour councillor and lost. She sat down in Trafalgar Square as part of a ban-the-bomb protest and got carted off in a paddy wagon.
They cited her immense knowledge on diverse topics. One friend said he was in hospital for an appendectomy diagnosed by my doctor dad at our home and she brought him a copy of War and Peace – she had read it several times in the original Russian.
I recalled that my mother had explained cloning to my son-in-law Nate. Also, that I once caught her reading Goethe’s poetry in German with her morning coffee. Bashfully, she said: “I find it soothing.”
My parents were married by a rabbi in 1944 at my mother’s home on Circle Road in an affluent neighbourhood of Montreal called Snowdon. My mother’s family weren’t kosher. According to my mother, Mel’s grandmother ate a ham sandwich unbeknownst to her. She was kosher.
In Montreal, I recently re-traced their steps. I visited both my grandparents’ homes – on Circle Rd. in Snowdon and on Esplanade Ave. It was emotional. I ate at my dad’s favourite restaurant – Schwartz’s. I savoured his favourite food at the counter – a bulging smoked meat sandwich with a giant dill pickle.
I talked to two general managers – Frank Silva and Saul Restrepo – at two iconic places: Schwartz’s, famous for its smoked meat, and St. Viateur Bagel. (Please listen to the podcast.)
Montreal is famous for chewy and sweetish bagels. I compared the rival bagels from Fairmount and St. Viateur. I bought them the same day, both were sesame bagels, fresh from the wood ovens. With my seasoned palate, I didn’t detect the difference. They were both delicious.