Lily-of-the-valley; “Let them visit.”

 

The next couple of weeks were intense with many thoughts and emotions….I called Rosie every 3-4 days to enquire about Lisl’s condition.

During these phone calls I was also able to clarify with certainty Lisl’s identity. Elizabeth, as Rosie called her, had blue eyes and a strong European accent (my friend Susie had told me these were two characteristics which would not change with age, and could not be hidden!!)

Rosie, (who seemed to share very honestly whatever Elizabeth had shared with her, for which I am thankful), also mentioned that E had spoken to her about her mother and sister who lived in B.C., and whom she “hated” 😦

Rosie shared with me that she herself was exhausted and would be hiring extra care to look after Elizabeth who still lived in her own home. Rosie lived a ten minute walk away and was at Elizabeth’s house from 7 AM until 8 PM, 7 days a week! Over the eleven years she had worked for Lisl, Rosie had never lived with my aunt. Elizabeth liked her solitude and wanted her privacy, but Rosie was regularly “on call” and would come quickly if needed.

However, since Elizabeth had fallen and broken her hip (apparently trying to reach a piece of potato that fell to the ground as she was eating a midnight snack!), Rosie had hired a night nurse and some extra hands to help her turn Elizabeth in the bed and help with bathing etc.

I enquired about finances….did she need help? My brothers and I could help….No, all was well; a small amount (2 hours a day), was provided by provincial health care.  The rest of care costs were paid through Elizabeth’s account; Rosie was her POA, fairly recently organized.

My desire to go for a visit and meet Aunt Lisl was growing stonger, even after Rosie told me Elizabeth had never mentioned she had two nephews and a niece!

My brothers were not very encouraging about my suggestion of going to visit: they were not optimistic she would want to see us.  Friends also gave us their thoughts and cautions….often from experience with their own family stories.

It was Rosie herself who encouraged me to come to Toronto, even though she had not yet been able to share my letter with Elizabeth. I had given Rosie no pressure concerning the letter, saying: “We don’t know her….you choose when it may be right to share it.”

The next week, I went on line, found a seat sale to Toronto and booked tickets. After discussing with Gary, I gave myself 10 days there. I could stay at the lovely OMF Guest Home on Avenue Rd at Eglinton. OMF- International is the NGO we had worked with for over 20 years, and still did. Only $9 per night, $12 including breakfast; close to busses and the subway, and I knew the area.

Gary would be coming out for a conference in Waterloo later that same week, and then would come to Toronto, and we’d fly home together after the weekend.

Rosie had told me just to come, and we’d see how things developed….I was willing to risk some type of a visit, without knowing quite how that would look and to see how things might develop over the week. I was also preparing myself for rejection by Lisl, and I had some TO friends to visit during my time and a visit to Azrieli foundation planned and also knew there was almost nightly Israeli folkdancing to distract me! I also wanted to visit Holy Blossom Memorial Garden and see my Great Uncle and Great- Grandmother’s graves.

My brothers were, probably very rightly, not at all supportive at this stage: “You can’t just go into her house without her permission, or without her knowing you are coming….”

However, I had prepared a line which I thought was very honest, and could be used for meeting her if I was just dropping in….

“We haven’t met before, but I think you are someone I have wanted to meet for a long, long, long ( choke), long time….” ( I am a risk- taker!) I practised it with my son Tim before I left for Toronto, and I did choke…. as I suddenly felt deeply that I had indeed been waiting since my childhood – over fifty years – to meet my Aunt Lisl. After all, I was named after her…Jennifer Elizabeth!!

Tickets booked, i started to prepare, digging through photo albums to gather a few of my Mum and Lisl at various stages, and their parents, and one with Uncle Frederick, who had lived in Toronto and became a father figure for both Lisl and my Mum after their own father died in Vienna.

 

 

 

 

Lisl and Lore, and their parents.         Sisters with Uncle Fritz.

Just prior to leaving, I picked a bunch of lily-of-the-valley blooms…..it was April 30th, but it had been an unusually warm Spring that year, 2016, and flowers were all ahead by 3 weeks. The lily-of-the-valley blossoms were hidden in the shade at the side of our rental OMF house, blooming beautifully!

At the time, I didn’t consciously think it through, but there is a family tradition…. when I was a child, my Mum always picked a small bunch of lily-of-the-valley from our garden and had it laying on my bedside table when I awoke on my birthday (which falls in later May). One year, she gave me a pretty little bottle of its perfume as well!

Of course, hearing about my Aunt Lisl’s being alive in Toronto had brought my own mother to memory very vividly. Although she had passed from this earth in 1988, after so many years, I still missed her.

 

 

 

With my mother at her VGH lab party.

And, I had discovered an older family connection to lily-of-the-valley while recently reading the translation of my Granny’s memoirs.

After many attempts at match-making to marry off my grandmother, Anna (by her mother and five elder brothers, and hilariously recounted in her memoirs ), one day a Polish engineer from Budapest, an acquaintance of one brother, had been invited around for tea to meet 24 year old Anna. Finally, the right man!!  Anna and Szymon Aszkenazy (Wolf) fell in love, and on one special visit, lily-of-the-valley came into the story!

( Spoiler alert! If you read the memoir one day, you will find out that Anna was aware that as Simon was courting her, he felt quite overwhelmed by her 5 very tall elder brothers, and he also felt her mother’s disapproval as he would likely take her daughter away from Vienna. Anna had sensed he needed some encouragement!)

 

 

 

 

Szymon Aszkanazy and Anna Mahler on their wedding day; July 21, 1918.              (Their daughter, Elisabeth Beatrice Flora, was born one year later on July 26, 1919.)

I placed the delicate bunch of lily-of-the-valley carefully at the edge of my purse and was dropped at the airport by Gary.

At the gate, just as the call for boarding had been given, I decided to give Rosie a quick phonecall, to touch base and confirm that I was indeed coming to Toronto. Yes, of course she had remembered, and…” Jenny, I read the letter to Elizabeth….we discussed it and she said: ‘Let me think about it’ and then later: ‘Let them visit.’ ”

Wow! Pensively and rather in awe, I boarded the aeroplane to Toronto, whilst simultaneously texting the good news to my family and friends.

 

 

 

 

Google search and tulip fields: finding Aunt Lisl

Aunt Lisl was my mother’s older sister by two years, and, for reasons not ever fully known or disclosed to us children, had a serious falling out with their mother in her later twenties or early thirties, and then cut off relations, which because of geography and connection, also included her younger sister and family, i.e. us.

My mother spoke quite naturally to my brothers and I as we were growing up about “your Aunt Lisl”; we heard some stories from their childhood, and I knew that she had blue eyes and blonde hair, was artistic and had experienced a broken marriage at a young age.

I knew what Lisl looked like from her photograph displayed at my Mum’s office in Heather Pavillion at VGH and from photo albums.

Elizabeth in her early twenties

I knew my parents had sought out Aunt Lisl and tried to contact her; I was aware she had lived in both Montreal and Toronto, and actually recall that my father, during a work journey back east, had been able to locate Aunt Lisl, but was unable to change her unwillingness to communicate with her own mother and sister in B.C.

As a result, when my Granny died in 1970, Lisl did not come. This I only found out when our own mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1988 and both my brothers and I had individually asked her whether we should look for Lisl. Her response was: ” don’t bother her; she did not wish to come when Granny died….”

So it was only many years later in 2011, when I, now with my own family had returned from Malaysian Borneo after a span of 15 years, that I wanted to explore the details of where and when Aunt Lisl had died, which is what I naturally assumed.  I had recently come into possession of a long memoir that my Granny had written and dedicated to me. I was starting to have excerpts translated into English from the German, and I suppose this sparked my interest in following up loose ends and missing people!

I met someone at our Israeli folkdancing class whose husband was cataloguing Jewish cemeteries in Toronto, and he had found my great grandmother’s and great- uncle’s graves (Malvine and Frederick Mahler) in Holy Blossom Memorial Garden. In another cemetery, he had found a possible grave ( I had given him Lisl’s name, maiden and married, and birthdate), to visit and check.

Shortly after this, I did go to Toronto, sadly for the funeral of a friend, and took the opportunity to search out this lead. After several bus connections, a taxi ride, and a walk in the snow amongst gravestones, disappointingly, it was not Lisl’s name or correct details on the gravestone….

Time flew by, as I became busy with family life and work for the next five years, until a chat in early 2016 with my half-niece Kathy (on my father’s side). She had recently located some missing relatives in her own family with her amazing internet skills and ability to navigate geneology websites, and this led me to ask her: “Could you please try to find some vital statistics on the death of our Aunt Lisl or any other info?” (I had searched Toronto and Montreal VS several times with no success.)  Btw, my Mum was Kathy’s godmother, and Kathy and I are close friends since early childhood, and her mother is my big sis, so close connections 🙂

Suddenly, a couple of weeks later, I had a phonecall from Kathy….with the astonishing words: “Jenny, I think Aunt Lisl could be alive!!”

Kathy had googled Aszkanazy- Rhodes (my aunt’s maiden name hyphenated with her ex- married name), and with her full name Elizabeth, she had appeared on several recent entries as a donor patron….of the Summer Lyric Opera Society, Wildlife Preservation Canada, and Springtide Resources, an organization working to prevent violence against women. These were definitely familiar family values on my mother’s side! Further investigation revealed a home address in the Willowdale area of north Toronto and even a phone number (which I tried once, and no reply), printed in 411 Toronto!

Google maps showed a small house with a large well- treed garden on a quiet street. The chain- link gate to the carport was closed….perhaps she has a little dog, I wondered….It did look like a little old lady’s house….born in 1919, Aunt Lisl would have been 96, by my calculations!! ( which was why we had wrongly, but also understandably, assumed she was no longer living).

A careful letter of introduction was composed by myself, and with input from my brothers and, after fine- tuning, was typed and, with my heart beating intensely, placed in an envelope addressed to E. Aszkanazy and mailed by express post with tracking to the Toronto address.

The wait was not long!! Three days after the tracked letter arrival, I received a phone call from Toronto. I was having a day out with girlfriends, picking U- pick tulips at a bulb farm in Abbotsford! They caught the moment on film 🙂

Coming through my cell phone was a sweet Filipina voice, who said she was Rosie, Elizabeth’s caregiver for the past eleven years.  Elizabeth had just that morning returned to her home after 2 weeks in hospital with pneumonia, following a broken hip the previous month, and Rosie had found and opened the letter.

Elizabeth was presently weak, and Rosie did not wish to read her the letter until she regained some strength. Rosie asked me a few good questions, clarifying who I was, and checking some facts that helped us both to suspect strongly that Elizabeth may indeed be our Aunt Lisl….amazing!!!

This unexpected news about our still living Aunt Lisl came into my life as a splash of beauty as I stood surrounded by multi- coloured tulip blooms, green hills and friends 🙂