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.
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 🙂
JenniEliz 