The Last Exile

Apparently, my father sends my daughter pictures he doesn’t send me.

This is a picture of my great-grandparents (paternal-maternal side), who my daughter only knows from stories. This happens to be the only picture I have ever seen with the two of them sitting nicely together. Their battles are the stuff of family legends…is it still called a ‘legend’ if I actually survived the witnessing? Everyone thinks their family unique but my has a certain flavour which truly is different.

I can never remember a time when my great-grandmother did not wear a hat. Mention my great-grandmother’s name to my mother, and 34 years after the woman’s death, my mother still gets enraged just someone saying her name. Personally, I always got on well with her but then I never did try to cross her.

My great-grandfather left Eastern Europe in 1917 and worked his way around the world as a merchant sailor. He made his living but gambling, and in fact, he won my grand-mother in a poker game – when her father ran out of cash so he put her in the pot. We won’t mention her age…This happened in a seaport in Eastern Canada. He wasn’t sure what to do with her so he married her and eventually they made their way to Montreal.

They lived in the first floor and basement of a bordello where he ran the gaming tables and my grandmother cooked…or so I was told. Things were pretty prosperous for them until one night when my great-grandfather’s partner decided my six year old grandmother was too great a temptation to resist. My grandfather killed him when he caught Andre in the act. This necessitated the children being put on the last evening train to Toronto where arrangements were made to live with a Russian Jewish childless couple by the name of Cooper.

My grandmother told me stay with the Cooper’s was the the greatest year of her childhood. She had a clean bed with sheets and blankets all to herself which beat sharing a pile of rages in the basement with my uncle Richard and auntie Bernice. Not only was she feed three times a day but she got to go to school and had special school clothes. After six months, my great-grandparents turned up to claimed the children – much to the horror of the couple who had taken them in. The Coopers begged them to leave the children with them but my great-grandparents refused. My great-grandmother decided to honour them instead by taking their last name which is how they became known as the ‘Coopers’.