An Italian Renaissance: Choosing Life in Canada by Robert Eli Rubinstein, Urim Publications, Israel, and Lambda Publishers, Brooklyn, 2010, ISBN 978-965-524-044-3, 177 pages including appendices and endnotes.
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO — Perhaps the author and publishers were a bit too clever in titling this family memoir. Although a portion of the action occurs in a DP Camp in Turino, Italy, where author Rubinstein was born and where his parents regained some faith in humanity following the Holocaust, the bulk of this biographical account occurs in Toronto, Canada, where the Rubinsteins subsequently rebuilt their lives.
What makes this book a welcome addition to the Holocaust canon is that it primarily deals with the process of recovery – examining how people who were subjected to humanity’s worst barbarism were, at least in the case of the Rubinsteins, able to put those experiences behind them and build productive lives.
The Rubinsteins came to Canada to be workers in the fur industry but eventually they veered off onto their own path, becoming successful residential developers.
The author reflects on the happenstances that resulted in him growing up in what became a well-to-do Canadian Jewish family. Initially, his concentration camp surviving parents had sought to resume their previous lives in their native Hungary, but after learning that the newly installed communist government had seized their business, they decided it would be best to migrate to mandatory Palestine. However, this was prevented by the British blockade, so they settle instead in a refugee camp in Turino, Italy. Here they were fed, housed, and treated kindly, but forbidden to compete with Italians for jobs – a situation that made them feel useless. While grateful for the Italians’ kindnesses, the Rubinsteins were anxious to be productive citizens. They jumped at the opportunity to become fur workers in Canda.
What would life have been for author Robert Eli Rubinstein if the Hungarian Communists had not been so quick to nationalize businesses that previously had been confiscated by the Nazis? Would he have grown up as a Young Pioneer, active like other Hungarians learning about Communism? Or, if the British hadn’t been blocking access of Jewish immigrants to Palestine, would he have become an Israeli, living perhaps in a kibbutz and later fighting with other young men his age in the 1967 Six-Day War?
Or what if the Italian government had extended citizenship and the right to work to the Jewish refugees in Turino? Would he have become part of the self-conscious Jewish community of that city?
There are many “what ifs” in people’s lives. What if I hadn’t gone to the dance at UCLA where I met my wife, Nancy? What if I had not changed one job in New York City for another in San Diego? Everyone reading this could ask similar questions about the turns in their lives. We don’t always realize which decisions we make might have bearing not only on our own lives but upon those of future generations.
While there were no answers to existential questions, Rubinstein’s reflections on his family’s story led him to visit Turino and to learn that residents there had more or less forgotten the existence of the DP camp where his parents had recuperated. Given that his father almost never talked about his pre-Canadian experiences, and that his mother could testify with accuracy only to what had happened to her – but neither read nor spoke Italian to directly learn what was happening around her – the stories Rubinstein pieced together about his parents’ experiences were not always accurate.
He had grown up understanding that his parents migrated to Canada only because newly independent Israel had been discouraging families with young children from making aliyah in the midst of the Independence War. Later, however, he learned such was not the case; Israel welcomed all Jews from the moment it became independent. The decision to go to Canada really was made for the peace of mind of his parents, who already had lived through enough tumult.
Rubinstein’s journey of discovery is not particularly a dramatic one. It is, rather, a stately progression toward self-knowledge and family history. In that he followed the evidentiary trail wherever it took him – even when it contradicted cherished family accounts—it made reading about his research an intellectually satisfying experience.
*
Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World
Mr. Harrison, thank you for your kind review. The title, “An Italian Renaissance”, an obvious play on words, refers less to the geographical setting of the story than to the process of rebirth experienced by my parents on their melancholy, meandering odyssey from the wartime camps to Canada via Italy. And, of course, the subtitle is “Choosing Life in Canada”. I assure you it was not my intention, nor the publishers’, to mislead anyone about the subject of the book.
With appreciation,
Robert Eli Rubinstein
Mr. Rubinstein–All of us who write are attracted to word play, but sometimes word play can detract from the central message of our thesis. Better to lose the pun then to pun to loss. Regardless, congratulations are due you for a fine, reflective book that is a tribute to the resilience of your parents and of our Jewish people. — Don Harrison