Honourable Menschen: Ron Csillag remembers some newsworthy Jewish Canadians who passed away from autumn 2022 through early summer 2023
I like the expressions on people’s faces when I tell them I write obituaries. They range from blank, to mildly interested, to a combination of alarm and bewilderment. “Somebody’s gotta do it,” one man shrugged. Maybe it’s akin to saying you’re a mortician. I then explain: These are not the small- font death notices in the classifieds that are hastily assembled by the deceased’s loved ones or a funeral home, or both. These obituaries are long-form accounts of lives I’ve written for The Canadian Jewish News and the paper that pioneered, in Canada, the full-page obit on a dedicated, ad-free page every day, the Globe and Mail . Readers may also confuse obits for eulo- gies or tributes to the subject. While they tend to be flattering, they’re supposed to be warts-and-all portraits, combining the laud- atory with the louche, written by a journalist who, ideally, did not know the deceased, or not very well. Maybe writing obits is like whistling past the graveyard. Even so, the whole subject gives rise to black humour. “The first thing I do is check the obits page,” goes the old Borscht Belt crack. “If I’m not there, I get up.” Or: Told that the legendarily taciturn U.S. President Calvin Coolidge was dead, Algon- quin Round Table mainstay Dorothy Parker wondered: “How could they tell?” One more: The late American comedy pi- oneer Jackie “Moms” Mabley made a career of celebrating the demise of her much-un- missed late husband. “They say you mustn’t say nothing but good about the dead,” Moms noted. “He’s dead. Good.” These are the common japes of the “dead beat,” as it’s sometimes morbidly called—but the best beat on any publication, as obit writers routinely insist. In what other area can you switch gears and write about schol- ars, business moguls, athletes or scientists one day, and war heroes, academics, artists,
Gerda Frieberg
Outspoken, gutsy and with boundless energy, Gerda, as she was universally known, came along just at the right time to chair the Ontario Region of the lament- ably defunct Canadian Jewish Congress. A highlight for any obit writer was a specific event: The time she faced down Holocaust denying pamphleteer Ernst Zundel and neo-Nazi leader Wolfgang Droege. At Toronto City Hall, she strode up to both of them and uttered something in German. She then turned around to the press in tow and gave a line straight out of a Hollywood Western (and pure catnip for an obit writer): “I told them is no room for three of us here and I have no intention of leaving.” The two men strode away. Gerda died on Jan. 3 at the age of 97. Any obituary recounting a Holocaust surviv- or’s rags-to-riches tale is bound to satisfy. So
politicians or the odd scoundrel the next? Properly done, obituaries are “biographical essays that set a life in context, pay tribute to achievements, and account for failures and faults,” as Sandra Martin, former full-time obit writer for the Globe , wrote in a collection of her best, Working the Dead Beat: 50 Lives that Changed Canada. As far as The CJN goes, I’ve always felt that every Holocaust survivor whose life ends in Canada deserves a full obit. Of course, that’s not feasible, but many of the bet- ter-known figures who have passed over the last year have received the treatment. I committed a basic faux pas when I wrote the obit for Holocaust survivor and educator Gerda Frieberg because I came to know her over the years. For reporters at The CJN, she was hard to miss.
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