Memoir Excerpt
Jewish Pioneers
Marcia Jean Diamond was born November 25th, 1925, Calgary, Alberta. Her ancestors, as much as I know of them, were as colorful as can be.
Her paternal grandfather Philip, and great uncles William and Jacob Tabariskey, changing their names to Diamond once off the ship in Canada, came from the town of Oshmana, Belarus.
Many of the Tabariskey forbears who stayed in Oshmana were part of a flourishing Jewish community. Between 1906 to 1914, one of the renowned Polish rabbis was Reb Yehudah Leib Fein, who headed the great yeshivah of the town at the time. My grandfather Joseph was actually a student there, and graduated as a shochet, a Jewish butcher. Many unknown cousins and distant aunts and uncles either stayed or ended up in South America, New York and Canada. In 1941, Oshmana was occupied by the Nazis, and the population of over 3,000 Jews, including unknown relatives, were either executed locally or sent to the death camps.
Thankfully, my people ended up in western Canada. My great, great uncle William set up his family in Edmonton in 1888 and founded the first synagogue there around 1890, as did his brother Jacob Lyon around the same time in Calgary, building the first temple, the House of Jacob there. Both are heritage buildings to this day. Calgary and Edmonton in those years were small prairie towns set near the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Frigid, long winters, short springs and autumns, bookmarked with beautiful summers, but not without ample, vampiric mosquitoes July and August, and tiny but ferocious black flies besetting my Jewish forebears May and June.
Why didn’t they choose the more populace cities of Toronto or Montreal…or the stunning coastal Vancouver rainforest with giant Sitka spruce trees? They clearly had money to travel so far, but why Calgary and Edmonton? Maybe they’d had enough of pogroms in the old country and thought the small Canadian outposts would give them a freedom that for generations in Oshmana was never their lot in life.
The government of Alberta also offered free lots for new immigrants to farm. Granted, the Diamond future progeny would possess Sony of Canada, be national hoteliers and co-owners of the NHL jockey franchise, the Calgary Flames. Moreover, they avoided two world wars and Hitler’s final solution.
My great grandfather Philip Diamond took a grander leap of faith. He came to Canada a dozen years later in the mid 1900s, ultimately settling with his seven children in Canmore, Alberta, twenty miles east of Banff. This was a tiny outpost deep in the Rocky Mountains. I can only imagine the vastness, the utter beauty, the untouched forests, the snowy, silent winters, the beautiful springs and summers. The emerald lakes and rivers too cold to swim in but with no-ending rainbow trout. Innumerable elk and white-tailed deer and mountain goats and black bears and grizzlies and moose were everywhere.
In 1971, when 19, I spent a summer at the Banff School of Fine Arts to study acting. My first true girlfriend was Meryl Taradash, a painting student from New York. She was just 17. One weekend we hiked up Mount Norquay. It may have been a Saturday night when we pitched our tent, zipped together our sleeping bags, somehow got naked enough in the freezing cold and made love. For me, it was truly a first and my release after years of being alone was overwhelming and incredibly powerful. Neither of us over the years have ever forgotten our teenage tryst and so remain friends to this day. Banff was wild then. The Alberta government had made Banff and its environs a national park so forbids any hunting of the wildlife there. Elk and deer still roam the streets of the town fearlessly.
But in 1909 there were no cars, just horse and buggy, so Canmore to Calgary was a 60 mile, two day journey. Canmore was a virtual wilderness, but my great grandfather Philip somehow built the first general store there. His wife, Ruchel, a true beauty, had issues with her health in the wet climate of the old country, and so hoped for a drier place somewhere in Canada. She died in Oshmana before being able to join her family. I can only imagine the difficulties Philip, now a single father, faced in the mountain wilderness. Moreover, his native language was, of course, Yiddish with a smattering of Russian. Learning English must have been an unbelievable trial.
Was there a burgeoning Jewish community in Canmore? Clearly not. Miners and trappers in need of supplies, yes. But who were the kids hanging out with? A few native children not yet sent to the horrific residential schools? Sons and daughters of the local pioneers? Certainly not Jews. What in the hell was my great grandfather thinking? He was crazier than his older brothers. Granted, the scenery was awesome, majestic and empty and wild. His children were left playing in the mountainous backwoods. Keeping the grizzlies at bay, Philip Diamond clearly saw an opportunity. His general store was indeed a cash cow. A couple of his sons, Harry and Jacob, ended up on the local hockey team and they and brother Louis ultimately ran the store. Their sister Fanny, (later a star tennis player who threw a baseball harder than her brothers), also took care of things, as well as the younger kids. There was a famed player piano at the center of the huge place with torn rolls constantly playing early 20th century hits. During the prohibition years, there was rumored bootlegging going on as well.
The summer of 1984, Deanna and I visited Canmore. A new general store has been built on the exact same site as my great grandfather’s original place. The town is still quite small and the natural surroundings as wild and beautiful as ever.
