Pearl and David Moskovic at their wedding in Ottawa in 1958. For their granddaughter, their slow-burn love story was tainted when the widower found someone new later in life.Courtesy of family
Hannah Alberga is a health reporter at The Canadian Press.
I first heard Ruth’s name in my mum’s silver minivan in May, 2010, on the way to the unveiling of my Bubby’s tombstone in Ottawa, four months after she died.
“Zaida has a new friend, Ruth,” my dad said from the driver’s seat.
I could tell my dad had been delegated to deliver this fireball of information about my maternal grandfather, Dave, widowed after more than 50 years of marriage. I took note as my mum sat silently in the passenger seat, looking out the window.
“So?” I spat back with the indignation of a grieving 14-year-old. “He can be friends with whoever he wants.”
I thought of my mother sitting by the land line every night speaking to my Bubby, doodling on scrap paper as she divulged the stresses of the day and consulted her on how best to cook the brisket.
I understood what my father was insinuating. Later, I would find out how it all happened – how, just days after my Bubby died, my Zaida began plotting his pursuit of Ruth, a 73-year-old with a jet-black pixie cut and rosy lipstick. They’d known each other a long time, and while my Zaida was much older, at 81, with pale blue eyes and a horseshoe of snow-white hair, he summoned the confidence of a college quarterback when he sidled up to Ruth in synagogue and whispered in her ear: “I’ll give you five good years, or you can have 10 bad years with some younger guy.”
That day in the car, though, I remember feeling an animalistic instinct to protect my mother. And I remember refusing to accept that my Zaida would betray his remarkable love story with my Bubby.
My Zaida is a Holocaust survivor. He was 14 when he saw his mother for the last time, running to her side as they were sorted into separate lines at a camp in southern Poland: one, offering a slim chance of survival, or the other, the path to immediate death.
He didn’t know all that at the time, or even that he had arrived at Auschwitz, where his mother and two younger sisters would soon be locked in a chamber of poisonous gas. He only knew that he desperately needed her, the woman who kept the stove aflame in their little log cabin and scrubbed each child’s body in a basin of water she collected from the river.
But he was pushed back into line with his father and older brother, though he would eventually lose them too, shortly before American soldiers rolled into Buchenwald in 1945. Of their family of seven, only Dave and his older sister Edith survived.
He was liberated at 15, still a child despite the lifetimes of pain he’d already experienced. He climbed atop a train without any sense of where it was going. He ducked when it bolted through tunnels and leaped off when it neared his hometown of Koňuš, a tiny village on the border of what was then Czechoslovakia and Hungary.
That was how he lived for years – leaping, without direction – until he landed a Canadian visa and moved to Ottawa. That’s where he met my Bubby, Pearl. It was the mid-1950s and she was getting her appendix out in an Ottawa hospital, angelically draped in a ruffled pink bedjacket, in his memory; he was at the hospital visiting a friend. He went back the next day to ask her out.
Pearl, a private and prudent Canadian-born girl, wasn’t sold right away on Dave as marriage material. But her parents were keen on this hard-working plumber who could speak Yiddish with them. They wed in 1958.
Pearl wound up providing a balance to Dave’s boyish spark, and they fell in love gradually, but wholly. He was keen for her to mould him – to just be guided, to have a north star in the misty night sky.
“Your Bubby made me who I am. I was nothing before her,” he told me.
I loved the slow burn of their love story. That’s why his abrupt relationship with Ruth felt like whiplash – a wrecking ball to an idyllic narrative.
Ruth and Dave in 2019. After his wife died, Ruth steered Dave away from falling into the pain and loneliness of his early life surviving the Holocaust.Stephen J. Thorne/Supplied
Ruth had lost her husband just months before Dave made his inappropriate proposition at synagogue, and shrugged him off. “I’ll always be your friend – but nothing more,” she told him.
Undeterred, Dave invited Ruth on a drive after shul, and despite her platonic intentions, she buckled in. The drives became daily, and allowed them to maintain a level of innocence at the beginning, like high-schoolers with a freshly minted licence, the lust glossy in their eyes. Eventually, there were covert late-night dates at Tim Hortons. Ruth couldn’t help it; she was charmed.
Weeks after his proposal of five good years, she whispered back in his ear at synagogue: “I’ll take it.”
Their relationship escalated quickly, as mature ones often do. Dave sold his house and moved into Ruth’s apartment. She started accompanying him to Toronto when he visited my family, often lounging on the couch in a bubble-gum pink terry-cloth nightgown.
Their public displays of affection made my teenage stomach lurch. Dave gushed about her brilliance. She giggled at everything he said. They kissed whenever they separated, even if it was briefly.
I could tell that my mother found their indiscretion unbearable. For some time, her eyes would flick in the other direction when they were in the same room. I knew her heart yearned for her own mother to put everything back into place.
I wanted to heal her open wounds. And so I aimed my rage at Ruth. I insisted that my Zaida move into our basement – alone – right in front of her, despite their cohabitation. I would ignore her when she spoke to me, fall asleep on the couch while she was talking, and demand that she put my Zaida on the phone if she picked up.
But none of it worked. She kept coming, even as the years went on. The flame of their infatuation never flickered, and eventually, I grew tired of being hostile.
After years blinded by grief, meanwhile, family members shook my mother and insisted that Ruth was a blessing, if she could only open her eyes. And she did, ever so slowly, as she wrestled with the guilt of what felt like disloyalty to her mother.
“I was able to, at a certain point, say, ‘This is right. This is beautiful. This is a gift,’ ” she told me.
“It took me a long time,” she conceded.
I followed suit. One night, with my guard down, I listened as Ruth told me that some friends had questioned why she – a McGill graduate, previously married to a Harvard-educated lawyer – would date a plumber. She basically gave them the middle finger. I liked that, and I knew my mum did too.
Holocaust survivors share the lessons that must never be forgotten
As my Zaida aged into his 90s, I also began to notice how she kept track of his appointments in her pocket-sized planner, and organized Sunday breakfasts with his friends at his favourite diner.
Over the years, the significance of these seemingly mundane acts sunk in: Ruth had steered my Zaida away from falling into the pain and loneliness of his early life surviving the Holocaust. When I told her this, she insisted it was a two-way street. “We saved each other from loneliness. We became one piece,” she said.
“Now we’re melted together,” my Zaida added, leaning his head against hers.
Still, Ruth understood long before I did that he needed a guide to resume the direction my Bubby had provided him.
I love her for seeing that, when I couldn’t.
I’m ashamed of the resentment I felt toward her in the early days. I wish I could take it all back. She’s made my Zaida “the happiest guy in the world,” as he says, for more than 15 years – a decade more than he’d initially promised, and counting, now at the ripe age of 96.
He skipped over so many life stages when he was prematurely forced into adulthood that he didn’t get to fully experience being a child who needed to be loved. It brings me joy now to think that he got a bonus third act in return. I think that would make my Bubby happy, too.