A Very CApAble life the autobiography of zarah petri Walters_CapableLife_Text_Final_SK.indd 1 01/12/09 9:40 AM Our Lives: diary, memoir, and letters Series Editor: Janice Dickin Our Lives aims at both student and general readership. Today’s students, living in a world of blogs, understand that there is much to be learned from the everyday lives of everyday people. Our Lives seeks to make available previously unheard voices from the past and present. Social history in general contests the construction of history as the story of elites and the act of making available the lives of everyday people, as seen by themselves, subverts even further the contentions of social historiography. At the same time, Our Lives aims to make available books that are good reads. General readers are guaranteed quality, provided with introductions that they can use to contextualize material and are given a glimpse of other works they might want to look at. It is not usual for university presses to provide this type of primary material. Athabasca University considers provision of this sort of material as important to its role as Canada’s Open University. Walters_CapableLife_Text_Final_SK.indd 2 01/12/09 9:40 AM A Very Capable Life the autobiography of zarah petri john leigh walters Our Lives: Diary, Memoir, and Letters Walters_CapableLife_Text_Final_SK.indd 3 01/12/09 9:40 AM © 2010 John Leigh Walters Published by AU Press, Athabasca University 1200, 10011 – 109 Street Edmonton, AB T5J 3S8 Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Walters, John Leigh, 1933– A very capable life : the autobiography of Zarah Petri / John Leigh Walters. (Our Lives: Diary, Memoir, and Letters series) Also available in electronic format (978-1-897425-42-8) ISBN 978-1-897425-41-1 1. Petri, Zarah. 2. Hungarian Canadians--Biography. 3. Immigrants--Canada--Biography. I. Title. II. Series: Our lives: diary, memoir, and letters (Edmonton, Alta.) FC106.H95W34 2010 971’.004945110092 C2009-905091-9 ISSN 1921-6653 Our Lives: Diary, Memoir, and Letters Series (Print) ISSN 1921-6661 Our Lives: Diary, Memoir, and Letters Series (Online) Printed and bound in Canada by AGMv Marquis. Cover, layout, and book design by Honey Mae Cafn, intertextual.ca Cover photograph: Private Family Collection Tis publication is licensed under a Creative Commons License, see www.creativecommons.org. Te text may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that credit is given to the original authors. Please contact AU Press, Athabasca University at For Jacquelynn Ann Barnes Fifty years and still not enough     Walters_CapableLife_Text_Final_SK.indd 5 01/12/09 9:40 AM vi john leigh walters Introduction A Very Capable Life: The Autobiography of Zarah Petri by John Leigh Walters is a remarkable book, seemingly straightforward, and highly accessible on one level, yet complex and provocative on another. Walters’s purpose in creating this memoir seems simple enough: to tell his mother’s life story in a way that evokes her own voice as accurately as is possible. Of course, the memoir genre is not a simple one, and in fact readers may well discern several more nuanced and overlapping purposes behind the manuscript: to tell a woman’s story, an immigrant’s story, a working class person’s story, an elderly person’s story, and in so doing, not only to valorize each of these subject positions, but also to reveal his mother, someone who has occupied all of these seemingly marginal spaces, as a truly extraordinary person, one who deserves to be remembered for her place in history as well as for her remarkable personal qualities. Given the range of territories through which it moves, this book will interest diverse readers, from specialists in such areas as women’s history, life writing, immigration history, and working class history, to those who simply enjoy a good read. Readers familiar with the broad story of the immigration to Canada from central and eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in particular, with the story of Hungarian immigration, will fnd in this memoir a compelling case study. While clearly propelled by her distinctive personality, Zarah’s story is nevertheless quite representative of the “Hungarian immigrant story,” in terms of the factors that “pushed” her family out of Hungary and “pulled” them to Canada, the period of their immigration, the places where they settled, even the problems Walters_CapableLife_Text_Final_SK.indd 6 01/12/09 9:40 AM a very capable life vii o f adjustment that they experienced. Historians of immigration generally, and of immigration to Canada and from Hungary in particular, will fnd this book a fascinating and valuable addition to the various primary and secondary sources that evidence/explore the second major wave of European immigrants to Canada in the inter-war years, the more so because it is about a woman, and immigration history in Canada has often been skewed toward a male perspective. Similarly, since women’s history in Canada has arguably been biased toward the Anglophone and Francophone majorities, this book makes a valuable contribution to our knowledge and appreciation of the diverse experiences of women who have helped to build this country. Readers will fnd here an intricate piece of storytelling, one that ofers a skilful rendering of Zarah Petri’s lively voice, as she tells her life story, more or less chronological, complete with engaging fashbacks and fash-forwards that lend the narrative coherence and momentum. However, the narrator’s voice/point of view is a complicated one, because it is retrospective and thus at once encompasses both the child (or young adult, for example) and the elderly woman, while also at times including the voice of John, the second son, the actual writer, his mother’s scribe. Some readers will undoubtedly fnd such a “memoir” problematic, if not downright objectionable. After all, the voice we hear is not really that of the woman supposedly at the centre of this narrative, but rather, that of the man who dares to speak for her. However, I hope that more readers will applaud Walters’s arguably audacious appropriation as a loving act, one that honours his mother by telling her story as authentically as possible rather than allowing it to fade into oblivion, lost, like most such “ordinary” stories, to all but her immediate family, and eventually even to them. Clearly, readers of this memoir are in the hands of two storytellers, who simultaneously lead them through Zarah Petri’s extra/ordinary life. Tankfully, both are artful weavers, Walters_CapableLife_Text_Final_SK.indd 7 01/12/09 9:40 AM viii john leigh walters a nd together they re-create the complex textures of Zarah’s experiences—the irony, the comedy, and the tragedy that constitute her difcult yet richly eventful life. Te narrator takes readers from her childhood in the early years of the twentieth century in the small Hungarian town of Becse, where she and her brother and sisters are left on the eve of the Great War in the capable and loving hands of their grandparents, while their less sensible parents follow the “Judas goat” Count Esterhazy to the wilds of Western Canada in search of a new life there for their young family; to her in many ways ill-fated journey to Ontario, where her poet father has purchased a beautiful but impractical farmhouse, in which later, unable to cope with mounting debts, he commits suicide, leaving his only marginally more capable wife to raise their young family in a foreign land; then to Zarah’s marriage as a teenager to John, a fellow immigrant, but somewhat less than kindred spirit; to their struggles during the Great Depression as they raise their two, and later, three, boys; through her challenges as a mature woman, as a widow, and then as an elderly woman confronting the indignities of Alzheimer’s disease. Her free spirit and sharp intelligence animate the narrative at every turn, making it the kind of story that once begun, one is loath to leave unfnished. Readers will not soon forget the expressive, albeit at times ungrammatical, voice of Zarah Petri—a woman whose courageous spirit, generous heart, and ferce independence as she confronts whatever challenges fate conjures make her worthy of our attention and respect, as she beckons us to join her in discovering anew the country to which she journeyed so many years ago. Tamara Palmer Seiler University of Calgary Walters_CapableLife_Text_Final_SK.indd 8 01/12/09 9:40 AM a very capable life ix Preface there is nothing ordinary, here. arriving as a child from Europe in the 1920s, Zarah Petri marries at age sixteen, and is subsequently released from her job in a knitting mill. (“No married ladies, please.”) Tese are also the Prohibition years, so the young bride confned now to the kitchen, moves to replace the missing income by making and selling “grappa,” a homemade liquor, a sweet and satisfying distillate, a quick seller to area speakeasy patrons. Zarah’s grappa becomes unexpectedly popular. Zarah prospers, and her missing income is made bigger by twice. Later, during WWII, faced with a heavy mortgage on a farm she bought, between rows of feld corn she grows rows of illegal poppies, the seeds of which she sells to the ethnic baking trade to be used in sweet goods. Historical: Te federal government of the day forbade the growing of poppies believing it would lead to the manufacture of heroin as it had in China in the 1930s. And through the war when meat is rationed, Zarah markets freshly butchered hogs from the trunk of a car, in the dark of the night, to a thankful Italian and Portuguese public. All these things are punishable by jail time, but she does them anyway. Zarah has her own test for what is proper or improper, taken from the Good Book, Exodus 20: 1–17 saying, “If it is not forbidden here, it is forbidden nowhere.” Proof to her purpose, there is nothing in the Ten Commandments about distillates, poppies, or pork. In the pages of this book I am the son mentioned. My birth occurred during the Depression; no money changed hands on that occasion; the attending physician, Dr. Leigh C. vanderburgh, was paid for his services by means of two imperial gallons of clear grappa. My middle given name is his. Walters_CapableLife_Text_Final_SK.indd 9 01/12/09 9:40 AM