Free Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen by Kate Taylor Page A

carefully folded inside its original envelope in a cigar box at the back of her underwear drawer, along with a few French francs and the pearls her mother had hung around her neck the day before she left. In years to come, she was to pull it out from its envelope so often the paper eventually disintegrated. She would read its sentences until she knew them like a prayer, but most of all she would simply stare at the words, “Your loving parents,” as tangible proof that Philippe and Sophie Bensimon had existed. Indeed, it was her proof that she herself had existed before the day, four months before her twelfth birthday, when she arrived in Canada and became Sarah Simon, the prefix of her last name lopped off by a Halifax immigration officer who just wanted to make her adjustment—and his paperwork—that much easier.
    In Paris, where her family practised little of their distant ancestors’ religion but knew which neighbours were Jews and which were Christians as part of an unspoken hierarchy they seldom pondered, Sarah Bensimon’s name instantly—and dangerously, as things were to turn out—identified her race. In Toronto, where Rachel and Sam Plot lit the Shabbat candles with affectionate pride every Friday night just as their parents had done in the Russian and Polish villages from which they had emigrated, Sarah Simon bore a name that allowed her to pass as part of the Anglo-Saxon majority. She had always spoken English well, for Sophie had been vigilant in her supervision of Sarah’s schooling. Within a year in Canada, the girl’s accent had all but disappeared and Sarah, with her light-brown hair and small features, had become invisible.
    Rachel sometimes wondered, when Sarah first arrived in their home or later, after the war had ended, with what sort of foresight the Bensimons had been blessed. While their neighbours debated whether they should comply with the orders to register with the French police, some arguing it would all blow over if one just laid low, others believing it was safest to comply with the letter of the new law, were the Bensimons somehow immune to the optimism to which lesser souls still clung? Did they know from what fate exactly they had rescued Sarah? How could they not know, Rachel wondered, for what mother would send her child across the ocean to a family she had never met unless she believed it was the one way to save her life.
    If Rachel pondered the situation, trying to imagine what Sarah’s mother felt, it was because, while she could never know for certain what had moved Sophie to give up her daughter, she suspected exactly why she, Rachel, had beenchosen to receive the girl. She had been chosen by Rabbi Cohn because he pitied her. She was certain of it and felt ashamed. Well, perhaps he respected her too, she might hope, believing that she would provide for the girl a good Jewish home—even if she and Sam did seem a bit isolated, all the way out here in the west end of town. But mainly she saw that he felt sorry for her and, giving precedence to the wrong needs, thought that the young Sarah would provide for Rachel.
    Rabbi Cohn had met Rachel two years before Sarah arrived, in 1940, or rather he had met Sam, at a meeting of the Workers’ Benevolent Association in a hall down on Spadina. Since he himself had arrived in Toronto from Cleveland in ’38 to lead a small Conservative congregation on Berkeley Street, the rabbi had never set foot in such a place, but tonight he needed the members of the Workers’ Benevolent Association. He was there to talk about events in Europe and to ask the men to volunteer their homes: Canada had agreed to accept five hundred European orphans who were to arrive from France in less than a month’s time. Committees in Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg had been established to find the families who would board them. Uptown, at Holy Blossom, his Reform colleagues were beating the drum, making speeches and raising money, but maybe they hadn’t found so