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

many people who really wanted a stranger’s child underfoot. At any rate, they were looking downtown now, and had called him. His congregation, in turn, was puzzled that the children were being sent to Canada not Palestine, and, finding few volunteers there, he had agreed to help further by speaking at a meeting called by the Benevolent Association. At the end of the evening, the Zionists were still protesting that greater efforts were notbeing made to settle the orphans in Palestine, while others said the matter would require further debate. Only one person had come forward to volunteer.
    “I’m Sam Plot. I will talk to my wife and call you.”
    And, after one long, agonizing week of talking to Rachel, he did call. They had discussed it for hours, the wrongs and the rights of it, had finally agreed this would not solve their problem, that they must not even hope it could solve their problem, but yes, they would be happy to provide a home for an orphan. “We will take a child,” Sam told the rabbi.
    As Ottawa dragged its heels on issuing visas and debated what numbers could be accommodated, Rabbi Cohn found he had plenty of time to visit the homes that would receive the children, and Sam got off the phone again one evening to tell Rachel to expect a caller.
    “A rabbi? What’s he going to think of us?” she wanted to know. “I had better start cleaning.”
    But when he entered the house on Gladstone Avenue, Rabbi Cohn did not sense Rachel’s nervousness that her house and housekeeping were about to be judged. Instead, he saw the quiet, uncomplaining facade she presented to the world, appreciated its gentleness, and quickly guessed at the greater sorrow that lay beneath. When he asked, Rachel revealed she was thirty-five. There were no children in the house.
    The Toronto committee, not to be outdone by Winnipeg’s eager response, eventually found its quota of Jewish homes, but in the end the five hundred orphans never came. There was this problem, there was that problem. Rabbi Cohn lost track of them all, and sent out a form letter to most of the volunteers, but he went to tell Rachel the news himself.
    “So you wouldn’t need us after all?” “No.”
    “Well, perhaps this too is God’s will…”
    She sound gracious rather than defeated.
    The rabbi, on the other hand, did not accept God’s will with the equanimity that one perhaps might expect of a religious man. He was righteous and, by 1941, he was furiously angry. He did not think Rachel Plot deserved to be barren, he did not think one could stand idly by while the Nazis in occupied Europe sent Jewish parents off to work camps and then declared their children orphans, and he did not think it was necessary to be polite to the bureaucrats. In guilty moments, he gave into this wrath and designed horrible tortures or imagined just fates for the intractable Mr. Blair, director of the immigration branch in Ottawa. His contacts at the Jewish Immigrant Aid Society, who had once accepted his help eagerly, no longer permitted him to attend their increasingly desperate meetings, still believing that gentle words would sway Canadian officials where the rabbi urged threats and demonstrations. In fact, he had not heard from the society in almost a year, when an official called to say that a dozen refugees on special permits had somehow made it to Halifax and they needed a home for one child. He called Rachel that afternoon. Since 1935, from the hundreds of thousands of Jews who had applied to leave Europe for resettlement in North or South America, Canada had accepted 3,273. Sarah Bensimon was one of the lucky ones.
    But Sarah did not feel very lucky. Rather she felt small. On the red streetcar that clanged along Bloor Street, leading her from the Plots’ home on Gladstone Avenue east to the shopsand lights of Yonge Street, she would catch herself staring at strangers, trying to fathom their Canadian lives. Where were they all hurrying to? What did their parcels and