Features
From painting and making bead necklaces as a teen – to nursing for most of her life – as well as writing a recipe column for the Jewish Post from 2010-2014, Francine Kurlandski has had a myriad of interests.
By BERNIE BELLAN We are often asked by readers why we profile so many ex-Winnipeggers.
“Aren’t there enough Winnipeggers with interesting stories to tell?” is what a lot of readers ask us.
The truth is that finding interesting people to write about is the easy part; finding writers who want to take the time to interview those interesting people though, and then turning that interview into a well-written article is the hard part.
When I was the publisher of this paper I generally shied away from doing exactly that kind of profile. It was time consuming and, knowing how fussy many individuals are about what’s written about them, I always felt an obligation to let the interview subject vet what I had written – even to make changes if they didn’t like how some things came out.
I started to record all my interviews – few as they might have been, and then transcribe them using a transcription service on my Mac computer.
But, for quite some time I had refrained from conducting any interviews. Then I was contacted by someone at the Jewish Post office in the Gwen Secter Centre who told me there was a very nice woman who was going to be visiting Winnipeg soon – and this particular woman thought that I might have an interest in interviewing her.
I was told that her name was Francine Kurlandski. “Why does that name sound so familiar?” I wondered to myself. With my curiosity whetted I phoned the number Francine had left with the Jewish Post and said to her, when she answered the phone, that her name was very familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite place her.
Francine answered: “Don’t you remember? I used to write a recipe column for the Jewish Post?”
It all came back. Of course, now I remembered, but didn’t Francine also have another name when she used to write for us? I asked.
“Yes, I was Francine Teller to start. Then, when I got remarried, I started using my new married name – Kurlandski.”
“But most of my friends in Winnipeg will remember me for my maiden name, which was Wise,” Francine added.
The daughter of Marion and Israel Wise and sister to Elaine, Francine, who was born in 1957, said she grew up in River Heights – at 756 Lanark to be specific. She attended, in order: John Dafoe, J. B . Mitchell, and then Grant Park.
Along the way, when she was 17 years old, Francine was also Miss Israel for the Israel Pavilion at Folklorama.
Francine had told me prior to the interview that her first career was as a nurse, so I asked her whether she had long had a desire to study nursing. Initially, she was unsure, but she says she “inherited the caring feeling that is so instrumental in nursing” from her father.
Israel Wise had a degree in social work, Francine said, and “worked for the province helping Indigenous people.” In addition, “he was also the youth director at the Shaarey ZedeK Synagouge and president of the General Monash branch of the Canadian Legion for veterans.” Francine’s mother, who worked for Technion Canada “also had a social service bent, so nursing was a natural fit,” Francine suggested.
Still, before eventually entering the Misericordia School of Nursing, Francine said her first love was art, a talent she now says “lay latent within her. “She recalls going downtown on weekends: “I remember going to the stores that had sold these little tiny beads – and that was so popular then. And I got into making beaded and feather necklaces.
“And then that led me into teaching myself how to do macrame, needle point and knitting. So, I loved all those crafty things. My parents had a cottage at Gimli. I remember loving to draw, and would go into the dock and sketch the boats and the birds. I loved all that.”
But, aside from her love of art, Francine found that enrolling in nursing school was a perfect fit for her. She remained a nurse until quite recently.
Francine was married at what we would now consider a very early age, when she was only 21. When she was 23 she and her then then husband moved to Toronto where Francine began “painting suede kippas with Sesame Street characters, also Ghostbusters, and I sold them to a couple of Jewish bookstores here.”
She began to study watercolouring in earnest, inspired, she said, by a trip she took to Israel where she saw the artists’ colony in Safed.
Francine noted that “once my children were in their teens, I had time to explore my painting. And that’s when I started a painting course from the city of. Toronto. I also connected with a group of artists in North York, and to this day, I belong to the Toronto Watercolor Society where I got to meet like-minded artists.”
Francine said she just recently retired from nursing after 45 years. The last 20 years of her career, she said, were spent working for another former Winnipegger, Dr. Rochelle Schwartz.
The mother of three sons, Francine explained that her home could be described as modern Orthodox. All three of her sons had the opportunity to study in Israel, she noted. Two of them studied at Yeshiva University while another one attended at Touro, in New York.
When the oldest was 18, she said, she took up painting more seriously.
I wondered though, about Francine’s cooking expertise. From where did that come?
“Was your mother a really good cook?” I asked.
“My whole extended family were good cooks, especially my late aunt, Karen Wise,” she answered.
In 1997, Francine noted, hospitals across Canada embarked on a downsizing campaign.
“I was on leave because I had a baby at that time. I really needed to bring in income. So, for extra income. I started to cook from my home… wholesome, nutritious food. I started a vegetarian food business, and did that for four years. And with that food business I thought I could teach cooking lessons, and write recipes for the paper.”
As a sidenote, I said to Francine that I didn’t remember when she actually wrote a cooking column for the Jewish Post, but when I checked our archives, it turned out that it was from 2010-14.
Francine’s food business lasted until 2003, until she began working for Rochelle Schwartz.
It was around that time that Francine started trying to enter some of her paintings in juried art shows. She continued to study art for a certain period with a private art teacher.
“Every course you take as an artist, you learn how to improve,” Francine observed.
“After I experimented with all kinds of different subjects I focused on portraits and Judaica art. I’ve always had a deep interest in the Jewish lifestyle.”
When it came to marketing her paintings though, once again Francine had to ” learn, even to put something on Instagram. It was all baby steps. And you’re doing this all by yourself. You don’t wanna hire someone to do it.”
Francine has had her art exhibited in many of the art society’s exhibitions and is working with Toronto’s United Jewish Appeal for a future showing.
You can imagine the excitement Francine must be feeling. If you want to see samples of Francine’s art you can check out her Instagram page. Just go to Instagram and look for @artistfrancine.
Features
100-year-old Lil Duboff still taking life one day at a time
By MYRON LOVE Last march, Lil Duboff celebrated her 100th birthday in a low key manner.
“I have always been a laid back kind of person,” says the Shaftesbury retirement home resident. “I just celebrated with my family.”
Lil Duboff’s life journey began in Russia in 1925. “I was six months old when we came to Winnipeg,” she says. “Most of my extended family had come before. We were supposed to leave Russia at the same time, but my mother was pregnant with me and my parents waited until after I was born.”
The former Lil Portnoy, the daughter of Hy and Pessie, grew up the youngest of five siblings in a large and loving family in the old north end Jewish community. Upon his arrival in Winnipeg, her father, Hy, joined his father, Jack, and his brothers, Nathan and Percy, in the family business, Perth’s Cleaners, which was established in 1914.
Following the education path of most Jewish Winnipeggers in the period between the wars and into the 1950s, Duboff started her schooling at Peretz School – although she attended William Whyte School for most of her elementary schooling, supplemented by evening classes at Peretz School – followed by Aberdeen School and St. John’s Tech for high school.
The family, she recalls, belonged to the Beth Jacob Synagogue on Selkirk Avenue.
After completing high school, Duboff took a business course and joined the workforce. She first worked at Perth’s, then Stall’s, and lastly, Silpit Industries – which was owned by Harry Silverberg. (Harry Silverberg was one of the wealthier individuals in our community and a community leader who contributed generously to our communal institutions.)
It was while working at Silpit Industries that Lil Portnoy met Nathan Duboff. “Nathan worked in the shipping department,” she recalls. “We dated for three or four years before getting married.”
They wed in 1953 at the Hebrew Sick Hall on Selkirk Avenue. The bride was pregnant soon after and quit work to look after her family. The couple had three children: Chuck, Neil and Cynthia.
The family lived in the Garden City area. While Nathan continued to work for Harry Silverberg for a time – at his Brown and Rutherford lumber business, he later moved to Portage Lumber as sales manager, and then Dominion Lumber, finally retiring as sales manager for McDermot Lumber in 1995.
During those years Lil did what many married Jewish women did and put her time in as a volunteer with different Jewish organizations. She served as president of the Chevra Mishnayes Congregation sisterhood and the ORT chapter to which she belonged. She also volunteered with B’nai B’rith Women and Jewish Child and Family Service.
Her leisure activities included playing mahjong with friends and enjoying – with Nathan – the ballet and the symphony. There were also all the holiday gatherings with the extended family and summers spent at the family cottage in Gimli.
In the mid-1980s, Lil and Nathan sold their Garden City home and moved to a condo on Cambridge in the south end. After Nathan’s sudden passing in 2003, Lil continued living at Cambridge Towers until three years ago when her declining physical health required her to move into assisted living at the Shaftesbury.
While Lil Duboff suffers from many of the complaints of old age, such as limited eyesight and hearing, and other health issues, she retains a clear and positive frame of mind. She appreciates that her children all still live in Winnipeg and visit frequently. She happily reports that she also has five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
“It’s different living here (at the Shaftesbury),” she observes. “I don’t see as many people as I used to. But I am accepting my limitations and take life one day at a time. You never know what tomorrow might bring.”
Features
The First Time: A Memoir
By DAVID R. TOPPER Nearly every life has a series of “first times,” no matter how long or short one lives. The first day of school, or the first bicycle – these quickly come to mind. Probably because of the deep and wide reading I’ve been doing for a story I wrote, I recalled another “first” in my life. It came to me with the same chill up my spine as on the day it happened. And that was long ago.
I’m now into my early 80s and this event is from the late 1960s when I was finishing my PhD, which required that I pass a second language test. It was the last essential test, since I was finishing up my dissertation. In the early 1960s, as an undergraduate, I had taken German for the language requirement and naturally I opted for German for the graduate requirement too. Relevant here is the fact that of all the undergraduate courses I took, the only subject for which I had poor grades was – you guessed it? – German, where I got less than As and Bs.
On the day appointed, I walked across campus to the German department and took the test. The task was to translate a page of text. I can’t recall the content or anything about it. But the result was sent to me and – I suppose not surprisingly – I didn’t pass. I was informed that I could make an appointment with a member of the department to go over the test and to get some tutoring to help me prepare for another try.
But where is the “first in my life” that this memoir is all about? As said above, I only recently recalled this “first.” The trigger was a newscast that Yale University professor Timothy Snyder was moving to the University of Toronto because of the recent presidential elections in the USA. This caught my attention because his monumental book, Black Earth, on the Holocaust in the shtetls of Eastern Europe during World War II, was so crucial to that story I wrote. Thus, my subconscious kicked in and that newscast led me back to when I met the tutor.
Frankly, I don’t remember much about that day. Not the time of year, or the weather. Except that I again walked across campus, this time to meet my German tutor. Even so, I only remember three things about the tutor – beyond the fact that it was woman. She was much older than me and she spoke with a thick accent.
We sat at a table, she to my left, and in front of us on the table was my translation sheet covered with corrections in red; the original German text was beside it, to the right. Slowly she went over my translation, pointing out my mistakes. I sat, focusing on what I did wrong and listening to her suggestions for what I should have done – when, for a brief moment, she reached across my sheet to point to a German word in the original text. With her left hand and her bare arm right in front of me – I saw something on the underside of that arm.
At the time, I knew about this. I had read about it. But back in the late 1960s I had never seen it for real – in the flesh. Really. Yes, “in the flesh” isn’t a metaphor. Indeed, I’m getting the same chill now just thinking about it, as I did when I saw it – for the first time.
On the inside of that arm, she had a tattoo – a very simple tattoo – just a five-digit number. Nothing else.
I was so rattled by this that I couldn’t focus on what she was saying anymore. The tattoo blurred out much of everything else for the rest of the day.
Fortunately, this happened near the end of our meeting, and I apparently absorbed enough of her help so that when I did take the test the second time – I passed. And here I am: a retired professor after many years of teaching.
Even today, that first tattoo is still seared in my mind. Oh, and that’s the third thing I’ll always remember about the tutor who helped me pass that key test on the road to my PhD.
Features
Japanese Straightening/Hair Rebonding at SETS on Corydon
Japanese Straightening is a hair straightening process invented in Japan that has swept America.
