Features
Anna Kaplan one of Winnipeg’s youngest personal trainers
By MYRON LOVE It is always uplifting to read (or, from my perspective, to write) about people who have been able to reinvent themselves – and even more so when such an individual can use her own transformation to inspire others. Such is the case with Anna Kaplan, a young (21) personal trainer whose passion for physical fitness grew out of personal troubles as a teenager.
“I had a feeling of being excluded,” says the daughter of Kevin and Roxanne Kaplan. “I was afraid that I was missing out. I was losing friends. I had developed some bad habits and was at a real low point in my life – at rock bottom.”
At 18, Kaplan determined to change her life. She began working with a personal trainer and going to the gym. She also changed her dietary habits.
“Before long, I was feeling better mentally and physically,” she recalls.
Two years ago, wanting to help others struggling to improve their lives, Kaplan opened A Plus Fitness. On her Facebook page, she notes that “When you sign up for online training with A Plus Fitness, you’re not just getting a workout plan — you’re getting full access to our all-in-one training app designed to support your transformation every step of the way.”
Kaplan started A Plus Fitness strictly as an online business for which she developed her own app. “I started building my client base initially by contacting friends and acquaintances via a social media platform to see what interest there might be out there,” she says.
With demand for her services growing, about a year ago she began working with clients in person out of a gym on Portage Avenue. In just two years, she reports, business has grown to the point where she has had to hire a second trainer.
“I work with people ranging from 18 to 65 plus,” she says. “The number of clients has tripled in the last year and I have been able to help over 100 clients to get into shape and change their lives.”
The reviews have been outstanding with many giving the young fitness trainer a 5 out of 5 rating. Says one client: ”I’ve been training with Anna for a while now, and it’s been an amazing experience! She really takes the time to understand my goals and pushes me in the best way possible. Since working with her, I feel stronger, more motivated, and more confident in my workouts.”
Adds another: “Over the past year, A Plus Fitness has completely transformed my approach to working out, helping me tone my body and build strength in ways I never thought possible. Anna’s guidance and personalized training plans have made a huge difference in my progress, pushing me to achieve results faster than I expected.”
Kaplan feels good that among those she has been able to help have been her own mother, Roxanne Kaplan, who says that ”I’ve always had some sort of fitness routine in my life. I followed along with the fitness videos with the weights that were recommended – I’d go through phases but never stuck to it. With Anna’s coaching and sticking to her program, I see muscle definition that I’ve never had before. I feel better, more confident, and well rested.”
Kaplan further points out that, in additions to helping people through her business, she is also community minded. “I have helped with several fundraising events in the Jewish community,” she reports.
Most recently, she helped raise money for the Reid Bricker Mental Wellness Fund in memory of a relatively young member of our community who struggled with mental health for several years before committing suicide 10 years ago. The fund aims “to increase the availability of mental health supports and education across the province while ensuring that individuals and families facing mental health challenges receive the support they need when they need it the most.”
Next for Anna Kaplan and A Plus Fitness is to open her own location at some point in the next few years.
Readers can contact Anna at 204 391-5832 or mail her at admin@aplusfit.ca.
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.
