Features
Return to Ukraine: searching out the Rosner family past
Introduction: Not too long ago we were contacted by former CBC Manitoba managing editor Cecil Rosner, who asked us whether we’d be interested in publishing a story about a trip he took in 2012 to visit the area in Ukraine where both his parents were born. Although it’s been 10 years since Cecil visited Ukraine, given the current situation in that country we thought it timely to get a sense of what life was like in Ukraine prior to the Russian invasion.
By CECIL ROSNER ““Oi — look at the way the schlemiel drives.”
We are bouncing along the potholed roads of Western Ukraine, heading from Lviv to my mother’s hometown of Buczacz. Our driver and guide isn’t Jewish, but that doesn’t stop him from endlessly whistling Fiddler on the Roof tunes and inserting Yiddishisms into every second phrase.
“These guys are all ganefs (thieves),” he says of the policemen we pass, as he forms his thumb and forefinger into a pistol and slowly pulls the trigger. Alex doesn’t like the speed traps the highway patrols set up, and he appreciates oncoming drivers signalling him to beware of cops just beyond the next hill. It’s an important issue for our driver, who crisscrosses Ukraine’s roads all year-long, ferrying tourists to distant towns and villages in search of their Jewish ancestors.
For Alex, who holds a history degree and is an expert at tracing genealogical roots, it’s an occupation he never dreamed he would have. But in the chaos of the Soviet Union’s collapse, when jobs were evaporating and everyone was trying to reimagine their lives, it seemed like a useful niche to pursue – especially as foreigners were finally trying to discover exactly what had happened to their relatives during the Second World War.
That’s why I’m here too, along with my wife and a cousin. Both of my parents were born in the region, and both were here when the Nazis occupied the area in 1941. In different improbable and miraculous ways, they both survived the war and emigrated to Canada. But every single other family member was shot, gassed, beaten or starved to death by the Nazis and their collaborators. We came here to see what traces of their lives remained.
It seemed logical to make our first stop the local museum, right across from the old city hall. Buczacz is little more than a village, with about 13,000 people. In the early part of the 19th century, Jews made up two-thirds of the population. While that number ebbed and flowed over the years, Jews were still in the majority when the Nazi occupation began. But that would have been difficult to discern in the museum.
In all the display cases, and in the colourful photo album that the town produces, there is no specific mention of a Jewish population. There is scarcely any reference to the Second World War, except for a notation that the town “was released from German invaders and captured by the Soviet Union.” Wouldn’t a town’s museum want to address what became of the majority of the population? What happened to thousands of farmers, shop owners, tailors, tinsmiths, doctors, lawyers and politicians? Doesn’t the mass roundup and extermination of most people in town even rate a mention?
The only hint of any Jewish presence came in the form of artifacts from the life of Shmuel Agnon, a Jewish writer born in Buczacz who won the Nobel Prize for literature. But the entire fate of the people Agnon wrote about had been erased.
Alex had little luck getting the museum’s employee to throw any light on what the town was like in the immediate pre-war period. She genuinely seemed not to know. But there were a few things I already knew.
My mother, Mina, had been born here in 1913, and her family owned a wholesale distribution company. They carbonated water and stored it in big, forty-litre copper cylinders, shipping them along with ice to shops throughout the area. When she was 25, she married my father, Michael Rosner, who came from nearby Kolomaya. In 1939, they opened a small retail store on the main town square, probably within metres of the present-day museum.
When the war broke out in September 1939, there was a reprieve. The region came under the control of the Soviets, and Jews were under no immediate threat. All that changed when Hitler marched eastward in 1941. My father was conscripted by the retreating Soviets, and my mother was trapped behind Nazi lines for the remainder of the war.
For the next three years, every member of my mother’s family – her parents, five brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and cousins – were dragged from their hiding places, bludgeoned or shot, or sent off to be executed. They were all dumped into unmarked graves. My parents’ first-born child – my brother – also fell victim, dying at the age of three in 1942.
My mother’s survival defied any normal odds. She fled from one hiding place to another, escaping just in time to avoid capture. She spent 11 months in the attic of a Polish family along with five other Jews. She took an assumed name and boldly convinced the Nazis she was Christian. Finally, after Buczacz was liberated, she re-united with my father and they came to Canada to start anew in 1948.
I had been to Buczacz once before, with my mother, in 1990. We came with a documentary crew to record her first visit back home since the war. It was an emotional trip and a difficult one for both of us. But we learned very little of the actual events that had transpired in the town, or the exact locations where they happened. That’s why, nearly 15 years after my mother’s death, I was returning for a second time.
I convinced Alex that our best strategy on this trip would be to find older people and ask them what they knew about the 30s and 40s. Alex seemed skeptical. For one thing, the war had begun more than 70 years ago, so it was unlikely there would be any useful first-hand witnesses at hand. And there was also the collective amnesia that pertained to inconvenient truths.
After all, a segment of the population had actively collaborated with Hitler. They were instrumental in helping identify and round up the Jews, the Communists, and all the other elements the Nazis wanted to destroy. Some might still be living in Buczacz and surrounding areas. Their children and grandchildren almost certainly are here.
The museum’s employee finally gives us a sliver of hope. There is someone in town we should visit – someone who knows the history and might be able to help us. His name is Mykola.
We drive for a few minutes and stop at Mykola’s house. I am expecting to find an elderly man who may have been a teenager during the war. Instead, we come upon a 40-something man in sweatpants and a Maple Leafs T-shirt. He is clutching a handful of papers and photographs. One of them shows a photo of Buczacz’s surviving Jews standing beside a memorial gravestone in 1944. Out of the original population of 10,000, no more than 100 survived. One of the people in the photo is my mother.
Mykola has taken an interest in wartime history, and now helps visiting tourists locate family remnants. He has a variety of interesting documents, including a map of pre-war street names, and a mid-19th century register of townsfolk. It turns out that he knows about some of the Jewish families that lived in Buczacz during the war – a handful of them have returned over the years, and he has helped them find their old homes and landmarks.
We ask Mykola if he could help solve a puzzle my mother and I couldn’t figure out on our previous trip. Her family had lived on a street called Zeblickevicie, which had changed names several times after the war. From her description, though, we knew it was beside a stream that ran into the Strypa River, a subsidiary of the Dniester.
We pile into the car along with Mykola and he directs us to the location. The stream had been covered over, except at the point where it emptied into the Strypa. Though the original home was no longer there, he shows us the exact location where my mother’s family had lived. I saw the idyllic surroundings, the lush vegetation around the quiet river, and for the first time I had an inkling of the peaceful life my mother experienced before the war changed everything.
While we were all walking along the old Zeblickevicie street, Mykola bumps into a friend and exchanges a few words with him. As we walk on, the friend stops my wife, Harriet, and our cousin Nina and says: “Mina Rosner – I am a Witness.” That is the name of my mother’s book. Alex is impatient. He had rich experience of locals trying to pester visitors, and he was eager to move us all along. But Harriet and Nina persist. It turns out the man on our chance encounter knows all about my mother’s story, and offers to take us on a tour of where she lived, where she went to school, where she hid during the war, and where her family members were killed.
Over the next 24 hours, Alex grudgingly admits he was wrong. Our serendipitous encounter has linked us up with Jura, a 60-year-old retired computer technician, astrologist and local historian. He knows my mother’s exact birthdate, and, it appears, everyone else’s in town. He has a photocopied version of my mother’s book, and he has pieced together her recollections with precise locations of many of the events she describes. If photographic memories actually exist, we figure he has one. He is a visiting tourist’s dream come true, and Alex has to take a back seat while Jura takes us on a remarkable tour of my mother’s life.
The first stop is just around the corner, on a street that used to be called Chechego Maya. I remember it from my mother’s stories, but we could never pinpoint it on our previous trip. Jura shows us the building where my mother’s sister and her husband ran a hardware shop. He knows the address because it’s listed in trade publications of the era. Though my mother’s original house and her parents’ store no longer existed, I finally had an authentic touchstone of some of her family’s life at the time.
Jura takes us to the pre-war building on Kolejowa Street that served as the cheder, the religious school, where Jewish kids studied. We visit the girls’ school and middle school where my mother was a student, and walk into Buczacz’s Sokol theatre, where she watched dramatic performances and movies as a teenager. A group of children is rehearsing a musical concert on stage, and I can imagine my mother sitting in the auditorium with her brothers and sisters and friends.
Just down the road, near an orchard, Jura shows us the garden of a long-ago demolished home where my mother hid during one of the Nazi aktions, or periodic killing sprees. A bunker had been constructed in the cellar, and this helped shield her and other Jews from capture. The Nazis conducted four major aktions during their occupation of Buczacz before declaring the town Judenrein, or completely free of Jews. But the declaration turned out to be false. My mother, along with dozens of others, managed to survive with the aid of courageous gentile families who risked their safety to shelter them.
In the middle of our travels, Jura pulls out a sheet of typewritten names – people who had served as policemen, gendarmes and SS officers during the war. I recognize some of the names. Some of the Nazi war criminals and their collaborators have been brought to justice, but the vast majority remain undetected and untried for their crimes.
We go to the Jewish cemetery, where many of the town’s Jews – including my mother’s parents – were taken to be executed. The place is untended and overgrown, a jumble of brush and junk, with headstones in various states of disrepair. We find my great-grandmother’s grave. It’s significant, because two plots over my mother buried her first-born child, Isaac, in an unmarked plot. I clear away the branches and debris from the group of headstones in the area to get a better view. I bend down and touch the ground where the brother I never met is buried. Exactly 70 years later, someone has come back to this place to remember.
Jura takes me down a path through brambles to a spot where survivors had erected a memorial to the war’s victims. The place is overgrown with trees and bushes now, but he says there was nothing here before the war. The marker no longer survives, and even if it did, it’s unlikely anyone would be able to find it without an expert guide.
Our next stop is Fedor Hill, another killing ground where thousands perished. It’s difficult to see traces of anything here, but Jura once again guides us to a marker commemorating the killing of 450 people during the early days of slaughter in 1941. It had been erected by a survivor’s family well after the war.
A far more prominent memorial on Fedor Hill is dedicated to the UPA, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the military wing of a movement that initially collaborated with the Nazis in hopes of winning an independent homeland. In fact, throughout our travels in Western Ukraine, there were numerous new memorials to Ukrainian nationalist fighters in places where it might have been logical to place markers noting the victims of the Nazi era. We saw this on the side of a synagogue in Ivano-Frankivsk, near the Jewish ghetto entrance in Lvov, and many other places. In my father’s hometown of Kolomyia, it was a similar story — no mention of Jews or Nazi victims in the local museum, no remnants of the huge Jewish population, and a patriotic memorial to Ukrainian nationalist figures on the site of a former synagogue. In the re-written history of today, the UPA and its related Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists are presented as groups that fought both Soviets and Nazis; no mention is made of the collaboration in 1941 that led to so much destruction during the war.
Throughout our trip to Ukraine, we were reminded of the upcoming election campaign and the ever-present imagery of Ukrainian nationalism, especially in the Western part of the country. In a land that was exercising its brand of democratic activity, we had to wonder how thoroughly the country had come to grips with its recent history. Many countries are wrestling with related questions, trying to reconcile horrendous events of the past with a way forward. But as in any process or truth and reconciliation, there needs to be an initial recognition of what took place. Erasing and denying the past is rarely the path to building a healthy future.
At the end of our tour in Buczacz, Jura wanted to know the exact date of my mother’s death. He also was interested in our birthdates and any other information he could glean from us. In a country that chooses to forget so much, he was something of an anomaly.
Features
There’s nothing Jewish about this classic American comedy — except just about everything
September 22, 2026
This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward’s free email newsletters delivered to your inbox.
Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s 1928 Chicago newsroom comedy The Front Page was so famous that when Harry J. Romanoff died in 1970, his New York Times obit referenced it. And in a 1986 review of a revival with John Lithgow as the conniving editor Walter Burns and Richard Thomas as the ruthless reporter Hildy Johnson, Frank Rich asked: “is there anyone who hasn’t seen The Front Page?”
Staged by George S. Kaufman and produced by Jed Harris, the original ran at the Times Square Theater for 276 performances. It has had many lives, including Howard Hawks’ fantastic 1940 screwball comedy, His Girl Friday. Hawks brilliantly turned the bromance into a he-she love story, casting Cary Grant as Walter Burns and Rosalind Russell as Hildy. He also softened the script so that it passed The Hays Office — the film censorship bureau named for ex-Postmaster General Will H. Hays.
The play’s many admirers include Walter Kerr, another New York Times critic, who, writing about a 1969 revival, memorably described it as ” like a watch that laughed.” David Mamet praised Hecht and MacArthur’s satire in several places, once calling it “arguably the best American play.” Tennessee Williams wrote that it “uncorseted the American theater,” and Kenneth Tynan and Tom Stoppard loved it.
Hecht, who, according to researcher Jesse Tisch in an essay on Medium, did the majority of the writing, died in 1964 and our century seems more ambivalent about the play. Some critics loved the 2016 Broadway version, which Jesse Green, then of New York Magazine, said had been pieced together from several scripts. That production’s all-star cast, including Nathan Lane as Walter Burns and John Lithgow as Hildy did not prevent the late Terry Teachout from calling it “toothless.”
Part of the play’s slide may be related to the demise of legacy journalism. Chicago is down to two newspapers from the seven of the era of The Front Page. And part may be style. The long, crowded scenes lack the propulsive energy of a lot of streaming-influenced drama and the characters lack the tormented interiority many theater audiences have come to expect.
Now, the first major production in ten years — by the playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, best known for Compleat Female Stage Beauty, which became a film starring Billy Crudup, and for a 2022 stage adaptation of Dial M For Murder — has opened Northlight Theatre’s inaugural season at their $33 million building in Evanston.
Set in a crummy press room in the Criminal Justice Building in Chicago, The Front Page was the first Broadway show about zany, wisecracking journos and the corrupt politicians they took down. About to quit the paper, get married and move to Buffalo, Hildy Johnson stumbles onto death row inmate Earl Williams’ jailbreak. Walter Burns wrangles Hildy into covering one last scoop.
The play uses many sources, some of which contradict each other. In Chicago, Hecht had both devoured and befriended the Jewish comics of the day. He loved clowns, including The Marx Brothers. The Cocoanuts, the 1924 Marx Brothers’ Broadway madcap vehicle that George S. Kaufman wrote and directed and Irving Berlin wrote music for anticipates certain elements of The Front Page. Set in a resort hotel instead of a newsroom, its crime and con-filled ambiance and fast-talking shyster characters seem like a prequel to Hecht’s drama.
But The Front Page also came out of the imagination of a first-generation American Jew who came of age in the 1910s. Born in 1893 in New York, Hecht moved west with his Russian immigrant parents, settling at age ten in Racine, Wisconsin. He arrived in Chicago when he was 16, became a journalist and hung out with figures in that city’s Literary Renaissance, most of whom were not Jewish.
Hecht had an enduring but tormented friendship with the writer Max Bodenheim, who was raised Jewish. It began with the men collaborating on plays and starting a modernist magazine, The Chicago Literary Times, and descended into each satirizing the other in novels. Even worse, Bodenheim seemed to become Hecht’s evil twin. Like Hecht, Bodenheim was a provocateur. Like Hecht, he moved to New York. But where Hecht flourished, Bodenheim crashed into poverty. Hecht helped him financially. But he couldn’t save him. In 1954, Bodenheim and his third wife were brutally murdered in their apartment.
If Bodenheim was a daredevil, Hecht was a fabricator. He embellished his nonfiction, including chunks of his 1921 and 1922 column for The Chicago Daily News, “1,001 Nights in Chicago.” Hecht’s Chicago peers mostly tolerated his provocations and fabulations. But as he grew famous, they became less tolerant. Writing in 1973, after Hecht’s death, Norman Mailer wrote that he was “never a writer to tell the truth when a concoction could put life in his prose.”
And yet to say that The Front Page is just an embellishment seems wrong. It is based in real life. Jazz Age Chicago had plenty of newspapermen, (some Jewish) who regularly impersonated people with accents, tall tales and disguises to get stories. The city was full of Jewish criminals too, like Ike Bloom, who ran Midnight Frolics Cafe, a nightclub Hecht frequented. But the central characters Hecht and MacArthur used as models for The Front Page were not Jewish. Walter Burns is based on Walter Howell, a famously Machiavellian editor. The death row murderer Earl Williams is based on Tommy O’Connor, a convicted murderer who was never captured after he escaped the county jail in 1921.
Though Hecht didn’t write The Front Page until he left Chicago for New York in 1924, he continued to identify with the city — or at least his version of the city. In Hollywood where he won his first Academy Award for the silent gangster film, Underworld, he wrote dozens of movies including Notorious, Scarface, Twentieth Century, Design for Living and Wuthering Heights and ghostwrote Gone With The Wind, Stage Coach and A Star is Born. “He invented 80% of what is used in Hollywood movies today,” Jean-Luc Godard said in 1968.
Hecht liked to say that “he became a Jew at 39” in the late ’30s, when he took up anti-Hitler activism. He wrote polemics entreating Americans to pay attention to Hitler and pageants, such as one staged in Madison Square Garden, encouraging the country to attack Germany. As the scholar Liesl Olsen has written, he was “a heroic truth-teller who demanded that his country act decisively during modern history’s blackest hour.”
But recent biographers have complicated the idea of Hecht’s Jewishness as a midlife discovery. In the words of one, Adina Hoffman, he was “divided,” the man who grew up hearing Yiddish. And he was, like a lot of Jews of his generation, not observant, instead using journalism and the performing arts to express his Jewishness. In his Chicago days, literature and theater were his response to literary friends (and enemies) characterizing his Jewishness in one way or another. Carl Sandburg affectionately referred to him as the “Jewish Huck Finn.” Ezra Pound (less affectionately) called him “Rabbi Ben Hechtenberg.”
Hecht had to protect himself, either by acting tough, or by submerging himself in characters and fantasies. So he turned to theater. In Chicago, he wrote plays with Sherwood Anderson and then with the founder of The Goodman Theatre, Kenneth Sawyer Goodman. In New York, he briefly hung out with the Algonquin Table set, many of whom dabbled in theater. But it was not a mutual admiration society. Dorothy Parker complained about his “smiling and swaggering savageries” and Alexander Woolcott wrote, “Hecht’s favorite character in literature is the disconcerting little boy who, when the King paraded in the imaginary robe, cried out: ‘But he hasn’t got anything on!’” Even the actor George Jessel, meeting Hecht during a rehearsal of The Front Page, described him as a yokel “wearing a loud red tie and a shirt that might have been used as a stage curtain for a troupe of very gay midgets.”
In The Front Page, Hecht and MacArthur wrote a play that, with its profanity and cynicism towards politicians and journalists, initially attracted the attention of the police, who sent stenographers to note the supposedly pornographic dialogue. But nothing much came of the outrage except that the play became a hit. Nearly 100 years later, the classic vehicle seems, at first glance anyway, more charming than shocking.
The new production is directed by Northlight Artistic Director BJ Jones, who was an unofficial associate at Skokie’s now-defunct National Jewish Theater in the 1980s and 1990s.
Jones sees The Front Page’s legacy in 20th century Jewish writers, especially ones with a Chicago connection — David Mamet’s scurrilous language, Larry Gelbart’s rat a tat dialogue in M*A*S*H.
Reading The Front Page now you also might get the sense of a Jewish play manqué: its outsider characters, its energy, its cynicism. Jeffrey Hatcher, who adapted it, says. “It’s Jewish in the same way as you could say about Irving Berlin, ‘there’s nothing Jewish about him except for everything he says.’ You feel it in the razzamatazz of the talk.”
Here are the first lines of the original 1928 script, in which the guys are playing poker:
The Card Players: crack it for a dime….by me…I stay…me too….I’m behind again…I was even a couple of minutes ago… papers…three…two…three to the dealer.
The scene is urban melting pot! Jazz! Vaudeville! As Hatcher puts it: “The play is chock full of Irishmen, Wasps, Presbyterians. But Jews are not there except in the style and verve of the language.” For his part, he names Officer Jacobi, who in the original is “voice from jail yard.” And he adds Abramovitz, an offstage journo.
Hatcher also wisely kept the gender-flipped casting from Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday, in which star reporter, Hildy Johnson, was played by Rosalind Russell. He whittles down the play from three acts to two and the cast from 23 to 13. And he cleaned up some of the slurs. Like Hildy calling Jacobi “pickle nose” and the word “sissy.”
He did, however, keep “Polack Mike.” “We don’t want to blunt the knife so that it’s a butter knife,” he said.
Still, there is something constricted in The Front Page. The long scenes are sometimes funny, but also cruel, this world where nepotism and corruption rule, violence is king, and an editor and a politician manipulate everyone. If Hecht’s divided Jewishness led to his outsider take on Chicago journalism, his world can also seem hollow.
In the famous last scene, Walter lets Hildy go off to get married and even gives the happy couple his watch. The minute they leave, he calls his henchman to get the police to arrest them. And then he delivers the fabulous last line as if he himself even believes it: “The son of a bitch stole my watch!”
In 1928 the phrase “son of a bitch” shocked audiences. Now it seems quaint. But the vignette made me consider how the play takes people’s selfishness and cruelty for granted. Those in charge are so glib about the lives of others, including those they supposedly love. It barely seems like a comedy anymore; it’s too real.
*
Rachel Shteir, a 2025-6 Guggenheim Fellow, is working on a book about why theater matters. Read full bio →
This story was originally published on the Forward.
Features
In memory of Joan Druxman
By BERNIE BELLAN In May 2023 I wrote a story about Joan Druxman, whom I had just met in person when she was a guest speaker at the Remis Luncheon series that month.
Sadly, Joan passed away on September 5, after a brief illness. My original story received over 4,000 views, so I thought it worth repeating here, to honour the memory of a vivacious and fascinating woman. Here is that story again:
The February 21, 2001 issue of The Jewish Post & News had an article titled “It’s a Comedy Night!”
That article went on to describe an upcoming event in which State of Israel Bonds would be honouring Rabbi Alan Green. Among the comedians to be appearing at the event was to be “Joan Druxman-Jones.”
Now, 22 years later, State of Israel Bonds doesn’t have an office in Winnipeg, Rabbi Green doesn’t live here any more (although he will be returning this weekend as the Shaarey Zedek’s Rabbi in Residence during Shavuot) and, as for Joan Druxman-Jones, well, she is back in Winnipeg – after having left in 1990 – and after having had a tumultuous series of career changes throughout her life –and, after having dropped the Jones in her name and gone back to Joan Druxman.
Joan Druxman was the guest speaker at this year’s kickoff Remis Forum luncheon on Thursday, May 11, at the Gwen Secter Centre.
I had never met Joan prior to that Thursday, although advertisements for her well-known women’s clothing store, “Joan’s Boutique”, were a regular feature in our paper for years. Once she took the podium at the Gwen Secter Centre it was easy to see how Joan had been a successful model for years. She still maintains a shapely figure and, even at 83, Joan is quite an attractive woman. (Is it okay to say that, I wonder? Who knows what’s permissible nowadays to write about a woman – or a man, for that matter, when it comes to physical appearance?)
But, more than anything, what struck me in listening to Joan tell her life story was her ease in speaking, her quick wit, and her self-effacing sense of humour.
As Simone Cohen Scott noted in an email sent out to Remis Forum attendees (and, by the way, anyone can attend a Remis luncheon. Just let the Gwen Secter Centre know you’re coming by the Tuesday of that week’s luncheon. Call 204-339-1701.), I took “voluminous notes” while Joan spoke.
So, here’s my account of the story Joan told: Born in Winnipeg, Joan (whose maiden name was Zelcovich, she said), grew up in Estevan, Saskatchewan, and moved back with her family to Winnipeg when she was 15.
Joan explained why her father decided to move to Winnipeg. He had owned a successful hotel in Estevan, but many of the patrons of that hotel were rough-hewn oil workers from the area around Estevan. “My father wasn’t about to let those oil workers anywhere near his two teenage daughters,” Joan said. (She had a younger sister at the time they moved here.)
But, the summer before the Zelcoviches moved to Winnipeg, they spent part of that summer at Clear Lake.
There were a lot of Jewish girls at Clear Lake, Joan noted, but they snubbed here because of the way she dressed. “They thought I was a hick,” she said.
That fall though, when Joan began attending Kelvin High School, and she was introduced by the teacher to the other students, the other girls couldn’t wait to be her friend, Joan said. This time she was dressed to the nines, she noted – something that has been very important to her ever since, she also observed.
As she noted toward the end of her talk, “I firmly dress the way you want to be treated.”
But from where did get Joan derive her impeccable fashion sense?
“My mother subscribed to the New York Times Magazine. It was the Vogue of the day,” she said.
Sure enough, when she was only 16, Joan got her first job working at the Mirror Room in the Hudson Bay store while she was attending high school.
After attending Kelvin for a couple of years Joan decided to attend the University of Manitoba. (In those days, she explained, you could take Grade 11 at the university.)
As things turned out, however, and as Joan observed, university was not for her.
“I hated it like you can’t imagine,” she said. “When I got 17 in Biology I knew university was not for me.”
So, Joan decided to enroll in the Angus School of Commerce (which was owned by Janice Filmon’s father at the time) where she obtained her diploma in typing and shorthand. “I was a wiz on the Dictaphone,” she noted.
But, she had to find a job after graduating. “I saw an ad for a company called Gunn Garment, which was owned by Harry Silverberg and Dave Kaufman, and which was managed by Max Duboff.”
“I became Max’s secretary and house model,” Joan said. “That’s how I became a model.”
It was during her time at Gunn Garment that Joan was introduced to the man who was to become her husband, Winnipeg Blue Bomber George Druxman.
“Marilyn Trepel called me up and told me someone had seen me at a wedding. Would I like to meet him? He’s one of the Blue Bombers,” Marilyn said to Joan.
As a Bomber wife, Joan was asked to appear on a local television show along with other Bomber wives where they would each be asked to cook a favourite dish.
“I made blintzes,” Joan noted.
As luck would have it, “two guys from Manitoba Sugar saw me and asked me to do a regular cooking show on TV.”
It was while appearing on her own cooking show that an editor of the Winnipeg Tribune asked Joan whether she would like to become food editor of that paper, and shortly thereafter, the fashion editor as well.
The next step in Joan’s career came when she was asked whether she would like to become the fashion coordinator for the Hudson’s Bay Company in Winnipeg, Saskatoon, and Regina, also the manager of the Fashion Room in the Bay.
But, as Joan recalled, “at the time the Bay fashions were all centrally coordinated. I hated them all. I decided to go out on my own.”
Thus began the longest segment of Joan’s varied career: as owner of Joan’s Boutique.
It was no simple matter, however, for a woman to strike out on her own in a business at that time, which was in 1976
Having been divorced from George Druxman (who died in 1999), Joan was mother of three boys at the time: Trevor, Greg, and Adam. Two of the boys were married by then.)
“I wanted to set up in an old house,” she recalled.
“I went to see a bank manager who said to me: ‘I’ll have you know fashion retailing is the riskiest business there is.”
Not one to be discouraged, however, a former classmate of Joan’s from Kelvin, Brian Aronovitch, told her there was a house at 34 Carlton owned by lawyer Ken Houston – who wanted to rent out part of the house.
At the same time Joan was introduced to another bank manager who was supportive of her dream of opening her own boutique.
“I opened Joan’s in 1977,” she observed. “Business just took off. It was bursting at the seams.”
Ever on the eye for another opportunity, it was while out for a walk in the neighbourhood of the Carlton store that Joan said she saw a rooming house for sale at 22 Edmonton.
“It was a tax sale,” Joan noted. And so, in 1979, Joan Druxman opened Joan’s Boutique at her new location on Edmonton, where she was to remain for the next 13 years.
“I gutted it and had clothing and accessories on the first and second floors,” she said, “with a hairdresser on the third floor.”
Ever restless, however, Joan decided to move to Vancouver in 1990.
“I saw things there that weren’t happening in Winnipeg,” she observed, including a very large Japanese population.
Joan opened her first store in Vancouver at the corner of 12th and Granville, but soon she came across a better opportunity at Berard and Granville. She approached a former friend from Winnipeg, Karen Simkin, who had also moved to Vancouver and who had opened a little gift shop.
“I invited Karen to move to that new location with me,” Joan said.
Karen’s husband, Garry Simkin, was fully supportive, and so the two women opened a store that was a combination clothing and gift ware store.
As mentioned though, Joan had taken note of how many Japanese tourists there were in Vancouver. Accordingly, as she explained, “I went to Simon Fraser University and learned how to read and write Japanese” so that she would better ingratiate herself with Japanese customers.
Things were going along well until their landlord told Joan and Karen that he was going to be raising the rent to $250,000 a year. (And remember, this was the 1990s. One can well imagine how exorbitant that amount would have been back then.)
So – another career switch for Joan was in the offing: “I decided I’d like to be an actress,” she observed. At the same time she started doing stand-up comedy (as noted at the beginning of this article.)
Ever eager for new challenges, however, Joan decided to apply for a green card and move to Los Angeles –where she began studying acting while working for Nordstrom’s.
“I also got my California real estate license,” she added.
But this was all before Obamacare, Joan noted. “Medical insurance was costing me $1500 a month.”
Joan decided to move back to Winnipeg where, once again, she opened “a little store.”
In 2020, however, with the onset of the Covid pandemic, Joan found she “couldn’t get stuff from Europe” and, as a result, she had to close her store.
“So, I walked into the cosmetics department of the Bay (Polo Park store) and said, ‘I want to see the Chanel manager.’ “
As luck would have it, that manager happened to need someone at the Chanel perfume counter and Joan was hired on the spot.
Which brings us full circle to where Joan started when she only 16 – working again at the Bay.
“Here I am at the Bay working five days a week – and loving it,” she said. “Without a bank manager, without a landlord, and without the tax man.”
But, as Joan observed, she still dresses to the nines – even though now she takes the bus to work. (It stops right in front of her apartment and drops her off right at work, so why not?)
As she noted though, you can imagine the looks she gets from other passengers who see an immaculately dressed woman getting on their bus every day.
One time, Joan said, her regular bus driver asked her: “Are you a celebrity?”
Joan told him she wasn’t, but one day that bus driver happened to be shopping at the Bay with his wife when he spotted Joan at the Chanel counter and said to his wife: “I know her. She rides my bus.”
That’s Joan Druxman for you – more twists and turns than a Gerry Posner story. Some day she ought to write a book. Hey, there’s an idea for her next career move!
Post script: We were informed that the day after Joan Druxman spoke at the Gwen Secter Centre she was involved in a terrible accident when she was coming out of work at the Bay.. It seems that Joan was caught in the midst of a situation where some young boys had been fleeing the store after having stolen some jeans. One of them ran into Joan, knocking her to the ground – which broke her hip. At last report she had undergone hip replacement surgery and had been released from the hospital.
Features
What I miss
By DAVID TOPPER When my late wife, Sylvia, and I moved into the house I’m still in, we brought with us not only our furniture and other things from inside the old house, but some outdoor plants and flowers – even a shrub. The shrub, of course, was small: a young mock orange. Sylvia had a thing about mock oranges, so we dug it up and took it with us to the new house. Then there were irises that we inherited from the previous owners of our first house. I can still recall Sylvia doting over those irises when we moved there in 1971. They were very different varieties from those she was familiar with. I liked them, too. I also remember a rose bush. Well, everyone likes roses. Appropriately, it was red. So, the irises, along with the mock orange and the rose bush were transplanted to the new yard. That was in the summer of 1976.
For reasons that I cannot explain, when it came to plants and such, there was a sort of division-of-plant-labor between us. I took care of all the indoor plants and Sylvia did the outdoor ones. This meant that she only worked during the relatively short span from late spring to early fall, since we live in Winnipeg, Canada. Whereas, I looked over the house plants all year long.
Actually, I can explain something. You may have noticed that when speaking of digging up things I use the plural. This was because Sylvia enjoyed physically working in the yard. This digging urge she acquired in the year after High School that she spent working on a Kibbutz in Israel. It was daily hard physical labor in the field: digging, planting, pruning, picking and so forth. Yet she always talked about it lovingly. That was 1960-61 and I saw the blissful look on her face when working in our yard, from 1971 onward.
In time we had a diverse array of plants and flowers. In no particular order, we had lilacs, peonies, hostas, lilies, day-lilies, irises, roses, tulips, lungwort, elephant ears, clematis, rhubarb and the mock orange (which – along with the irises and roses – had grown quite nicely, since the summer of 1976).
All this lasted until the foremost transition in our lives. Early in 2014 Sylvia was diagnosed as being in an early stage of dementia. Over the next six years, as she drifted deeper into her black hole, I gladly obliged taking over the household chores, some of which I had begun already – such as doing most of the cooking. As for the outdoor tasks from spring through summer, that deeply implanted love of gardening was one of the last things to go from her immediate world. Even when she was not too sure who I was, she was glad to work with me in the yard with a shovel in her hands – and a smile on her face.
Sylvia died in the winter of 2020. Come spring, it was just me and the yard.
I don’t remember if it was that first spring or one later, but one day I noticed that the mock orange looked less robust – so I pruned it. That seemed to work for the summer, but the following spring it lost its vigor. More pruning didn’t help. Thus, slowly, over time, it died off and I dug up what was left.
Around the time I was still fiddling with the mock orange, I noticed the rose bush that Sylvia gave lots of love and care was not looking its usual hearty self. I got the fertilizer that she used to try to revive it, and that seemed to work. But the following year, the bush lost its vitality – and nothing I did (extra watering; keeping it dry) worked to impede the track it was on. In time, the rose bush died, too.
“What’s next,” I shouted to our yard.
The following spring the tulips came up as usual, but didn’t look as healthy as they should. These had a special meaning, since we bought the bulbs on a trip to Holland and planted them ourselves. Obviously, I tried everything I could to bring them back – reading all that the Internet had to say about tulips. Needless to say, that was the last summer for the tulips.
“Oh no,” I cried the following spring, when I first saw the irises. They were up, but not looking very well. This was probably the most difficult loss. I don’t know why, but those irises were part of an exceptional bond between us. Sylvia and I and the irises: their singularity symbolized the uniqueness of our relationship.
The irises were the last to go.
As I write this, the rhubarb still comes up, but it’s not as hearty as it used to be. The rest of the plants are doing fine: lilacs, peonies, hostas, lilies, day-lilies, lungwort, elephant ears and clematis. Incidentally, I also have a unique fondness for the clematis, since I bought it and planted it myself many years ago.
I wish to make clear that I’m not putting forth any causal or symbolic or spiritual or mystical meaning to all this, in relation to Sylvia’s demise. Rather, I’m just telling the story of my personal experience with the plants and flowers in our yard. You may read into it whatever you wish.
Now when I walk about my yard, enjoying the remaining plants and flowers amidst the bushes and trees, I not only see and derive pleasure from all that I still have – but I also “see” what is missing: that mock orange, the rose bush, those tulips and the irises.
It also reminds me what I intimately and ultimately miss.
Tags: bonding |caring |coping |loss |sharing |symbolism
David R. Topper writes in Winnipeg, Canada. His work has appeared in Mono, Poetic Sun, Discretionary Love, Poetry Pacific,Academy of theHeart & Mind, Altered Reality Mag. and elsewhere.
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