This is a departure from crime writing, but it was a good opportunity for sleuthing. I like a good mystery, so when I opened a letter sent to my address — not expressly sent to me, mind you – I whooped out loud.
If these walls could talk: A chance letter and a reporter’s curiosity bring Russian immigrant couple to life
Saturday, April 19, 2003
Section: Observer
Sherri Zickefoose
Calgary Herald ©
Now, I’m starting to wonder if it’s Fanny, or maybe Looe.
For the past year, I’ve rented the house they used to live in — a cherished sanctuary where they spent the happier years of their hard lives.
Sunlight splays through their 1950 bungalow’s wide windows. On the front lawn, two towering spruce trees stand like blue sentinels.
Despite the elegant arches inside and glossy wooden floors, the southwest house is not a high point in architectural history. One day, it will no longer exist because the property’s owner is planning to rebuild.
That makes me the last resident to share Fanny and Looe’s intimate space. I hang my coats in their closet, store dishes in their cupboards, hang pictures on their walls.
While I call this house home, I’m curious to learn about Fanny and Looe Loshaek, penniless Russian Jewish immigrants who risked everything when they escaped an oppressive Communist regime in 1928, only to face the Depression as they stepped off the train to start a new life in Calgary.
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Recently, I found a letter in my mailbox addressed “Current Resident.”
Inside, the handwriting was neat, the request brief: “We would like to find out any information about people who lived at this adress (sic), family Mr. and Mrs. Loshaek who are my relatives. We are from Odessa, Russia. If you have any information, please let us know.”
Included were photocopied pictures of a grey-haired, friendly looking old, smiling couple.
It was sent from Brooklyn, N.Y., signed by a woman named Anna. She would turn out to be the niece of Fannie and Looe, a woman who moved to Brooklyn from Russia in the late ’80s.
But she would never know Fannie and Looe, because of a fateful night in 1946, when the callous government of the day deceived her mother into missing the chance to be reunited with her family in Canada.
Little did Anna, now 66, know that through the curiosity of a stranger she mailed a letter to, and the convenience of e-mail it would bring Fanny and Looe to life.
That letter, which others might have thrown out, stirred my fascination about the couple who once lived in the house.
I often stand in these rooms, wondering who’s been here before me. Where I sit reading in an empty room, listening to James Brown too loud, they sat around a proper dining room table with crisp linen and matching cutlery.
I wonder why there is an old gas stove sitting unused in the basement.
I plugged the surname into an Internet search engine. Within seconds, a Calgary hit revealed the couple are buried in the Erlton Jewish Cemetery, revealing the years they were born and died.
More importantly, they had names: Fanny and Looe.
Thanks to my neighbours, and e-mail, Fanny and Looe’s children shared the story of how their family came to Calgary.
“Thank God they had the guts to get out of there,” said the couple’s 77-year-old daughter, Betty Starr, who has visited the family’s old village outside Odessa.
While searching for long-lost family ties, she discovered barely a trace of the Jewish community, even in the cemeteries.
Starr, who lives in California, says her parents rarely spoke of those early days to her or her brother Sam, 79.
Family lore, however, reveals that when the Russian Revolution erupted in 1917, Looe was a teenager, determined to overcome the horror around him. Like scars, he carried memories of frozen bodies lining the railroad tracks — nearly an entire village wiped out by the Bolsheviks.
At 28, he knew the only way his young family would survive the deadly Stalin era was to escape.
After selling horses, their house and belongings, the family of four had enough money to board a ship.
After arriving in Halifax, they boarded a westbound train. By Winnipeg, four-year-old Sam had the measles and Fanny was forced to stay behind with him in quarantine.
Though he had just $6 in his pocket, Looe gave most of it to his 24-year-old wife; he kept a dollar in change for himself and Betty.
Then they boarded the train for Calgary.
Their poverty and inability to speak English made them outcasts, recalls Sam, who lives in Florida.
“We were poor and not sought after. It was tough in that regard.”
Looe, a born entrepreneur, was too proud for handouts and eked out a living as a pedlar.
He eventually bought a horse and cart for salvaging junk; batteries, scrap metal, and rags. Fanny laundered the rags, keeping what looked good enough to sew into clothes, Sam recalls. “We lived in dire poverty, to say the least.”
By 1934, Looe and a friend traded in the horse and cart for a truck. “They saved every penny and nickel they could.”
Looe realized garbage was like gold and started a business, the Calgary Scrap Metal Company.
Years of sacrifice eventually allowed the family the luxuries they only once dreamed of.
In 1950, Looe surprised Fanny with a new house on 34th Avenue and 9th Street S.W. For the next 38 years, Looe toiled with the lawn and creaky back fence. He left his mark: the spruce trees he planted nearly touch the moon now.
Fanny, a fastidious housekeeper, spent hours in the cool basement of the white stucco house, where she kept a second, kosher kitchen.
The gas stove she roasted chickens in still sits there, as does the counter she used for making pastry.
When Fanny turned 60, she wanted to learn how to drive. Looe, who drove a Chevrolet, figured she should have a car, too. He bought her a matching Chevy.
Before moving into the house, Looe had another mission — to find his younger sister, Eugenia, who was left behind in Russia. A dozen years younger than Looe, she had married young and lost her husband during the war.
A widow with three children at the age of 30, Eugenia eventually found work as a cook at a military camp.
One night in 1946, police hauled Eugenia in to sign papers she didn’t understand. Frightened, she signed the forms, not realizing what she was being tricked into doing: refusing to accept her brother’s offer to move her and her children out of Russia to live in Canada.
While the Jews were disappearing around her, it became clear to Eugenia that the only way her family could survive was to change their identities. A Christian baptism and new names saw Emma become Anna, Naum change to Anatoly and Beba was reborn as Bronya.
For the next few years, they lived with a Ukrainian family, posing as relatives, living in fear for their lives.
Eugenia’s dream was to move to Canada to be with Looe, but before she could, she died in 1988.
Oddly, Fanny suffered a stroke the same year. She died a week later from heart failure at 84.
Looe, who developed stomach cancer, died the next year. He was 89.
Around the same time, two of Eugenia’s children left Russia. One of them, Anna, settled in Brooklyn 10 years ago. Armed with a treasured old letter sent from Calgary, the 66-year-old followed up on her mother’s lifelong wish to find Looe.
A few weeks ago, she sat down with an English-speaking friend and they wrote me the letter.
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While death cut the ties between Fanny, Eugenia, and Looe, their children have the chance to connect.
After I gave Anna’s Brooklyn phone number to Sam and Betty, they managed enough words in Russian to call and introduce themselves.
The four first cousins — Anna, her brother Anatoly, Betty and Sam — are going to meet for the first time this spring. They can barely believe they’re about to become a family.
“It is heartwarming to find blood relatives when we thought there were none,” said Sam.
“We are so glad to learn they didn’t die in the war.”
Life in Canada offered Fanny and Looe opportunities they’d dreamed about. The escape from the early Stalin years was worth every bit of struggle, said Sam.
“They loved Canada, their freedom and their own home.
“They thanked God for it.”
