In this excerpt from the beginning of the Author's Note for What Wakes the Heart, I explain my family connection to this book. (For excerpts from the book proper, just scroll down.)
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My mother Bronislawa Zarkowerovna, called Bronia (one of several common diminutives for her name) by family and friends, emigrated from Poland to Canada at the age of fifteen. A brilliant young woman, she had dreamed of being the next Marie Curie. She lived in a village called Maxymuvka, but took the train to the city of Tarnopol to attend high school and then got an apartment there with her younger sister. The mud at the train station was knee deep or more, but my grandfather carried her to keep her from having to wade through it herself.
He was a grain merchant, but was able to get out of Poland, months ahead of the Nazis, by promising to farm land in western Canada. Their destination proved to be Sundance, Alberta. Sundance had a one-room schoolhouse, with a teacher little older than Bronia. My mother spoke more English than most of the family, but that wasn’t saying much. Nonplussed by the challenge of this new pupil, the teacher handed her a book of fairy tales and told her to read from it. Unimpressed with the result, she had my mother begin with the work of the first graders and go on from there. It took a year, and the humiliation of that year sank deep, but my mother’s English improved substantially. She eventually finished high school elsewhere, but for a range of reasons, she did not attend college until her daughter Karen was thirteen years old.
By the way, her last name is an example of how Polish last names are inflected. Her father Lonyo’s last name was Zarkower; my mother’s reflected her status as his daughter. I chose not to deal with that complexity in this book, aside from mentioning it here.
The brief mention of classmate Louisa’s innocence, and its apparent effect as some sort of protection, is based on my mother’s sister Erika, who was very pretty and somehow sold magazines to sailors fresh off sea voyages without being harassed.
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