cart
Rosalie Wise Sharp's riveting memoir, Rifke, opens in 1998 with a fabulous flight around the world in the private jet recently acquired by her husband, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts CEO Isadore Sharp.
They're grinning, but this is not a book about the rich and famous enjoying their wealth and fame. It just strikes the author as hilarious that this could really be happening to "two schleppers like us ... both raised in households where one bathroom served 12, and our parents came from a Polish shtetl with no indoor plumbing."
And that opening is just an entertaining tease to draw us into the real story that Sharp has to tell – about growing up in a Jewish family that still behaved as if it were still caught in the traditional ways of a Polish shtetl, while surrounded by the overwhelmingly WASP culture of North Toronto in the 1940s.
Now after becoming fabulously wealthy and moving into another world, Sharp clings to the honest dirt of her roots in the vanished world of Jewish Poland – wiped out in the Holocaust even while she was growing up confused but safe in Canada. In this vividly detailed memoir, she catches both the drama and the comedy of the improbable journey, in just one generation, from horse and buggy on backroads to around the world in a private jet. She felt the need to pay tribute to the very old country Jewish ways that used to embarrass her.
With startling candour that has even old friends buzzing, Sharp trusts readers with secrets about her parents, her courtship with the charming young Issy, and the devastating loss of Christopher, one of their four sons, to cancer at age 17, still a cause of sorrow and anger almost 30 years later.
But while working on the book, she thought of it as something suitable for a vanity publication.
"I didn't think of myself as a real writer," explains the 71-year-old author as she signs books in preparation for a launch bash Issy Sharp gave last night in the glittery ballroom of his flagship Four Seasons Yorkville Hotel.
This was definitely not your average Toronto book launch. Several hundred guests were served Jewish food from the vanished world of the shtetl that propelled the author, including miltz (cow's spleen) and lung en leber (cow's lung and liver). The room where the party was held was designed by Rosalie Sharp when the place was converted from a Hyatt to a Four Seasons three decades ago. She even bought the chandeliers for a pittance after one of Montreal's old hotels was demolished.
Having dropped out of university when she married, Sharp (converted to feminism by reading Betty Friedan) went back to school after her children were in school, graduated from OCAD at the top of her class, and started a successful design career.
She wrote Rifke because, looking back now, she felt a need to salute the vanished Jewish world she came from, even though at the time she felt excruciatingly embarrassed about belonging to it.
To her, barely one generation removed from a small Jewish town in Poland where life had remained the same for generations, North Toronto was like a foreign place. Which is why, as a child, she led a kind of double life, posing among her school friends as a gentile who sang in the Christmas choir. As for the title: Rifke was her Yiddish name, representing everything she yearned to escape from.
"In our house, we spoke Yiddish, wore funny cut-down clothes and ate the unmentionable parts of animals," she recalls.
This was during World War II, and the Wise family was defined by missing grandparents, uncles and aunts, and by their lost hometown of Ozarow in Poland.
In the 1940s, most Jewish families in Toronto were clustered downtown near Spadina. But her ill-matched parents settled north of Lawrence off Yonge St., living in cramped quarters behind their dry-goods store.
She yearned for the perks like ballet, piano and skating that some of her classmates enjoyed. But in her house, such luxuries could not even be spoken of.
"What I did have was a library card," she recalls. "Books were my escape." She preferred to stay home and read rather than go out on a date. And she dreamed of living in the kind of house described in books, where people spoke in quiet voices and changed their underwear every day.
Sixty years later, living in a dream house on a ravine just a few blocks from where she grew up, Sharp still prefers to stay home and read rather than join the rich ladies who lunch.
Her life changed forever as a result of falling for the dashing Issy Sharp. She was a naïve teenager, and he, four-and-a-half years older, seemed incredibly worldly. Friends feared he was a playboy who would break her heart, but she couldn't help herself. She was smitten.
Nice Jewish girls in the 1950s did not have sex with their boyfriends, but he talked her into it – with traumatic consequences. It was a rocky start to what turned into a great, long-running romance.
"I could have been headed for disaster," she says breezily. "But once we were married (in 1955), Issy turned into the world's most responsible husband."
Anyway, she says, "I had no choice. I was smitten."
 |
 |
