Do you remember as a child when you would confuse a word that had two meanings? The adults around you would be talking about something and you'd hear a familiar word but in a context that made no sense to you. I'm sure it's happened to most of us so I'll just assume you know what I'm talking about. Things are going to get complicated enough as it is without me having to worry about that part of the story.

First off I need to explain my mother's extended family to you a little for this to make any sense at all. Her mother's family were Polish Jews who settled in Toronto in the early 1900s. They had been your typical Fiddler On The Roof-type farming/peasant people who managed somehow to get the heck out of Poland with what they could carry on their backs and made their way to Canada.

Her father's family were Romanian Jews; well-educated city dwellers that probably never got their hands dirty in their lives. According to my grand father, they came to Canada because his father had an altercation with a Cossack — he knifed him — and the family was forced to flee forthwith. They settled in Montreal because they were fluent in French, but spoke very little English at the time.

Even during the times our family lived in Toronto we always seemed to end up seeing more of our Montreal relatives than those in Toronto. Part of it was that my Grandfather wasn't that thrilled with what he called "the dumb Polacks" (even among the downtrodden there is a hierarchy: with European Jews, the only thing lower on the scale than a dumb Polack was a Litvack - Lithuanian) and my mother was closer to her cousins on that side of the family than on her mother's side.

We usually ended up in Montreal at least once a year, more if by chance we happened to be living in Ottawa at the time. My father worked for the Canadian government in the Justice department, so he was transferred between Toronto and Ottawa every three to four years until he quit. Ottawa was only about an hour's drive from Montreal, so it was easy to go up for a day visit if we wanted.

For some reason I remember a period of a few years when we seemed to end up in Montreal every year for Passover. I don't know if this was accidental, but I do know they would always invite my grandfather and grandmother to come from Toronto, and I think it was a good excuse for all of us to get together when we were living in Ottawa. My grandfather was the last of his generation alive for the Montreal family. He had been the youngest child, born in 1900, and all of his brothers and sisters had died young.