In 1980, my mother and I moved into an apartment in the neighbourhood where she had spent a large part of her childhood. 47 years earlier she'd been brought home from the hospital five blocks south of where we now lived, just north of Spadina and College in Toronto, Ontario. In 1933, Cecile Street and its environs, The Kensington Market area of Toronto, was still primarily Jewish, home to a good many immigrant families who had fled Europe one or two generations previously.

Although by that time some families had gained enough success to establish Jewish enclaves in slightly more affluent areas of the city, Kensington Market was still home to a large percentage of the city's Jewish population. Many families had children who, like my mother, represented a second generation born in Canada. But life remained hard for them. It was the middle of the Depression and work was scarce, especially for minority immigrants.

When I used to walk through the neighbourhood in the early 1980s, you could still see traces of the old community. A sign on an old building advertised a kosher butcher, or a house on a back street was still an active synagogue. These were reminders of an earlier time when a village had emigrated together and its people had done their best to create a familiar atmosphere in a foreign environment.

In the years from my mother's birth up to September 1939 when the Germans invaded Poland, a trickle of new immigrants arrived in Toronto whispering of a new pogrom, far worse then any the Tsars had conducted, being carried out by the Nazis. It is to Canada's and the US's eternal shame that they refused to lift their quotas on Jewish immigration, in spite of having impartial reports confirming the round-up of Jews in Germany and the confiscation of all their property.

Mayer Kershenblatt was one of the lucky ones who got out before the war started. He came to Canada in 1934 from the village of Apt in Poland. Later when he had his own family he would regale them with tales of life in the Jewish community in that small city, to the point where his daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, encouraged him to try and bring the people and places to life through paintings.

One day, talking with some friends, he realized that no matter what happened, his friends' conversations would always turn to reliving their days in the concentration camps. It was as if no life existed before the war for any of them. In his introduction to They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories Of A Jewish Childhood In Poland Before The Holocaust, Mayer describes those conversations as the motivation for finally surrendering to his daughter's wishes, and setting brush to canvas in an attempt to preserve the memory of pre-War Jewish life in Poland.