Autobiography -  Sheldon Oberman Writer and Storyteller

The creative spirit loves to wander and wonder. Yet it also has a goal; to create something wonderful. That's how it is with the creative people I have known; writers, actors, artists, designers, architects, directors. That's how it's been with me, writing books, plays and songs, directing theater and film and performing as a storyteller. I feel most alive when my imagination is at play or at work; when I can experience something in a new way or I can create something new and interesting.

I feel lucky to be able to do this. I've known many people with great talent and determination but for one reason or another, things didn't work out.

Luck is peculiar and sometimes you don't know when you are lucky or unlucky. When I was young, I would not have thought there was anything fortunate about being poor or being in a minority group or being alone so much of the time. Yet those very things that seemed to be disadvantages turned out to be great assets; they helped to shape me as a writer.

I was born in 1949 in Winnipeg, Canada where my parents had a small clothing store in the city's immigrant North End. We lived above the store overlooking Main Street. The building was old and shabby with a cranky coal furnace and not enough hot water for a bath on Saturday night. My parents had to take in a boarder to help pay the rent, Bert, a fifty year old bus driver. Bert and I shared one small bedroom with bunk beds. I got the top one. My parents didn't have a car - I travelled by bus or by sitting on my dad's handle bars as he rode me on his bike. There were no vacations or summer camp or fancy birthday parties. Those things took spare time and spare money; my parents had neither.
Sheldon Oberman

No one around us was any better off, so by comparison, my life felt normal. In fact, the neighbours considered us well off since we "owned" a business. What my parents actually owned was a pile of debts which they worked sixty hours a week to keep from getting worse.

Still, we had decent clothes and decent food. Friday night we would eat at the Good Earth Chinese Restaurant across the street and on Saturday after they shut the store, we'd go to the movies. Best of all, we had a good time together so it didn't matter that some people whom we had never even met, had much more money than we did. Of course, my parents wanted me to have a better life but that didn't mean being rich - it meant getting a good education, so I could find work that was fulfilling and useful in the world.

As I grew older and compared myself to others beyond our neighbourhood, I realized how poor we actually were. Yet even then I understood that our poverty was not the "destructive" kind; it was not inescapable or demeaning. I was growing up in the 50's and 60's, a time of increasing opportunities. I could look beyond the present to a promising future, it would just take work.

That was no problem - I had learned how to work. When I was an infant my mother kept me in a bassinet beside the cash register - I was already part of the business. I grew up helping out in the store and later when we had a coffee shop, I worked there, too. Much of our family time was spent working together though I must admit that my favourite chore was done in solitude, - I'd peel potatoes for an hour or more each day, mulling and musing and making French fries for the coffee shop. Some people distance themselves from their work and concentrate on other parts of their life. For me, work has always been an essential part of who I am and fortunately, my work has generally been rewarding.

I grew up alone as an only child with no other children nearby but I wasn't lonely in the way some people get when they are separated from others. I was used to being alone and learned to enjoy my own company and my own thoughts. I'd take pleasure looking out my parents' store window with its faded mannequins, watching the people passing by on Main Street. I'd hang about the other stores or wander the back lanes meeting the odd characters of the neighbourhood. I'd sit on the narrow stairs that led up to our apartment and I'd day dream, travelling even further through my imagination.
 
 

Soon, books offered me even better fantasies than my own, after all, they were created by professional dreamers with much more experience. The public library introduced me to Mark Twain, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas, Robert Service, Lewis Carrol, Robert Louis Stevenson and Enid Blyton, great storytellers one and all. The drug store teamed me up with Superman and Batman. The supermarket supplied the first books I ever owned, The Golden Book Encyclopedia. I bought one volume each week with my allowance - they were a wonderful hodge podge of exotic facts and colorful pictures - the perfect material for day dreams. I was alone but I had myself and I had books.

Of course, I didn't actually share much in common with the heroes of my books. Most of them were rich and upper class with many noble companions. If they were poor, they were British, French or American poor. They weren't Canadian and they certainly weren't Jewish.

I felt different from my class mates, too. Occasionally someone made me feel badly about being "a Jew", though it seldom happened openly. I learned about the Holocaust and about earlier persecutions such as the ones in Russia that killed my great grandparents and others in our family. Even the stories of the Bible ended with the destruction of ancient Israel and the Jewish people expelled. The more I learned the history of my people, the more vulnerable I felt. I had wanted to be a hero, but my Jewishness seemed to be telling me that I fated to be a victim.

I didn't like the many rules of Judaism, either, like keeping kosher and going to synagogue. I was glad my parents weren't observant, in fact they used the excuse of our gentile boarder to have a Christmas tree. I suppose Christmas was a good reason for us to celebrate; it was a big event in the store, the Christmas shoppers paid our bills.

I accepted being poor and being alone but it was harder to accept being Jewish. The only attraction I felt for it, was through my grandfather, a gentle loving man who seldom spoke yet had great wisdom. He became the spirit of my heritage and after he died I felt him offering that heritage to me in the form of a heirloom. I put his gift aside and forgot about it for many years. But more of that later.

Many things that might seem like disadvantages, turned out to be great help in making me a writer. Being alone taught me how to use my imagination and it made me a friend who will be with me as long as I live, my own true self. What I learned from being poor is worth more than money can buy. And when I did accept my heritage, I realized the greatness of my own people, not only of the famous like King Solomon, Elijah and the wonder working Ba'al Shem Tov but also the greatness of ordinary people with extraordinary hearts and spirits, an inspiration for endless stories.

Dad helped out in the family business, Obie's Steam Bath, where the locals came to strip, sweat and play poker. He'd stay up late into the night as the regulars joked, bragged and consumed surprising amounts of herring, corned beef and rye whisky. He'd clean up, then catch some sleep and hurry to his day job loading trucks and carrying huge crates up flights of stairs.

My mom was an impulsive young woman from small town Saskatchewan. She had won a beauty contest but also earned the highest marks in the high school provincial exams. Her parents decided that it wasn't proper for her to go to university; she should stay home and help in the store. Instead, she ran off to the big city. She met Dad and six weeks later they were married. The day after their honey moon, they opened Dobies Style Shoppe on Main Street.

I wrote about that street in This Business With Elijah, a literary book of connected short stories centered on a ten year old boy, Danny Stein. His world is based on mine and his stories intertwine with those of the street's many colorful characters.

I modelled two characters on my father, though they became quite different as they developed. One is the muscled storekeeper who is a total loss trying to sell women certain "delicate" items of clothing. The other runs a coffee shop.

My dad's actual coffee shop was a 60's style diner, a hang out for tough kids who played the pinball and jukebox. Not a high class crowd, their idea of a hot meal was French fries with gravy. A sophisticated drink to them was a mickey of lemon gin they'd keep hidden in the men's toilet tank.

Still, they had remarkable talents, especially with their hands. My job was to wash dishes and to watch them so no one skipped out on a bill or stole anything on the way out. But quick hands can also be open hands and they were always ready to help their own. Every so often some couple's relationship shocked everyone by a sudden swerve into lawful wedlock. But it was no shock to see some grinning bride and groom still in tuxedo and long lacy gown stop off for burgers between their wedding and reception. One time the gang welcomed a wedding couple with stunning gifts of silverware and crystal. For one half hour, my dad's cafe looked more like Ben Moss Jewellers (the unfortunate store where they did their shoplifting).

My book looks closer and harder at one of those teenagers. Pop, the coffee shop owner, is trying to reach a kid who is both troubled and in trouble, a kid who needs to be tough to survive but also needs someone to care about him. Pop is so entangled by his own needs and problems that he fumbles his chance to help. Everything he's done turns sour and they become bitter enemies. Pop is so upset that he abandons the coffee shop, feeling as trapped and hopeless as the boy he tried to rescue. It's a sad story, like the lives of many real people whom I knew all too well.
 
 

Mom was and still is very psychic. She'd wake up with some dream or another. "A man means number two," she'd say. "A desk means four." She'd rush off to Bingo to play the lucky numbers. Often enough, she'd bring back a new radio or toaster.

Her special ability wasn't something she discussed. Mom grew up in Kamsack, Saskatchewan which was much like an uprooted Eastern European village. Few townsfolk scoffed at psychic phenomena, many accepted it completely. As witchcraft.

Her parents suspected she had the "gift". So when my mother, at ten years old, woke up late at night crying that the boarding house across town was burning, her parents listened. They knocked at the dark and silent building. A moment later they heard shouts of "Smoke! Fire!" Sure enough, someone who had drunk too much had fallen asleep with a burning cigarette. The boarding house was saved but Mom's reward was an stern lecture. She had to promise to block out those disturbing thoughts.

She tried to keep such thoughts at a distance for many years until she finally found someone who understood her. That was Tamarra - a huge, boisterous, irrepressible woman, who had learned the craft of the seer in Russia a half century before.
We never had a family doctor but we always had Tamarra, our family fortune teller. She taught Mom how to manage her powers and when Tamarra died, she gave Mom a blessing. It was not the sort of blessing that could be recorded in words; instead, it registered in psychic voltage. Mom's apprenticeship was over.

She set up business in her home, letting in immigrants, judges, prostitutes, social workers, stock brokers, healers and dealers, cops and robbers. They all sat side by side on her living room couch, waiting to get to her kitchen table where their futures would be unfolded in her comforting hands.

Murderers, too. And potential murderers, wanting to know, "Can I get away with it?"
"Yes," she told one. "Until they do the autopsy."

Or the tearful wife. "My husband's terribly sick. How much longer has he got to live?"
"He'll get better," Mom answered. "He'll last another ten years. Maybe twelve."
The woman stood up with a scowl, threw down her money and stomped out. You can't please them all.

Mom has finally had to slow down. When the manager of the Marlborough, a grand old hotel asked her to find their resident ghost she refused. "Too many stairs to climb," she said. She might have liked to train one of us to take over but psychic reading hasn't become a family business. Whatever "visions" I receive, all turn to images for my stories, though certainly some of my tales have mystical elements. My older son, Adam, who has the strongest "gift" became a mathematician. Go figure.

Of all my mother's psychic accomplishments, our favourite is the reading she gave a woman some twelve years ago. Mom saw an "S" in her cup and accurately described the character of the man the woman was soon destined to meet. But Mom couldn't see his face or any details of his life. Four weeks later, the woman met the man whose name began with "S". She didn't mention the reading; he didn't tell her about his mother, the psychic reader. It eventually came out, well before the two of them, Lisa Dveris and I, were married. It's what we call Our Psychic Connection.

There is one other major character to acknowledge from that book, though he had no single model. Mr. Werner is the caretaker who Danny discovers in the building's basement workshop. He is an old Jewish immigrant who can tell the ancient mystical tales of their people and his own thrilling stories of his life in the Old Country and in this New Country.

The old man and the boy form a special friendship that serves them both. Danny is hungry to learn about heroes and the ways of the world; tales to prepare him for his future. Old Werner needs to tell his stories so he can gather the precious moments of his past and make some final sense of his long life.

"I'd visit Mr. Werner often, stirring about his worktable as he drifted through his memories. Perhaps my visits changed him, woke him up, because his stories grew more lively. He did, too, as if he'd brushed himself off and got back to the work of living once again.
He guided me through my family's Passover seder, he taught me how to work with my hands and with my head. He started me dreaming of another world, woven by his memories and folktales, a world greater than any in my comic books. I'd tell him things, as well, chattering about my family and school; neither of us needing the other to listen very carefully.
One time I found that I'd planed the end of a two-by-four into a paper thin wedge. I'd been daydreaming, had lost the wood and then lost the daydream. Another time, I shuffled down the stairs, aching from an insult. Werner was working on a padlock. I grabbed a scrap of lumber and hammered it with larger and larger nails until I split the wood. I tossed the broken pieces, then hunched over a coffee tin of loose nuts and bolts to sort and match. All this time not a word was spoken, not a look exchanged. As I threaded pairs of nuts and bolts, I barked out my story.
I'd been watching two pigeons on a branch outside my classroom window. Their throats were glazed with purple, their heads were bobbing in a mystery of need as they jostled one another toward the end of the branch which bowed to their weight and tapped against the glass. It was golden in the sun, just like Elijah's magic branch. Mr. Werner had told me how the spirit of the Prophet Elijah gave the Ba'al Shem Tov a branch from a wonder tree on Mount Carmel. The Ba'al Shem Tov carved it into a walking stick to call down miracles. When the Ba'al Shem's great deeds were all completed, Elijah took it back, returning it to the wonder tree to become a living branch again. So I watched in awe as a golden branch tapped against the class room window, offering itself to me.
Until the laughter of my classmates blew my fantasy apart. My name was shouted. Thirty faces cooed, hooted, and above them all was Mrs. Maitland commanding me to copy out a lesson all through recess.
"It wasn't fair," I complained to Mr. Werner. "I knew what she was teaching. She was picking on me."
"Did you explain about the branch?" he asked.
"Huh! What does she care? She's got no time for stories."
"Yah," he said. "Grownups got no time. But you got time for branches. And for comic books. And even to build and break with nails."
I felt my throat tighten. I lowered my head to the hurt that was rooting in my chest.
"And me, I'm just the same," Mr. Werner said. "I got time to free a lock that doesn't even have a key -- a lock to shut a workshop that's got nothing anyone would want to steal." His hand, rough as bark, rubbed across my cheek and came to rest upon my shoulder. "It's not so bad," he assured me. "We can't be standing at attention all day long. A boy has got to build his hopes and dreams. And old men have lots of memories that need putting into place."
For a long moment we said nothing, we thought nothing and felt no differences between us. Though we worked and told our stories each for different ends, this dreamy silence from which all our stories seemed to come, made the two of us one and the same.

Mr. Freedman was a butcher at Omnitsky's Kosher Meats, down the street from our store. He was a short, stout and homely man. He had a bad lisp and glasses as thick as Coke bottles. Yet he could walk confidently into a room, face an audience and hold their attention with a convincing and entertaining speech.

My mother decided that if Mr. Freedman could overcome his obvious handicaps, he could certainly teach me how to overcome mine. I was merely awkward, self conscious and lacking basic social skills; typical afflictions of a thirteen year old, especially a "loner".

Mr. Freedman had me write and memorize a five minute speech and present it to him in his living room. He was tremendously impressed. He then showed me how to speak, how to pause and how to use my hands. The next week I returned with a better speech and a better presentation. Again, he was tremendously impressed and taught me with even more techniques. I did about fifteen speeches before he judged me ready for the next level. He took me downtown to the Toastmasters Club, his public speaking group. He had me speak before a group of professionals and business people. All of them were tremendously unimpressed. After all, I was just a kid. Mr. Freedman kept training me until even those grouchy Toastmasters accepted me with their grudging applause. My parents taught me a love of creativity. Books inspired me with exciting stories and ideas. Mr. Freedman gave me my voice.
 
 

Being a good talker also got me my first well paid summer job. At fifteen, I became a door to door salesman selling Watkins Products - spices, vitamins, cosmetics, ointments, cleansers and a catalogue full of high quality household items ... "which you (sir or madam) and your family simply won't want to do without especially after allowing me to present you with these free samples of Watkins Shampoo and Conditioner while I show you some particularly fine products which, by the way, are presently on sale - half price!"... And so I talked, grinned and gestured on countless doorsteps, turning empty talk into solid money - more dollars an hour than either of my parents were making. It was pretty heady stuff for a kid off Main Street.

I kept talking after work as well, making friends and acquaintances as I hung around the pool hall or outside the local cafe, telling stories and cracking jokes. All I did was speak my magic words and a whole new world was opening up. Around midnight, I'd join the crowd gathering in the parking lot behind the cafe. My pals and I would trade wise cracks while others, less verbal, traded blows. It was puberty with a punch or punch line. I can't imagine anything I'd rather have been doing.

By the second summer, the power of the gab was losing its appeal. I was still making a ridiculous amount of money and even getting awards from the company for selling so much. My family was still impressed telling everybody how I was so successful. People said I should become a businessman or lawyer but something felt wrong.

I felt I was misusing what I'd been taught by Mr. Freedman. Selling door to door was different than making speeches. It wasn't presenting an insightful opinion or a clever story. It was fast talk. I was conning people, getting them to buy overpriced goods that they often didn't need or couldn't afford. The more "successful" I got at it, the worse I felt.

It all came to a head in one bizarre incident when I was demonstrating an air freshener to a man and I accidently sprayed it in his eyes. As he stumbled about, his eyes stinging, I grabbed a tin of Watkins Medicated Ointment and tried to sell it to him. It still took me half a day to I realize what a self centered, predatory jerk I had become. I quit. I'd had enough of fast talk.
 
 

The next summer I took a job for a third of the pay, as a pantryman on the CPR Transcontinental, washing dishes in a steaming kitchen 16 hours a day as the train rattled and rolled between Winnipeg and Vancouver. It was exhausting work but I was glad to be a "worker" doing hard honest labour with my hands instead of my mouth. Even if I tried to talk, I couldn't - the kitchen was too noisy and too busy. Of course, the down side was that I felt like an insignificant cog in a hot, greasy, and relentless machine.

Feeling insignificant was an appropriate preparation for the last years of high school. I had always been an ambitious student but St. Johns, my big high school, seemed like an anonymous storage center for adolescents who were too young for the work force and too old to be left with their parents. We were packed 40 to a room and kept busy by teachers who were, except for the memorable few, too burned out to make any special effort. So I didn't either. I got lazy and moody, shifting between being a passive goof off and an irritating goof.

My only creative effort was in pulling pranks. Once during a hideously boring school operetta, Die Fleitermaus.  I crashed a scene in a gorilla costume (a rather crude form of theatrical criticism). The chorus of girls in courtly gowns scattered with an off key scream, their fans aflutter. I climbed a table, beat my chest and howled, sounding like a cross between an adolescent ape and an apelike adolescent. My two accomplices then chased me through the audience yelling, "Tonka has escaped!" I was only saved from expulsion by the school president who brought me onstage at the end of the play, pulled off my gorilla head and had me bow me to the audience. I received such a huge ovation that our purple faced principal couldn't punish me. The best part was that my teachers had unwittingly paid the rental of my costume. I had collected the money from them for a "special presentation" on closing night.

Being a wise guy was better than being a zombie but it didn't help me pass my courses. I failed Math and French and almost the whole year. After summer school I had an even greater shock, one that pushed me completely out of my adolescence.

I was working as a second cook in the day coach diner. The train was snaking up a mountain pass in the Canadian Rockies. At 7 am I made my way through the day coaches calling out that breakfast was being served. Most people were awake waiting for the call and as I returned to the kitchen they crowded into the diner and began to order. Suddenly the whole train jolted. We just managed to steady the tall urn of hot coffee before it spilled over us. A couple more jolts and the train ground to a halt. The chef and I figured the engine had hit a moose but it was far worse.

A six ton boulder had rolled off the mountain. It hit the train derailing six of the train cars. A day coach took the hardest blow - it was unrecognizable, a gaping wreck of metal and glass with half the seats torn away. When the boulder hit, the engineer had sped up and manoevered so the cars derailed against the mountain wall. Otherwise they would have fallen over the edge into the river 600 feet below and would have pulled the entire train down with them.

We rushed about getting first aid supplies for the injured. Luckily most people had left the day coach when I made the call for breakfast, except for a university student who had stayed behind to sleep a little longer. They found her body far down the tracks. I had walked through that coach only minutes before the boulder hit. As my shock wore off I realized how close I had been to death.

Helicopters came for the injured and the passengers were evacuated by a relief train. As we waited our turn, I sat at a counter in the diner, writing to a friend, describing the events and my feelings as fully as I could. It was my first truly serious writing. I had written letters to amuse some friend and assignments to please my teachers, but this was different. I was writing to express what I could not say aloud, feelings and thoughts that grew and deepened as I set them on the page. I never mailed it and to this day I have never felt the need to read it. The important thing was that I had found the heart to write it.
 
 

I could no longer be a wise guy or a goof off. I entered university with a serious purpose - to learn what was true and important. I read the great writers and philosophers. I studied the best minds of the ages. I loved university and the people I met there. Many of them, like myself, wanted more than just a degree that would lead to a job. They wanted knowledge and that meant a full awareness of themselves and their world. I learned as much from them as from my books and my professors and I am still grateful for their friendships.

We were the Baby Boomers, born after World War Two ended when our parents could finally settle down, have children and get to work. The country became so prosperous that by the time we graduated high school, universities were affordable and easy to enter. We didn't have to work much - summer paid enough for the rest of the year, including tuition. So there was no rush to get into a career or to get a degree, no rush to grow up at all. We were the Hippies.

We were, however, in a rush to experience the world. That summer after first year university I bought a back pack at Army Surplus and told my mother that I was heading to Toronto, 1300 miles east. Maybe I'd find a job there. Or something. She told my father and he pretended not to know because he had no idea what to say or do about it. I was so eager to get going that I slipped out of the apartment at six AM and hurried across Main Street to hitchhike out of town. It was far too early, the street was completely deserted. Finally I spotted my first car and stuck out my thumb. It was a police cruiser.

The officer stopped and asked,"Where are you headed, son?"
"Toronto," I answered.
"That's an awful long way," he said. "Where you coming from?"
"Across the street." I pointed to the apartment over our store.
"You haven't got very far, have you?" he laughed. He shook his head as he drove off.

But I did get far. I slept in a couple of pretty rough places on the way and I met my share of strange characters but I made it to Toronto. That was the summer of Woodstock.

Suddenly I was twenty, living on my own, making my own rules. So was everyone else I met. There were so many people my age that we seemed to have our own separate world. We went to coffee houses to hear old folk songs and new songs of protest. We talked late into the night in communal houses lit by candles and musty with incense.

We discovered books like Catcher in the Rye, On the Road, Catch 22, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and music by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Joni Mitchel, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. We saw strange movies like Harold and Maude, Easy Rider, Alice's Restaurant, 2001, Man From La Mancha - all telling us to Dream the Impossible Dream and sometimes to Live Impossibly Bizarre Dreams. A new attitude was forming. Be free and don't trust anyone to tell you how to think or act, especially no one in authority.

It was then that I began to write a journal, not a diary of events as much as a record of my thoughts and feelings. I wrote it in a black notebook that I carried in my back pocket. I still keep it these thirty years later, though now I type it into a notebook computer that I carry in my satchel.
 
 

I needed to experience more of the world so in 1970 after second year university I went travelling for a year. I had always imagined travelling through Europe in a storybook sort of way. Suddenly I was heading there with a few friends who I'd talked into coming as if it was a party or a camping trip. When we landed in London we found the streets crowded with other young travellers. It was as if the same message had relayed through all our minds at the same time - DROP EVERYTHING. BUY A PLANE TICKET. HEAD TO EUROPE. It helped that a flight to Europe was only $100 one way - about a week's wages.
We were totally unprepared. We had hiking boots, army ponchos, water canteens and Swiss Army knives as if we were exploring the Canadian Woodlands not the London subway system and the British Museum.

Soon we all went our own ways, following separate fantasies. Mine took me hitchhiking through the British Isles, up to Holland and then through Belgium, France and into Spain. By early winter I was in Morocco heading further south on the Marrakesh Express.

I knew almost nothing about Morocco. I was drawn there by a handful of beads. I'd seen them one night by firelight while I was camping on a beach in Belgium next to an old German bunker. An Irish fellow dressed in motorcycle leathers asked if he could bed down beside my fire. He was returning from North Africa and he opened a leather case to show me a treasure he'd found there -"Pierres du Mauritania" he called them. Legend had it that they were made by God in the Sahara Desert. Actually they came to Morocco by camel caravan from Mauritania where they had been crafted by some secret process for over 2,000 years. Those mysterious and lovely beads fired my imagination. I headed for Morocco.

Marrakesh is an exotic and ancient walled city. No more hiking boots and army ponchoes, I switched to sandals and jloba -the hooded robe used for protection from the harsh sun. I made friends with young merchants in the marketplace and taught them English. They taught me Arabic and showed me a Morocco most foreigners never saw.

My adventures had far harsher edges and harder landings than in my childhood storybooks. The shock of a different culture left me disoriented. I lost the little common sense I had and became quite reckless. I ended up living in a mud hut village and while exploring some old ruin in the desert I was attacked by a pack of dogs. I fought them off but one bite drew blood and I had to get shots for rabies. A UNICEF post gave me the long needles, thicker than pencil leads injected into my liver, for the next 16 days. It was a gruelling time and the serum affected my mind as if I really was touched by animal madness.

I moved in with a pack of hippies by the sea and spent those days and nights in tormented dreams. All the ugliness and beauty of Morocco swirled in my thoughts; the beggars and thieves; the rats and filth; the haunting chime of camel bells and wail of the muezzin praying from his minaret; the strange faces of the natives who don't share your language, your beliefs or even understand how you think or act; the Blue Men of the Sahara stained by dye; the women of Agadier so covered in white sheets and veils that they seemed like clouds drifting in the streets; the fire eaters, snake charmers, acrobats and African dancers of the market place; the disfigured waiter who served me sweet tea in glasses filled with fresh mint leaves and hovering bees; the Arab preacher who stopped me in a narrow street, stern as Moses with one hand pointing up to heaven and the other stretched out for money. And my lovely beads, the "pierres du Mauritania" that I had finally found; I gripped them as tightly as I could through those long days and nights of illness.

On the day of my last injections I heard that two Austrians with a Volkswagen bus were leaving for Spain. I jumped in and told them that I was leaving with them, whether they wanted me or not. I had follow my fantasies so far and so naively that I stumbled into danger and into the dark side of the imagination. Others were even less fortunate. I saw some have serious breakdowns, or waste away or die through some foolish accident. Some simply disappeared, no one knew where.
I smartened up but I still wasn't very smart. I got stuck in a blizzard for three days in the mountains of Yugoslavia wearing my jloba because I had given away my coat. When the blinding storm cleared we found our van in the snow where we had given up pushing it. We had unknowingly pushed it off the mountain road to the very brink of a deadly drop. Another time I landed in Cypress having mixed it up with Crete where I had hoped to swim and sun on some exotic beach. Instead I spent the next few days with UN soldiers who were grimly guarding it from civil war.

Eventually I got to Israel and volunteered on a farm kibbutz. It was all orange groves and laughter, a time of healing, strengthening, making friends and exploring the Land of the Bible. For all the political trouble in that country, I was never in a place where I felt so welcome. I was not a stranger in that land.
 
 

When I returned home, ten months and twenty countries later, so much had changed. In me. My parents' home felt smaller, my family and friends seemed distant and bewildered by my stories and my manner. Home began to feel like a foreign place.

I completed my BA at the University of Winnipeg and returned to Israel in 1972 where I studied Conrad and Yeats at the University of Jerusalem. Israel had always been a center of civilization, connecting three continents and merging people from everywhere in the world. I thought it would be the perfect focus for culture and learning. But the country was too intense for me. Certainly, people of every country were coming together in Israel but they didn't seem to harmonize very well.

I returned to Winnipeg, the place I knew best and married Lee Anne Block, who was also returning after teaching in India. I wanted to find worthwhile work; I had enough learning and experiencing, I needed to produce and to create. I trained as a teacher and in 1974 began teaching in a small town, the same year that we had Adam, our first child. The next year I taught English and Drama in a Jewish high school in Winnipeg. We bought a gracious old duplexed house with another couple and settled in.
 
 

I did have some regret about becoming so responsible so abruptly. When I was a child I would think about how I would someday have to give up my childhood and turn into one of those large, moody creatures called adults and how I would forget what it was like to be a child. So I promised myself that somehow I would make myself remember, I would make everybody remember. Of course, I got caught up in my needs and obligations and stuck in many new roles; teacher, parent, husband, home owner, tax payer, mortgagee. And I forgot.

To my surprise, I was led back to childhood by my own children. My son, Adam and my daughter, Mira, would ask me to tell them stories, especially stories about me as a child. They loved that, of course. It put me on their level. Soon I began making up stories and songs at bedtime and we were sharing the same childlike sense of delight at a good tale.

One of their favourites was a rhyming story about a boy who rode out late at night and was surprised by a fearful creature.

"I'm a witch, John R.W.,a horrible witch! Cackle and hackle and snaffley snitch!
Watch my face turn all green and my ugly nose twitch! Cackle and hackle and snaffley snitch!
I can turn to a toad and make your skin itch! Cackle and hackle and snaffley snitch!"

Said John Russell Watkins, "Why you don't scare me.
You're as little and silly and sad as can be.
And I've seen all those tricks while watching TV" And rode off, clipidy clop, clop clop.

A ghost and troll have no better luck scaring John. Finally all three creatures burst into tears as they beg him ...

"Please pretend to be scared. Please could you try?.
"No!" said John R. W., "That would be a lie!" And he rode off, clipidy clop, clipidy clop
He rode off, clipidy clop, clipidy clop.

I gave a copy to my friend, Fred Penner whom I had met when we were both acting in plays. He was starting out as a children's entertainer so I hoped he could give me tips about writing for children and a bit of encouragement. Instead he told me he was planning a children's album and asked if he could use my poem. What an encouragement! Fred Penner and I went on to create many poems and songs for his albums and then for his national TV show.

One of the narrative poems led to my first children's book Julie Gerond and the Polka Dot Pony about a girl who loves riding on a merry go round despite the nasty and peculiar woman who runs it. Julie discovers that her favourite wooden pony is actually a real pony who has been bewitched.

"I am caught in this circle. I am stuck on this pole.
And unless I touch earth, ever round I must go!"

Julie finds a way to rescue the pony and they escape before the angry witch can catch them.

"Julie Jerond and the polka dot pony
Ride away to a grey willow tree
They hear wind in the leaves and branches that sigh
On the edge of a shimmering sea."

I also began to write for adults. Something creative had been released, I no longer felt "bewitched" by the demands of adulthood. In fact, I could use my adult discipline and maturity to write. Without it I might keep on dreaming but I'd produce little.

I took a year off teaching in 1978 and free lanced for Winnipeg's main paper. I wrote about whatever interested me: "The Pinball Prince of Portage Avenue", "Emergency Ward - the Fight For Life", "The Naked Zoo - Private Lives of Animals Behind Bars". "Step Right Up - Working on the Midway" I was astonished by the power of being a reporter. I only had to say I was from the Free Press and suddenly I could enter almost anywhere and ask anybody almost anything. I'd then write up a story, get it published immediately and be paid to boot.

One of my first books came through my training in journalism. The Folk Festival Book was written during six intense weeks as I interviewed hundreds of people from famous performers and folk festival staff to volunteers and members of the audience - all the folk who make up a folk festival - all in six weeks. Most of my other books, even storybooks, take more than six years.

The other breakthrough of that year occurred on a trip to Toronto. I had a day and a half alone without distractions, only the Ontario wilderness outside my window and the comforting rattle and roll of the train. My mind drifted back to my childhood on Main Street and I wrote my first significant short story. It took another twenty drafts but it became a published work.

I returned to teaching and kept writing whenever I could. I loved writing but I didn't know if I should dedicate myself to it. I needed to know if I had what it takes. The Banff School of Fine Arts in Alberta gave me the answer. I was accepted into its summer writing program, directed by W.O. Mitchel, a great Canadian writer. His method was perfect for my improvisational nature. For six weeks twenty of us put aside all previous writing. We began practising "Free Fall" a directed form of stream of consciousness writing to uncover fresh images, characters, settings - the raw material of our imagination. Formal writing was not accepted. No rewriting either. Free Fall was an exercise in discovery. Each morning, interesting work from the previous day was read aloud and discussed by the group without any negative criticism. The rest of the afternoon and evening was spent in writing.

Most of my earlier writing had imitated other writers. Here I was going deeply into my own experiences and emerging with my own distinctive expression. I've been in many workshops, courses and various writing groups. They all had particular skills to teach but W. O. Mitchel showed me how to find my creative sources and how to believe in myself as a writer.
 
 

I became a member of a commune in southern Manitoba. I bought an old caboose, moved it onto the land and converted it into a rustic retreat. I'd drive out whenever I had a break, with the kids or on my own, light some candles, toss logs into the stove and set the water boiling for my coffee. I would jump into my writing with the same delight as jumping into the creek outside my door.

Sometimes, there would be a knock and one of the members would call in, "Sweat lodge tonight, Obie. When the moon comes up." We never knew when Herman, an Ojibway medicine man, would stop by to conduct a sweat lodge ceremony for us "crazy white people".

I'd follow the creek to where the woods opened onto a prairie field. There the sweat lodge stood, a low dome of four thick willow poles covered in canvas. Long ago, it would have been covered by buffalo skins but otherwise it was the same lodge as in the distant past.
"On Tour", Baker Lake,
Northwest Territories,
April 1989

Eight or ten of us stripped and put on shorts. We placed ritual offerings of tobacco on a crescent shaped mound that sheltered the fire and represented the moon. We crawled into the lodge and waited to welcome the seven large rocks as they were pulled from the outside fire. The rocks represented the Seven Grandfathers, guiding spirits of the Ojibway. The tent was sealed and became hotter than any sauna and utterly dark except for the glowing rocks. Then came drums and rattles, native chants and prayers. At certain moments the medicine man dashed the rocks with water so the steaming "breath" of the Grandfathers would make us groan and sing with more vigour. It was a place of endurance that woke up the body as well as the spirit, a place for healing, visions, guidance and thanksgiving. Sometimes a second set of rocks were added, sometimes a third. When the ceremony was complete and the tent opened, we'd crawl out so heated up by the Grandfathers' "spirit" and so entranced by the chanting and drama of the ceremony that we'd fall into the creek or onto the dewy grass and watch the stars as if we'd never seen them before. When I got back at the caboose I'd dream the whole night through or stay up writing till the morning light surprised me at my desk.

I wasn't trying to become a full time old time commune hippie or an Ojibway Indian, either but I am grateful to that community and to the native sweat lodge ceremony. They raised my spirits and cleared my thoughts.
 
 

After the debut of my play
The Always Prayer Shawl,
with my son and father, 1995

I continued to teach at the same high school and I still teach there part time, over twenty years later. Teaching keeps me sharp and lets me share the literature that I love and the energy of the young who are still questioning and learning.

My first years of teaching drama were especially exciting. I began directing students to create their own scenes and short plays through improvisation. I'd have them do physical warm ups beforehand and then they'd "warm up" their imaginations by pantomiming an experience as I was describing it. They'd enact fantasy journeys, exploring different places - some very ordinary, others strange and dreamlike. I didn't realize how powerful the exercises was until some students reported feeling and smelling the objects that they were creating through mime. The students were having sensory hallucinations. I was inadvertently hypnotising them.

I became more cautious in my drama direction but began studying hypnosis and guided imagery. After some courses and training, I offered help to people with creative blocks or who wanted to better manage their feelings and responses. I showed them how to enter a trance and I gave them direction as they imagined ways of dealing with their problems. It worked pretty well and it was very enjoyable work though I eventually moved on. It taught me a lot about communicating, especially how words and images affect us at a subconscious level - important information for a writer. I also became more receptive to my own subconscious. I still keep a dream diary - a record of that 1/3 of one's life spent asleep and dreaming. It's as valuable to me as my writer's journal.

For a few years in the mid 80's my creative work shifted to writing and directing independent films. Every day of film making was new and unpredictable. I remember finding an abandoned train station that I could use as a setting for a scene. (Why is my life so involved with trains?) When I returned with my film crew to prepare the scene, we discovered that someone had bought the 80 year old station and moved it away. No one knew where. We had to delay the film and rewrite the scene. Another time, after editing a film, I realized I needed one more shot of a certain character. When I called the actress, I discovered she had cut off her long hair. We had a awful time getting a wig that resembled her original look. I found film making a thrilling, all encompassing and transformative experience. Thank heavens I quit before it got in my blood.

The family at home:Mira, Adam, Jesse, Lisa, and myself, 1996

Soon after I became involved in a children's game. It began when Henry, my next door neighbour, called to me from his front porch. Henry had time on his hands, he'd even walk my dog when I couldn't. He asked me to join him in a game he was making up. Players got cards with moral questions on them. They guessed how other players would answer. I smiled saying, "Sorry, Henry I've got to get to work." I thought I was being the productive one and he was wasting his time. I was wrong.

Six months later, I was surprised to see a news crew at Henry's. He was being interviewed about his game. More crews showed up over the next week and soon every time I visited, he was on the phone with some reporter or radio host. His game, A Question of Scruples, was a huge success. It was even played a number of times by Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show.

I didn't turn down his next invitation to play. I found it was an fascinating game that offered real insight into people's character and motivation. I suggested that he make a kids version.
"Kids don't have moral issues," he replied.
"Sure they do, Henry. They're always getting into new situations where they have to decide what's right and wrong."
"Make up some questions," he said. "Let's see if it works."
The game needed 240 questions. After three 14 hour days I had 200.
"This could be a great game," said Henry.
"Terrific," I said. "I'll write another 40 questions and we're done."
"Not so fast," he said. "So far you've only got 14 really good ones."
I ended up writing 4500 questions that we rewrote and whittled down into 220 acceptable ones. We got the other twenty from kids. Hasbro bought the game for world distribution and it was especially gratifying to see it produced in different languages.

I was occasionally invited to schools to talk about my work but when the Junior Edition of A Question of Scruples came out, invitations increased and I developed presentations for different ages. At first I read my stories and poems but soon I was performing them and discussing how they came to be. I involve the students so they can realize that they, too, can develop their creativity. Presenting at schools, festivals and conferences has become a third career for me, blending my teaching and my writing in a way that keeps me improving both.

One of my first tours as a writer took me to the North West Territories in the spring of 89. It wasn't spring there. It was fifty below as I debarked from the plane and what I thought was the roar of the plane's engines turned out to be the howling north wind. Simon Tookoome, an Inuit artist and hunter came for me in his dog sled. I was a bizarre sight, clutching two crates that held my Apple E2 computer while being "mushed" over the hardened snow. We stopped at a high snow drift that turned out to be completely covering his home. Everything felt strange to me, eating raw caribou meat, exploring a wilderness without trees or bush and speaking only through translators. Yet when Simon began to tell me tales of his shaman uncle, his adventures with his pet wolf and how he survived blizzards and famine, I felt at home for they were stories told by one storyteller to another.

Simon Tookoome has since become a godparent to my youngest son whom Lisa and I have named Jesse Paul Shoshan Tookoome Dveris-Oberman. Inuit tradition has it that since my son shares Tookoome's name, Simon Tookoome, though sixty years old, is our spiritual son. I am completing a book with Simon about the adventures of his youth. It turns out that Simon is very much like me after all; he, too, wants to remember and recount the wonders of his childhood.
 
 

However much I may play with different creative forms, I always care most about a good story simply told. I wrote one of my most important stories as a gift to my son, Adam. It is a story about a gift, one which was offered to me but which took years for me to accept.

My grandfather, Zaida, had died when I was twelve and was buried wearing his sabbath shawl. His high holiday shawl went to me. I loved my grandfather deeply but when my father handed me that shawl I almost flinched. I would have been happy with Zaida's watch or his cuff links, his old leather wallet, almost anything but that shawl.

The prayer shawl seemed to represent religious demands and restrictions that repressed me as an individual: "Go to synagogue. Recite the prayers. Follow the laws. Don't grow. Don't change!" I put it away in a drawer and likewise I put it out of my mind. In fact, I never even had a Bar Mitzvah. Years later I found myself preparing for my own son's Bar Mitzvah and I came across that prayer shawl again still in that drawer, still waiting for me.

As I held it, I smelled a faint trace of Zaida's shaving soap. Soon came a rush of memories - his whiskery face; his gentle voice; the softness of his shawl against my cheek when I would lean against him; the way he wrapped the "tseetseet" around his fingers -- those woollen strings tied to the garment that he would tie to himself -- strings meant to awaken the memory of our history, of our covenant. More memories still - the way he would rise and rock back and forth in prayer and how the prayer shawl swayed with him, as if it might open and spread out like great white wings.

Had the shawl changed so much since I'd put it away? No, but I realized that I had. I was middle aged, halfway between the child I used to be and the old man I may someday become. I had all the individuality I needed. What I was craving next was peace of mind, wisdom, a faith in something beyond myself -- and the quiet strength that my grandfather had drawn from his beliefs. I wondered if I might find it by honouring what he honoured and by drawing upon its power. So I finally accepted my grandfather's gift, in my own way.

Soon afterwards, I wrote The Always Prayer Shawl, for my son Adam so he might know my grandfather who had died so long ago. It was published as a children's book in 1994, received a number of awards and produced as a play a year later. It is about a boy who left Russia during the revolution taking with him a single precious gift, his grandfather's prayer shawl. It describes the changes that happen to the boy and to the shawl until the time comes for him as an old man to pass the shawl on to his own grandchild.

By 1994 my life had reached another stage. My first children, Adam and Mira were teenagers; Lisa and I had married; we had merged as a family and had a two year old boy, Jesse. My career as a writer was also reaching a new stage. Along with
The Always Prayer Shawl I published two other books; This Business With Elijah and a children's picture book, TV Sal and the Game Show From Outer Space. TV Sal was a spoof teasingly directed at my daughter, Mira who had been deeply rooted into the couch and firmly attached to the TV remote control.

I began speaking at conferences and performing my works as well as telling traditional Jewish tales across Canada and the States. I developed workshops for teachers, writers and communities on personal and family storytelling, even a website. One good story leads to another and soon everyone in the workshops would be sharing stories. I also had my students record family stories and do video interviews of an elder relative. When Boyds Mills Press asked me for another book, I wanted to write one that had that intimate sense of personal and family stories. I recalled some of the stories that had moved me most.

One of my students shared the story of his grandfather, Samuel, who had survived the Buchenwald concentration camp. Samuel was walking out of Germany, confused and in despair when he stopped at a house to ask for water. There he saw a prayer shawl being used as a table cloth. He managed to barter something for the shawl and by rescuing it, he was changed. He felt that somehow he had rescued himself and restored his identity.

Another person told of visiting a Spanish immigrant woman and discovering an old menorah, a Jewish ritual candle holder. It had been in the woman's family for centuries but she had not known what it was or that her ancestors were possibly Marranos, secret Jews who had hidden their religion since the Spanish Inquisition of 1492. When the Spanish woman learned more about Jewish traditions, she made sense her grandparents' odd rituals and secretive ways. More than that, she began to make sense of her past and how it had shaped her.

Another story was about a chaplain during World War 11. He had dedicated himself to rescuing pieces of stained glass from bombed out churches. It was dangerous work, often near the front lines and during one mission the champlain was killed. A soldier kept up his work and the glass was later assembled into a commemorative window in the chaplain's home town church.

These stories were defining moments for the people who told them. At a personal level, they were like the great moments in history that shape a nation's identity. I began to think of the stories that the Jewish people recall on holidays such as Passover and Hanukkah. This all coalesced as I wrote By the Hanukkah Light. Rachel hears two tales from her grandfather; a tale of their people and a tale of their own family, both are miraculous tales of the Hanukkah light.

The tale of Hanukkah recounts how the light of the Temple, the Jewish symbol of spirit and faith, was almost lost but then rescued and miraculously restored. The grandfather's second story is in some ways parallel to the ancient one. He recalls being a child in Europe and his family being afraid because they were Jews; how they could not celebrate Hanukkah openly and finally fled, leaving behind their hanukkiah, the lamp of Hanukkah. He told how he returned later as an Allied soldier and fought "like the old Maccabees". Miraculously, at the end of the war, he recovered his hanukkiah in the ruins of his house, the same hannukiah that he and the grandchildren have just cleaned and lighted.

The two stories become equally moving and meaningful. Rachel promises her grandfather, "When I grow up and have children, I will tell them these stories, the story of our people and the story of our family as we gather by the Hanukkah light."
For me, stories of our past are heirlooms to treasure them and to pass on to the next generation.

As I looked at the grand stone walls I noticed a single brilliantly white quartz stone. I then realized that it was the only white stone in the entire wall. My writer's "spider sense" tingled. Why only one white stone? Who brought it and how?

I turned local history into historical fiction by writing a story of John Tommy Fiddich, a poor immigrant lad who had a garden "where he worked hard everyday". His harvest would earn him a silver dollar making him "the luckiest boy of all!"

Then the hail beat everything down
the insects ate everything up
and the wind blew the rest away
except for a dirty, grey stone.

John's luck hits bottom but shoots up again when Sir Henry Pellatt calls for stones. He heaves the stone into a cart, hauls it through Old Toronto during a heavy storm and struggles up the hill to Casa Loma. But the rain wash the grey dirt from the stone and the master of the wall has to reject it. Sir Henry asked for only dull colored stones.

"Your stone is all bright white. Sir Henry will not want it.
I cannot buy it from you for his wall."

John told him, "Sir Henry owns this great castle.
He owns all the lights in the streets of the city.
All that I own is this one white stone
and I hauled it up the hill for him."

The builders of the wall,
the drivers of the wagons,
the servants of the castle all said:
"John Tommy Fiddich,
your white stone is worthless.
You're the unluckiest boy of all."

In the spirit of the Horatio Alger fantasies that inspired our grandparents' generation, John's hard work and sincerity are rewarded. He fatefully meets and impresses Sir Henry who buys the white stone for his wall and gives John a job working in his English flower garden. Is John once again the luckiest boy of all, as everybody says?

"I've been lucky and unlucky,"
answers John Tommy Fiddich,
"but I earned a silver dollar all the same.
And I brought Sir Henry Pellatt
a great white stone for Casa Loma,
a stone that's worth a lot to him and to me."

John has created something he feels good about. That's been my goal as well. I've looked at factors in my childhood; being poor, being alone, being from a minority and I've seen how they shaped me as a person and a writer. I've looked at my adulthood and I've made some sense of what I've achieved and what I haven't. I suppose I could have charted all my "ups and downs" deciding where and how I've been lucky or unlucky, but like most of us, I've learned that luck is not the point. Lucky and unlucky, we do what we can with what we've got. I've been doing what I can, trying to stay true to the people that I love and and to that creative impulse that has given me such joy.
 

THE END

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