Tom wouldn't hurt a fly.
He's like the snuggles bear.
You just want to hug the guy to bits.
Excerpt: The enchantment of Tom Mulcair | Ottawa Citizen
ottawacitizen.com
NDP leader Tom Mulcair’s autobiography, Strength of Conviction, hits bookstores Aug. 1. In this excerpt, he describes how, as a young law student, he wooed his future wife, Catherine, despite the initial alarm of her well-to-do parents. Over the years, she would also become his most trusted adviser.
In the summer of 1974 I was nineteen years old and I had just completed my first year at law school. A dear friend’s sister got married that summer. The families gathered on a beautiful July day in the Laurentians. At the reception after the ceremony my best friend Wayne Hellstrom and I were put in charge of the bar by the lake. At one point there appeared a girl I had never seen before. She was very striking, very beautiful, with a sensitive, thoughtful face, eyes that shone brightly, and a radiant smile. Her name was Catherine Pinhas, and she was a cousin of the groom. She told me that she’d just arrived from Paris and was representing the French side of the family. I loved the way she spoke, the music of her French. She was a real beauty who stood out amongst all the guests.
That evening a group of the younger attendees wound up hanging out together. There were other cousins in, too, from France and Sweden. We all concocted a plan to go to Old Montréal together. I had spent much of the evening speaking with Catherine and looked forward to the outing. Our trip to Old Montréal with Catherine, her cousins, and other friends (we were seven in a Mazda) turned out to be Catherine’s and my first date. It was a road show. We spent all of our free time together for the next few weeks, and Catherine pushed back the date of her return to France. I soon introduced her to my family. Our life was so different from anything she’d experienced. She’d grown up with one sister in a very straight-laced, tony neighbourhood of Paris. My family was rough-and-tumble, with children all over the place and people who made four sandwiches out of one chicken wing, and who said “I love you” all day. Dad was a big, imposing man who often shouted to be heard in our noisy household. To Catherine at first he seemed a bear, until she realized he was really just a lovable teddy bear. Catherine and my mom hit it off right away. Catherine has always said that my mom is a saint.
As I took her around the Laurentians, the beauty of the landscape, the wide-open spaces, and even my family enchanted her. We became inseparable. By the end of her stay we had fallen deeply in love. To me, being a logical, practical kind of guy, her returning a continent away left a huge question mark. Pursuing a relationship with her across five thousand kilometres of ocean just seemed so difficult. But Catherine, who believes that with a little effort, will, and imagination you can overcome any obstacle, reassured me. She would simply announce to her parents that she’d met the man she was going to marry and that she was going right back to him.
Of course, when she got there and informed them of her plans – showing them a picture of me with hair halfway down to my elbows and a beard, dressed in white overalls and a white Indian tunic – they were appalled. After all, aside from the fact she was just nineteen and they didn’t know me from Adam, the original purpose of sending their daughter to that wedding had been to stop her from going off to Greece to celebrate passing her French baccalauréat with friends they disapproved of. Add to that the fact that we were from totally different backgrounds and her parents had good reason to feel worried. Their family was well to do and lived in Neuilly, a wealthy upper-middle-class suburb of Paris. Culturally, too, we couldn’t have been more different. I was from a devout Catholic family, while her parents were Sephardic Jews, originally from Turkey, who had been very young during the German Occupation and had survived the Holocaust, while many of their relatives had not. Catherine and her sister Brigitte were kept in the dark about that part of their parents’ lives while they were growing up. It was never mentioned, a place of immense pain that they never spoke of and didn’t want their daughters to ever have to know about.
Catherine and Brigitte had had very little religious upbringing beyond tradition. That, I was to learn, was all too common with people who had suffered that indescribable fear and trauma. Her parents, just like the father of her Canadian cousin, seemed far more open to talking with me about it. The stories came out slowly. Stories of courage. Of survival: how Catherine’s mom, Lydia, had escaped in the night with her parents, just before her eleventh birthday, to what was then still the unoccupied part of France. In a town called Aurillac she would spend three years with her parents, living in an attic. How her dad, Raphaël, had seen his father, Nissim, and then his sister, Ida, taken by the French to the Drancy internment camp for deportation. Another part of the history is that Generalissimo Franco was issuing Spanish passports to Sephardic Jews, the descendants of Jews who had been expelled from Spain by Queen Isabella, four hundred and fifty years earlier in 1492. Thanks to that gesture, that part of Catherine’s family went to Spain and were able to survive the war. In the summer of 2014, Catherine and I took Lydia back to Aurillac for the first time since the war. She was able to show us around with the eyes of the young girl that she had been during those years. We even went to the house where she had lived.
Catherine’s parents were quite understandably alarmed that their otherwise reasonable daughter had somehow decided, over a summer holiday in Canada, that she was going to spend the rest of her life with the guy in that picture. When Catherine couldn’t be dissuaded from carrying out our crazy plan, her parents convinced her to at least wait until Christmas, so that I could come to Paris to meet them. At the end of the fall term I cut my hair to shoulder length, trimmed my beard, and flew to Paris. Arriving from the airport with Catherine, I remember walking through the entranceway to the magnificent building where her family lived and feeling slightly intimidated. By pure chance we bumped into her parents in the courtyard, and it was a bit of luck that allowed us to break the ice. Her mom, still in her early forties, was the incarnation of Paris chic. Her dad, who I was soon to learn had a delightful sense of humour, cracked a joke or two, clearly intending to put me at ease. It worked. They went off to do an errand while Catherine and I breathed a sigh of relief that it had gone so well. The trip allowed us both to realize that this was real.
We’d written to each other every single day, and after my return to Canada we continued doing so. We still have the hundreds of letters that we each wrote over the two-year period from our meeting in 1974 to our wedding two years later. The following summer, in 1975, Catherine came to Canada and lived with my brother Peter and me in the apartment the two of us shared in N.D.G. There might have been a slightly different version told to her parents about Catherine staying at the apartment of my sisters Colleen and Jeannie in Westmount, but I’m not sure anyone was fooling anyone else.
That time together was magical. I would bike to work in the morning to Atwater Roofing in Ville Saint-Pierre, the same company where I’d worked for several summers. Exceptions were the days when it was raining. You cannot work with hot tar on those days. So Catherine and I were probably the only two people in Montréal who were thrilled if it was raining in the morning, because it meant we’d be together for the day.
This was to be a short summer in terms of work, however, as Catherine and I had decided we were going to get married. We were both twenty. We informed my parents of our plan and had their blessing – they were both in love with Catherine. She then returned to France a bit before me and gave her own parents enough of a hint so that it was now up to me to formally ask her dad for her hand in marriage. Here the reactions of both our dads are worth retelling.
After Catherine and I spoke to my parents, my dad pulled me aside, and in one of those serious moments where you know you’d better listen, he simply said, “I’m thrilled for both of you, but you’d better understand that this is not like having a girlfriend, then moving on.” He was speaking from the heart, and his heart had a serious place for Catherine, and he was making sure that I understood how important this was.
Catherine’s dad, predictably, played it both ways. When I asked for Catherine’s hand he agreed with tears in his eyes to let me marry his daughter. Then, when we returned to the living room where Catherine and her mom were waiting, he couldn’t resist; he told Lydia that he’d given me permission to have their daughter’s hand in marriage, but added – laughing – “But I also told him ‘no returns.’” That was Rapha. Our parents spoke to each other over the phone and, even though they had never met, they were all thrilled.
– Excerpted from Strength of Conviction by Tom Mulcair
©2015, Tom Mulcair. All rights reserved. Published by Dundurn Press
Excerpt: The enchantment of Tom Mulcair | Ottawa Citizen
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