I. Introduction

Judith Rudakoff

Over the past decade, most of my dramaturgy practice has focused on creating tools to encourage people to tell their own stories. Along the way, I've encountered people whose place of origin is no longer accessible to them because of political, social, economic, religious, and other barriers. Encouraging, facilitating, and developing self-reflexive artistic material with participants such as youth-at-risk, refugee or immigrant communities, those marginalized due to gender, ability, age, in fact any displaced or dislocated individuals, has been both challenging and fulfiling.

Art, I suggest, is a weapon in the war against cultural obliteration. Further, narratives that emanate from personal experience, when shared with a wide public, can inspire others to do the same, and as a result, to validate and value their own stories.

When I work as a developmental dramaturg, one of the questions I ask the primary creator on any project is "what is your creative obsession?" I then define creative obsession as the theme or idea that permeates everything an artist generates. Over the years, I have realized that my own creative obsession is finding home, which I identify as a place or condition of safety, freedom, belonging, and agency which might be found within a community, a union of two or more people, or a movement.

I do not claim a direct link to the experience of first generation exile. I position myself as a witness, and, in some cases (where friends are involved), as an ally to survivors of the upheaval, the rootlessness, the resettling, and the recalibrating that comes with adapting to living in exile.

To clarify my own position within this project, and as context for the centrality of finding home in my creative work, here then are some specific thoughts on my relationship to exile.

Diaspora, Family, and Exile

I am not a refugee, asylum seeker, or immigrant. I was born in Canada and have built my life here. My parents were also born in Canada, in Montréal, Québec, where they resided until they died. I grew up in a middle class neighbourhood, went to a private parochial middle school, a well-funded public high school, and graduated with degrees from three Canadian universities before working as a dramaturg in Canadian theatre. I have taught playwriting, dramaturgy, and contemporary Canadian theatre for three decades at a Canadian university.

Let's scrutinize that idyllic snapshot of privilege and belonging.

My family history is a patchwork of grudgingly told anecdotes marred by paucity of detail.

The following facts comprise most of what I know of my antecedents.

My parents were the children of Jewish immigrants to Canada. My maternal grandfather arrived at the Port of Montréal via New York's Ellis Island in 1921 from Zareby Koscielne, the shtetl ("small village" in Yiddish) in Poland where the family lived. All I know about my family's life in this shtetl is that each time there was a local dispute about occupied territories, the control of the village alternated between Russia and Poland. My maternal grandmother, who worked as a bar maid at a local tavern (this is one of the very few personal details she shared with me about her life in Poland), had to switch language of daily use frequently, speaking either Russian or Polish to serve the current clientele, which was mainly comprised of soldiers.

When they left Eastern Europe to avoid the worsening socio-political situation, only part of my grandmother's family could afford passage. My brother and I don't know how many siblings were left behind or if they survived the subsequent local pogromsand more far-reaching wars. My grandparents refused to talk about those who stayed. Those siblings who immigrated to North America were split up by the authorities at Ellis Island: one brother remained in New York City; one was accepted nowhere but Buenos Aires, Argentina because (we were told by my mother, but I have no definitive proof) of his declared communist leanings; one sister went to St Louis, Missouri; and my grandmother was settled in Montréal.

My paternal grandfather arrived in Montréal from Russia by ship in 1908, and was joined by his wife and two sons on September 30, 1910 via the SS Tunisia that sailed from Liverpool, England. I know these facts through the research efforts of retired Ottawa business owner, John Diener, who contacted me initially as part of his own genealogical research, when he identified my paternal grandmother in one of his family photographs.

My paternal grandparents' original point of departure with their two sons was the shtetl of Dashev, in what was then Russia, and now is located within the Ukraine. Three more sons, including my father, were born in Canada. There was possibly also a daughter, who died young.

I know nothing more about my history and have no way of tracing any of the paternal family back farther than my great grandfather, as our surname, Rudakoff, was likely that of the Russian landowner on whose land my family members lived and worked. They were Jews and therefore officially known only by the landowner's surname. Another possible derivation of our surname is that because a number of our family members had red hair, the Yiddish language nickname for the family might have been roite kopp or redhead. In an attempt to make the name more local or familiar to the authorities, the Russian transliteration could have been Rudakov, a recognizable Russian surname.

I have one brother. After my parents died, he cleaned out the storage locker of their apartment in Montréal. Most of what he found was junk (my father, a child of the Great Depression, was a lifelong hoarder): dozens of pairs of black socks, hundreds of tiny plastic boxes of mints, expired tubes of toothpaste. He also discovered five large, dusty boxes filled with mouldy, disorganized, unlabelled...