How this 92-year-old first-time author is keeping her father’s story alive

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When she was a child, Sheila Baslaw would sometimes ask her father about his own childhood, one of grinding poverty in a tiny Russsian “shtetl,” or Jewish village, in the early 1900s.

“He hated talking about it,” Baslaw says, as she sits in the sun-drenched living room of the Alta Vista home where she’s lived for more than six decades. “If I asked him, he’d say, ‘What do you want to know about that for? It was a terrible time. We were poor. We were always hungry. I don’t want to talk about it.’

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“Of course, the more he didn’t want to talk about it, the more mystery there was.”

Over the years, snippets of Shmuel Saslovsky’s boyhood slipped out and Baslaw would scribble them down on scraps of paper she would tuck into books.

Now, at age 92, Baslaw has recounted one of them in her first children’s book, The Lightkeeper, which she co-wrote with her friend Karen Levine, a retired CBC documentary producer. It tells the story of the day electric lighting came to the village, through the eyes of 10-year-old Shmuel, the youngest in a family with five sisters. Fascinated by the new technology, Shmuel befriends the workers, soaking up information like only a child can, until one day he gets his chance to be the village hero as the only one who knows what to do when a light burns out.

From then on, the boy became the shtetl’s light keeper.

It’s one of the few stories Shmuel “Samuel” Savlovsky would share with his daughter.

“He was so thrilled to be able to do that, to earn a kopek — a few pennies — for his family,” she said. “It was an honour to be identified as the light keeper.”

The two authors met when Levine approached Baslaw, whom she knew through her sister, to write an essay for the CBC about the burden of caregiving for an ailing spouse. A few years later when Baslaw decided to begin writing down her father’s stories, she again turned to Levine for help. The two women — Baslaw in Ottawa and Levine in Toronto — worked together online to hammer out the story and its structure.

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“We worked on a whole bunch of stories because Sheila was very determined to get them told,” Levine said. “At the end of the day, when I looked at what we had, I thought, ‘This is a story that could be turned into a book.’

“It’s a wonderful story and it’s an inspiring story. It was about his yearning to be a big guy who could contribute to his family. It made him feel all grown up.”

Levine took the idea to Margie Wolfe of Second Story Publishing, which had published Levine’s own award-winning non-fiction book for young readers, Hanna’s Suitcase, about a Czech girl murdered in a Nazi death camp. Toronto artist Alice Priestley brought the story to life with her illustrations. The book is aimed at children ages six to eight.

“This was a very different experience for me,” Levine said. “You have to tailor your language and your ideas to a slightly younger group. Even though Hanna’s Suitcase has some hope in it, it’s a very dark story and there’s a lot of sadness. But this one was a joy. It’s about bringing light into the world.”

Shmuel Saslovsky emigrated to Canada in the 1920s, opening up his own upholstery shop in Sandy Hill. The curiosity and skills he showed as a child served him well all his life. He could fix anything and learned not to waste any opportunity. He would harness the heat from the car engine.

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“He’d wrap up hamburgers and put them on the exhaust manifold,” Baslaw recalled with a laugh. “We’d go on road trips and have hamburgers for lunch.”

And he worked hard, leaving for the upholstery shop at 6 a.m. and returning home at 11 p.m. He died in 1986.

“I wish he were here again for just half an hour. I’d have so many questions for him. I wish I’d try harder, but he was so austere that once he said ‘No,’ we obeyed,” she said.

“But little things would drop out. He’d say, ‘Well, you know, the floor in our house was dirt and on Friday night we’d put a layer of yellow mud over it to keep the dust down.’ Or, ‘We stole apples or cherries from my grandmother,’ and I’d think, ‘Oh, that’s a good story.’ All the while I was compiling the evidence.”

When she did her own research about what life was like for Jews in Russia in the era, a time of poverty, pogroms and anti-semitism, she found little about the lives of children.

“I realized there was no adolescence. You went from child to adult. And you could be an adult at age seven or eight. If you were a girl, you would be taking care of children. If you were a boy, you were cutting wood or carrying water. There was no time for fun.”

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She’s excited to know her father’s stories will be preserved, not just for her children and grandchildren, but for the wider world.

“When somebody dies, if you’re lucky you have good memories,” Baslaw says. “If you’re lucky you have good photos. But to make them come alive, you need stories. Stories that tell the character and the personality and the values. What was that person about? What was he like? That doesn’t come out in the photos and the memories.

“That person dies when you die, if you don’t carry on their stories and make them alive for the next generation.”

The Light Keeper has a book launch party with Baslaw and Levine at Temple Beth Israel, 1301 Prince of Wales Drive on Sunday, Oct. 27 at 10:30 a.m.

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