Walters - A Very Capable Life: the Autobiography of Zarah Petri

A VERY CAPABLE LIFE

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ZARAH PETRI

OUR LIVES: DIARY, MEMOIR, AND LETTERS
Series Editor: Janice Dickin

OUR LIVES aims at both student and general readership. Todays students, living in a world of blogs, understand that there is much to be learned from the everyday lives of everyday people. Our Lives seeks to make available previously unheard voices from the past and present. Social history in general contests the construction of history as the story of elites and the act of making available the lives of everyday people, as seen by themselves, subverts even further the contentions of social historiography. At the same time, Our Lives aims to make available books that are good reads. General readers are guaranteed quality, provided with introductions that they can use to contextualize material and are given a glimpse of other works they might want to look at. It is not usual for university presses to provide this type of primary material. Athabasca University considers provision of this sort of material as important to its role as Canadas Open University.

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF ZARAH PETRI

JOHN LEIGH WALTERS

2010 John Leigh Walters
Published by AU Press, Athabasca University
1200, 10011 109 Street
Edmonton, AB T5J 3S8

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Walters, John Leigh, 1933
A very capable life : the autobiography of Zarah Petri / John Leigh Walters.
(Our Lives: Diary, Memoir, and Letters series)
Also available in electronic format (978-1-897425-42-8)
ISBN 978-1-897425-41-1

1. Petri, Zarah. 2. Hungarian Canadians--Biography.
3. Immigrants--Canada--Biography. I. Title. II. Series: Our lives: diary, memoir, and letters (Edmonton, Alta.)
FC106.H95W34 2010 971.004945110092 C2009-905091-9

ISSN 1921-6653 Our Lives: Diary, Memoir, and Letters Series (Print)
ISSN 1921-6661 Our Lives: Diary, Memoir, and Letters Series (Online)

Printed and bound in Canada by AGMV Marquis.
Cover, layout, and book design by Honey Mae Caffin, intertextual.ca
Cover photograph: Private Family Collection

Please contact AU Press, Athabasca University at
aupress@athabascau.ca for permissions and copyright information.

For Jacquelynn Ann Barnes
Fifty years and still not enough

A Very Capable Life: The Autobiography of Zarah Petri by John Leigh Walters is a remarkable book, seemingly straightforward, and highly accessible on one level, yet complex and provocative on another. Walterss purpose in creating this memoir seems simple enough: to tell his mothers life story in a way that evokes her own voice as accurately as is possible. Of course, the memoir genre is not a simple one, and in fact readers may well discern several more nuanced and overlapping purposes behind the manuscript: to tell a womans story, an immigrants story, a working class persons story, an elderly persons story, and in so doing, not only to valorize each of these subject positions, but also to reveal his mother, someone who has occupied all of these seemingly marginal spaces, as a truly extraordinary person, one who deserves to be remembered for her place in history as well as for her remarkable personal qualities. Given the range of territories through which it moves, this book will interest diverse readers, from specialists in such areas as womens history, life writing, immigration history, and working class history, to those who simply enjoy a good read.

Readers familiar with the broad story of the immigration to Canada from central and eastern Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in particular, with the story of Hungarian immigration, will find in this memoir a compelling case study. While clearly propelled by her distinctive personality, Zarahs story is nevertheless quite representative of the Hungarian immigrant story, in terms of the factors that pushed her family out of Hungary and pulled them to Canada, the period of their immigration, the places where they settled, even the problems of adjustment that they experienced. Historians of immigration generally, and of immigration to Canada and from Hungary in particular, will find this book a fascinating and valuable addition to the various primary and secondary sources that evidence/explore the second major wave of European immigrants to Canada in the inter-war years, the more so because it is about a woman, and immigration history in Canada has often been skewed toward a male perspective. Similarly, since womens history in Canada has arguably been biased toward the Anglophone and Francophone majorities, this book makes a valuable contribution to our knowledge and appreciation of the diverse experiences of women who have helped to build this country.

Readers will find here an intricate piece of storytelling, one that offers a skilful rendering of Zarah Petris lively voice, as she tells her life story, more or less chronological, complete with engaging flashbacks and flash-forwards that lend the narrative coherence and momentum. However, the narrators voice/point of view is a complicated one, because it is retrospective and thus at once encompasses both the child (or young adult, for example) and the elderly woman, while also at times including the voice of John, the second son, the actual writer, his mothers scribe. Some readers will undoubtedly find such a memoir problematic, if not downright objectionable. After all, the voice we hear is not really that of the woman supposedly at the centre of this narrative, but rather, that of the man who dares to speak for her. However, I hope that more readers will applaud Walterss arguably audacious appropriation as a loving act, one that honours his mother by telling her story as authentically as possible rather than allowing it to fade into oblivion, lost, like most such ordinary stories, to all but her immediate family, and eventually even to them.

Clearly, readers of this memoir are in the hands of two storytellers, who simultaneously lead them through Zarah Petris extra/ordinary life. Thankfully, both are artful weavers, and together they re-create the complex textures of Zarahs experiencesthe irony, the comedy, and the tragedy that constitute her difficult yet richly eventful life. The narrator takes readers from her childhood in the early years of the twentieth century in the small Hungarian town of Becse, where she and her brother and sisters are left on the eve of the Great War in the capable and loving hands of their grandparents, while their less sensible parents follow the Judas goat Count Esterhazy to the wilds of Western Canada in search of a new life there for their young family; to her in many ways ill-fated journey to Ontario, where her poet father has purchased a beautiful but impractical farmhouse, in which later, unable to cope with mounting debts, he commits suicide, leaving his only marginally more capable wife to raise their young family in a foreign land; then to Zarahs marriage as a teenager to John, a fellow immigrant, but somewhat less than kindred spirit; to their struggles during the Great Depression as they raise their two, and later, three, boys; through her challenges as a mature woman, as a widow, and then as an elderly woman confronting the indignities of Alzheimers disease. Her free spirit and sharp intelligence animate the narrative at every turn, making it the kind of story that once begun, one is loath to leave unfinished. Readers will not soon forget the expressive, albeit at times ungrammatical, voice of Zarah Petria woman whose courageous spirit, generous heart, and fierce independence as she confronts whatever challenges fate conjures make her worthy of our attention and respect, as she beckons us to join her in discovering anew the country to which she journeyed so many years ago.