When the Fatwa Generated a Storm:
The Freedom and Integrity of the Pen
By Rabbi Corinne Copnick
It was December, 1992 — a quarter of a century ago — when my sister arrived, to visit me in Toronto. Wheelchair bound for many years, she travelled rarely. Thrilled that she was coming, I had planned various activities I knew she would enjoy, among them PEN Canada’s annual gala, a fund-raiser at which some of PEN’s literary celebrities (like Margaret Atwood) would perform [1]. The event was to held at the downtown Pantages Theatre in Toronto, where I reserved two seats, one of them wheelchair accessible for my sister, with great sightlines. But the night of the gala, it started to snow hard, quite hard, and so I packed my sister into the car, folded her wheelchair into the trunk, and left much earlier than I would have done normally in order to get there on time.
Canadian born, my sister and I were used to winter. My family were all skiers. I know how to drive in snow. But this night was a doozer! Despite the weather, though, when we finally got to the theatre, it was packed full of hardy souls, just as we expected. First of all, the tickets were too expensive not to come, once you had one, and secondly, none of the assembled literati, including me, were going to miss the PEN Gala. It was not exactly the Canadian version of the Oscars, but it was close.
My sister’s handicap placard wasn’t valid in Canada, but the police – oh my goodness, there seemed to be a lot of them! – kindly let me park right in front of the theatre long enough to unpack the wheelchair and push my sister, a rather hefty bundle, through the snow into the theatre. We found our seats, and then I left to park my car. By this time, the snow was heavy but still “walkable,” and I was exuberant at finding a parking space in a lot a couple of blocks away, or so it seemed to me. I quickly parked the car and briskly walked back to the theatre, sinking into my seat just a couple of minutes before the curtains parted for the show.
Nevertheless, I still had time to observe that the theatre’s interior seemed to be lined with quite a few Mounties (Royal Canadian Mounted Police, although they rarely ride horses anymore) in full ceremonial dress. These are the federal police in Canada. Interspersed among them were others in civilian dress, probably detectives, scrutinizing the crowd. And then I had no more time to think. The show had started!
It was a lot of fun, especially for people with a literary bent. My sister loved it. But then, just as the audience was starting to applaud for what we thought was the final curtain, a male figure strode onto the stage, surrounded by a semi-circle of Mounties.
The First Miracle
When the center figure of the semi-circle on the stage was introduced as Salman Rushdie, author of the satirical novel, “The Satanic Verses,” the audience gasped. We all knew that a “fatwa” calling for Rushdie’s assassination had been issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran, four years earlier in 1989. Why? For satirizing the prophet Mohammed and his wife, Aisha, in “The Satanic Verses.” The Ayatollah considered it blasphemous. Salman Rushdie was therefore condemned to death, and anyone who murdered him would be well rewarded with a milliondollar bounty.
But Salman Rushdie was British-Indian, born in India, educated at Cambridge, and a British citizen. For the Ayatollah to issue a death warrant for a British subject was a great affront, not only to Britain, but to what was then called the free world – in other words, the West – whose shocked reaction was ineffective. Although Iran had thrown down the gauntlet, the Western countries seemed not to know what to do beyond diplomatic protests. Meanwhile there were public burnings of Rushdie’s books in countries with Muslim majorities.
As a result, Rushdie was put under police protection by the British government for several years. The PEN event in Canada three years after the fatwa was issued was the first time any organization had the courage to invite him to give a public reading. It took a great deal of courage and organization, and the invitation was conducted in complete secrecy. Only the top executive leaders of PEN knew Rushdie was coming.
Onstage, an immensely grateful Rushdie described what it was like to live in hiding, fleeing with his wife, and – with the help of the British government – to sleep in a different house every night, and always with the fear of being killed in his sleep. It was such a memorable event that in 2012, PEN Canada held a 20th Anniversary celebration of this occasion [2].
When Rushdie read to us excerpts from his new manuscript, “Midnight’s Children,” which he was still writing while in hiding, it was a moment that this 1992 audience would never forget. It was such a memorable event, accompanied by tumultuous applause, that in 2012, PEN Canada held a 20th Anniversary celebration of this occasion [3].
After the reading, my sister’s face was flushed with excitement and appreciation. When Rushdie had first appeared on the stage, the audience had almost collapsed in, as one writer put it, “collective disbelief.” It seemed like a miracle. For my sister and myself, it was to be only the first miraculous event of the evening.
The Second Miracle
The second miracle didn’t feel like a miracle at first. It felt more like a disaster. After I parked my sister in the theatre lobby in front of a large glass window looking out at the street, I said, “I’m going to get the car now. I won’t be long. I’m just parked a couple of blocks away.”
But when I stepped outside, the driving snow had turned into a veritable blizzard, and the direction I was walking was heading right into it. The snow had already built up halfway to my knees. So I crouched down low, lifting one foot up from the thick snow and planting it down further ahead in more thick snow, and then the same thing with the other foot. Methodically I advanced toward the parking lot a couple of blocks away. On the South East corner of the street, right? That’s what I had noted when I originally parked there just two and a half hours earlier.
When I finally plodded through the snow to the parking lot on the corner, it was still full of cars. Only they all looked the same. Completely covered with snow. And guess what color my car was? You guessed it! White. Never buy a white car in Canada. I tried to determine the approximate place in which I had parked my car – and brushed away the snow from the license plates in that general area. Brush, brush! Not my car. Brush, brush! Not my car. After a lot of brush, brushing and many wrong license plates, I determined that 1) my car was not in that parking lot, no way, and 2) that I had better get back to the theatre lobby before they closed, and my sister was out in the street.
Plod, plod, plod, plod. “I’ll never make it to the theatre.” I was shivering. Just at that moment, I spotted an ambulance, a police ambulance, parked at the side of the road and just starting up the engine. “Wait, wait,” I yelled at the top of my lungs. “Wait for me.”
The ambulance driver did. I managed to reach his window and begged him to 1) help me pick up my invalid sister and 2) help me find my lost car. “Well, it’s against the regulations” he hemmed and hawed, but as he watched my tears freeze on my face, he said, “Okay. Get in. I’ll help you.”
So we got my sister, to the worried manager’s relief, and the three of us lifted the wheelchair, and my sister in it, into the ambulance. Thank God. My sister could not conceal her amazement. Where had this ambulance come from? I realized it had been parked on the street as a precaution in case there were any problems associated with the Rushdie reading. Well, now we were the problem, my sister and I.
“Show me this parking lot,” the ambulance driver said kindly.
“The South East corner, two blocks down.” So he drove me there, and I told him about my earlier brush, brush routine. He understood. “A white car,” he groaned. His ambulance was white too. White and blue.
“You know,” he said, “there’s actually another parking lot on the South East corner, but it’s one block over to the right. Do you think you could have parked there?”
A light went on in my head. Could it be?
So he drove us to the next lot, and after a lot of brush, brush on my part, the letters and numbers of my totally snow-covered license were revealed. My car! My white car!
We thanked him a million times as he transferred my sister to my car, helped me fold up the wheelchair and pack it in the trunk, and waited until I cleared the snow off my windows, the front and rear lights, and my tailpipe, revved up the car, and backed out. Ready to go.
“Drive slowly,” he said. And with a wave of his hand, the officer and his ambulance were gone.
My sister and I were giddy with relief. We laughed and laughed and giggled and giggled. We couldn’t stop. “No one will believe me,” my sister chortled. She was known to embellish a tale or two. And then there was a third miracle.
The third miracle was that by keeping my eyes focused on the red tail lights of the cars directly in front of me, I managed to see my way through the blizzard. When we got home, we were still laughing.
So that’s how it happened. Three miraculous events in one night. And all of them were generated by the courageous leadership of Canadian writers who respected the integrity and freedom of the pen. Even in a snowstorm.
* * * *
[1] PEN was originally an acronym for Poets, Essayists, and Novelists, and you had to be invited to belong. Today this international organization includes Playwrights and diverse other writers as well.
[2] Graham Gibson, then President of PEN Canada, and the husband of Margaret Atwood, and several others like John Ralston Saul are to be commended for inviting Rushdie and for the complex organization and security arrangements that followed.
[3] “On December 7, 1992, PEN Canada held a benefit for Salman Rushdie at which then Ontario premier Bob Rae became the first head of government to welcome Rushdie in a public forum anywhere in the world…. Rushdie later described the evening as one ‘he would never forget’” (PEN newsletter).
©️Corinne Copnick, 2017. All rights reserved.
Thanksgiving, 2017[1]
by Rabbi Corinne Copnick
I feel a poem grow in me
like green grass dotting
faded frosty plains,
jade clusters sculpting
flattened land
again to leafy life.
I feel a poem rise in me
like high hilltops tombed
in fog as sudden sun
seeps softly through,
coaxing far-down coastal
waters to glitter
silvered streaks
beyond the broken rocks.
I feel a poem’s urge.
©️Corinne Copnick Spiegel, Embrace/Etreinte: A Love Story in Poetry (Montreal, Editions Guy Maheux, 1981) 63.
[1] A limited edition, this bilingual (English/French) book can occasionally be found in rare book stores. “Thanksgiving, 2017” was originally titled “Process.”
My International Kids: Jade [1]
By Rabbi Corinne Copnick
I was beginning to contemplate moving to California where two of my daughters already resided, and my first grandchild was on the way. A third daughter was heading for California as well, and my fourth daughter was now living on the West Coast of Canada. It was lonely living by myself in Toronto when I was used to bustling activity, company for meals, and youthful enthusiasm all around me. So, even though I might be leaving for the U.S. soon, I agreed to host another international student. Jade was my first student visitor from mainland China.
A rather plain and initially awkward girl from a rural area, teenage Jade was surprisingly astute when it came to financial matters. She had a business mind like a steel trap. Her father ran a shoe factory in China, and he had sent her to study English, so that she could help him do business with Western countries. She was thrilled to be in Canada, so excited at the prospect of learning, and honored to have the responsibility with which her father had entrusted her at an early age.
When I looked at the clumpy, unattractive shoes Jade wore, I realized that she indeed had a lot to learn if her father’s factory was to please Western tastes. But Jade was a fast learner, a veritable sponge! With her inquisitive mind, she absorbed and analyzed everything she saw around her. Unlike the other Asian girls from Taiwan and Japan whom I had previously hosted, however, Jade was lacking in charm and polish, and she was smart enough to realize it. She extended her course of study for another few months – to absorb charm and polish, of course!
While I am enjoying life in California now with my own children and grandchildren close by, I often wonder how my international kids, my “adopted” Toronto family, fared when they returned to their own homes in other lands. Are Llazlo and Olga, the inseparable Yugoslav couple for whom no room was too small, who would gladly share a single bed to remain together, still a team?
And dear Lily from Taiwan? My guess is that, after traversing the world for a while, she would opt to marry the well-heeled, classy suitor her parents favored, one who could give her a spacious apartment in Hong Kong. I suspect that she will not send her children away to boarding school, as her parents did with her. She will be at home with them when they are young.
Mariko from Japan knew that she was too “Western” for most Japanese men’s tastes, so I imagine that she soon became the principal of the Japanese school where she taught first-level English to foreigners and eventually married the Japanese suitor educated in the United States — who, on her behalf, hand-delivered a Japanese-style rice-maker, made in New Jersey, to me in Toronto.
I hope that Danilo married his Brazilian sweetheart, and that while they were raising their family in relative luxury in Brazil, they also did something to alleviate the poverty in which so many families live in that country. Years later, I heard from him via Facebook that he had achieved his dream of working in the airline industry.
Khaled had already decided to avoid paying the heavy “bride price” demanded for a Bedouin bride in Saudi Arabia by marrying the Chinese student he fell in love with in Toronto. Also, because the Bedouins, from whom he originated, tend to marry their cousins, he hoped to circumvent the genetic sickle cell disease that plagued his own family by marrying “out.”
As for entrepreneurial, sharp-as-a-tack Jade, I would hazard a guess that she quickly became a sophisticated, prime footwear entrepreneur. She likely put marriage and family on the back burner, delaying having children until her career goals were met.
Lots of naches from my international kids!
©️Corinne Copnick, Toronto, 2008; Los Angeles 2017. All rights reserved.
[1] Adapted from Corinne Copnick, Cryo Kid: Drawing A New Map. (New York: iUniverse, 2008). Finalist 2009 Next Generation Awards of Excellence.
Homage to a Veteran [1]
By Rabbi Corinne Copnick
I found a tree that feels like me,
all flame and autumn fire,
dark branches reaching fine-honed
fingers to hold the wistful sky.
I touched a tree whose roots go deep,
proudly placed by sturdy stones,
moistly loved by velvet earth,
tall grown to sanctify this day.
I touched a tree whose time has come,
whose winter color gladly bares itself
to winter’s gusty grasp and
guards her blazing power,
transplanted in the night.
[1] This poem first appeared in “Altar Pieces,” by Corinne Copnick, a narrated collection of the author’s stories and poems that was screened many times nationally on Vision TV in Canada.
©️Corinne Copnick, Toronto, 1992; Los Angeles, 2017. All rights reserved.
My International Kids: Danilo, Olga, and Llazlo [1]
By Rabbi Corinne Copnick
Danilo was the next student who came to live at my house. I was hosting International students in Toronto while waiting for my U.S. documents so that I could join my children in California. Tall and handsome, with hazel eyes that belonged on a film screen, he was my first Brazilian student, my first male guest, and a breath of fresh air every time I came home after visiting my mother. We got along so famously, it was like having an eighteen-year-old son live with me. (They’re so happy when you feed them well!) He wouldn’t let me lift a finger to do anything that he could physically help me with.
He explained to me that the degree of poverty experienced in Brazil is almost unimaginable for a Canadian. It is nearly impossible for poor people to have any upward mobility. If you are born poor, you die poor, he said. Even though I did not consider myself to be a rich person, Danilo would point to my dishwasher, or to my washing machine and dryer, or the décor in my living room and pronounce gravely, “You are a favored person” in the English he was rapidly learning.
* * * *
The next student to enter my home came through the door with the largest suitcase I had ever seen – almost the size of an old-fashioned steamer trunk – and behind him slipped a second someone who appeared so furtively that, for a moment, she appeared to be a shadow.
“I am expecting one student,” I said. “Not two.” It was two in the morning. I had expected my Yugoslavian student to arrive well before midnight, and I was already in my nightgown and bathrobe.
“No,” the shadow cried dramatically, her feet firmly planted in my hallway. “We cannot be separated.”
“You are from [the former] Yugoslavia?” I inquired. “Students at the language school?”
The male student nodded vigorously, as his female companion in the hallway answered rapidly in understandable, heavily accented English.
“Yes, and we have been assigned to different home. No! No! We must remain together.”
“Why did the school place you in different home?” I asked, trying to assess the situation. The school’s rules did not require that hosts keep students assigned to them if they did not find the students suitable to their home environment.
“We are not married,” she told me. “They say that we can only stay together in the same house if we are married. But we live together in Yugoslavia. We are like one!”
“I see,” I replied. I knew that many of the host families had young children, and the language school had set the rule in order to prevent embarrassment to the families.
“It’s very late,” I continued. “I can’t contact the school now. I do not have any young children, and I have no objection to you sharing a room since you have apparently been living together for some time, but I have only one room to offer you. It does have a double bed.”
I thought for a moment about my former students — Lily from Hong Kong and Mariko from Japan — and their different space perceptions compared to their home environments. Lily thought the guest room in my house was small, and Mariko thought it was very big. Danilo from Brazil thought I was rich. Khaled from Saudi Arabia prepared rice sitting on the floor of my kitchen.
“I think the room is big enough,” I told the Yugoslavian students, “but you might find it too small for two people.
“Oh, thank you, thank you,” the girl replied, tears filling her eyes. “it does not matter if it is a single bed. The room will be big enough.”
When I opened the door to what would be their bedroom for the next two months, they gasped with happiness.
“It is wonderful. Thank you, thank you.”
“We’ll talk at breakfast,” I said, summoning up a pleasant smile. I could hardly keep my eyes open. “Welcome to Canada.”
After a myriad of “thank yous” later that morning, they began the task of hauling the new suitcase up the stairs to their new room, where they somehow stashed it in the clothes closet. Olga and Llazo were a team not only in regard to hauling a suitcase, but when it came to language skills as well. They were a totally complementary couple. She could speak English but not read or write it (Cyrillic script is very different from the English alphabet), and he could read English but not write it. Their intention was to equalize the situation at the language school. She hoped to learn to read and write, and he wanted to learn to speak English. Meanwhile, together they could communicate in a strange land.
During the few weeks they were with me in the last year of the 1990s, gradually they told me a lot about their life in their home country. They marveled at the variety and plenitude of food that stocked the shelves of Toronto’s supermarkets. “We earn salaries,” Olga said sadly, “but we can’t buy anything with them. The shelves are empty in my country.” In comparison to the other students I had hosted, their concerns were so serious, so concentrated on basic needs.
At my anything but empty table, they greedily filled themselves with food. Olga was a tiny brunette, but it was amazing how much food she could hold. And Llazlo was a big boy, a professional hockey player in his home town, who was always hungry. They ate everything at every meal. It was as if they wanted to make sure they were full in case another meal was not forthcoming.
One day, as Olga grew closer to me, she showed me the contents of their still bulging suitcase. It contained mostly food. “Look,” she gestured grandly, “dried soups, smoked sausages, sardines, crackers, enough for a long time.” They had stocked themselves up for a disaster.
When their language classes concluded, a relative of one of them – an aunt — drove up to our door. By pre-arrangement, she carried with her official documents allowing Olga and Llazlo to visit her in New York State. Down the stairs came the suitcase, and somehow they stowed it into the trunk of her car. As they said their goodbyes, accompanied by hugs, kisses, and heartfelt thanks, I wondered if they would ever return to their home country.
[1] ©️Corinne Copnick, Los Angeles, 2017. All rights reserved. Adapted from Corinne Heather Copnick, Cryo Kid: Drawing a New Map, Los Angeles, (New York: iUniverse, Inc., 2008). Finalist, Next Gen Awards of Excellence, 2009. Available from Amazon.com.