This piece first appeared in The Similkameen Spotlight in 2014. That year it won third place for column writing from the Canadian Community Newspapers Association. It is my Remembrance Day tribute to a very special woman.
There’s someone I would like you to meet.
Gifted and prolific writer, courageous newspaperwoman, pioneering feminist and freedom fighter.
That is my grandmother, Irma Grebzde.
I didn’t meet Irma, did not even know of her existence until 14 years ago. And I’ve never written about her, which is odd because with nearly 30 years in the business I’ve written about almost everything else.
It started with a phone call, and a stranger on the line from the bowels of a government building in Montreal. The stranger’s name was Barbara, and her hobby was the very illegal accessing and matching of birth documents with information gleaned from an online adoption registry to which I’d contributed data years previously.
I have the name of your birth mother. She is Dace Grebzde.
Barbara was passionate about uniting birth families. She was on a search for her own daughter whom she gave into adoption the same year I was born. Also a genealogist and researcher, Barbara then went to work for me investigating the past.
Never ask a question unless you are sure you can handle the answer.
Dace Grebzde became a mother at the age of 24. Years earlier she was, by all accounts, a bright and inquisitive youngster. At the age of nine she experienced an acquired brain injury and that’s where she stayed, at the age of nine and a forever child.
There is no record of my birth father so all I know about him is he raped my mother, as a forever child cannot form consent.
Dace herself was born in Germany in 1943. Her father – my maternal grandfather – was described to me as “a tax collector for the government of the day.”
The search was over. Mommy was brain damaged, daddy was a sexual predator and for all I knew I was directly descended from Hermann Goring.
It brought the essential functionality of my adopted family into startling focus.
And that’s when Barbara gave me Irma.
Irma Grebzde was born in Latvia in 1912. University educated as an agricultural engineer, in 1935 she veered from that path to become the first professional woman journalist in that country.
Over the years I’ve had nuggets of her writing translated to English. In one autobiographical piece she described her first day at work, walking into the newsroom to see all the men employed there had pushed their desks to the outer walls, leaving her workspace isolated in the centre of the office.
I can hear the silence of the Underwoods as she took her seat, and I like to imagine she gazed calmly around and instructed the closest misogynist to get her a coffee.
In another article she talked about watching her friends being herded onto trains.
Irma was there for that. She saw it and she reported it and she was one of those tremendously brave journalists who risked their lives trying to inform their own communities and the rest of the world what was happening in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the war.
Irma fled Latvia with the Russian army at her heels. You know a country is a hot spot when your idea of safe respite is Nazi Germany during the Battle of Berlin. She lived there for four years and it’s where she published her first book, a collection of children’s stories I imagine she wrote first for Dace.
In 1948 Irma and Dace escaped Germany for a home in Canada, leaving grandpa somewhere in the rubble. Once here she established herself as a dominant figure in Latvian culture both in the west and in the Baltic States. She penned dozens of books, fiction and non-fiction, and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, many of them about women’s rights, improving lives for children and challenging injustice. She wrote a weekly column for a Latvian newspaper in Toronto until her death. Her last submission, I believe, was published posthumously.
When I found Irma I was already formed; a mom, something of an obnoxious feminist according to friends, and a journalist whose passion was to expose abuse of women and children, and vulnerable people. I’d had my own weekly newspaper column for 18 years.
It’s comforting to think that as a person you are not just so much paint thrown at a wall, to think perhaps there is an artist in the background.
I attempted to reach out to Irma, after speaking several times on the phone with caregivers at the Latvian retirement home where she spent her final days, living as always with her forever child. I explained to them I’d recently learned Irma and I had family in common.
I wrote her a letter. Dear Irma, I hope it’s okay to write to you.
Two days after I mailed it, Irma died. The envelope was returned by Canada Post, unopened. Someone had scribbled all over it with black crayon. Of course that was my mom.
It saddened me because I wanted Irma to know the child whose conception and creation must have caused her so much grief did okay. I wanted her to know I was in the world taking baby steps on a trail she cut. I wanted to say thank you.
Eventually I concluded I didn’t need to tell Irma anything.
If life works the way I think it does, and I guess I’ve just explained why I know it must, Irma knows.