Halfway through the school year my family moved to Saint Louis. Alex and I exchanged a few letters but then lost touch. But years later, as a young man visiting Toronto with my girlfriend, I surmised that Alex was no more likely to have stayed in Sudbury than I was, and where would he go but to Toronto? So I looked for him in the phone book, and sure enough, he was now Alexander Leve, attorney. We stopped by and spent a couple of hours. I told him about a trip back to Sudbury I’d taken a few years earlier, when I visited our grade school, Prince Charles, and a teacher I remembered with particular fondness was revealed to me now as a brittle spinster. I could have told you that back then, said Alex.
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But one slow afternoon in 2006, after yet another search for Alex turned up nothing, I had a thought: Why not google her? What’s to lose?
To the Jews in Syria she was known as “Mrs. Judy in Canada.” She said to me, “I never offered to help anybody. They had to find me. They managed through friends, their underground, through people they could find. Everybody knew somebody who knew my phone number.” Encouraged to study music by the same teacher who flunked me on the trombone in ninth grade, Judy had been educated as a musicologist. But she gave up teaching when the rescue work (and the six children she was raising) took over her life.
“He was crossing Arthur Godfrey Boulevard in Miami Beach against the light and a van hit him. It was his fault,” she said. “My brother died the way he lived. Recklessly.”
