Read more
Does a child have the right to know a parent's history? Does the key to one's identity lie within that history?
Raised as a Catholic in Ireland and Canada, the author of Dancing with my Father thought so as she probed her father's past, at a loss to understand why he spent so much of his life hiding and fearing it. After all, he painted his early years in Vienna as filled with light and music. Decades passed before he would talk about the dark side that he had left behind in Vienna, when he fled alone, as a teenager, to Ireland in 1939.
Though he finally broke open the secrets of his history, was he ever able to see himself in the enormity of those times and forgive himself?
About the author
Fifty years as a curious daughter fuelled the author's quest to unearth her father hidden past as a teenager in Nazi Vienna. Tenacity and a refusal to accept his attempt at keeping her out sustained her pursuit. Her determination to know his past was driven by the need to know who she was. After 40-plus years working in Toronto (with short stints in Zambia and El Salvador) as an employment counsellor for women, as a chair and dean in a community college, and as an associate director of governance for Ontario colleges, the author moved to a rural community in south-eastern Ontario where she began working on this story.
Though the ten-year journey into her father's pain-filled past extracted a heavy toll on both of them, the resulting understanding and knowledge deepened the love between them. Dancing with My Father is their story.
The author and her husband live in Ottawa, Canada.
