by Dave Hazzan
In 1905, a wave of pogroms spread across the Russian Pale and Abrahim Herzel escaped across Siberia to Japan where he signed on a freighter to British Columbia and learned to speak Cree and became a link from the native peoples to the authorities in Ottawa and saved several nations from extinction. Peter Moore was found frozen in the ice on Baffin Island, in his belly the remnants of the other members of the Franklin expedition. At Vimy, Chris Tpeswich was shot. Gilles Lescarbeau spent his days riding the CPR from Halifax to Vancouver and back again, year after year, as the Great Depression continued into its third, fourth, fifth years and in Regina he was shot in the stomach by the Mounties. At Dieppe, the Allied ships circled the English Channel just out of German Artillery range while the Canadian Infantry stood under the bluff. Then Peter Biscombe took a run for the Channel, started swimming across and a quarter of the way to the ships he turned around and landed back at the beach and said that it was too cold. Now he’s dead.
Dave Hazzan is a writer and student at UVic, on hiatus in Hull.