Dany Assaf

Chapter Two

Home is People

A favoured taunt of racists, one my family has heard, is, “Go back to where you came from!” In the case of me and my brothers, that is Edmonton. Our family originally came from the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. My great-grandfather Said (Sid) Tarrabain arrived in Edmonton in 1927. He was following in the footsteps of other Muslim Lebanese immigrants.

It is believed that the Rahal family was one of the first, arriving in 1885, the same year that the ceremonial Last Spike was driven by Donald Smith. News of the 1896 Yukon gold rush brought others from Lebanon. But news travelled slowly back then, and by the time it got to two other Lebanese adventurers in the Bekaa Valley, Sine Abouchadi and his nephew Ali Abouchadi, the gold rush was over. They arrived in northern Alberta in 1905, the year Alberta officially became part of Confederation, and five years after the gold rush had played out.

The landscape the Abouchadis found themselves in was cold and hostile, the opposite of the lush Mediterranean Bekaa Valley. Northern Alberta was sparsely treed, sparsely populated, and covered in snow half the year. There was no gold and few would immediately see it as the land of opportunity. But the Abouchadis saw opportunity there. At the time, other immigrants were starting to arrive to the West, many of them taking advantage of the government’s offer of free land. There were more than a million immigrants in the course of twenty years, and those people needed supplies. The Abouchadis opened a store in Lac La Biche, 160 kilometres north of Edmonton. It was a great success, and in 1911, Mohamed Abuali Gotmi (re-named Frank Coutney) came from Lebanon to help out in the store. Frank was an enterprising man and soon set up his own fur trading business. He learned to speak not just English and French, but also Ukrainian and Swedish, so he could speak to the newly arrived immigrants. More importantly, he learned to speak Cree and Dene, so he could trade with the Indigenous neighbours who were still heavily involved in the fur trade. Lebanon has always been a crossroads, and deeply ingrained in its culture is a respect for the power of language and commerce to forge connections.

That lesson wouldn’t have been lost on a farmer from Bekaa Valley, and the Abouchadis applied it in northern Alberta. Four years later, Mohamed Assaf, a cousin of my great-grandfather, came to Lac La Biche to work in the fur trade as well.

The business that had brought the French and English to Canada four centuries earlier was now attracting Lebanese immigrants. The original fur trade had languished in the mid-nineteenth century when the fad for beaver hats died in Europe, but at the beginning of the twentieth century it was revived by the demand for fur coats. The Abouchadis tapped into that demand and became very successful. Others came to join them. By 1969, the Lebanese Muslim community in Lac La Biche made up 10 percent of the town’s population, the highest proportion of any town or city in North America (it’s now 14 percent and, farther north, in Fort McMurray, it’s 15 percent).

The Abouchadis sent back word of this new world of opportunities to their hometown of Lala in the Bekaa Valley. This was what brought Lala resident Sid Tarrabain, my great-grandfather, to Alberta. He had first tried to come after the First World War, but his ship only got as far as Genoa, Italy before turning back.

After the failed Genoa voyage, his next opportunity didn’t arrive until 1927. Unfortunately, his wife was six months pregnant with their son Mohammed Said. They already had a daughter, Fatima (my grandmother). It was a difficult choice to leave his family behind, but the plan, as it was for so many immigrants, was that he would go and establish himself in Canada and then send for the family. So in 1927, Sid arrived in Edmonton alone.

It was a city of 68,000 then, the former staging point for the Klondike gold rush, now settling into its role as the provincial capital. While the climate, vegetation, and history of Lala couldn’t have been more different from Alberta’s, they had one thing in common: they were both farming communities. There is family lore of Assaf dynasties of centuries past, but by my great-grandfather’s time our family were simple farmers. And perhaps this underlying familiarity with farming life made him feel comfortable on the Prairies.

There was also the fact that farmers in my great-grandfather’s village tended to be merchants as well as farmers. They had to go to Beirut to sell their produce. It was in Beirut that they got news from the outside world, and that news trickled through the population in varying degrees of reliability. For centuries, Lebanon has hosted dozens of cultures and traders. It has been ruled by

Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Ottomans, and after the First World War, was under the French mandate until it achieved its independence in 1943. If nothing else, this taught the Lebanese to adapt and even thrive under any circumstances. In some ways, that ancient land was an early version of Canada, where people from different places and identities have always intersected and ultimately co-existed.

Sid opened a general store in the centre of the city, on Jasper Avenue. His cousin, Ali Tarrabain, who came to Canada around the same time, opened a store on Whyte Avenue, the other major street in Edmonton. Sid quickly built relationships across the community, as many of those early Lebanese immigrants did.

By the 1930s, there were dozens of Lebanese fur traders throughout northern Alberta and into the Northwest Territories. I had another set of relatives among this group, including my uncle, Munir Hamdon, who is still vibrant at now more than 90-years-old; he was the son of Hilwi Hamdon, who was so instrumental in building Edmonton’s historic Al Rashid Mosque, the first mosque in Canada. His parents operated the general store in Fort Chipewyan and were also in the fur trading business. “There were Lebanese fur traders in every little town from Edmonton to the Arctic,” Mo told me. “Fort Chipewyan, Fort McMurray, Grande Prairie, Frog Lake, Lac La Biche. Almost all of them from the Bekaa Valley, most of them somehow related.”

Munir’s father would supply local Indigenous neighbours with food, traps, and whatever else they needed to operate. The trappers would return with pelts, pay off their bill, and be paid for the rest. Munir’s father would then sell the pelts, thousands in a single season, at the fur auction in Edmonton. If he felt the prices there were too low, he would go to Winnipeg or Montreal, or, for the best price, New York. He had contacts across the continent, an extraordinary thing for a man in such an isolated area.

Fort Chipewyan had 800 people, including the RCMP officers stationed there, a radioman from the army corps, a few hundred Indigenous people, and the Hudson’s Bay Company.

But while many people flourished, there could be a personal cost. Three years after arriving, my great-grandfather Sid still didn’t feel he was established enough to send for his family. By the time he was ready, he received the terrible news that his wife had died. His children were too young to come over, and they stayed in Lebanon to be raised by an uncle and aunt.

By 1950, it was finally time for Sid to send for his son, my uncle Mohammed Said Tarrabain (later re-named Jimmy), to join himin Alberta. Jimmy was in his early twenties, and may have been the first person to come from Lala by plane. Fatima, his sister and my grandmother, stayed in Lala, got married and started her own family. It hadn’t been an easy childhood for Jimmy and Fatima, and it created a very special bond between them. In many ways, she loved him as much as her own children. She was also immensely proud of the success that their father had achieved in Canada, but these feelings were mixed with sadness. Canada was also the reason that they didn’t get to see their father. Because of the vast distance and the responsibilities of running his business, Sid had never been back, hadn’t seen his children grow up, hadn’t been able to attend his wife’s funeral. But he would finally see his son, who was now a young man.

Jimmy came to Canada in August 1950 to work in the store on Jasper Avenue. He only stayed there a few months before joining his relatives in the fur trade. Sid was connected to Lac La Biche and the fur trade through his cousin, Mohamed Assaf (who would also become the first Secretary of the Arabian-Canadian Muslim Association). By the end of his first year in Canada, with the support of his father, Jimmy was in the mink ranching business in Lac La Biche. Mink ranching had become a big business. When Frank Coutney had originally gotten into it a few decades earlier, the Dominion Bureau of Statistics reported only three mink ranches in all of Canada. But demand for fur coats grew and hundreds of fur ranching operations started in the 1920s. By 1930, there were 1,600 mink on Alberta farms. As the industry grew, standards fell.

The mink were often kept in poor conditions, which yielded poor results; the coats were inferior to mink trapped in the wild. In 1936, the Alberta government built a model fur farm and experimental station for mink at the Oliver Mental Hospital outside of Edmonton, an attempt to improve the quality of mink farming. Uncle Jimmy didn’t need the government’s help. His furs were winning awards across North America, receiving accolades from The Hudson Bay Company, at the Seattle Fur Exchange, the Western Canadian Raw Fur Auction, and in New York. His furs were sought after by ranches as far away as Russia. He had initially bought breeding pairs from local Indigenous neighbours, and also bought fish from them, which he fed to the mink. I can remember going up to the ranch as a child and feeding the mink.

There were rows of cages in a big barn. They were vicious and Uncle Jimmy warned me to be careful feeding them or I’d lose a finger. He had learned the hard way, losing one of his own fingers when he first got into the business.

While Uncle Jimmy was setting up his new life in Lac La Biche (with a large family of 9 children including his only son Sid, who I greatly looked up to as a kid and who became a prominent lawyer in Alberta), my father, Mohamed Assaf, was still a young boy in Lala, going to school and helping with farming duties. My father was the second oldest of Fatima’s eleven kids and the oldest boy, which came with many responsibilities. Lala was known for its wheat, barley, and lentil crops so he helped in the fields as well as in the family orchards of olives, grapes, figs, cherries, walnuts, almonds, and apricots. He also had to tend and milk the cows and help my grandmother around the houses

In 1959, when my father was sixteen, he left the village to go to Beirut so that he could finish high school on his own and continue his post-secondary education in accounting. At the time, Beirut was still truly the “Paris of the Middle East.” It is now hard to imagine how beautiful and cosmopolitan the city was before it became a symbol of devastation. It was a fashion capital, and both an intellectual and banking hub that gained power after the Arabian Gulf oil boom. There was a vibrant café life, and the architecture was a graceful blend of Arabic and French colonial.

It was a great city to be young in. But like most major centres there was an entrenched social hierarchy and, as a farm kid, my father felt he would have more opportunities in Canada. So, in 1965, at the age of 21, he arrived in Edmonton, hoping to make his mark. Edmonton didn’t offer the cosmopolitan life of Beirut of the ‘60s. While oil was in the process of re-shaping the province, the next boom would still be a few years away. The province was ruled by the staid Social Credit Party, which had been founded by an evangelical radio preacher, William “Bible Bill” Aberhart. And, of course, there was the weather; that first winter was a shock.

Still, my father felt at home almost immediately. The Muslim community was well-integrated, and he saw what they had achieved there, how prosperous they had become, how they were civic leaders. At one point, three members of Alberta’s legislature could trace their roots to the tiny village of Lala, including Larry Shaben, Canada’s first Muslim cabinet minister, who served in the governments of Premiers Peter Lougheed and Don Getty, and Sine Chadi, the grandson of Sine Abouchadi, who nearly became leader of the Alberta Liberal party in 1994. (Sine Chadi’s brother

Jake became a well-known lawyer in Edmonton and he gave me my first summer law job at his firm.) Even Premier Ralph Klein once visited Lala. My father’s first major decision upon arriving was whether he would join Uncle Jimmy in Lac La Biche or stay in Edmonton.

He decided on Edmonton and found a job at a company called ECCO Heating. He excelled there, and was promoted quickly, eleven times in twenty-seven months. This experience showed him that Canada was a place where merit was rewarded, where it didn’t matter what your background was. He sensed that the values prized in the Muslim community and that had been prized back home on the farm—hard work, the importance of family— were prized here.

Within a year, there was suddenly much greater pressure on him to make money. His father, my grandfather Hassen Assaf, was diagnosed with an advanced brain tumour and given no chance of survival. He was 53-years-old at the time. He was sent home from the hospital so he could pass away in the comfort and dignity of his own home, surrounded by his family. The same day he came home he lost consciousness and was pronounced dead. That night, from the town’s minaret, it was announced that Hassen Assaf had sadly passed away and would be buried the next day.

It was a welcome shock to everyone when they found Hassen conscious and walking around the next morning. He was quickly returned to hospital, where the doctors said they could try a very risky surgery. Even if he survived, they said, he would certainly lose one of his senses, though they couldn’t predict which one would be lost. As fate would have it, my grandfather survived surgery and lived for another forty years, but without his eyesight.

He was unable to work, and this meant that Uncle Jimmy and my father, who were halfway around the world, were now responsible for taking care of Fatima and ten children. Over the next twenty years, my father put his brother through law school in Beirut and brought the rest of his siblings to Canada.

My grandfather was a wise and gentle man who taught me a great deal about life and people. His blindness made him extremely patient and insightful. I never heard him raise his voice or say an unkind word about anyone. He certainly would have had a lot to complain or be bitter about, but he was always at peace. I still deeply miss his warmth and calmness.

My own connection to Lebanon was nurtured as a kid on those trips to see my grandparents in my family’s ancestral vil-lage of Lala. Though the civil war had ravaged Beirut, the village remained an oasis of sorts. The beauty of the Bekaa Valley is almost surreal. Sitting on my grandparents’ porch overlooking the valley, I could see the patchwork of farms. Being in the heart of the Mediterranean, the fields and groves provide olives, grapes, cherries, figs, apricots, pomegranates and every other fruit and vegetable you can name. As a kid who grew up with Edmonton winters, it was fascinating to see exotic things growing all around.

I remember how much I enjoyed figs off the tree because they were so sweet and tender, and I would ask my parents for that “fruit with the jam in the middle.” Another thing that struck me was the resilience of the people. If something was destroyed in the morning, they would start to rebuild that afternoon. Even in the midst of war, and with no central government to provide for them, the village had electricity and phone service because private enterprise found a way. Some family would get a few massive generators and wire the town, becoming the local supplier. Another bought a satellite phone system and essentially opened phone booths for people to make calls from. Of course, my heritage made me partial to them, but they have an irrepressible joie de vivre and they are almost wired to always try to seek light even in the darkest times. However, the tragedy remains that a decade after my father arrived in Canada, Beirut erupted into the bloody civil war that divided the Muslim West and the Christian East. The elegant downtown became a no-man’s-land, and huge swaths of the city were reduced to rubble. In the first two years of the war, 60,000 people died and the beautiful city was utterly devastated. War raged for fifteen years, driving people out of the country, destroying towns, and turning paradise into hell.

Half a world away, however, Muslims and Christians were happily integrated in Alberta. The success of this integration by the early immigrants is captured in the wise and almost poetic advice my father received from Munir Hamdon upon arriving in Canada. Munir told my father that Canadians always say please, thank you, and stand in line, and he should never forget those words if he wanted to succeed here, in this country.