This has been an unusual week. I last posted at the close of my second day in the archives. Since then, I've spent a good many long days there, and scanned and photographed more things than I'd care to count. Some highlights have included materials from the Junior Red Cross, and the notes for an educational psychology research project in 1950 - particularly exciting for me also because my mother is in that field, and when I went home for the weekend, I shared the files I'd found. She'd administered those same tests and was able to give context for the psychology side of things.
Almost every day, I find something that makes me laugh. An awkward typo, asking for "poets" rather than "posts" to build a fence. A letter with a cigarette burn. A political cartoon inserted between two far more serious documents. The documents I've found haven't quite made me cry yet, and I'm not so sure that's a good thing. In the past two days, I've been looking at a box of restricted material about health in the Sudbury area (a district which included a large chunk of northern Ontario). A mother writes in from a sanatorium, asking to be transferred to the same facility as her son. A bureaucrat denies her request. Two children write letters to their mother in a sanatorium; the mother forwards the letters to the Department of Indian Affairs, concerned that her daughters are being mistreated by their father and stepmother while she is away.
This week, the archives have been the consistent thing that holds me together. I've had to change accommodation, after my Airbnb rental turned out to be quite disastrous. I've been itching to write it down, and lack a better place to put it, so here goes.
The place looked great in the descriptions and photographs on the Airbnb website. Queer-friendly household, vegetarian, rabbinical student who collects books. They sounded like my kind of people. When I got there, though, the place was in a bit of a shambles. When I arrived on Sunday, I found that the room I'd rented lacked a dresser, so I couldn't put my stuff away, and it was so tiny that with open suitcases on the floor, I really couldn't walk. The host had large piles of her stuff in the corner, so I couldn't even push my stuff out of the way. Despite the description saying that the host was fastidious about cleaning, that turned out not to be the case - dishes everywhere, hair everywhere. Both women who lived there have very long hair, and said hair went everywhere possible - in my bed, all over the kitchen and bathroom. I can cope with a bit of hair, though, or a few dishes in the sink; I'm hardly a neat-nik.
After remembering that the ad for the room showed a picture of a dresser, I looked again at the Airbnb listing. That's when I realized that I wasn't just awkwardly feeling out of place in a new space - the room wasn't at all like the one in the photographs! It took little time for me to realize that I was living in an entirely different place. They had taken photos in their previous home, then moved to a different apartment in the same neighbourhood. Since I'd decided against previous places because of the lack of either a dresser or desk, or because the room didn't have much floor space, it was frustrating to find myself suddenly in a place that I would have turned down had I known what it actually looked like. The bedroom was small, and I didn't feel like I could hang out in the living room very much, because my host had rented her own bedroom, and was sleeping on her sofa for the month. Airbnb, when I told them about it, let me know that I'd be eligible for a full refund if I had to leave the place.
The other thing that I didn't know about in advance is that my host runs a minyan out of her home, regularly having prayer and study groups in her living room.
On my second day in the flat, I texted a good friend: "I am moderately concerned that my airbnb hosts want to convert me to more Jewish than I am." It turns out that I was on to something. On my third evening there, they invited me to the Torah study they hold regularly in their living room. I'm generally up for learning something new, so I went. That week's reading was Emor, from Leviticus, and indeed it was interesting stuff. Most of the study group ended up being tangents from the text, which was good, because the text is obviously far more religious than I am comfortable with. My host seemed to figure out, perhaps just from my body language, which parts of the discussion resonated with me - so she offered to lend me particular Jewish texts to talk about various issues. At the conclusion of the Torah study, I felt like I'd learned a lot, and figured I'd go back the following week. I realized later in the evening that something just didn't feel right, though, about this. I've always felt comfortable in how I practice Judaism (generally in my case, it is a culture, rather than a religion, and I am absolutely fine with that). The Torah group made me feel like there was something wrong with what I have been happily doing all my life, and that I need to prioritize doing more, and being more visible. Each of my hosts covered their heads with a kippah, and wore long sleeves and long skirts. In their home, I felt naked, wearing the shorts that I usually do during a heat wave. When they prayed before meals, I felt like I should be doing something, too. It is disconcerting to me, now, that I felt compelled to change something about myself, after just a couple of days - and that I continue thinking about them, six days after leaving their home. My host's roommate, who converted to Judaism quite recently, is preparing a course for Jews who have been out of touch with Judaism and wish to reconnect. We chatted a lot about queer issues, and politics - particularly the Alberta election - but ultimately, every conversation made its way, somehow, to religion. Would I consider a female God? A gender-neutral one?
Following the Torah study, I asked my host if she could please move her piles of stuff out of the corner of the room, and set up some sort of a dresser so that I could unpack; it's so hard to feel at home in a place while living out of a suitcase. I'd arrived while she was out of town, and her room-mate had said she'd look into it, but obviously the two women hadn't communicated about the dresser yet. Yes, she said, of course she'd do this, right away while I was at the archives the next day.
I arrived home that evening after a long day in the archives. Nothing at all had changed in my room, and my host made no mention about it. I realized that if she hadn't done anything about it by then, odds are that she wouldn't - and perhaps she never had any intention to. When I first arrived, I'd asked my host's room-mate about locking the doors at night, because I really don't feel safe sleeping when the doors are unlocked. She agreed to, but every night thereafter, I had to do it - and if they put out the trash or something after I'd already locked the front door, they didn't lock it again. The bathroom had no curtain or frosting on the window, and while getting out of the shower, I noticed a person in a window across the backyards. Obviously that sort of thing creeped me out, but I realized that I felt even more uncomfortable with the people who were in the home than the people who were outside of it. I can be an anxious person at times, but I normally have things under control. In this home, I was beginning to panic. It was clear that I had to move. Officially, the reason for the move was the lack of a dresser; of course, that was just the tip of the iceberg.
While packing my belongings, late at night, my host got up from the sofa to use the washroom, and confusedly wandered into my bedroom. Already on edge, I was really unable to handle having an unexpected person stumble in the door. She muttered a bit, then left. I finished packing, and slept terribly. Fortunately, a good friend of mine lives in Ottawa, and was happy to rent me her apartment while she spent time with her boyfriend out of town. In the morning, I took a taxi to her place.
I spent the weekend at my mother's home in Toronto. When I described my hosts to her, she mused that this sounded a bit like a cult. I looked up the rabbinical program that my host had trained in, and it certainly sounds fringey - something along the lines of Hassidic Judaism, combined with Buddhism, and elements of various other spiritual practices, taking a feminist sort of approach. I googled the name of the group, adding the word "cult" to my search. While no list of cult-like religions is infallible, the presence of this group on such a list was enough to make me feel that I'd dodged a bullet by leaving.
At present, my host is messaging me insisting that she will not give a refund. Airbnb has already refunded my money for the nights I didn't stay, and I will not be bullied into giving any of that back. All in all, I probably lost a day of good archive work to dealing with this situation, and found myself even more stressed than I would normally be during a research trip. Worn down, today I took a two-hour nap after breakfast, and I'm hoping that I'm not getting sick.
Now, back to the archives.
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