No mambo through St. Léonard
by Sarah Deshaies
It doesn’t add up.
“Who builds curved, wooden staircases, outside, in a place where it snows?” questions the old woman seated at the centre of a Sunday family dinner.
That is what immigrant Dora faced when arriving in a wet and idiosyncratic Montreal in April 1955: nonsensical stairs in a cold land. She’s recounting the hardships of arriving in a new country, so different from her native Italy, with one child tucked under her arm and another trailing behind her. “Stupid WOPs, maudits Italiens,” the neighbours hissed at the time. Despite not knowing a lick of English or French, Dora knew exactly what they were saying.
