Short Talk on Stucco
Front view of bungalow at 755 W 64th Street, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
“It’s sad, you know, I really never talk about it…I get really upset…”
“Well, if you don’t want to talk about the Pesach part, then you can—”
“Well, there’s a lot more than the Pesach part, you know. There’s a lot involved there…”[1]
A short history
Anna Flynn, my late maternal grandmother (Bubby), was born in 1933 in Lvov, Poland (now, Ukraine). She passed in 2007 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Larry Flynn, my maternal grandfather (Zaidy), was born in 1929 in Transylvania, Romania. He passed in 2014 in Vancouver.
My Bubby and Zaidy were Holocaust survivors. On Anna’s side, the family name has changed time and again according to geographic resettlement. Parnes became Rosenstrauch, which bridged the gap between escape from the Spanish Inquisition and Austrian citizenship. Rosenstrauch then became Rozanski, as family members moved from Austria to Poland. Finally, Friedmann, a “visibly Jewish” last name—Larry’s true identity—became Flynn. Once my Zaidy discovered that 1950s Vancouver refused to hire a Jew, a faux-Irish Catholic name became the necessary requisite for employment.
In the 1940s, my Bubby lived in Lvov and my Zaidy grew up in Transylvania. The Nazis eventually took hold of both places. My Bubby was imprisoned in a ghetto and also hidden inside various attics and cupboards belonging to paid-off, non-Jewish families. Along with his two sisters, mother, and brother, my Zaidy was taken to Auschwitz in 1944. He and his brother miraculously survived as “laborers,” eventually liberated by the Allies in 1945, but his female family members were killed upon entry into the camp. There is much more to these histories…
After the war, Anna and Larry (Friedmann) Flynn settled in Vancouver. They married and purchased a rainbow house: a stuccoed bungalow on W 64th Street. What follows are some colorful, fragmented memories of that home, some formative experiences, speckled with warm glass shards.
My mother always says, “Bubby never had a childhood, but she had one with you and through you. That’s why she loved watching cartoons on the couch beside you, playing with stuffed animals, seeing you dress up. She loved to cut flowers with you, make bouquets for me and Zaidy, while laughing together. You were a toddler and she was elderly, but you spoke the same language.”
Photograph of Anna Flynn by Tadeusz Rosenstrauch/Rozanski, ca. 1936.
Photograph of Larry Flynn (in a displaced persons camp), 1946. From “International Information Office, Dachau. Schleissheimerstrasse 90,” document 10056807, The Arolsen Archives online collections, https://collections.arolsen-archives.org/en/archive/1-1-6-2_01010602-oS/?p=1&doc_id=10056807.
A short stucco memory
What is stucco? Bits of blue glass, deep purple, some green and red splashed onto buildings. Beyond the official history of stucco—I assume there is one—, I wonder about that first person who thought to themselves, and then aloud, “hundreds of thousands of tiny faux-crystals should be glued onto houses. We’ll build them, embellish them, sell them. This will be most pleasing and best for living.” I assume that is how they worded it, probably verbatim.
I am color blind, but I think I know how most people see blue, purple, green, and maybe red. If not, I see them as I am told of them. In my undergraduate art history classes, immediately before the midterm and final exams, I would spend hours memorizing whatever my professors had said about color. If color was important to any of the works selected for 7-minute slide identifications, or to those 14-minute image comparisons, I would paraphrase my lecturers in my chicken scratch analyses—those poor TAs.
According to my notes from Intro to Art History, “the Parthenon was lavish with color: there is evidence,” while Jacques-Louis David, in his Oath of the Horatii, applied color in a “very simple scheme (reds, whites, blues). This way, for the viewer, attention is devoted to the central issue: brothers, fathers.” I also thoughtfully noted, “white is white for the white dove in the Ghent Altarpiece because white is pure and good (Holy Spirit = goodness).” These could be bullet points to another short talk I will never write, but remain hilarious memories, problematic and crazy.
Unlike art historical arguments, shining shards of colored glass affixed to Canadian homes still dazzle without any concern for formal examination. Those houses have no cognitive requirement, no hued memorization, no regurgitation of colored symbolism. My cousin and I spent hours in the laneway of W 64th. We sat there, reaching and vandalizing, collecting and loving those tiny glass pieces. My grandparents were generally fine with it, so long as our iconoclasms were isolated to the stuccoed garage. The embellished home was off limits, but we often conveniently and quietly forgot that rule. I do not remember why we loved picking those shards, but I know we cupped our loot in hand like trophies, admiring the sparkles before chucking them onto the soil like fertilizer.
I miss that home and those stucco memories, but most importantly the owners, Anna and Larry Flynn. My Bubby and I also had fun collecting things. She was not interested in defacing her stucco, but we had other hunting and gathering hobbies. We would pick lilacs and lavender from her garden, cut the stems, and water them. We made bouquets as gifts for my mother and Zaidy. We also collected VHS recordings of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck for viewing, some important coins for historical memory, and many stuffed animals for enjoyment and puppetry.
We often went to the Vancouver Superstore. The Superstore was this sort of incredibly huge Target on the West Coast. I remember being very little, probably six or seven years old, walking down an aisle that had costumes and face paint and things to be purchased, then shortly discarded. My Bubby asked me what I liked, and I remember glancing at, then quickly rejecting, the traditional “boy” options. They were never fun or sparkly like the stucco from the laneway. The aisle was divided in two: boy and girl. This partition was unwritten but known.
How odd is it to think back on these memories? To realize that those aisles are still intact, still consciously divided between “genders?” I do not know if anyone ever told me, “left is for you, right is for girls.” Ridiculous. I do, however, know that I had some inherent sense about the spatial gendering of costumes and options: an awful sense of “normalcy.” That ignorant distinction always stuccoed my brain with self-loathing and fear, but not when I walked alongside my Bubby.
She wished for happiness to color and paint those around her. Bubby could not have cared less about those absurd separations, insane expectations. We entered that aisle and she asked what I liked. She never once pointed or gestured to the left or right. She certainly knew about my unauthorized stucco extractions from the home beyond the garage, just as I know she knew deep down about the sparkling costumes I preferred from the “girl side,” which never required an explanation beyond “this one!”
The Superman and Batman garments were dark: blue, black, and navy, without glitter and very little gold. “So boring,” I thought (or, I can imagine this is how I thought), “no pink or purple, no frills… Who in the right mind wants to wear these?” I have no idea what I said, but I know I requested the sparkling option: a shining Cinderella outfit with kitten heels. I saw it and remembered the way the sun fell on that stucco glazing. How brilliantly it would shine, illuminated by the coastal sunsets that descended on my grandparents’ home like a spotlight. I knew that costume would make me shine too, like a W 64th house or garage, much tinier but still colorful and loud, planted firmly in a foundation. It was no problem for my Bubby; she loved it for me.
I wore that costume whenever my mother and I flew over from our Torontonian concrete jungle to visit the Vancouver lush, stucco, grandparent heroes, and the sea. I distinctly remember sporting that plastic Superstore clothing until my feet began to fall off the backs of the heels. I would put on the costume and trot up and down the hallways, or along the cement garden walkways, and often in the laneway. I collected stucco in my glistening outfit, made Challah and Polish pastries, gathered lavender, lilacs, and memories.
[1] Anna Flynn, “Oral history interview with Anna Flynn,” interview by Renia Perel and Heather Korbin, The Jeff and Toby Herr Oral History Archive, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, acquired from the Western Association of Holocaust Survivors, September 25, 1990 and February 21, 1991, audio, 1:01–1:15, https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn513726.