VACLOVAS VERIKAITIS

In the early nineteen-fifties, CBC radio launched a long-running series of weekly half-hour programs entitled “Songs of my people”, using live talent. This was a time when the broadcasting budget was big enough to support the use of actors, singers, and musicians, and writers and composers, all day and all evening — in marked contrast with the current situation, which is an almost uninterrupted parade of disc-jockeys. It was also a time when the demographics of Canada were undergoing massive change; immigration had long been part of the Canadian scene, but it had always been gradual, and the Anglo-Canadian presence or the French-Canadian presence had been dominant; however, in the years immediately following the second world war, there was a huge influx of refugees from continental Europe, driven west either by poverty or by political per­secution. These people came seeking jobs and freedom, and brought with them an array of languages and cultural identities that stood out as novel (and to some bigots, as unwanted) against the normative background of Anglophone or Francophone traditions. Most of them were grateful to Canada for admitting them, and were eager to fit in. But the task of building bridges between the established community and the new arrivals was not an easy one.

“Songs of my people”, in a modest way, tried to make a contribution to that process of absorption and mutual understanding. It presented folk songs and folk dances from, in its own words, “the people of many lands who have made Canada their home”. Every week, there was a guest artist singing in his or her mother tongue, introduced in English by a regular host, who translated the text of each song and gave a succinct idea of its place in the culture it belonged to. The effect, cumulatively, was a double one: on the one hand, it reassured immigrants that their identity was valued in their adoptive country; and on the other hand, it demonstrated to a nation-wide audience how rich and varied were the cultures now being grafted onto the native stock. Crucial to the effectiveness of this interchange was the role of the host, who served as a genial intermediary between the new and the old.

Jan Rubeš, an émigré Czech, who hosted the programs and was also the principal singer, was already a star in his own right. As an operatic basso, he had sung many leading roles in Czechoslovakia and Germany, and he was a founding member of the Canadian Opera Company. His opera tours had taken him to many cities and towns all over Canada, large and small, and had given him well-earned fame as an outstanding classical artist. But in those days, radio reached far more people than could be reached by a small and pioneering opera company on tour. “Songs of my people” made Rubeš a national figure, virtually overnight. With every week that passed, he became more and more secure in the affections of his audience, for he exuded enormous personal charm, he sang magnificently, and his scripts (which he wrote himself) were a fund of interesting, and some­times amusing, information.

Rubeš, however, was by no means alone in bringing an imported flavour to the program. The guest singers, of course, did so, too; and between them they gave exposure to all the majority languages of Europe except Albanian and Basque, and to languages in Africa and Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. In addition, the membership of the regular ensemble was so international that performances had a confident ring of authentic­ity to them. The conductor and arranger, Ivan Romanoff, was a multi­lingual Ukrainian. Key members of the small orchestra were Dutch, English, Italian, Polish, and Slovak. The eight-voice male choir had in it a Byelorussian, a Bulgarian, two Lithuanians, one Russian, and three Ukrainians. Remarkably, they managed to sing multitudinous languages in a convincing way; this was thanks to coaching by Romanoff, who consulted with experts about pronunciation and then devised a phonetic system of his own which enabled the singers to wrap their tongues around some unfamiliar sounds. The measure of his success was in the audience response: listeners were constantly expressing astonishment at how accurately their mother tongue was sung by people to whom it was only a learnt skill.

All of these participants, and especially the vocalists, constituted a cultural mosaic that prefigured the Canada of today. Any one of them experienced, within, a tug-of-war between the sense of exile, with its grammar of loss, and the knowledge of escape, with its accents of hope and opportunity. Typical of them was one of the Lithuanians, Vaclovas Verikaitis, who sang baritone in the choir and was occasionally featured as soloist in songs from his former homeland. A gifted musician, he served as organist and choirmaster in a Franciscan church with a mostly Lithuanian congregation. His devout Roman Catholic background left him with tragic memories of slaughters back home: under the German occupation, almost all the Jews were exterminated and many Gentiles were deported to work as slave-labourers; under the Russian occupation, hundreds of priests were murdered and thousands of lay people were banished to Siberia, never to return. Verikaitis made a new life for himself in Toronto, and achieved a good measure of contentment. But for him, as for so many others, the past was always with him.