The Devil Is Clever: A Memoir of My Romanian Mother

Ronald Charles Epstein is a Toronto-based freelance writer and published poet.

A little farm girl loses her mother and her father. She is sent to live
with an abusive aunt, who treats her as an unpaid servant.

A fairy tale? The hapless child lives on the prairie; these classic
fantasies are never set in North America. A Hollywood telefilm plot? Her
farm was in Saskatchewan, a possible shooting location, not a drama
setting.

Author Sandra Birdsell praises this book as a “memoir,” but it is
actually the story of the early life of Annie Corches, the author’s
mother. It also traces the establishment of Western Canada’s Romanian
Orthodox community.

Although the protagonists are peasants, others can appreciate Radu’s
book. Westerners, especially seniors, can identify with a woman who
experienced the Great Depression in Regina. Those who are descended from
Romanian Christians may enjoy the descriptions of religious rituals;
their Jewish peers may remember the taste of “Mamaliga (Cooked
Cornmeal).” Farmers may share a country girl’s memories.

If Annie symbolizes first-generation Canadians, then Kenneth Radu
represents their assimilated descendants. He can examine and repudiate
historical stereotypes. Many of his peers passively accept the famous
cliché about “a stalwart peasant in a sheepskin coat” uttered by
Clifford Sifton, Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s interior minister. The writer
discerns “the implicit animal metaphor” that others miss. He also
scorns the beloved humourist Stephen Leacock’s pompous dismissal of
immigrants. To be fair, Leacock died in 1944 and was unable to meet the
descendants of the people whom he scorned.

The author has made a prodigious attempt to re-create his mother’s
lost world. If his account is not to one’s taste, perhaps his
ancestral recipes are.