By the time Laine returned home, her mother had the family schedule in order. Early each morning, Morris drove to the office, while she prepared the children for school. After they left, Annie took the streetcar and joined him downtown. It wasn’t an era of working mothers. Annie discreetly employed a homemaker so that she could put in a full day at the Mission, usually coming home exhausted.
For the Zeidman children, the Mission schedule was closely linked to family life. They helped out as best they could through the year, joining in regular family programs through fall, winter and spring and then residing at the summer camp with the other kids. When needed, they were extra hands and feet for innumerable daily tasks. As they grew older, each one in turn would find a place in the work.
It was a lively house, full of music and its share of laughter. Occasional evenings were spent singing around the piano—Morris loved to sing, and Annie had trained in voice as well as piano at the Royal Conservatory of Music. Everyone kept up a sharp sense of humour. When Alex was a theology student at Knox, Laine knit him a tie in the purple and grey colours of the college. She’d made it a bit long, so one morning he showed up at breakfast wearing his usual college tie and Laine’s knitted handiwork wrapped around his leg for decoration.
Despite their busy schedules, family members were expected to be home and gathered at the table for dinner, followed by a Bible reading with devotions. There were no more amusements once the Scriptures were opened. Morris and Annie were serious life-long Bible students. Only in time did Laine fully understand how much of the Word of God she’d absorbed from them, a lifetime’s treasury of wisdom and comfort that came to mind when it was most needed out of the lessons from her earliest years.
The hours after supper were equally occupied. Annie used the time to teach her daughters how to play the piano, and later that was time for practice. To help make ends meet, she sewed a lot of the children’s clothing. Morris, too, spent his evenings focused on studying and writing at the kitchen table. He relied on Annie to be his editor while he composed tracts and articles, plus his international correspondence. Always studying, Morris earned a PhD and was a Bible college teacher of Greek and Hebrew. Later, the children would recall vividly how Morris’s bedroom was filled with books, newspapers and clippings from newspaper subscriptions that kept him abreast of international news—in English and Yiddish—from across Europe and America.
Afterwards, Annie would read to the younger children. Those moments became some of Laine’s most precious memories. As a young child, she was encouraged to say prayers before bedtime. There was one she could easily recall and had taught to her own daughters:
Jesus, tender shepherd, hear me,
Bless thy little lamb tonight;
Through the darkness be thou near me,
Keep me safe ’til morning light.
During one of those prayer times, Annie wanted to know why her 11 year-old daughter was in an irritable mood. It eventually occurred to Laine that it was Miss Stacey’s fault. During the Sunday school lesson, Miss Stacey had asked the children in her class, “Has anyone here given their heart to Jesus?” Laine was troubled because she couldn’t say yes. So Annie began explaining how she could say yes, right then and there beside her bed. That was the moment when Laine prayed for Jesus to enter her heart.
As the family struggled to cope through numerous trials with the Mission over the next few years, Laine started to show a rebellious streak. During the first year of high school at Malvern Collegiate, her behaviour became a problem. She was seeing far too much of the detention room. Morris was embarrassed. He expected his children to the know the importance of education, but Laine didn’t act interested anymore. She was falling in with the wrong crowd.
Annie had taken each child aside when they were eight or nine years old and taught them, “Remember who you are.” They were responsible for being “a Zeidman.” There were standards to maintain—the conduct suitable for children of clergy. Young as they were, the message was clear: “We’re not like other families.” By high school, Laine seemed to have had enough of that. Some of her attitudes might have come from her teachers. Neither of her older siblings had excelled at that school, and Margaret described the teachers as openly anti-Semitic.
Morris was determined that his daughter was not going to give up on her education. Despite the cost, he placed her at Moulton College, a Baptist all-girls high school associated with McMaster University, where families in ministry received financial considerations.
Soon Laine would find a supportive circle of friends, although that didn’t seem so likely when she first arrived. The girls were fixing their place in the social order as each one answered the question, “Who’s your father?” Of course, she knew that many of the girls had heard of her father or The Scott Mission, but Laine wasn’t quite sure how to answer that question. Who was Rev. Morris Zeidman, and why was it so difficult being his daughter?
Lunch
By Elaine Z. Markovic
As I make a lunch this morning
I wonder about the lad
Who offered his food to Christ.
Five small loaves and two fishes.
Did that one argue, “Loaves and fish again!
Mom, do I have to take it?”
Was she tired, too? And said,
“Don’t give me lip. No lunch, no trip!”
But Jesus took the meal,
gave thanks, broke bread,
And fed
A crowd
Who soon would witness
The broken Bread of Life.
Chapter 2: An Interesting Wedding
In the glow of late summer, on September 2, 1926, Miss Annie Aitken Martin, draped in ivory taffeta and framed by the graceful high stone arches of the Knox College chapel, came down the centre aisle to meet her groom, in dark morning coat and white bow tie, the Rev. Morris Zeidman. Today, the chapel remains an inspired setting of hushed reverence near the centre of the University of Toronto campus. Sunlight pours down through tall latticed windows with a smoky yellow glaze. Dappled shadows from the trees lining King’s College Circle dance over long dark rows of pews. On that day, before the college opened for classes, the pews would have been filled with many dear friends and ministry colleagues.
Newspaper accounts of the event, quite common at the time, give us colourful details: the bride’s American beauty roses; the maid of honour and bridesmaid in pink and blue georgette with “old-fashioned nosegays.” But the Toronto Evening Star hinted at something else when it called the event “interesting.”1
The bride’s mother had passed on a few years earlier, and her father, Mr. William Martin, was also absent. The papers said that he lived in Edinburgh, Scotland, but he’d been a long-time Toronto resident and moved back to Scotland only a few months before. In an era when cross-cultural marriages were frowned upon, it’s hardly surprising that he had strong objections to his daughter’s choice, described by the Telegram as a “Presbyterian missionary to Jews.” Annie had come down the aisle on the arm of Rev. John McNicol, the distinguished principal of Toronto Bible College.2
Details of Mr. Zeidman’s parents and family are also conspicuously missing from the newspaper copy. But a few inches of type could hardly explain how Morris, who had left an Orthodox Jewish home in Czarist Poland 14 years before, was now ordained and getting married in a Canadian Protestant seminary.
Another, less prominent, name in the newspapers draws our attention. The service was conducted by two clergy: Rev. Dr. J. G. Inkster of Knox Presbyterian Church, assisted by “the Rev. S.B. Rohold of Haifa, Palestine.” Rohold had been Morris’s mentor and predecessor at the Scott Institute, where the couple would begin ministry when they returned