I knew very little about my Calgary relatives when I was growing up in Montreal. I remember that they visited our family when I was small and brought me a collection of toy airplanes, but I didn't meet them and they remained a mystery to me. All I knew about them was that they lived in Alberta, were somehow related to my grandfather, and that my dad's cousin Pat Hector's brother had been killed in the war. It was interesting that I was related to someone who lived in the far-away city of the Calgary Stempede, but not of any immediate importance to me then. Like a typical teenager, I was much more interested in rock and roll and girls, and somehow scraping through high school.

      When I moved to Calgary in the summer of 1970, I met my Calgary relatives for the first time. Sam and Pat Hector and their daughters Ellen and Judy welcomed me like a long lost relative and I learned more about my Alberta family and my western Canadian roots. Every now and then my students would bring me a photocopy with some snippet of family history such as a page from the 1906 Lovell's City Directory or a Calgary Herald advertisement from the 1930s featuring Jack Bercuson's clothing store. When I began to mix and mingle with the Jewish community here, I was always asked "Are you related to Lionel (Pat Hector's other brother) or Joe (JackBercuson's oldest son)?"

      I tried to find out as much as I could about our family history from my grandfather. Everybody called him "Sam" even though his actual name was Solomon (my son Michael Solomon is named after him). But he was very sick when I moved here and he died shortly after, leaving too many holes in the story of our branch of the Bercuson family for me to ever write a cohesive history of it. But my brief talks with him, a little digging of my own, and help from Judy and Phil Parker and my Israeli relatives filled in some of the missing story.

      Sometime around the turn of the century, four Bercuson brothers left Panciu, in the northeast corner of Rumania, and set out for Canada. They left two sisters and one brother behind, never to see them again. The Rumanian branch of the family survived the Holocaust because the Germans never occupied that part of Rumania; most of them tried to reach Palestine aboard the illiegal refugee ship Pan York in late 1947. The Pan York and its sister ship, the Pan Crescent, were seized by the Royal Navy and my Rumanian family were interned on Cyprus until early 1949 when they were released and completed their journey to the new State of Israel.

      No one really knows why the four Bercuson brothers left Rumania when they did, but we do know that Jack and Herman were the first to settle