Rhapsody in Quebec ─ On the Path of an Immigrant Child

Born in Hungary in 1975, Akos Verboczy moved to Montreal at the age of 11 with his sister and mother, an esthetician, who learned that in Canada women were willing to pay a fortune ($20) to have their leg hair brutally ripped out. His story begins in Hungary, where at the age of nine he learned that he was a Jew too—“half-Jew” to be more accurate. Unlike some who emigrated from Eastern Europe, Verboczy has no particularly beefs about life “behind the iron curtain.” He lands in Montreal as James Brown’s Living in America plays and Rocky knocks the Russian communist boxer flat in Rocky IV. The good guys he had learned to like were now officially the bad guys. Once in “America” he discovers that he will be going to French school—after all it is Québec—, but then he learns that Canada is the only “place on the planet where there’s no prestige in speaking French.” In fifty vignettes and tales that belie all the clichés about immigration to Québec, he depicts the experience of embracing a culture and a people who are constantly obliged to reaffirm their right to exist.

Akos Verbczy was born in Hungary and arrived in Quebec in 1986 at the age of eleven. As a political science student at the Université du Québec à Montréal, he became active in politics. In 2011 and 2012, he wrote a weekly column in the daily Métro newspaper dealing with cultural issues on identity and diversity. His book Rhapsodie québécoise, Itinéraire d'un enfant de la loi 101 was published in January 2016 and has since been regularly on Quebec's bestseller lists. Casey Roberts is a literary translator living in Montreal. He has translated several fiction and nonfiction books and won the John Glassco Prize awarded by the Canadian Literary Translators Association for his translation of the YA novel Break Away, Jessie on My Mind. Toula Drimonis is a Montreal-based freelance writer, editor, and award-winning columnist and a frequent guest on English and French-language radio and television. A former News Director with TC Media, her freelance work has appeared in the National Post, the New York Times, Ricochet Media, Ms. Magazine, Buzzfeed Canada, Huffington Post, J-Source, and Le Journal de Montréal, among others. Politics and women’s issues remain her main points of interest.