Staff of Life

Estonian Foundation of Canada 2020 Short Story Contest was a fun challenge to write a fiction or non-fiction piece with a connection to the Estonian-Canadian experience. It was a great way to celebrate our unique community. A panel of judges selected winners in 3 age categories – which will all be printed here in Eesti Elu and can be viewed on the EFC website at https://www.estonianfoundation.ca/en/efc-short-story-contest

Adult 2nd place “The Estonian Pompeii” by A. Christina Tari (printed EE # 9, Mar 5, 2021). Adult 3rd place “The Staff of Life” by A. Christina Tari

Anne Christina Tari was born to Estonian parents in the late 1950s and raised in Toronto. She began the exploration of her Estonian roots in the 1990s and is delighted to share the adventure through this short story.

Staff of Life

by A. Christina Tari

As a child I learned that there are three kinds of bread: real bread, near bread and fake bread. Real bread is perfect. It is always delicious, nutritious, and never ever goes mouldy, probably because it is so delicious that it is always eaten to the last crumb as soon as it is served. There was, however, a complication with real bread: it could only to be sourced in the 45,000 square kilometres (what we then conceived of as 28,000 square miles) of the blessed old country, Estonia. And the blessed old country was firmly locked behind the Iron Curtain. Which meant that real bread existed only as a mythical gold standard for comparison and as a perennial topic of conversation whenever expat Estos gathered. Tragically, this also meant that I, as a first generation Canadian, was destined to never know real bread.

(Full story available via link below)